Does Africa have no history?

 

“Africa has no history.”

At first sight, this may seem like an absurd statement. However, it is not a phrase that we have invented for this article.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we find European intellectuals who argued, in one way or another, that Africa stood outside universal history, that its societies had not reached a level of development comparable to Europe, or that the African past was of little historical importance.

Not all Europeans thought this way, and it would be a mistake to present European intellectual history as a single, uniform tradition. There were travellers, researchers, archaeologists, linguists and historians who made important contributions to the study of Africa.

But there was also a deeply Eurocentric current of thought that turned the European historical experience into a standard by which other societies were judged.

And Africa was one of the regions upon which these ideas had particularly important consequences.

Therefore, the question we should ask is not whether Africa has history.

The question is:

Why did certain intellectuals believe for so long that Africa did not have one?

Hegel and Africa outside history

One of the best-known examples is the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831).

In his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel established a particular conception of the development of universal history.

When he came to Africa, he wrote:

“For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit.”

Hegel went on to describe what he considered Africa proper as an “unhistorical” and “undeveloped” spirit, still closely connected to the conditions of nature.

This is not a later interpretation of his ideas.

Hegel wrote it himself.

And this is particularly important.

Hegel was not simply saying that he knew little about African history.

He was establishing a philosophical classification of societies and their relationship to what he understood as universal history.

Even when he recognised the importance of particular African regions, he could place them within other areas of his historical framework.

Carthage, for example, was considered by Hegel a Phoenician colony and was therefore connected with Asia.

Egypt also occupied a particular place within his philosophy of history.

In this way, a large part of Africa was excluded from what Hegel considered proper universal history.

Europe as the measure of history

Here we encounter one of the fundamental problems of Eurocentrism.

It does not simply mean that a European studies Europe.

That would be perfectly normal.

The problem arises when the European historical experience becomes the universal model through which the development of all other societies is judged.

If a society does not possess the same institutions as Europe, it may be considered backward.

If it does not use the same forms of writing, it may be considered to have no history.

If it does not follow the same political, economic or religious development, it may be considered inferior.

And if its societies do not fit the European model of development, they may be presented as stagnant.

Africa was frequently interpreted through these kinds of categories.

Did Africa have no sources?

One of the arguments used for a long time to question the existence of African history was the scarcity of certain written sources.

But here we must make an important distinction.

Not having large written archives does not mean having no history.

Many African societies preserved knowledge of their past through oral tradition.

Genealogies.

Historical narratives.

Poetry.

Memories of events.

Political traditions.

Stories transmitted from one generation to another.

This does not mean that every oral tradition should be accepted without criticism.

On the contrary.

Oral tradition, like any other historical source, must be examined, compared and critically analysed.

The Belgian historian Jan Vansina was one of the key figures in developing methods for studying African oral traditions as historical sources.

His work Oral Tradition as History, published in 1985, became a major reference in this field.

The issue was fundamental:

the absence of one particular type of documentation could not be used as proof of the absence of history.

Archaeology

We must also remember another fundamental source:

archaeology.

Africa preserves material evidence of thousands of years of history.

Settlements.

Cities.

Fortifications.

Temples.

Tombs.

Ceramics.

Tools.

Metallurgy.

Sculptures.

Coins.

Architecture.

Trade networks.

Archaeology has made it possible to reconstruct African societies that left few written documents or that developed other forms of transmitting knowledge.

UNESCO's General History of Africa devoted its first volume to methodology and African prehistory, including archaeology, historiography and different types of sources.

The second volume is dedicated to the ancient civilizations of Africa.

Therefore, we are not dealing with a continent without a past.

We are dealing with a continent whose past requires the use of different types of sources.

Africa had civilizations

This point deserves emphasis.

Africa was not simply a collection of small, isolated communities waiting for the arrival of Europeans.

African history includes complex political societies, great states, cities, empires and trade networks that developed over centuries.

Ancient Egypt.

Kush.

Meroe.

Aksum.

Ghana.

Mali.

Songhai.

Kanem-Bornu.

Ife.

Benin.

Kongo.

Great Zimbabwe.

Mapungubwe.

And many other societies and political entities form part of the history of the continent.

They were not all the same.

They did not have the same institutions.

