Africa has a rich and complex history, but there is widespread ignorance about this legacy. A famous British historian once said that there was only the history of Europeans in Africa. In recent times, there has been an increased interest in what lies behind this lack of knowledge.
The Great Pyramid of Giza in Cairo is rightly considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. But travel further south along the River Nile and you’ll find a thousand pyramids that belonged to the Kingdom of Kush, in what is now Sudan.
Kush was an African superpower and its influence extended to what is now known as the Middle East.
The kingdom lasted for many hundreds of years, and in the eighth century BC it conquered Egypt and ruled for the best part of a century.
What’s left of the kingdom is equally impressive. More than 300 of these pyramids are still intact, virtually untouched since they were built almost 3,000 years ago.
Some of the best examples can be found in Jebel Barkal in northern Sudan, declared a World Heritage Site by the UN cultural agency, UNESCO.
Here you can find pyramids, tombs, temples and burial chambers complete with painted scenes and writings that UNESCO describes as masterpieces “of creative genius that demonstrate the artistic, social, political and religious values of a human group for more than 2000 years”
The project was conceived in the early 1960s during the period of rapid decolonisation in Africa. Some of the newly independent African leaders decided that, having decolonised their countries, they also wanted to decolonise their history.
Western historians had lamented the lack of written documents in some African countries and had used this as a reason to legitimise such neglect.
UNESCO helped African scholars put together the project, recruiting 350 experts, mostly from across Africa and from a variety of disciplines, to compile eight volumes, from prehistory onwards to modern times.
The eighth volume was completed in 1990 and work is now underway on a ninth.
UNESCO took the controversial step of starting the volumes with the origins of humankind and explaining the theory of evolution. In doing so, they risked incurring the wrath of Christian and Muslim communities in some African countries where there was, and still is, a widespread belief in creationism.
Kenyan palaeontologist Richard Leakey, who contributed to volume one, says he still believes that the fact that humans originated in Africa is a curse for some Westerners, who prefer to deny their African origins.
The history of the Kingdom of Kush, a superpower in Western Asia as well as Africa, where queens could rule on their own, is also often overlooked.
This also applies to the Kingdom of Aksum, described as one of the four greatest civilisations in the ancient world.
The Aksumite kings controlled trade in the Red Sea from their base in what is today Eritrea and Ethiopia. They were also the first rulers in Africa to embrace Christianity and make it the official religion of the kingdom.
This history is little known, both in Africa and elsewhere, because many academics and teachers in African countries have been a product of colonial education themselves, and therefore could not get a comprehensive and chronological account of their own history.
Such a view was reflected in the commentaries of Hugh Trevor-Roper, widely regarded as one of Britain’s foremost historians.
He said in 1965: “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 Europeans in Africa.
“The rest is mostly darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history.”
The fact that very few people know about the volumes that have been compiled under the auspices of UNESCO also says something. You wonder why leaders didn’t want to shed more light on it.
I’m not suggesting there was a conspiracy, of course. Just that not enough emphasis was placed on African history by either African or non-African leaders.
However, this is of particular interest to Africa because it has been infantilised to a degree that we have not seen in any other region of the world.
Challenging the stereotype
This is partly because there has been a way of seeing Africa in terms of poverty and conflict – the coup, the war, the famine, the corruption – that has become a kind of shorthand for the continent that still exists today.
Development issues in Africa still largely emphasise charitable aspects and aid.
While this is done with the best will in the world, it has nonetheless fed into this representation of Africa, where it is assumed that for the people to develop and for them to have enough to eat, they must rely on outsiders.
The General History of Africa is a start, and Unesco plans to incorporate its research into school curricula across the continent.
Hopefully, future generations will have a better idea of their history and see that there is much they can be proud of from their past. A past that provides the foundation for an even greater future.
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