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Connecting
African History to the Major Themes of World History
Candice L. Goucher
Washington State University Vancouver |
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Teaching about Africa has been an endeavor as marginalized
as the continent's history. Yet the story of Africa's past is truly a global
tale. The telling of that tale presents classroom opportunities to connect
past and present in powerful ways. In particular, it provides opportunities
to re-tell the traditionally Eurocentric narrative of world history. The
academic field of African history dates from about 1960, with the publication
of the Journal of African History by Cambridge University Press.
Almost immediately, African history became politically contested terrain,
a flagship of African nationalism, cornerstone of African-American identity
politics and the emerging field of black studies, and the target of those
who (like British historian Hugh Trevor- Roper) claimed that African history
was nothing more than "the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in
picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe."1 Eventually, the teaching and practice of African history
did lead to major contributions to the discipline of history, making the
reliance on cultural contextualization, oral evidence, and archaeology much
more routinely acceptable since the last third of the twentieth century.
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Given this success, why does African history continue
to be marginalized by world history narratives? Africanists, including Patrick
Manning and David Northrup, have played key roles in the rise of world history
and the professionalization of the field. And the focus on Africa, inevitably
selective, fits well with a thematic approach to world history. Yet
Africa's past has been omitted from world history for many of the same reasons
it was marginalized as a field of history. Often, Africa is presented as
an integrated whole, referred to as if it were a single empire rather than
a continent. In too many textbooks, Africa is mentioned in only two or three
chapters, where it is often lumped together comparatively with Latin America
or another world region, reinforcing the colonial notion that Europe is
the standard against which every other place must be measured. Invariably,
even when Africa is included, the textbook focus of the few pages devoted
to coverage of African history is on enslaved and colonized Africa.2
The entire history of a continent is still often taught in one or two semesters.
Thus, after more than a generation of inclusion within the academy, African
history remains largely segregated from the human story, dismissed to a
terrain belonging to area specialists. This essay contributes to the emerging
dialogue on the usefulness of thematically organized world history courses.
It does so by suggesting how we can bring Africa to the core content of
the world history classroom.
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Human Migration In and Out of Africa
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| Where do we as world historians begin the
story? |
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Current evidence points to the fact that the human
story begins in Africa. Migration both in and out of Africa weaves
through the earliest human history, the peopling of the planet, the Bantu
migration beginning about 5000 years ago, the African Diaspora extending
into the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, and more recent displacements caused
by economic factors, political oppression, conflict, and famine.3
The theme of human migration concerns not only historians – it encompasses
processes basic to human history, the study of demography, ecology, economics,
geography, and cultural change, to name just a few. In order to communicate
the centrality of Africa to world history, it is probably essential for
world historians to build bridges to the understanding of the most distant
human past, the period once relegated to "prehistory." This project
will require the assistance of other disciplines. Genetic evidence,
paleontology, biology, geology, historical linguistics – all beg for our
historical attention, while offering compelling evidence regarding the history
of the human species on the African continent and beyond. By placing
the slave trade in the context of other major events in the history of human
migration in and out of Africa, teachers can also emphasize change over
time and present more recent world history against the backdrop of the stunning
longevity of the African past. Beginning world history in Africa helps
to place the continent's past in the center rather than the margins of historical
discourse. It might also prompt essential classroom dialogues about race
and racism in global and historical terms.
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Encounters Beyond the Slave Trade and European Colonization
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| Can teachers help students avoid the conclusion
of European superiority and the inevitability of imperial conquest by placing
the slave trade in its larger global context? |
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The "out of Africa" migration story can and should
be extended to the migrations of the modern world, including the slave trade.
Often the classroom focus on slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic
world is the most powerful way that historical analysis places Africa at
the center of world history narratives. However, this focus simultaneously
and inadvertently can communicate assumptions about European superiority,
especially if most teachers of world history consider Africa only
through the lens of the slave trade and the commonplace portrayal of Africans
as passive victims |
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The trade in enslaved Africans connected four continents
(Africa, Europe, North America, and South America), and arguably the globalization
of coerced labor after 1500 cannot be studied without also including (besides
Africa) Asia and the Indian Ocean. Turning the slave trade unit into
the study of the globalization of labor after 1500 can also permit the use
of the African Diaspora as one of several early sites where capitalist ties
simultaneously created systems of exploitation as well as rich examples
of global culture and interaction. Recent scholarship on the Diaspora
suggests how integral transplanted African technological expertise was to
the construction of plantation technology in areas as diverse as rice agriculture
and metallurgy. Indeed, the fact that modern African migration occurred
in the context of slavery does not alter its global impact. |
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Caribbean cuisine and cultural forms such as carnival,
Trinidadian calypso, Haitian vodoun, Brazilian candomble,
samba, and capoeira reveal the complex processes of creolization
and syncretism at work on a global scale. It is possible to use religion,
food, dance, and other cultural forms to explore the story of enslaved Africans
as a history of resistance rather than domination, cultural syncretism rather
than simply acculturation, and survival and empowerment rather than victimization.