They did not belong to the same period.

They did not share a single culture.

And precisely here lies one of the great riches of African history:

Africa did not have a single civilization. It had many.

Egypt

The case of Egypt is particularly significant.

Pharaonic civilization is one of the great civilizations of antiquity.

And Egypt is in Africa.

This may seem obvious.

Yet historically there has been a tendency to study Egypt separately from the rest of Africa, placing it primarily within the history of the Mediterranean or the Near East.

This does not mean that Egypt did not have relations with other regions.

Of course it did.

Precisely for that reason, it should be studied within the networks that connected the Nile Valley with the Mediterranean, the Near East and other parts of Africa.

But Egypt does not cease to be an African civilization.

UNESCO's General History of Africa itself devotes substantial attention to Egypt and Nubia within the development of African civilizations.

Kush and Meroe

South of Egypt we find another fundamental history:

Kush.

The Kingdom of Kush developed in Nubia and came to exercise considerable power in the Nile Valley.

Its rulers even controlled Egypt during what is known as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty.

Later, Meroe became an important political and cultural centre.

Once again, this demonstrates why African history cannot be reduced to Egypt.

Other African societies had their own political, economic and cultural structures.

Aksum

In the Horn of Africa we find another major civilization:

Aksum.

The Kingdom of Aksum developed important commercial relationships with the Red Sea and Indian Ocean worlds.

Its importance is reflected in its monuments, inscriptions, coins and commercial connections.

Aksum does not need to be explained as an extension of some outside civilization.

It was an African society with its own historical development and its own relationships with other worlds.

Ghana, Mali and Songhai

In West Africa we find another succession of major political formations.

Ghana.

Mali.

Songhai.

Their histories were connected to the trade routes crossing the Sahara and linking West Africa with the Maghreb, Egypt and other regions.

Gold played an enormous role in these networks.

But it would be a mistake to reduce the history of these states to trade alone.

There were political structures, cities, taxation systems, armies, religious institutions, centres of learning and diplomatic relations.

The famous pilgrimage of Mansa Musa to Mecca in the fourteenth century is one of the best-known examples of Mali's international connections.

We are not talking about isolated societies.

We are talking about societies integrated into extensive commercial and intellectual networks.

West Africa and knowledge

The history of West Africa was also connected to an important written tradition.

Cities such as Timbuktu became centres of learning and manuscript production.

Libraries and collections of Arabic and African manuscripts preserve evidence concerning the political, religious, legal and social history of the region.

This is particularly important for our subject.

Because it demonstrates that the issue of sources cannot simply be reduced to the claim that Africa had no writing.

There was writing.

There were manuscripts.

There were historians.

There were jurists.

There were chroniclers.

And there were also forms of oral transmission.

African history, like the history of any other region, used different types of sources.

Great Zimbabwe

Another particularly significant example is Great Zimbabwe.

The enormous stone structures of this archaeological complex constitute one of the great testimonies to the history of African societies in southern Africa.

Yet during the colonial period there were interpretations that denied that local African populations could have built these structures.

Other explanations were sought.

Arabs.

Phoenicians.

The Queen of Sheba.

Even biblical figures.

The issue is revealing.

When one begins from the assumption that an African society could not have produced a particular achievement, archaeological evidence can be interpreted by searching for almost any alternative explanation rather than accepting the ability of African populations themselves.

Later historiography placed Great Zimbabwe within the history of the African societies of the region.

The case became one of the best-known examples of how prejudice can influence interpretations of the African past.

The racial element

Here we encounter another aspect that cannot be ignored.

During the centuries of the slave trade and later European colonial expansion, different racial theories were developed and disseminated.

These theories were not simply a matter of scientific classification.

In certain contexts, they established hierarchies between peoples.

Europe could be presented as the model of civilization.

African peoples, meanwhile, could be represented as primitive, backward or incapable of developing certain institutions.

UNESCO has explicitly recognised the role of myths and prejudices in obscuring Africa's past and the importance of the General History of Africa in presenting the continent's history from an African perspective.

Therefore, when we speak about Eurocentrism in African historiography, we are not talking simply about geography.

We are also talking about who establishes the categories through which other societies are judged.

