Racial Politics of Writing African History

In a previous column I documented the long history of racism towards global Africans. An editorial decision was taken to re-title the piece "We Have a History" (New African, January 2008), which gave some readers the wrong impression that I was suggesting that centuries of anti-Black racism are the only defining feature of our history.  This was not my intent. Rather, my goal was to provide a historical genealogy of western racism, and to show how consistent and enduring that history has been.  Placing today's increasingly frequent attacks on global African humanity within this larger history illuminates the persistent nature of racism and helps to challenge the often bandied about idea that where race is concerned we've come along way. 

What most intrigued me about several readers' responses to the column, however, was that they struck at the heart of the complex racial politics of writing African history.  Kofi Campbell wrote in from Kingston, Jamaica to raise his objections to my citing the work of a white scholar, Martin Bernal, on the Afro-Asiatic roots of Greco-Roman civilization, while not mentioning the earlier work of African scholars. In Campbell's view, by citing the work of a white scholar I implicitly reinforced the very notion of black inferiority I was challenging. While I whole heartedly agree with Campbell that Bernal owes a great debt to Cheikh Anta Diop, Martin Delaney, and other African and African diaspora scholars, Black Athena was indeed path-breaking in its extensive engagement with both old and new archeological, documentary, and linguistic evidence and in its ability to force Classicists and Classics departments worldwide to reckon with the African (and Asiatic) roots of Greco-Roman civilization.  

A fact that Campbell may not know is that Bernal comes from a deeply progressive tradition of scholarship and activism, and he himself would be the first to acknowledge that as a white, British, male scholar his pedigree has much to do with why his work was not ignored or summarily dismissed by mainstream academia, as was the case with the earlier generation of African and African diaspora scholars that he owes so much to.  Precisely because he could not be sidelined Bernal was instead the target of some of the most vicious and vitriolic attacks that academia had witnessed in decades.   As a historian of African descent, and as an Africanist, I regard the decolonization of knowledge as a crucial step in ensuring that Africans worldwide retake control of their own destinies and histories.  At the same time, I also realize that just as there are Mobutus there are also Lumumbas, and equally so just as there are James Watsons and Hugh Trevor Ropers, there are also Basil Davidsons and Martin Bernals. Honest scholarly and intellectual engagement requires that we give credit when it is due.  This small example illustrates the large role that identity politics can play in the field of African history.

Another reader, who wrote directly to me, also criticized my reference to Bernal's work.  But this time because he claimed Black Athena was "a fake and full of myths and inaccuracies." Not surprisingly, he also argued that Africa has no history. If Africans really built the pyramids, he argued, why hadn't they developed civilizations of equal grandeur in other parts of the continent?

The question is probably best answered by flipping it on its head and asking why Egypt was so complexly organized at a period in time when most other human societies (not just in Africa, but the world over) were still organized along much simpler lines.  Yet, what I find most intriguing is the underlying assumption that a human society has to be state-based, hierarchical, at least partially urban, and organized in a "complex" manner in order to qualify as a civilization.  Instead of accepting this prefabricated model of civilization and trying to squeeze every corner of African into it, we need to rethink what constitutes civilization. 

This has been one of the central tasks of Africanist historians.  Yet, our work has often been complicated by the thorny racial politics that surround not only the idea of Africa, but also its material realities. Perhaps more than any other field of history, African history has been called upon to do more than just interpret and record the past. It has often been vested with a mandate to defend the humanity of Africans.  The very evolution of the field, in fact, says much about what is at stake in telling Africa's history.

It goes with out saying that long before African history emerged as a formal discipline in European and later American universities, Africans were recording their own history. Even before the Egyptians pioneered hieroglyphics around 3150 BCE, older African civilizations recorded their history through rock paintings, many of which survive today in northern and southern Africa.  The manuscripts of ancient Mali, and in particular those found in its great center of learning, Timbuktu, also provide an incredibly rich written record of the region's scientific, economic and religious history.  Contrary to the popular opinion that oral tradition alone has preserved Africa's heritage, the manuscripts, some of which date back to the thirteenth century, point to the fact that Africa has a rich legacy of written history. Yet we should also stop to consider why it is that the written record is often regarded as a marker of civilization, while the oral record is seen as the preserve of "primitive" societies. Oral historians, sometimes called griots in West Africa, are rigorously trained and have succeeded in preserving and handing down much of Africa's history, but until more recently their histories were often dismissed as an unviable resource for the reconstruction of Africa's past.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it  was African scholars, including Samuel Johnson, Samuel Crowther, Edward Wilmont Blyden, JE Casely-Hayford, and CC Reindorf, who wrote most prolifically about the history of Africa. It was largely amongst this group of scholar-activists that the early anti-colonial movement sprang up.  In addition to these historians, a great number of diasporic African scholar-activists were also writing about Africa's history in the early twentieth century, long before the field was institutionalized in mainstream American universities. First among them were W.E.B. DuBois, Drusilla Dunjee Houston, and Willis Huggins. Shortly thereafter John Henrik Clarke, St. Clair Drake and Ralph Bunche would follow in their footsteps. Yet the contribution of all of these scholars to pioneering the field of African studies has largely been written out the field's "founding myth", which credits mainstream European and American universities with establishing African studies as a discipline of scholarly study.  

