Getting started with revision

If you are stuck with revision or feeling overwhelmed by all the information you need to process, here is my suggestion on how to get going.

1. Look at your lecture and tutorial notes for the topic you are revising, and briefly identify its key themes, related historiography, and if relevant, theories.

2. Turn these key ideas into headings for whichever method of revising works for you. For example, you could use them as legs on a spider diagram, or devote a sheet of paper to each one. The important thing is to make sure you keep all the information reasonably categorised and easy to memorise, and organising your notes around very specific headings really helps with this.

3. Your revision material should be made up of your lecture and tutorial notes, essays, the main tutorial readings listed in the course outline, relevant notes from books you've read this year, and relevant chapters from useful overview books like Illife's Africans and John Parker's Very Short Introduction to provide context. Don't attempt to read whole new books from scratch at this stage. For additional material, particularly for the three topics on which you have not done essays, read digestible chunks such as journal articles, chapters in edited volumes, etc, which appear on the reading list for that topic.

4. Some people take more notes initially than others, but you need to keep reducing your notes down (however many stages this takes!) until you can fit everything you need onto about a side of A4 of trigger words and phrases. The process of doing this will help you memorise everything.

5. The final stage should be to practise making exam essay plans for each version of the question that you can find in the past papers. It is a really good idea to get used to doing this within the time limit you will have in the exam, which is about 10 minutes. These plans should be a maximum of half a side of A4. You can also practise writing out entire answers to past questions under timed conditions (45 mins). This seems laborious but is extremely helpful.

Revision checklist

For each of your six revision topics, do you have:

- A breakdown of its key themes? (E.g., some of the key themes for Christianity are: its nature as a 'world' religion, literacy, the 'civilising mission', African Independent Churches, etc.) Use these key themes to direct your revision, e.g., as headings on a spider diagram or note cards.

- A good idea of the change over time present in your topic? Can you contrast, if relevant, pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods for its key themes? Can you chart the change within these periods?

- A carefully-chosen selection (usually around three will be sufficient) of case-studies? Pick ones that can be well-contrasted, e.g., if you are looking at colonial rule, don't pick three examples of British indirect rule, but rather e.g. a British, a French, and a white-settler colony.

- Knowledge of the historiographic debate surrounding the topic? Can you can plot a a basic outline of how the study of the topic has developed, who its important authors are, and what they have argued?

- If necessary, an understanding of the theory of your topic? This does not apply to all topics, but there are some ideas (e.g. gender, identity, spirit possession, etc) for which knowledge of the ways in which they may be interpreted is important.