David Northrup's accessible study of this interaction, Africa's Discovery
of Europe: 1450-1850, suggests that it makes a difference if we
view Europeans and Africans in the full variety of their encounters, sometimes
as trading partners, sometimes mutually engaged in cultural practices beyond
their place of birth, and sometimes (but certainly not always) engaged in
the master/slave relations of domination. This is wonderfully accomplished
by Northrup through the presentation of collective experiences and individual
lives over a wide swathe of time.
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Slave accounts are not the only classroom tool for
presenting African voices. Recent studies of the African diaspora have explored
the past through the use of archaeological and ethnohistorical recovery
of maroon history (escaped African slaves), slave community history, and
the transfer of technological and cultural traditions in the Atlantic world.
These new directions in slave studies reveal the complexity of slave systems
beyond the black/white dichotomy. Such work reveals that slaves initiated
their own food production and that they re-created cooperative, communal
values of food sharing that defied the greed and oppression of slavery and
capitalism. In addition, maroon freedom fighters maintained distinct
political and cultural identities that derived empowerment from the persistence
of African cultural patterns. Studies of the African Diaspora are better
developed for the regions of the circum-Caribbean world, but also reach
into the Indian Ocean world, where centuries-old connections between Africa
and Asia flourished through maritime trade and immigration. The growing
body of Diaspora scholarship has significantly influenced the field of African-American
studies, and most recently has been used as a model for understanding the
history of the western Indian Ocean communities, such as those in Mauritius
and India.4
These approaches emphasize the history of slavery and the slave trade in
an expanding global context.
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Cultural Memory Systems in Africa and the Global Past
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| How can teachers provide insight into the
non-written records of world history? |
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The sheer immensity (in terms of both historical
time and space) and the staggering diversity of the African continent will
continue to provide challenging barriers to non-specialists yearning to
be inclusive. Connecting the peopling of the planet with more recent
migrations is a challenging leap across world history, one that requires
expanding the sources typically used by world historians. A recent trend
in African historical scholarship is to employ techniques that achieve deep
historical time recovery through the reconstruction of change over time
in a single cultural. Donald Wright's The World and a Very Small
Place in Africa is one example, where the author explores eight centuries
in a single area along the Gambia River. Another is Allen Roberts and Polly
Nooter's work on the Luba and cultural memory, which explores Luba art,
history, and identity over millennia and raises important questions about
why and how a society remembers its past. Recent scholarship in African
history demonstrates that it is often necessary to weave together the work
of several scholars, writers, or artists in order to achieve the goal of
chronological depth. Here again, reaching across disciplinary boundaries
is useful for classroom teachers. Incorporating the work of African filmmakers
or novels by African writers allows for a level of cultural specificity
and access to authentic voices that world history teachers seek to embrace.
Comparing and contrasting two vastly different historical experiences from
distinct cultural regions can be a powerful way to promote comparative thinking
and at the same time demonstrate the cultural complexity of the African
experience, both past and present.
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Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart is
frequently used in both the high school and college classrooms. It
was written at a time when the only history of colonial Nigeria was written
by the colonizers. Part of its appeal is that it allows readers inside of
the colonial experience and hints at the mutuality of that experience for
both colonizer and colonized. The novel's title (from the Yeats poem "The
Second Coming") refers to the ominous period after Christianity's arrival
into the ancient world. Achebe's title also suggests one approach to using
his novel as a means of exploring change over time from ancient (precolonial)
forest states to the arrival of Europeans on the West African coast. Writing
during and after the colonial period, Achebe writes of a dynamic, historical,
and specific culture. In so doing, he holds that Africa had its own history,
culture, and civilization that were equal—if not superior—to that of the
imperialists. Below I explore some ways to contextualize Achebe's
work and to extend its use in the classroom to both earlier and later periods
of world history.
