Final answer:
The belief that most history in ancient Africa before 1300 CE was written down is false; instead, historians primarily rely on oral traditions and archaeological evidence due to the limited number of texts.
Step-by-step explanation:
The statement that most history in ancient Africa, or before 1300 CE, was written down in manuscripts or books is FALSE. Instead, much of African history from this period comes from oral sources like poems, praise songs, and the accounts of oral historians known as Griots. Given the sparse evidence of widespread literacy and the scarcity of manuscripts from that era in Africa, historians have had to rely on these oral traditions as well as archaeological evidence to reconstruct the past.
Moreover, the lack of written records from ancient Africa does not reflect the primitiveness of the societies but rather the different ways in which they recorded their history and conducted their affairs. In some African civilizations, such as Ancient Egypt and later in the medieval empires of Mali and Songhai, writing was used, but for large parts of Africa, the oral tradition was predominant.
Recent scholarship has aimed to reassess the historiography of Africa with a more nuanced approach that acknowledges these oral traditions and the diverse ways that these societies transferred knowledge.