HIS/P6: The External Contacts with African Communities

Africa as a continent is full of diversity, seen arguably in every facet of life; as a result, over time, diverse interpretations have been given to Africa’s realities and circumstances.

Archaeological finds in East Africa posited Africa as the cradle of human life, and historical evidence has shown that Africa once stood as a gateway to “awesome civilization”.

Unfortunately, the history of Africa tended to focus on the activities of two groups, the Arabs and the Europeans in Africa. This situation produced a medley of confusion in African historiography, as African history was written merely from the bird’s-eye view of aliens and, second, was sequenced following patterns of historical developments outside the continent.

The consequence was that Africa’s historical sequences became jumbled, and externalities not congruent with trends in Africa’s past and realities shaped her historical timelines.

Some European authors had assailed and even doubted Africa’s historical heritage; one even went as far as to say, “Africa had no history prior to European exploration and colonization, that there is only the history of Europeans in Africa.

The rest is darkness”, her past “the unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe” (Trevor-Roper, 1963: 871). Even Hegel, in an apparent attempt to besmirch Africa, once asserted that “Africa is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit” (Hegel: 1956, 99, The Philosophy of History).

Denying the association of a whole continent with any kind of civilization, in his Races of Africa, C. G. Seligman wrote brazenly that the “civilizations of Africa are the civilizations of the Hamites, its history is the record of these peoples and of their interaction with the two other African stocks, the Negro and Bushmen” (Seligman, 1930, 96).

What he was positing here is that the other two “races” were incapable of achieving anything without the Hamitic influence. His espousal of the myth of the superiority of light-skinned people was only a part of the European prejudice ubiquitous in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

These trenchant remarks about Africa’s past all arose as a result of the inclination of a section of humanity to debase and denigrate another.

The absence of written records in much of Africa posed a great challenge to the historical reconstruction of her past, and this was what spurred African scholars to evolve and insist on the use of oral history in reconstructing it, not minding the gaps inherent in this medium.
VIDEO TALKS ABOUT SOME OF THE EXTERNAL CONTACTS ON AFRICAN SOIL