| “From nation-state history to global peoples’ history: the imperative for a new African history” (Paper presented at the South-South Conversation Series. University of Toronto: December 12, 2008) By Fikru Gebrekidan, Ph.D. | December 24, 2008 ________________________________________________________ African sociopolitical history covers wide-ranging topics, from ethnicity at the micro level to imperial history at the macro. While prolific in topics, methodologically African historians remain fixated with the top-down or, more recently, bottom-up vertical trajectory, where the nation state is the primary unit of analysis. This essay argues that, for African history to have social relevance and purpose, historians should go beyond the nation state and engage in the exploration of horizontal themes and ideas. The field of African history emerged in the 1960s, in part in response to Western historians’ dismissal of Africa as a continent void of history. No one better epitomized this condescension than British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. In 1962, in an Oxford University lecture, Trevor-Roper stated: “Perhaps in future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none. There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness … and darkness is not a subject of history.” Naturally, the ambition of the first generation of African professional historians, or Africanists, was to take Trevor-Roper and the likes of him to task. By skillfully combining oral traditions with archaeological findings and available written sources, such historians were determined to prove that Africa had its share of past empires and flourishing kingdoms. The more critical, among them the late Walter Rodney, were quick to insist that, had it not been for the slave trade and colonialism, Africa too would have developed and become industrialized. But these pioneering scholars also had a second mission. If nationalist politicians were the harbingers of change, historians were its defenders and legitimizers: they had to formulate the intellectual brick and mortar, or national histories, with which the new nation states were held together. Now, half a century later, these nation-state historians have completed their mandate. For good or ill, the African nation state is there to stay. The job of the succeeding generation of Africanists is, therefore, to transcend such narrow national histories and help shape a timely discourse that is horizontal and far-reaching. This is not to say that Africanists have shied away from transnational history. But, rather, that such works tended to follow the vertical trajectory of North versus South, or metropole versus colony, in which the intra-African agency was little appreciated. The shift toward a horizontal paradigm assumes at least four inter-related approaches: regional, continental, transoceanic, and global. Compared to nation state, regional history deals with a much broader geographic zone, normally a subcontinent, in which the historian discerns a common thread and shared characteristics. While this sounds rather obvious and basic, in the African context regional narratives are few and far between. Countries in the Horn of Africa, for example, constitute both a cultural and a historical block. Yet, not a single text exists that purports to be a regional history of the Horn. What the Horn of Africa offers is, instead, a classic example of the symbiotic relationship between balkanized area studies on the one hand and fractious and dysfunctional state politics on the other. The end result has been a stagnant intellectual culture that is ill-prepared to tackle, with dispassion and urgency, the many interstate conflicts that continue to plague the region. The above indictment might implicate political scientists more than others, but it does not vindicate historians either. Historians continue to define historical boundaries in terms of political borders. True, political borders are real and insular, but historical boundaries are fluid and permeable. History follows peoples’ movements. And national frontiers, even when clearly demarcated, have never deterred the flow of particular types of people: long-distance traders, smugglers, pastoralists, bandits, refugees, and insurgents. Much of Africa’s informal economy flourishes on cross- border trade; and many of its political unrests, especially civil wars, foment in borderlands where armed uprisings are easier to organize. If approached creatively, therefore, border studies could have served as the interlocking points of two or more national histories, which in turn would have provided the building blocks for a regional history. At the continental level, African history has become a burgeoning market for publishers. Continental histories make good university texts as well as ideal reference sources for basic research, hence their popularity. That said, however, most existing African history texts tend to provide little more than a synthesis of fragmented local histories. They remain Eurocentric in approach, reinforcing the aforementioned North-South dichotomy. For instance, the old Congo kingdom and the Solomonic empire of Ethiopia had more in common than differences. They were centralized, practiced divine kingship, cultivated diplomatic ties with Portugal, and embraced Catholicism, albeit briefly in the Ethiopian case. For a while, the Portuguese and the Vatican had even entertained the idea of a Congo-Ethiopia missionary corridor. In 1617, in fact, Alvaro II of Congo wrote a letter to his Ethiopian counterpart defending the importance of such a missionary link. As it would turn out, the transcontinental vision never took off. If anything, Ethiopia and Congo would later suffer similar fates of civil war and decline as Portuguese role turned from that of an ally to that of a predator because of the slave trade. Clearly, Ethiopia and Congo together provide an ideal case study for a transnational research on the medieval African past. Alvaro’s letter alone, no doubt the earliest example of a pan-African correspondence, would have evoked serious interest among Africanists