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Reaching Back to Ancient African Worlds Completes a Global Story
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| What is the ancient world alluded to in the
title of Achebe's novel? |
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The Ibo past is now well-documented both archaeologically
and in oral traditions. Archaeological excavations at Igbo Ukwu in southeastern
Nigeria hint at rich cultural continuities over a millennium. Bronze artifacts
uncovered there suggest trade connections across the Sahara and beyond,
possibly prior to the arrival of Islam. The same artifacts also appear connected
to modern Ibo cultural traditions such as scarification and titled political
office. Excavated by the British archaeologist Thurstan Shaw, the
three sites of Igbo Ukwu revealed the most surprising cache of metals in
all of West Africa. Together the sites suggested a complexity, virtuosity,
and sheer wealth of metal known only from later, and much larger, trading
states and empires. Two of the sites were provisionally identified
as a storehouse of regalia and a royal burial chamber, (the third was probably
a disposal site), and included staff ornaments, regalia, pendants, anklets,
copper rods, human heads with scarification marks, and symbolically powerful
images in bronze such as horses, leopards, and elephants.
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At first it was thought that such sophisticated
metalworking could not date from the period before the arrival of Europeans.
Yet strikingly, there were no finds to suggest a European presence – no
smoking pipes or cowries, for example, which suggest a date at least prior
to 1650. The existence of an object (known as the Horseman's Hilt)
depicting a human rider astride a horse suggests a date after 1000 CE, when
horses first appeared in West Africa as a result of the trans-Saharan trade.
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What was perhaps most intriguing about the finds
at Igbo-Ukwu was their cultural context, based on the observations of contemporary
Ibo people and traditions. Who were the individuals connected to these
1000-year-old sites? What can we say about their society? Unlike the
ancient empire of Mali, celebrated in the songs of griots, no single great
kingdom or state had been remembered in the oral traditions, yet these objects
clearly reflected access to long-distance trade and technology as well as
the accumulation of great wealth. One clue lies in the scarification marks,
called Ichi marks, identical to those of the local Nri culture, which suggest
the possibility of cultural continuity with the present in at least some
form.
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Other implications of the archaeological evidence
of Igbo Ukwu have to do with its link to a larger world beyond the small
forest community. The presence of bronze and copper objects, the image of
the horse on the horseman's hilt, and also imported glass beads suggest
a sophisticated social hierarchy as well as the existence of highly specialized
craftsmen. In addition, such a complex society must have had a rich agricultural
basis. Yet unlike comparable technological and artistic centers such
as Chavin de Huantar in the Andes or urban centers like Anyang in China,
Igbo Ukwu did not attract a large population. Igbo Ukwu thus did not form
the foundation for a large-scale political system. Indeed, its existence
seems to deny much of world history's emphasis on the seemingly inevitable
growth in scale, complexity, urbanization, and empire-building of most societies
once touched by the forces of globalization. Igbo Ukwu was in fact associated
with larger forces of trade and interaction, and yet remained a small-scale,
local society. For that reason alone, Igbo Ukwu presents an excellent case
study for the persistence of localism in globalizing economies. |
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Connecting Colonial and Postcolonial Struggles
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| How and why should teachers link the past
and present of Africa? |
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Early Ibo history is less accessible by comparison
with many other early histories. There are no written documents, and
the symbolism of the archaeological finds must be inferred from much more
recent ethnohistorical research. Historians once described complex societies
like that at Igbo Ukwu as "stateless," suggesting somehow a lack of civilization.
In fact the social order designed by the ancient Ibo—including an intricate
weaving of social relations, political decision-making, economic achievement,
and cosmological well-being—provided a remarkably resilient cultural fabric.
Teachers might consider using Ibo history alongside the history of the Bambara
(including the era from the kingdom of Mali as remembered and told by the
griots) or the history of the Luba (from the perspectives of archaeology,
the bana balute, men of memory, and their mnemonic devices known as memory
boards) to demonstrate that there are a variety of ways of recording and
remembering the past. Indeed, in societies like the Ibo, Bambara, and Luba,
the past lives in the present.
