E. S. Atieno-Odhiambo
Introduction
Recent thinking on the philosophy of history has delineated its basic concerns as being, firstly, the nature of historiographical knowledge, and secondly, the metaphysical assumptions of historiography (Tucker 2001). The seemingly weak status of the sub-discipline (Stanford 1998, 5-8) belies the interdisciplinary diffusion of articles and books across the disciplines of history, philosophy, law, political science, and sociology. This diffusion is particularly marked in the field of African studies (Karp and Bird 1987, Mudimbe and Jewsiewicki 1993, Odera Oruka 1990, Karp and Masolo 2000), and may indeed beguile the scholar into the false recognition of the absence of an African philosophy of history. And yet a proper reading of the Africanist founders of African historiography should soon disabuse us of this erroneous posture, given their early concerns with ancient Egypt as the plenum of all history and the foundation of all black civilization (Cheikh Anta Diop 1954); with ancient Egyptian labels written in hieroglyphic signs as being the world’s earliest examples of phonetic writing (Dreyer 1992, 293-99); with the pharaoh Akhenaten as being “the first individual in human history” (Breasted 1905 as cited in Montserrat 2000, 3); with methodology and assumptions of African historiography (Ranger 1968, ix-x); with an antecedent historical consciousness (Ogot 1978); with an African world order or an African vision of reality that informs the political, historical, philosophical, value-ethical, and epistemological fields of concern (Ogot 1961, 1972); with the attainment of wisdom that comes with age (Lonsdale 2000, 5); and with the relationship of African historiography to African realities (Ranger 1976, 17-23). Can African historians recapture this historical space and reintroduce an African philosophy of history that emphasizes African autonomy?
During the recent post-structuralist and postmodernist era it has become fashionable to think of continents, communities, identities, belonging, tradition, heritage, and home as imagined, invented, or created entities. The idea of Africa has been tantalizing to the West since Homer imagined the flight of the Greek gods from Mount Olympus to Africa, there to feast with the blemishless Ethiopians. In the fifteenth century, a Papal Bull imagined Africa as a terra nullius and proceeded to divide it between Christian Spain and Portugal. The English poet Jonathan Swift imagined a “yon Afrique” where geographers were wont to fill the blank spaces with elephants for want of towns. The partition of Africa at the Berlin West Africa Conference in 1884-1885 carved up Africa between the European powers ostensibly because the continent had an ignoble history of slave trade and slavery which could be stamped out only through European colonization. Thus the former citizens and subjects of African kingdoms and of stateless communities were dubbed peoples without history. Instead it was asserted that there was only the history of Europeans in Africa. European authorship from Hegel down to H. R. Trevor-Roper asserted that Africa constituted a blank darkness, and “darkness was not a suitable subject for history” (Trevor-Roper 1966, 9). The colonial period was a time of distortion through power: “[P]ower was used to force Africans into distorting identities; power relations distorted colonial social science, rendering it incapable of doing more than reflecting colonial constructions” (Ranger 1996, 273). One of these distortions was that of thinking of Africans as people without history.
The other Africa, the actually existing Africa of the Africans, did not participate in this discourse. The fact that history is a record of man’s past, and that the philosophy of history consists of second order reflections on the thoughts of historians about the historical process, engaged the oral historian Mamadou Kouyate of the empire of Mali as much as it did the Moslem scholar Ibn Khaldun of the same empire at the same time. This tradition of production and engagement with the memory of their own histories continued through the ages into the twentieth century, the age of Africa’s peasant intellectuals (Feierman 1990). Here, tradition means:
the socially consolidated versions of the past, and particularly accounts of origins of institutions, which served to define communities and underwrite authority in them. Memory refers to those traces of past experience present in the consciousness of every human being, which provided the essential but problematic basis for the sense of personal identity, as well as the constraining or enabling basis for future action. Tradition was social and hierarchical, memory was individual and open-access. (Peel 1998, 77)
Overview of African Historiography
Precolonial historiographies of Africa consisted of oral histories as well as written accounts. The oral histories included myths, legends, epics, poetry, parable, and narrative. They varied from dynastic accounts and kinglists that were a record of the royal courts and the state elites to the clan histories of the stateless societies. Because of their selective valorization and silences they constituted historiographies in themselves. These oral renditions were the resources that the first Christian African elites drew on to write their histories in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Apolo Kagwa in Buganda, John Nyakatura and Kabalega Winyi in Bunyoro, Samuel Johnson among the Yoruba, Akiga Sai among the Tiv, and J. Egbarehva in Benin. Similarly among the stateless peoples the clan histories were to become the resources for writing the wider histories of the Luo by Paul Mbuya (Ogot 1997).
