Historical skills, source analysis and historiography
What this domain tests
The Historical skills, source analysis and historiography section of NSSCAS History 8234 asks you to do more than summarise a source. You must identify provenance, explain purpose and audience, judge utility and reliability separately, corroborate claims, and recognise that historians interpret evidence differently. Namibian topics often appear here because the 1904–1908 genocide is documented through German military records, missionary letters, oral testimony and later scholarship.
Core rules
- Provenance: author, date, place, status, audience and purpose.
- Utility vs reliability: a distorted source can still be useful evidence of the author’s attitudes.
- Corroboration: compare independent sources; silence is evidence but needs explanation.
- Historiography: colonial writers often minimised violence; revisionist and postcolonial historians restore African agency and oral evidence.
Worked example
A question gives Lothar von Trotha’s October 1904 proclamation that every Herero “with or without a gun, with or without cattle” would be shot. Asked about utility, a weak answer says it is unreliable because it is racist. A strong answer says it is highly useful for German military intent and the language of annihilation, but limited for Herero experience; it should be corroborated with missionary records, Herero oral testimony and the 1985 UN Whitaker Report, which classified the events as genocide.
Traps
Calling a source “biased” and therefore useless; treating utility as identical to reliability; ignoring audience; judging nineteenth-century actors by present-day assumptions without explaining the difference.