Brief Thoughts on the Beginnings of Colonial and Post-Colonial African Historiography

In Adebayo Oyebade’s “The Study of Africa in Historical Perspective” the author informs us of the history of Eurocentric presumptions of Africa’s lack of history and thus, lack of civilization (7). Oyebade emphasizes, however, that history in many parts of Africa was primarily preserved by way of oral tradition. It was only with the onset of European colonialism, as we will see, and the fear that these traditions were being lost, that we see an impetus for them being written down.

The European concept of Africa as a continent without civilization or significant achievement was a by-product of racist pseudo-science and self-justifying scholarship. (9) Margery Perham, a British political commentator, wrote that until the arrival of Europeans to the continent, Africa was devoid of writing and thus “without history.” (10) Such pseudo-intellectual scholarship emanated from Europe, but was hardly confined to it. In the United States, particularly the South, we find wide-spread examples of similar polemic. In Africa itself, many of the early-Modern period written works on African history were a by-product of colonialism. These works were written by the colonizers as an attempt to define the history of the subjugated and justify European custodianship, of sorts, of a “superstition-ridden people” who practiced “human sacrifice and cannibalism” (11).

British historian D.G.O. Ayerst explained colonialism as a “civilizing mission” of the European to Africa. This “Dark Continent” thinking continues today in a subtler guise, but as recently as 1963, we find British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper writing that “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at the present there is none” (ibid). Arguing against desegregation in the United States, Professor Henry Garret did not hesitate to call the history of Africa “blank” (ibid) with “no written language; no numerals; no calendar or system of measurement” (12).

African historians too, motivated by patriotism, began preserving much of the oral history in written form. More than ever, due to the permeation of European colonialism, it was feared that the oral tradition might be lost for the first time if not set to paper. African historian Samuel Johnson observed that the Yoruba knew well the history of England, Rome and Greece, but no longer knew anything of their own history (13).

Western academia, nevertheless, continued to undervalue many local histories. The systematic collection of source materials, the heavy reliance on oral tradition, and often a lack of critical evaluation and interpretation of reports made some of the early-Modern local African histories more ethnographical in nature. (14) The 1950s, however, saw a new phase in the decolonialization of both Africa and African history.

Academic historiography of Africa began to take shape as a credible pursuit. African historians applied critical methodologies, insisting on “thorough investigation of issues with a view to arriving at a creditable conclusion.” (14) This was largely the result of many Universities having been established in Africa. The formal teaching of these methodologies thus paved the way for African scholars to apply historiographical methods of critical scholarship to the collection and interpretation of African histories.

By the mid-1960s, a cemented curriculum of African history was finally established in African institutions. (15). The author comments that “unlike the ethnographic and superficial analysis of Africa by the European writers, and the non-critical, story-type accounts of the local chroniclers, the historical scholarship produced from the late 1950s has laid a proper claim to academic history.” (16)

Over the past few decades, African history has matured within the United States as well. Afrocentrism, often controversial, has emerged critiquing the “European hegemony in scholarship.” (18) Molefi Kete Asante regards the Eurocentric model as an “ideology that masquerades as a universal view.” (18) The author explains that the Eurocentric model frames the black historical experience “as a by-product of European culture” (19)

The centrality of Africa to the study of African history, however, is no longer an issue of contention or controversy. Since the 1960s, African historians can more or less, across the board, be regarded as “Africa-centric.” The disputes arise with regards to the focus – even fixation – of noted scholars such as Cheikh Anta Diop on Egypt as a sort of “intellectual muscle” to Afrocentrism and African history. A comparison can easily be made between this and the focus on ancient Greece in European history. However, like Ancient Greece and Rome, most scholars content that there is no evidence for a purely “black African” Egypt, and that instead the evidence points to a culture of many hues, where the concept of “race” does not seem to have been so prominent, if extant at all (20).

The primary critique of Afrocentrism in African studies is that some of its conclusions are ideologically driven and thus, may at times, lack objectivity in a reactionary way to Eurocentric scholarship. Diop’s African Origins of Civilization is right to note the many early Egyptian depictions of rulers with an appearance that one might regard as “black” or sub-Saharan. His focus, however, seems to over-emphasized these while assuming the records of rulers and citizens with different features and even skin tone to be later, almost clearly demarcated additions to Egyptian society, which did not intermix. Scholars who reject the scientific validity of the concept of “race” have proposed criticisms, variations and amendments to Diop’s theory. Nevertheless, though assertions of a homogenously and ethnically “black” Ancient Egypt may over step some academic bounds, Diop’s – and related scholars’ – thesis, was important to the field, in that the centrality of Egyptian pollination of ideas and technologies to Ancient Greece had been greatly underemphasized by Eurocentric scholarship