How I source and verify information
This page explains how articles on Provenance Africa are sourced and checked, and what happens when one turns out to be wrong, so you can judge the reliability of what you read here for yourself.
Elegy for Abdullahi dan Fodio
SOAS University of London, digital collections
Image: SOAS University of London, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence · Source
Where the facts come from
The standard for a published article is at least two independent sources, checked before it goes live. A small number of early entries still fall short of that and are being brought up to it. The material I work from:
- Academic and historical references: encyclopedic sources, peer-reviewed research, university-published material
- Primary historical records where they exist, including declassified U.S. State Department documents from the Foreign Relations of the United States series
- Established journalism (Reuters, the AP, Euronews, and similar outlets for more recent events)
How I find and verify sources
I start from general reference material, then follow its citations back to the original scholarship: the academic monographs, university press books, and peer-reviewed journal articles that historians have actually written on a subject. I confirm each source is real and substantively covers the topic, not just adjacent to it, and cite that source directly rather than the reference material that pointed to it.
If a subject has no qualifying book or paper behind it, I leave that section empty rather than cite something weak just to fill it. Where there is one, it appears in a "Books & Further Reading" section on the article itself.
When historians disagree
Some events in African history don't have a single agreed-upon account. The Congo Free State's death toll, for instance, is cited anywhere from 1.2 million to 10 million depending on the historian and their methodology. When that happens, the article says so, name the range, and attribute it to the historians who hold each position, rather than picking one number and presenting it as settled fact.
Who checks this
Provenance Africa is a one-person project, run by me, Princewill Ubani. I choose what it covers, and I am responsible for every page on it.
What happens before an article publishes: every date, figure, quoted line and absolute claim ("first", "only", "largest") in the draft is checked back against the sources actually read for that article, rather than against a memory of having researched it. Quoted wording is copied from the source or it doesn't run in quotation marks. Anything that can't be re-confirmed is cut, instead of being softened into vaguer wording that still implies precision.
A researcher checking his own work catches a lot and misses some. When something gets through, it goes in the corrections log. If you think something here is wrong, incomplete, or missing context, tell me.
What "verified" means here
When this site calls a claim verified, it means the claim was checked against the sources listed on that entry, and nothing in those sources contradicts it. It does not mean every historian agrees, or that the claim can never change. Where historians disagree, the entry says so. Where later evidence shows an entry was wrong, it gets fixed and the fix goes in the corrections log.
Researched articles and On This Day entries are checked in different ways:
- Researched articles (/history/articles/) are checked through the full process on this page, including the check of every date, figure, quote and absolute claim.
- On This Day entries (/on-this-day/) are short summaries checked against the sources cited on each entry. Most cite two or more; a small number don't yet list sources, and those shouldn't be treated as verified.
What this site is not
This site isn't trying to be the source for "10 facts you didn't know about Africa" clickbait. If a claim can't be sourced properly, or its context can't be verified, it stays out, rather than getting dressed up as something it isn't.