under ideal circumstances. Yet, no historian has ever given this unique document a notice, let alone studied its content. Evident in this Ethiopia- Congo example is, therefore, the need to go beyond traditional narratives. The starting point is the use of comparative study, where analysis of two societies in juxtaposition reveals structural similarities and differences. To this should be added the exploration of the role of third parties, in this case the Portuguese, as catalysts of ideas not just from Europe to Africa but, rather, among the African kingdoms themselves. The third approach toward a horizontalized African history should synthesize the transatlantic, Indian ocean, and Mediterranean slave trades into one coherent whole, or into a single maritime history. This is so enormous an undertaking for sure. But so is its transformatory effect on African studies, for it allows a better appreciation of the diversity, complexity, and richness of the African experience at the global level. If critics dismiss such approach as naive, they need to be reminded of the traditional Euro-American-Mediterranean narrative, condensed and taught as the history of Western civilization. Neither should they forget the upcoming field of world history, which is even more ambitious in breadth and scope. In fact, if the planet’s past can be truncated into a digestible world history, there is no reason why the same cannot be done for African dispersals across oceans under the rubric of African maritime history. After all, the delineation of the sea into various zones is a relatively recent cartographic construction. And even as one sees distinct differences between the African presence in both hemispheres, there are enough identifiable patterns to warrant comparison. Two examples well demonstrate this latter point. First is the East African or Zanj slave revolt in Southern Iraq in the ninth century, 869-881 Common Era, to be precise. True, unlike the Haitian revolution a millennium later, the Zanj uprising was finally suppressed, albeit after a decade-long brutal warfare. However, while different in outcome, both Zanj and Haitian slave revolts shared a fundamental similarity. The war against Napoleonic France helped forge a Haitian national identity, jettisoning aside ethnic differences and color consciousness between mullatoes and black slaves. The Zanj revolt in Southern Iraq also brought together various marginalized segments of society: Bedouin Arabs, peasants, craftsmen, and of course enslaved Africans of various ethnicities. Second is the role played by black Africans as soldiers and commanders in the early history of Islam. This makes a compelling analogy, in process and outcome, with the African-American involvement in the Revolutionary War. In both cases, ideologies with liberationist ethos meant a great deal to enslaved Africans, which explains why many of them eagerly took up arms on the side of former slavemasters. But in either instance reality never lived up to expectations. Once securely entrenched, Islam lost its egalitarian drive and slavery and the slave trade revived to historic proportions. Likewise, after defeating Britain, framers of the American Constitution found the topic of slavery too sensitive to even address, let alone dismantle the institution. Finally, if African history is to have a coherent and redemptive message, as all histories from below should, it has to become a global peoples’ history. By peoples’ history one means history of the marginalized, or the subaltern. Africa is home to the largest number of subalterns. In fact, given the continent’s peripheral status globally, African history is subaltern studies par excellence. African historians should therefore address the condition of marginality in its universal context: first nations in Australia and the Americas, ethnic and religious minorities across Asia, and the poor and the underclass in Europe and North America. In the past, the North-South dichotomy was geo-racial: Africa, Asia, and Latin America on the one hand, and Europe and North America on the other, Japan always the exception. With the rapid industrialization of many Third World countries—China, India, Brazil, and South Korea—geography and race no longer define the rift between the North and the South. From a historian’s point of view, this militates the need to redefine or reconceptualize the meaning of the South. Central to the definition of South should be the concept of relative marginality, or the question of one’s socio-economic place not just within the larger global order but also within one’s own immediate circle. Most Africans are marginalized both by their governments and by the global order, so the placing of Africa at the epicenter of the South is only logical. But there are also millions of people who, while located physically in Europe and North America, have much in common with the masses of Africa given their relative socio-economic marginalization. These are the new South, whose histories must be woven into a new web of South-South historiography, and in which African historians can play a leading role. In conclusion, African nation-state historiography emerged in the 1960s in part to affirm Africa’s historicity, and in part to legitimize independence and nationhood. Forty years later, the nation state still remains the primary unit of analysis in African history. Unfortunately, this has obfuscated the need for a more integrated African history. World politics has become ever more interdependent. Universities, for instance, have been paying more and more attention to courses with global scope, like the world history curriculum. What this implies is a rapid shift in the methodology of teaching and writing history. The message to African history is clear. It is time that African historians transcended the confines of state, region, and ocean, and that African history shared the center stage in global peoples’ history. _____________________________________ The writer is Professor of history at St. Thomas University, Canada. fikrug@stu.edu. Back To Home |
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