An important part of Europe's colonial machinery, universities often trained would-be colonial administrators in African languages, and through the fields of history and anthropology attempted to introduce this cadre of colonialists to the kinds of societies they would meet and work with overseas.  Perhaps the best example of this is London's School of Oriental and African Studies.  Founded in 1916 primarily to train colonial administrators for work in Britain's Asian empire, by the 1930s the growth of Britain's African empire necessitated the introduction of a robust African studies program. While the institutionalization of African studies in European academies of learning was intimately linked to colonial rule, its introduction into post-WWII North American universities was closely tied to the Cold War and neocolonialism.

During the late 1940's and 1950's when considerable funding for Area Studies was made available by the United States government in an attempt to understand the changing face of the Cold War global community a handful of African studies centers were established in several universities in the United States, including Northwestern University and University of Wisconsin, Madison.  The urgency for producing academics equipped to understand the rapidly changing political reality of the African continent resulted from the growth of the post-World War II nationalist movements that swept the African continent and Cold War politics.

By the 1960s a new wave of scholarship began to emerge on the continent itself, as many African universities, which prior to independence had been appendages of European educational institutions, became autonomous and developed vibrant history departments. With the political developments of the time many Africanist historians focused their attention on understanding the roots of the nationalist movements, while others concentrated on recuperating Africa's more distant past in order to reestablish the historical legitimacy of Africa's emerging nations.   The desire on the part of many historians to ground new African nations in a glorious past warrants further exploration, beyond the dictates of nationalism, as it suggests something larger about how the pursuit of Africa's history has been shaped by persistently negative ideas about the continent.

While Europe defined Africa in contrast to itself, Africanist historians have often tended to challenge this definition by documenting the historical similarities between Europe and Africa. Ghanaian historian, Kwame Arhin, writing in 1983 summed up this tendency when he noted, "recent theoretical and conceptual disputations...seem...to be concerned not with what Africa has actually been or is, but with the degree to which it has resembled and resembles Europe."  A decade later Finn Fuglestad named this phenomena "The Trevor-Roper Trap," after the Oxford historian who infamously claimed that Africa had no "purposive" history outside of the history of Europeans in Africa. Fuglestad argued that by constantly trying to prove that Africa's history witnessed strong parallels with Europe's, instead of redefining what constitutes "purposive" history, many Africanists unwittingly bought into Trevor-Roper's paradigm of history.

In neglecting aspects of African history which did not conform to European notions of advanced civilization, high culture and purposive movement, many Africanists implicitly accepted Europe as the yardstick by which Africa's history and civilizations should be measured. The preoccupation with Africa's state-based societies to the exclusion of its far more numerous acephalous societies is but one indication of the very real impact that the urge to challenge western racism has had on the production of historical knowledge about Africa.

Developing new methodologies for getting beyond elite and state-centered histories expanded the kinds of topics Africanist historians were able to pursue.  In this way the growing field of social history in the 1980s was of seminal importance.  Methodological advances, however, had to be coupled with a willingness on the part of Africanist historians to tackle the more quotidian realities and less glorious aspects of African history. Since the early 1990s social historians have avoided the Trevor-Roper trap through their grassroots approach to the study of Africa's history. Nuanced studies of gender, labor, ethnicity, microeconomics, memory, migration, religion, agrarian production, culture, class and more multi-layered studies of domestic slavery and colonialism, along with studies that look at the inter-relationship between many of these different fields of inquiry characterize this expansive field.  Indeed their work has unequivocally demonstrated that civilizations come in all shapes and sizes. 

First published in New African, May edition 2008.