The knowledge of African history has changed significantly in the last half century and continues to take on new variations. This is due to two crucial factors: first, until the late 1950s, the documentation of African history was not undertaken by Africans themselves. Thus, the earliest knowledge about sub-Saharan Africa came from the accounts of European travelers, encyclopedists, missionaries, traders, and colonial officials, among others. Second, as David Northrup has shown, these early writings were grossly speculative and generally reflected the ignorance, prejudice, or racial attitudes of the writers – factors that influenced early European perceptions of, engagements with, and writings about Africa.
Most scholars agree that African history has been a topic of much speculation since the days of Greek and Roman antiquity. By the first century CE for instance, the Roman encyclopedist, Pliny the Elder (c. 23-79 CE) had infused much of the prevailing distorted views of Africa into his famous work, Naturalis Historia in which he described Africans as “fear inspiring and monstrous.” This was arguably the first recorded writing about Black Africa and in many ways, it canonized the stereotypical portrayal of Africa as “the heart of darkness” to use the words of Josef Conrad. This perception would be adapted into medieval European scholarship as evident in the writing of Saint Isidore of Seville (c.560-636) for whom Africa was “filled to capacity with a multitude of wild beasts and serpents including rhinoceros and basilisk.” These distorted views created a legacy of exoticizing Africa that fed into colonial era prejudice.
Even with the increase in European eyewitness accounts of sub-Saharan Africa from the 17th century, misrepresentations of African realities continued to linger in European thinking because Africans had to be seen as different, primitive, and unmodern, to justify the idea of European cultural universality and racial superiority. A much-cited example of this perception is Professor Hugh Trevor Roper’s infamous 1963 description of Africans as “barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.” Thus, colonial era knowledge about the African past was built to justify the colonial project, embedding the binaries of African vs European, modern vs primitive, et cetera, and became the dominant European perspective of Africa until the late 1950s when African history as an academic field emerged. Bolstered by the widespread anticolonial nationalism across the continent, Africanist historians set out to reconstruct African histories using a myriad of sources including oral tradition, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and sociology, among others. This new school of history unarguably revolutionized the study of African history – even if momentarily. Did this turn of events in African historiography fundamentally alter colonial conceptions of history and modernity? In what ways did the nationalist school challenge Eurocentric notions of Africa? What type(s) of history did the new school produce, and how far did this scholarship resonate with African realities in the postcolonial moment? My next blog will dissect these questions to show how this new field of African history evolved and examine its significance and challenges.
