In the tenth-anniversary editorial of the Journal of West African History, I announced the launch of our West African Language Pilot Program—an initiative as bold as it is necessary. For too long, scholarly discourse on West Africa has been filtered through languages and epistemologies that are external to the region. This program is our deliberate intervention in that history. It is a call to rewrite the geographies of knowledge production, to center the languages, cultures, and worldviews of the very communities whose histories and lived realities animate our scholarship. By creating space for West African languages within the pages of a leading peer-reviewed journal, we affirm that these languages are not mere vessels for folklore or oral tradition, but powerful, precise tools for theorizing, debating, and shaping history itself.The significance of this pilot extends beyond the borders of West Africa. It challenges the global academy to reckon with the fact that knowledge is not neutral, and that its circulation is shaped by power—power that has historically privileged certain tongues while silencing others. In an age when countless African languages are at risk of extinction, the stakes are high: each lost language narrows the scope of human understanding, erases distinct ways of knowing, and diminishes the intellectual heritage of us all. By embedding indigenous languages into the formal architecture of peer-reviewed scholarship, we are not only preserving linguistic diversity; we are transforming who gets to speak, in what voice, and on what terms. For the Journal of West African History, this is more than an editorial experiment—it is an ethical imperative, and a blueprint for how academic publishing can engage more equitably with the worlds it seeks to study.West Africa's linguistic landscape is staggering. Across the fifteen ECOWAS states, the region sustains approximately 1,047 living indigenous languages—nearly half of all living languages on the African continent. This density is not a curiosity; it is the intellectual soil from which our histories, epistemologies, and archives grow. Nigeria alone counts 520 living languages, with 12 now fallen silent. In a region where hundreds of tongues face the slow erosion of disuse—casualties of globalization, migration, and the lingering dominance of colonial languages in education and scholarship—the stakes of language choice in academic publishing are existential. Every abstract we translate is a small act of conservation and a recentering of knowledge on the terms of the communities that produce it.In this inaugural implementation, the languages featured—Sierra Leonean Krio and Yoruba—were not preselected by the editorial board. They emerged organically, arising from the lived geographies and cultural landscapes of the communities our authors engage in this issue. This was intentional. We designed the program so that the languages represented would be determined by the work itself, ensuring that translation is not an imposed overlay but a faithful extension of the histories and people at the heart of the research. In doing so, we elevate not only the languages but the intellectual traditions, cultural logics, and worldviews they carry. As the Yoruba proverb says, “A river that forgets its source will dry up,” and by grounding our scholarship in the linguistic wellsprings of the region, we guard against such amnesia.By featuring Krio and Yoruba here, we begin the long work of reversing the tide of erasure. Future volumes will include Hausa, Igbo, Wolof, Fula, Mandinka, Mende, and others, dictated by the voices our authors bring. Over time, we aim to build a multilingual archive of abstracts—an enduring resource that affirms West African languages as essential to global intellectual life. In doing so, the Journal of West African History moves one step closer to its vision: a scholarly landscape where Africa speaks for itself, in its own words, and is heard around the world.As you move through the pages of this issue, I invite you to listen—not only to the arguments and analyses, but to the languages that cradle them. Attend to the textures of Krio and Yoruba, to the worlds they evoke, to the histories they hold. In their sounds and cadences lie new ways of seeing, knowing, and imagining. May they remind us that history is not only about what is told, but how—and in whose tongue—it is told.
Nwando Achebe (Wed,) studied this question.