Introduction
The issue of history for Africa and Africans is very complex especially in the last 2 generations and almost everywhere Africans are found currently. The confusion of an average African when it comes to his or her history can be disturbing. While it is very clear that a dramatic shift emerged with colonialism, this shift seem to have morphed into consolidation of nonsense; the abrogation of African history. Of course if you do not know your history you are not only lost, your trajectory is equally a lost path no matter how temporally rewarding it may appear. Let me do a brief survey of my contentions in confrontations with history for Africans.
Assignment 1
In an era when the northern countries have ‘conquered history’ by attempting to re-write the historiography of human interaction in part through allowance for relationships of negatives, double negatives. A counter-productive and regressive affront on compendium of certified human historical precedence! A concerned individual agape at the confusion is best served to know oneselves with certainty before taking a plunge. Let us inject some tasks by tackling the questions, Who are you? Who are your fathers and mother at least to last 4 generations? Where did each generation reside? Do you believe as ‘instructed’ that data is unavailable or unreliable where it is available?
Plain Truth Ma’am/Sir
Few items to clarify! I have stated in an earlier piece that the biggest battle for mankind is the battle of the mind. It will be the most contested piece of ‘real’ estate as evidence increasingly shows that concentration of attention on the material is waning. What is attracting most attention of power elites is the means to control the mind of those controlling/consuming resources especially what I call hidden or unknown but knowable knowledge. Nothing esoteric! Reflect back on the various battles fought with so much blood to testify the dignity of African person. The earlier generations of Africans suffered, perished and decimated because they are human but denied their dignity.
When this battle was won on the back of irrefutable evidence that the ‘conqueror’ is rather a child of the conquered hence came from a common origin in Black (East) Africa, naturally the discursive calculus was shifted to culture. That all human beings are Africans including the Chinese and Indians, that no one is superior to Africans and vice versa. A powerful conclusion in the face of slavery and racism and other discriminatory strategies institutionalised even in God’s name! In essence the case is finally settled that we are all (equal) human beings but gaps remain in the cultural sphere. Have you noticed how mainstream media and establishments in the Anglo world attempt to portray their view of underground racism? How they avoid the biological question but focus on culture whatever-it-means when equality issues by minorities come to public attention? Then such attitudes will be trivial challenges to Africans at least for the effort of Dr Chiek Anta Diop whose indefatigable scholarship finally laid bare the truth of Africa and Africans. His books are legendary in setting in stone who Africans are. The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality?, Black Africa: Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federal State, The Cultural Unity of Black Africa, Civilization or Barbarism etc.
No Obstacles
Those who spent sometimes in formal studies in Africa in the last few generations must have confronted parts of the brainwashing that suggest African peoples/communities’ isolation, siege mentality and erstwhile fear of their neighbours including impossibility to conquer their physical environments and elements. One point is that Sahara Desert was an obstacle to interaction between African peoples while evidence points in the opposite direction. Another salient point was the determinism enthroned that the peoples/communities inhabiting jungles of tropical equatorial climate stagnated in the shrub areas of impenetrable vegetation, suggesting their lack of technological initiative/infrastructure to dominate and control their environment and intellectual advancement to trade, share, exchange and interact. Evidence equally points in opposite direction.
The second case continues to raise its head with most peoples of Southern Nigeria in their argument against errors of colonialism that forced different peoples under the same political/geopolitical umbrella. Yes, differences exist but were similarities totally absent? Were interactions between communities totally non-existent? If these peoples come from the same origin in East Africa, how come difference rings the bell more than similarities? Does the failure of imposed political experiments eviscerate prior indigenous models and structures of interaction between communities prior to colonialism? Weren’t communities engaged in trading across thousands of miles? Are Igbo totally isolated from Yoruba, Nupe, Hausa, Angas, Birom and the rest? Prof John Oriji’s effort in this direction is laudable at least in delineating the temporal and spatial dimension of interconnection and interaction between Ndigbo and their neighbours over time.
Common Identity
Are our historical endeavours serious when attention is focused mostly on unique differences and narrow cultural nationalism? No offense to Ijaw/Ijo family members but Prof E Alagoa made this type of historical scholarship his fort in the attempt to erase Igbo connections in space and time. At a sundry level, doesn’t the current Nigerian President possess Igbo heritage in his names despite being Ijaw? Whose interest is best served by such academic and political polemics? Is it not the case that every community or people in West Africa finally settled in their respective geographies after setting on westward migration from East Africa many generations ago? Naturally languages are lost and gained; defensive-oriented dispersal produced new losses and gains, cultural reduction and enrichment as well.
