Who is Writing Africa's History?
The question of how African history has been written is one of the fundamental themes shared by the authors selected for this article. As the continent has been the site of some of the worst colonial abuses throughout centuries of European imperialism, many of the authors share similar concerns regarding the ability of Africans to tell their own story, free from Eurocentric biases and Western institutional limitations. The question has become more than just a curious academic inquiry, as the creation of African identity during the colonial and neo-colonial periods has led to some of the worst abuses at the hands of those who have devalued the lives of the colonized.
Why have Africans not Written their own History?
In “From African Historiographies to an African Philosophy of History,” Kenyan scholar E.S. Atieno-Odhiambo begs the question of why an African philosophy of history has not been possible given the postcolonial turn.[1] Detailing the historiography of the continent, from its precolonial beginnings through its transformations during the nationalist movements of the 1960s, into the present status of African historians writing about their own nations, Atieno-Odhiambo presents the difficulties of escaping an outsider’s framework when writing from the perspective of an African.
African History Shaped by Outsiders
Africa's history has been shaped by external influences for centuries. From Muslim historians who traveled to Africa from the eighth to the fifteenth century, to the accounts of European travelers during the age of exploration, to the dreadful portrayal of Africa as a continent of eternal “blackness” by the German philosopher G.W. Hegel in the nineteenth century, it has been very difficult, even in light of the decolonization movements and the relative independence of certain African nations from European rule, to escape foreign distortions of the continent.
An Unfair Portrayal of Africa
Continuing along similar lines, Cameroonian intellectual Achille Mbembe’s masterfully crafted chapter, “Out of the World” from his book On the Postcolony, challenges readers to come to terms with African identity in relation to the wanton violence that had both been imposed through colonialism and that continues to plague Africans in post-colonial times. In his painstaking recreation of how Western scholars created Africa as a historical construction, from the backward, hostile, and uncivilized portrayals by Hegel, into twentieth century Europe’s adoption of these older views, Mbembe is concerned with how it has been historically possible to remove colonized Africans from the sphere of humanity in order to manipulate them for imperialist ends.
Post-Colonial Africa
Similarly, Mbembe questions how this historical phenomenon has affected post-colonial Africans; that is, can Africans live totally free from the vestiges of dehumanization and indiscriminate violence which were commonplace for centuries of their respective regions’ histories? Discourse as power is a key theme of this chapter, and as Mbembe argues, “picking up rumor and gossip, amplifying them in the telling, [discourse] claims to throw light on things that haunt and obsess it, but about which, in truth, it knows absolutely nothing.”[2]
Discourse as Power in Africa's Colonial Past
As the inconceivable and arbitrary violence born out of colonial discourse attest to, the power of ideas is often just as effective – or perhaps more effective – than brute force or less institutionalized methods. By reducing colonized Africans to the status of animals to be tamed, hunted, and harnessed for labor, colonial discourse has proven a difficult thing to shed for those contemporary inhabitants of the continent who are drawn into the maelstroms of violence which still plague regions of Africa.
Laura Bohannan's "Shakespeare in the Bush"
In a slight departure from the other articles mentioned earlier, Laura Bohannan’s “Shakespeare in the Bush” presents a brief, but telling anecdote about conceptions of literature as universal. By having West African village elders challenge so well-studied and time-honored a work as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Bohannan was forced to reconsider both the concept of cultural universality, and the persistence of tacitly assumed portrayals of Africans as incapable of intellectual rigor on par with Western scholars. As the elders skillfully demonstrated in their analysis of Hamlet, Western societal norms limit the famously universal classic to a much smaller audience than Bohannon originally believed. [3] And with regard to the construction of history, this article is a powerful response to traditional Western depictions of Africans as backward and naïve.
How can Africans Tell their own Story?
All three of the readings I've suggested in this article share the problem of Africans telling their own stories in the wake of colonialism. The challenge is two-fold: how can historians of Africa shape their own field in a forum that remains a Western institutional phenomenon, and how can they restore a voice to a people beset with the memories of having been reduced to objects by colonial oppressors?
[1] E. S. Atieno-Odhiambo, “From African Historiographies to an African Philosophy of History,” in Africanizing Knowledge: African Studies Across the Disciplines, eds. Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 15.
[2] Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 178-90.
[3] Laura Bohannan, “Shakespeare in the Bush,” Natural History (August-September 1966): 30.
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