Cheikh Anta Diop

And this is where we encounter a fundamental figure:

Cheikh Anta Diop.

Diop was born in Senegal in 1923 and died in 1986.

His importance to Africanist and Pan-Africanist thought is considerable.

In 1954 he published Nations nègres et culture, a work that became a major reference in twentieth-century African historical thought.

Diop challenged interpretations that placed Africa in a historically subordinate position and argued for the study of African civilizations in a way that recognised their own historical agency.

One of the central subjects of his work was ancient Egypt.

Diop argued that Egypt should be situated within African history and challenged interpretations that radically separated Pharaonic civilization from its African context.

His work was not limited to Egypt.

He also studied African political and social systems and sought to demonstrate the historical depth of African societies.

His importance therefore does not lie simply in having defended the historical importance of one civilization.

It lies in having challenged the way in which the historical narrative about Africa itself had been constructed.

Diop and Eurocentric thought

Diop's importance must be understood within his historical context.

He was not simply trying to add a few African chapters to a history written from Europe.

He was challenging a historiographical model in which Europe occupied the centre.

His work argued that Africa could be studied as a historical subject.

That its civilizations could be investigated.

That its societies could be analysed.

That its languages could provide historical evidence.

That its heritage could be studied scientifically.

And that African history should form part of universal history.

UNESCO would later recognise the importance of this change in perspective through its General History of Africaproject. Diop himself was one of the African scholars associated with this project.

Kenneth Onwuka Dike

Diop was not alone.

In Nigeria, Kenneth Onwuka Dike developed important historical research.

In 1956 he published Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–1885, a study of the economic and political relations of the Niger Delta.

His work contributed to the development of a historiography in which African societies appeared as protagonists in political and economic processes, rather than simply as passive objects of European expansion.

This is important.

Because the history of Africa does not consist only of studying what Europeans did in Africa.

It also consists of studying what Africans did.

The history of Africa is not the history of Europeans in Africa

This distinction may seem simple, but it is fundamental.

For centuries, much European documentation about Africa was produced by explorers, merchants, missionaries, soldiers and colonial administrators.

These sources are important.

But they have their own perspectives and limitations.

If we use only these sources, we can end up telling primarily the history of Europeans in Africa.

And that is precisely what Hugh Trevor-Roper argued.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

Trevor-Roper was one of the best-known British historians of the twentieth century and held the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford.

In a series of lectures broadcast by the BBC and later published in The Rise of Christian Europe, he stated:

“Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness... And darkness is not a subject for history.”

The passage appears in The Rise of Christian Europe, p. 9. The lectures had originally been broadcast by BBC Television and were subsequently published in The Listener before appearing in book form. Cambridge Assets+1 

Trevor-Roper was even more explicit elsewhere.

In his 1969 article “The Past and Present: History and Sociology,” published in Past & Present, he wrote:

“It follows that the study of history is and must be Eurocentric.”

He continued by arguing that the history of the world over the previous five centuries, insofar as it was significant, had been European history. Cambridge Assets 

Here we do not have to force an interpretation upon his words.

The author himself used the term Eurocentric.

Hegel and Trevor-Roper

Hegel and Trevor-Roper lived in very different periods and their intellectual systems were not identical.

We should not turn them into the same thinker or attribute precisely the same ideas to them.

But there is an evident similarity in their statements concerning Africa.

Hegel had considered Africa not to be a historical part of the world and claimed that it had no movement or development to exhibit.

Trevor-Roper stated more than a century later that there was little or no African history to teach and that the African past was “darkness.”

The issue is particularly striking because Trevor-Roper made his statement at a time when historical research on Africa was already developing considerably.

A growing African historiography

While Trevor-Roper argued that there was little or no African history to teach, other researchers were demonstrating precisely the opposite.

Jan Vansina was studying oral traditions.

Kenneth Dike was researching the economic and political history of Nigeria.

Cheikh Anta Diop was studying African civilizations and their place in universal history.

Other researchers were working on archaeology, linguistics, manuscripts and African sources.

African historiography was not waiting for Europe to discover that Africa had a past.

It was already being studied.

UNESCO's General History of Africa

In 1964, while numerous African states were gaining independence, UNESCO launched one of the most important historiographical projects of the twentieth century:

the General History of Africa.

