In August 2026, a draft for this blog said that the archaeologist Peter Garlake had been imprisoned and expelled from the country where he spent his career. It read well. Garlake had spent decades defending an inconvenient account of Great Zimbabwe against a government that wanted a different one, so prison and expulsion fit the shape of the story.

He was not imprisoned. He resigned from his post in the Rhodesian civil service and left the country by his own choice. The claim traced back to a general line about archaeologists „such as the noted Peter S. Garlake“ facing consequences, a sentence about a group of people, stretched to cover one name (Pikirayi, 2012). It got caught before publication. Not because someone happened to check that day, but because there is a specific rule for exactly this situation: no claim about a named person survives without a source that is actually about that person. A sentence about a profession does not become a sentence about an individual just because the individual is standing nearby in the same paragraph.

That correction is the reason this post exists. It is fair to ask why a reader should trust a blog run by one person, covering the history of an entire continent plus its collisions with Germany. The honest answer is not a life story. It is a small set of working rules, most of them adopted because something went wrong first.

Two to six sources, not twenty

Every post here draws on two to six sources, never more. That is not a shortcut. It is the opposite of one. At six sources, every one of them can actually be read in full and every claim can be checked against the page it came from. At ten or twenty, that stops being true, and a source list turns into decoration: it looks thorough, but nobody, including the person writing, has actually verified that each sentence says what the post claims it says.

The limit is kept by cutting claims, not sources. If a source has to go, the sentence that only it supported goes with it. What survives the cut first is what decorates rather than carries the piece: comparisons to other countries, exact founding dates of committees, side plots that feel interesting but do not change the argument.

Modern scholars are paraphrased, not quoted

Nothing a living historian has written appears here in their own words. Their findings do, credited by name, but not their sentences. Only historical sources themselves get quoted directly, meaning something a person of the period actually wrote or said, and only when the wording can be traced to where it was first recorded.

That rule is also why the Garlake sentence broke. A collective claim about „archaeologists“ had been paraphrased into a specific claim about one archaeologist, which is a different sentence with a different source requirement. Attaching a person’s name to a claim means the source has to be about that person, not about the group they happened to belong to.

What Doesn’t Add Up

The Garlake correction is the clean version of this story, a mistake caught, a rule working as intended. A messier example makes the limits of the method more honest.

In 2020, historians Bettina Brockmeyer, Frank Edward and Holger Stoecker went through Tanzanian, German and British archives on the skull of the Wahehe leader Mkwawa, which Germany returned to Tanganyika in 1954 as a gesture tied to Article 246 of the Treaty of Versailles. Their conclusion: the skull handed over in 1954 was almost certainly not his. A story built around a named object, a named treaty article and a named ceremony rests on an identification nobody can actually confirm.

That finding is inconvenient for a blog piece built around the drama of the return itself, and it would have been easy to leave it out or bury it in a footnote. It stayed in, because the same rule that catches other people’s mistakes has to apply here too. Being honest about a source only when the source is convenient is not honesty, it is selection.

But the method has its own blind spots. A cap of two to six sources means real, ongoing disagreements between historians often do not survive into the piece at all, because there is no room to represent both sides properly, so the harder call is which disagreement gets cut for space. That is an editorial decision wearing the costume of a rule. Paraphrasing modern scholars instead of quoting them protects against misquotation, but it also means a reader cannot check the exact sentence an author wrote, only the citation attached to it, and most readers will never open that citation. And calling this an observer’s approach does not make it a neutral one. Which topics get covered, which categories exist, and which contradictions get flagged as worth mentioning are all choices made by one person. Whether the Afro-German questions behind this blog ever became relevant to that person personally is beside the point of any single article, but it is not beside the point of why the rules exist at all. Rules get kept most reliably by someone who has something to lose by breaking them.

What this changes for you as a reader

None of this makes the next post immune to a wrong sentence. Sources get misread, names get mixed up, a paraphrase drifts from what a source actually said. What these rules change is smaller and more specific: there is a fixed place where a wrong sentence is supposed to get caught, and a fixed place, right here, where you can see what it looks like when the catch works and when it does not.

If you want the longer version of this argument, applied to a whole continent’s worth of image making rather than one blog’s footnotes, it is worth reading how the same habit of checking a convenient story against its actual sources plays out at scale.

Written the same way this post describes: sourced where a claim can be checked, and honest about where it can’t.

Sources

• Innocent Pikirayi, „Peter Garlake (1934 to 2011), Great Zimbabwe and the politics of the past in Zimbabwe“, Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 47(2), 2012. [Link](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0067270X.2012.682779)
• Bettina Brockmeyer, Frank Edward and Holger Stoecker, „The Mkwawa complex: A Tanzanian-European history about provenance, restitution, and politics“, Journal of Modern European History 18(2), 2020, pages 117 to 139. [Link](https://doi.org/10.1177/1611894420909033)
• Treaty of Peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany, Article 246, Versailles, 1919.