Social history as a genre of Nigerian history began only recently (around the late 1980s to be precise), as a result of factors including the very epistemological origin of professional historical scholarship itself. As seen in various sections of this book, the greatest impetus for the development of professional historical studies on Africa was a defensive one: the need to explore aspects of the precolonial histories of the peoples of the continent in order effectively to challenge the unscientific notion that Africans had not possessed the ability to govern themselves before the encroachment of Europeans. The professional discipline of African historical studies, from its inception in the 1950s, was directed largely toward the exposition of the political aspects of the African precolonial and colonial past. This brand of scholarship, otherwise called nationalist historiography, was aimed at providing a needed intellectual weapon for the nationalist movement by exploring precolonial forms of state and empire building in Africa. After the demise of colonial rule in 1960, and throughout the first two decades of independence, the bulk of historical research continued to be directed toward unraveling Africa's precolonial and colonial political past at the expense of other fields of history including social, labor, military, medical, gender, and women's. Pioneering Africanists recognized this deficiency in Nigerian historiography.