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An example of Ibo history that reinforces the idea
of living history is the story of the events termed the "Aba Riots" by the
British colonizers, but remembered in women's oral traditions as the Ibo
Women's War (1929). The Ibo Women's War was a significant event in
the history of African colonialism. During the 1929 events, Ibo women
engaged in the tradition of "sitting on a man," a cooperative and non-violent
protest against abusive male power, in this case directed against the colonial
system. These techniques of protest and rebellion used kinship and
other associations, and they can help historians reach into the distant
cultural past of patriarchal Ibo society. Since these methods of protest
and revolt continue today in Nigerian cities, they provide a window on the
links between the past and the present.
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Other aspects of Africa's past are also accessible
through novels and films, such as those of African filmmakers Ousmane Sembene
(Senegal) or Souleymane Cisse (Mali) or Safi Faye (Senegal). Many
of their works explore contemporary issues of identity, courage, and corruption,
by pairing global tensions with local traditions, and by setting their plots
in distinctive historical eras. Like Achebe's novel, their films succeed
in giving local voice to West African perspectives on world history, from
the rural village to the urban enclave.
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Remembering the Present and Re-imagining the Past
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| How might the inclusion of African history
alter the world history narrative? |
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In his recent volume The Origins of the Modern
World, Robert Marks writes about the origins of the modern world, its
historical inequities, conjunctures, and contingencies, with clarity and
an engagingly persuasive style. And if ever a topic called for the
inclusion of Africa, this is it. Yet the book is notable for the disappointing
lack of inclusion, neglecting much of Islam, Africa, and Latin America in
favor of a narrative that deftly links China, India, and Europe. And
while the author (a China specialist) clearly does not seek such balance,
the failure to be fully inclusive of the world beyond Europe does little
to address his stated goal of supplanting Eurocentrism. Africa remains
the elephant in the room. Told globally, African and African Diaspora
examples might have supported the author's thesis. Instead, this China-centered
East Asian perspective narrowly focuses on the story of a British-led Euro-American
world system.
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The Marks volume in fact provides the arguments
for such inclusion of Africa. Africa is unique in having been connected
to forces and trade routes external to the continent via very different
directions. Viewed on a global scale, Africa's past contains the diversity
of local and global historical examples. Should world historians frame Africa
differently, depending on the mercantile networks in force during any particular
historical era? Must the view from the Atlantic exclude the littoral Africa
that was brought into the 13th-century world system through Islamic
and Indian Ocean connections? We are clearly only beginning the process
of integration, a process that will rely on Africanists and others both
in and out of the classroom. Africa's unique role in world history will
be defined differently depending on one's perspective, chronological framework,
and specific thematic interests. Yet the continent's historical depth
and its placement both within and outside the modern story of globalization
should demand that we consider refocusing the narrative. Why was globalization
incomplete? Why has it been met with resistance? How were the
gaps created by imperialism deepened by the processes of globalization?
These are but a few of the questions that emerge from an Africa-centered
narrative of world history. .
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Conclusion
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The practice and teaching of world history straddles
the tension between the specific historical narrative of a place in time
and space and the larger patterns and processes of the past. This battle
to resolve this tension is, in fact, part of the heady lure of the field.
The interdisciplinary nature of African history and its reliance on multiple
sources to recreate the past have much to suggest for altering the world
history narrative beyond making it more inclusive. Africanists, writers,
filmmakers and scholars have also debated these tensions in their own ways.
The writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o has searched the implications of the political,
social, and economic circumstances of the neocolonial period. Eschewing
the colonizer's English, Ngugi eventually chose to write in Gikuyu, explaining
in his book Decolonizing the Mind:
" [A] specific culture is not transmitted through language
in its universality, but in its particularity as the language of a specific
community with a specific history. Written literature and orature are
the main means by which a particular language transmits the images of
the world contained in the culture it carries. Language as communication
and as culture are then products of each other. . . Language carries
culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature,
the entire body of values by which we perceive ourselves and our place
in the world. . . Language is thus inseparable from ourselves
as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a
specific history, a specific relationship to the world these works help
the reader determine if a novelist's portrayal of African society fully
reflects its social relations, political arrangements, and economic
factors." 5
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The marginalization of African history is only one
legacy of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization. Colonialism tried
to justify its systematic rules of oppression and exploitation by resorting
to claims of racial superiority. Many African writers and filmmakers countered
such claims by producing artistic works that showed that Africa had its
own history, culture, and civilization that were equal if not superior to
that of the imperialists. In so doing they became the 21st century
griots, propelling the traditions of the continent into the most recent
era of globalization. One of the famous lines in Achebe's novel is
"proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten." What does
this mean? Palm oil is the rich yellow oil pressed from the fruit of certain
palm trees and is used both for fuel and for cooking everything from fried
plantains to soups. Proverbs truly enrich language use, adding complexity
and nuance. The use of proverbs is a measure of full cultural literacy,
a fullness that escaped the colonizer. Sharing proverbs in the classroom
encourages students to recognize the richness and complexity of Africa –
culturally, a world away. But as another Ibo proverb reminds us, "a
hot soup is licked gradually from the edge," suggesting that world historians
first must use the available fragments of the outer ordering of the world
to understand its inner core and ultimate flavors. After all is said and
done, world history without the flavors of Africa's past can no longer satisfy
the appetites of our global community. |
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Biographical Note: Candice Goucher is professor of History and Liberal
Arts Coordinator at Washington State University, Vancouver, where she
teaches courses in African History and Caribbean Studies. She is the co-author,
with Linda Walton of Portland State University, of the world history textbook
In the Balance: Themes in Global History (McGraw-Hill, 1998). She
is also a lead scholar in the creation of a 26-part video series and interactive
website called Bridging World History, which is funded by the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting/Annenberg.
For Further Reading
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958).
_____, "The Novelist as Teacher," in John Press, ed., Commonwealth
Literature: Unity and Diversity in a Common Culture (London:
Heinemann, 1965), 201-05.
E. Kofi Agorsah, ed., Maroon Heritage: Archaeological, Ethnographic,
and Historical Perspectives (Kingston, Jamaica: Canoe Press,
The University of the West Indies, 1994).
Douglas V. Armstrong and Kenneth G. Kelly, "Settlement Patterns
and the Origins of African Jamaican Society: Seville Plantation, St. Ann's
Bay, Jamaica," Ethnohistory 47:2 (2000), 369-397.
Herbert M. Cole and Chike C. Aniakor, Igbo Arts: Community
and Cosmos (Los Angeles, Museum of Cultural History, UCLA, 1984).
Alice L. Conklin, "Boundaries Unbound: Teaching French History as
Colonial History and Colonial History as French History," French Historical
Studies 23:2 (2000) 215-238 Candice L. Goucher, "African metallurgy
in the Atlantic world," African Archaeological Review 11 (1993),
197-215. Candice Goucher, Charles A LeGuin and Linda A. Walton, In
the Balance: Themes in Global History (Boston: McGraw-Hill,
1998). Jay B. Haviser, ed., African Sites Archaeology in the Caribbean
(Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers; Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers,
1999) . John N. Oriji, "Igbo Women From 1929-1960," West Africa
Review 2:1 ( 2000).
Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen F. Roberts, Memory: Luba Art and the
Making of History (New York: Prestel, 1996). Thurstan Shaw et al.,
eds., T he Archaeology of Africa: Food, Metals and Towns (London:
Routledge, 1993). Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind (London:
James Currey; Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1986). _____, Penpoints, Gunpoints
and Dreams (Oxford: Clarendon; New York: Oxford UP, 1986). ______,
"Europhonism, Universities, and the Magic Fountain: The Future of
African Literature and Scholarship," Research in African Literatures
31:1 (2000) 1-11. Judith Van Allen, "`Aba Riots' or Igbo `Women's
War'? Ideology, Stratification, and Invisibility of Women," in F.C.
Steady, ed., The Black Woman Cross-Culturally (Cambridge,
Mass: Schenkman Publication Co, 1981).
Judith Van Allen, "Sitting on a Man: Colonialism and the Lost Political
Institutions of the Igbo," Canadian Journal of African Studies
6:11 (1972).
Notes
1 Reported in the Listener after a
BBC lecture (November 28, 1963).
2 There are exceptions among the currently
available textbooks and not surprisingly the best coverage of Africa
is by Africanists involved as authors.
3 The Bantu migrations dispersed speakers
from their probable homeland in the Nigerian Cameroon highlands; eventually
they occupied most of the continent south of the equator.
4 See for example the archaeological research
of Amitava Chowdhury on maroons in Mauritius (History Department, Washington
State University).
5 Ngugi
wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind (London: James Currey;
Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1986), 15-16.
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