Its purpose was to study the history of the continent from an African perspective.

The project brought together hundreds of historians and specialists from Africa and elsewhere and was overseen by an International Scientific Committee in which African scholars played a leading role.

The work did not limit itself to the colonial period.

Its structure begins with prehistory and the ancient civilizations of Africa and continues through the medieval, modern and contemporary history of the continent.

UNESCO's volumes include one devoted to methodology and African prehistory and another specifically devoted to the ancient civilizations of Africa.

This is particularly significant.

Because it demonstrates that African history does not need to be reconstructed only from the moment Europeans arrived.

It has thousands of years of history before that.

Africa is not a single history

We must also avoid another mistake.

Recognising African history does not mean presenting Africa as a single civilization.

Africa is an enormous continent.

Its societies have been extraordinarily diverse.

We cannot place Egypt, Kush, Aksum, Mali, Kongo, Benin and Great Zimbabwe into a single category as though they had formed one civilization.

They did not.

Each had its own historical context.

Its own institutions.

Its own religions.

Its own economic structures.

Its own relationships with other peoples.

Precisely for this reason we speak of African histories.

And all of them form part of the history of the continent.

Nor is this about idealising Africa

Recognising the existence of African civilizations does not mean presenting the African past as some kind of golden age.

African societies experienced wars.

Conflicts.

Slavery.

Inequalities.

Political struggles.

Territorial expansion.

Religious changes.

Crises and transformations.

Like every other human society.

Precisely for that reason, they are historical societies.

We do not need to idealise them in order to recognise their historical importance.

History is not about presenting perfect peoples.

It is about studying what happened.

Africa Has History

And we return once again to the title of this article.

“Africa has no history.”

After everything we have seen, the statement is difficult to sustain.

Africa has history.

It has one of the oldest histories of humanity.

It has civilizations.

It has states.

It has cities.

It has trade networks.

It has intellectual traditions.

It has manuscripts.

It has monuments.

It has oral traditions.

It has archaeology.

It has languages and cultures that allow us to reconstruct historical processes of enormous complexity.

And, above all, it has societies that were protagonists of their own past.

The problem was never that Africa had no history.

The problem was that for a long time certain ways of writing history failed, refused or were unable to recognise it.

Hegel expressed this through his philosophy of history.

Trevor-Roper expressed it well into the twentieth century.

Against these views emerged African and Africanist scholars who demonstrated that the continent could and should be studied as a historical subject.

Cheikh Anta Diop was one of the most important figures in that transformation.

Later African historiography greatly expanded our knowledge.

And UNESCO's General History of Africa brought together much of this effort in a work of extraordinary scope.

Therefore, perhaps the question should never have been:

Does Africa have history?

The correct question is another:

Why did some people claim for so long that it did not?

The answer takes us directly into the history of Eurocentrism, colonialism and racial theories which, at particular moments, placed Europe at the centre and treated European historical development as a universal measure of human progress.

But none of these ideas can erase the past.

Africa was there before Europe described it.

Its peoples built states.

Its societies created cultures.

Its merchants travelled great distances.

Its rulers exercised power.

Its scholars transmitted knowledge.

Its artisans built cities and monuments.

Its generations preserved the memory of those who came before them.

Africa had history.

And it still does.

Bibliography and Sources

Primary sources

• Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History.
• Trevor-Roper, Hugh. The Rise of Christian Europe. London: Thames and Hudson, 1965, pp. 9–11.
• Trevor-Roper, Hugh. “The Past and Present: History and Sociology.” Past & Present, no. 42, 1969, pp. 3–17.
• Diop, Cheikh Anta. Nations nègres et culture. Paris: Éditions africaines, 1954.
• Dike, Kenneth Onwuka. Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–1885. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.

African historiography

• Vansina, Jan. Oral Tradition as History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
• Ki-Zerbo, Joseph, ed. General History of Africa, I: Methodology and African Prehistory. UNESCO.
• UNESCO. General History of Africa. Collection of volumes covering African history from prehistory to the contemporary period.

Institutional sources

• UNESCO. General History of Africa.
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Link to the Spanish version of the page: https://biladsudan.blogspot.com/2016/08/africa-no-tiene-historia.html