Is it logical to claim the Berlin Conference boundaries are unrepresentative while simultaneously deny the obvious brotherhood/sisterhood littered across common words, similar manners, similar rituals and accepted hospitalities? Divide-and-rule seems to be the lesson most (African) elites accepted hook, line and sinker.
One of the saddest outcomes of independence is the confidence colonisers maintained and continues to do so that their expectation will not fail. The confidence that the new elite in various African countries will maintain the status quo. In essence that the new elite will never recover their history, they’ll never know who they are. It is a powerful faith even for the theologically faithless. Part of this outcome originated in the universalist imposition of cultural imperialism by sadistic purveyors of Christianity & Islam. Their ultimate goal of creating new men and new women rested in their prior total destruction; their historicide. At this point one can surmise some correlations between rendering of unique history of peoples and the propensity to concentrate power in a particular people to dominate others. Few African countries actually pursued sound historically-oriented development post-independence where citizenship of the new political entity doesn’t clash with original nationality.
The knowledge of history is the beginning of wisdom. Until Africans begin to see and believe that all Africans regardless of their pigmentation come from the same source, the same origin, the same hearth; then previous mistake occupy the conveyor belt for the next run. History is not just about yesterday; it is equally about living connection with events of long time ago, appreciating the highs and lows of these interconnected actions of peoples, deep reflexive reception of one’s heritage as historical/value priority without bigotry and devoid of puritanical fit.
A spectre is haunting the world, the spectre of change. This change is gradually emerging even as many deny it. It is not just about the decline of North America and Europe, it is rather the obvious reality that political experiments of the last 100 years will modify or go away. For those who are thumping their limbs as archpriests and apostles of one brand of democracy or another, such realities will decline. Look back to the history of Africa and other continents up until 1900, political power is mostly concentrated in few individuals and is definitely hierarchical. The delusion that the current generation is special and privileged is nonsense. Only lack of historical knowledge can generate such conclusions.
Conclusion
I’ll conclude this piece with a comparative rendition of 2 men’s understanding of history, their distinct managements of state affairs and how their platforms have survived their legacies.
Dr Kwame Nkrumah burst into the colonial scene with vigour and clarity of his place, the place of Africans and the place of the coloniser in history. He was not a child of privilege or sufficiency. He was quick, aggressive and too shrewd a player for London. In a sense he was isolated at the time even in his own (West Africa) backyard. While Ghana (Gold Coast) offered him a platform to resist the coloniser he had no illusions of his limited resources and it in part contributed to his leaning toward utilisation of communist opportunities. Nevertheless he accepted the historical vision of one people, one heritage and one continent. Geopolitics dominated and underpinned by African history and experiences! While he was overthrown under the auspices of the West, Ghana at least remained intact and continues to do.
Mr Felix Houphouet-Boigny (Le Vieux: Old Man) burst into the scene as an aristocrat and privileged. As an assimilated French person he saw himself as an extension of the metropolitan France hence Ivory Coast is solely an appendage of the Republic in the north that happened to be in Africa. His position and strategic interest conflicted with his African origin as expressed in Franz Fanon’s conclusion in Wretched of the Earth. Le Vieux was aware and could have been present in Paris when General De Gaulle denied gallant African troops glory in WW2 victory parade. There is no evidence he protested such racism. Today, he’ll be regarded as a moderate in the true sense of the word. His understanding of history is rather confusing but at best accommodates subservience.
As time will have it he served as useful conduit for destabilising Nkrumah’s Ghana and contributed to his overthrow and exile. While he stood in power for the next 3 decades, Ivory Coast, his baby, became a model with ‘achievements’ including a replica Vatican in Yamoussoukro his village when majority of his subject had little to eat. When he died in 1993, his baby equally died with him. But before that he played a part in the murder of another proud African whom he despised as a challenger, Captain Thomas Sankara. Captain Sankara’s murderer, Captain Blaise Campoare heeded his father-in-laws advice to do the honours and Captain Sankara was cut down in his prime because he knew and relished his African history.
In a twist of history, Ivory Coast has never seen peace since Le Vieux’s exit to the point that his Paris deemed it strategic to attack the country twice. Just another piece of real estate! Of course Le Vieux approved of General De Gaulle’s genocide of Africans.
In a history of 2 histories of 2 men, one was driven out in ignominy because of his assertiveness and acute sense of history. The other held on for tactical victory only for the heritage amassed from his poor sense of history to go up in flames. Lessons of history are not only acquired in classroom rather enriched in willing hearts out of great experiences and proud associations drawn from greatness of men and women who lived before.
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