The written sources of African history belong to three different historiographical traditions. First was the enormous corpus of Muslim sources from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries C.E. Written by Islamic missionaries, travelers and scholars to Sudanic and the eastern coast of Africa these included the works of Al Masudi, Al Bakri, Al Idrisi, Ibn Batuta, Ibn Khaldun, and al Wazzan (Leo Africanus). These sources consisted of direct and reported observations of local societies. The sources were biased in favor of Muslim rulers and said little positive about the non-believers. After the sixteenth century African Islamic scholarship emerged that incorporated the local oral traditions in its renditions. This scholarship took center stage with the emergence of the Tarikh al Sudan by Al Sadi of Timbuktu in 1665, Tarikh al Fattash (1664), and Tarikh Mai Idris by Imam Ahmad Ibn Fartuwa. Swahili Islamic scholarship emerged also, beginning in the eighteenth century, embodied in city-state histories like the Pate Chronicle or in the nineteenth-century resistance poetry from Mombasa, Muyaka. The same happened in the Hausa states, giving rise to the Kano Chronicle as a generic format. These documents focused on state power rather than the wider social processes. In the nineteenth century vigorous Islamic scholarship flourished in the Sokoto Caliphate as well, represented by the extensive writings of the founding Caliph Shehu, Usuman Dan Fodio, and those of his successors.
The second corpus of written sources consisted of European traders and travelers’ accounts dating from the fifteenth century. They imparted the image of the exotic as well as a primitive Africa often at war with itself, particularly in the nineteenth century. The third strand of scholarship came from the Africans in the Diaspora in the Americas, beginning with Olaudah Equiano in 1791 and continuing on to Edward Wilmot Blyden in the nineteenth century and W.E.B. Dubois and Leo Hansberry in the twentieth century. This trend marked the opposite of the European endeavor: it sought to glorify the African past. In Africa, Cheikh Anta Diop endeavored to prove that the foundation of ancient Egyptian civilization was Black and African. This tendency has been seized upon by the school of Afrocentricity in the United States, led by Molefi K. Asante.
Colonial historiography produced its own knowledge of Africa, based on the premise of European superiority and the civilizing nature of its mission. Colonial historiography presented the Europeans as the main actors in any significant transformation of the African continent since its “discovery,” exploration, and conquest. Elspeth Huxley’s White Man’s Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of Modern Kenya (1935) was typical of this genre. The Africans were seen by the administrators, missionaries, historians and anthropologists alike as being static and primitive, the passive recipients of European progress. Africa’s self-evident artistic achievements, its historic monuments, its political kingdoms that resembled any other western-type bureaucracy, and its complex religious institutions were attributed to foreigners, the Hamitic conquerors from the northeast. The “Hamitic hypothesis” (Sanders 1969) was predicated on the doctrine of ex oriente lux (out of the east, light). It served as “a convenient explanation for complex historical events, an explanation that filled a historical vacuum and served as a rationale for colonial rule” (Fagan 1997, 52). It was ubiquitous, being used to explain eastern coastal urbanization as well as the Yoruba myths of origin. The external factor in the twentieth century was European colonialism, seen as a civilizing mission among inferior peoples. History served as an ideological legitimation of Europe in Africa. In the eyes of at least one African historian this was “bastard historiography” (Afigbo 1993,46).
The nationalist movement was in part a challenge to this notion of Africans as peoples without history. With the attainment of independence in the 1960s emerged a postcolonial historiography centered within the continent but with significant external liberal support as well. Liberal historiography in the 1960s sought to help Africans recover and reclaim their own histories in consonance with the attainment of political independence, to distinguish the history of Europeans in Africa from the history of African peoples, and to write history from “the African point of view.” Conceptually the liberals worked within an interdisciplinary framework alongside archaeologists, political scientists, and economic historians. Methodologically, they developed the field of oral history, and appropriated and extended the range of questions to be asked concerning social change by social anthropologists. The favorite theme of the period was African resistance and its opposite, African oppression. The dyad of resistance and oppression (Cooper 1994) inspired magisterial research on Samori Toure by Yves Person, on the Maji Maji war in Tanganyika led by John Iliffe and Gilbert Gwassa, on the Chimurenga war in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) by T. O. Ranger, and on the Herero/Nama revolt in Namibia by Helmut Bley. “The people in African resistance” became a mantra for the period. An early opposing view suggested that within African communities there obtained a paradox of collaboration and resistance; that within the textures of African societies the resisters of today would be the collaborators of tomorrow, thus creating “the paradox of collaboration” (Steinhart 1972; Atieno-Odhiambo 1974). The dyad still held sway in African historiography in the 1980s.
In the 1960s Dar es Salaam University became most associated with this enthusiasm for the recovery of African initiative. The Dar es Salaam school of history was created under T. O. Ranger. It sought to explicate the explanatory value of African history as a discipline, to give Tanzania its national history, and to engage in debates relating to the build...
