BY MULUGETA GUDETA
The distinguished British historian E.H Car E. H. Carr has written an interesting book called “What is History?’. He subsequently said that, “History is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.” Carr further argues that the past is knowable via the evidence and remains so even as it is constituted into the historical narrative. This is because the good historian is midwife to the facts and may remain sovereign.”
Unfortunately, many colonial-era historians wrote books on African history by sitting in the British Library in London and their remote controlled history books often fail to satisfy the African audience because they are not based on first hand research of the facts and figures. Or as Carr said they wrote about Africa without trying to being good historians who could be “midwives to the facts.”
We Africans have been programmed by centuries of colonialism into thinking that we are unable to think for ourselves or write our history the way it is and the way we make it. Well, programming as we know it now was not known during the colonial era. However, historians of European colonialism programmed Africans by writing books that brainwashed generations into thinking that they can neither write their history nor become the masters of their own fate.
At a time when computers were not known, colonialism could brainwash Africans by using the written word. So, there were in many stereotypes created by colonial writers in order to keep Africans in mental slavery by thinking that they could not understand or write their history.
Now that direct colonialism is gone for good, its ideas, practices and stereotypes have changed form but continue to exist in our minds. That is why the struggle nowadays consists of denying not only what the old colonialists were telling us about ourselves but also understanding our realities and writing about them.
There are still colonial-minded people who find it hard to believe the motto “Africa rising” or “African Renaissance” make sense at all and that it is mere sloganeering, devoid of substance. Such views are now and then expressed in the by some sections of the global media often drum in their relentless efforts to discredit the continent’s peace and development efforts, recent events seem to be disproving
In the past, the political or diplomatic scripts that should be enacted by Africans were written by outsiders and handed over to the regional actors for execution. The results were most often than not political disasters from which Africa continues to suffer from down to this day. The first successful step to break out of the historical cocoon that forced Africans to play the role of mere spectators of historical dramas was the end of Apartheid in South Africa or the total assumption of independence by former African colonies back in the 1960s.
The fall of the Apartheid system in South Africa which was a historic moment in its own right, resulted from the decision by Africans to own their destiny and become their own scriptwriters and actors on the stage of history. In principle, there may be nothing bad for external forces to help Africa achieve peace and stability in its own backyards. The problem is that failure on the part of Africa to act on its own, had in the past, led foreign forces to control its destiny.
External interests quite often looked at Africa’s problems through the narrow prism of their own national interests that did not converge but diverged from Africa’s interests. In this age of struggle for global hegemony, various powers are out on the prowl presumably to help Africa deal with its myriad problems but in fact push their agendas and portray themselves as ‘friends of Africans’.
The present role of the African Union in the ongoing peace process in Ethiopia and the so far successful efforts or promising steps made to break the impasse gives much food for thought. The involvement of former African heads of States Uhuru Kenyatta and Olussegun Obasanjo with a view to “Solving African problems by Africans themselves” if successful at all, might represent a radical departure from the old stereotype of external meddling by outside forces in the continents internal affairs.
This will certainly mark or represent Africa’s true ownership of its destiny. There is no reason that the current experience of conflict resolution and mediation mechanisms would not be further replicated to address similar problems in the Horn at large and wherever there is a pressing need to restore peace in places such as the DRC or the Greater Horn region. This is in a certain of the idea of “Africa rising” in a nutshell or its realization by Africans.
During the colonial era, African history was written largely by European scholars who mostly justified the colonial conquest by European powers. They were then followed by new historians who continued the works of their predecessors with a new twist that, in the final analysis consolidated the colonial narratives in the neocolonial context.
In fiction there is what critics call creative freedom or the freedom to see things the way the author likes or interprets reality on the basis of primary or secondary experience. Fiction is of course different from non-fiction. In fiction, authors are not required to base their stories on reality because they have a wide range of freedom to invent things.
This is not so in non-fiction writings or in academic writings in particular that requires hard work, research, analysis distillation and sifting of facts. History and politics are subjects that require more analytical skills and the ability to research in depth rather than imagination because you cannot imagine historical facts or political processes. History or politics are fact-based disciplines that should be true, persuasive and authentic although some degree of imagination is required on the part of the writers in the process. The historian’s imagination is at work albeit in a different way or for a different purpose.
There were a few exceptions however. The first book on Africa philosophy was written by Father Placid Temples, a Belgian priest, and is entitled “Bantu Philosophy” (1945). Father Temples, despite his missionary objectives, has established the fact that Africans too have their own philosophy. He did this in the face of European intellectual denial about Africans being able to think philosophically.
Among them were Hegel, the German philosopher and the father of what they call “dialectical thinking” who said that Africans were living in a state of nature, a euphemism for “uncivilized life” and had no capacity to think rationally. Even Carl Marx who was hailed by many African leftist politicians as the “friend of the oppressed and the poor” said that colonialism was doing a good job in Africa by ridding the peoples of barbarism and backwardness and taking them to the golden age of capitalism.
The emergence of African writers who write from the African perspectives is a very recent phenomena. This was not because there was lack of talent on the part of African authors and academics but the post-colonial elites in Africa were trained in the West and absorbed Western education and scholarship quite uncritically. They were so much in the grips of European or American intellectual traditions and adopted the point of views, methodologies and approaches of the Western scholars to look at the history and politics of their own continent. Some of them might adopt the Western analytical methods voluntarily but most of them were directly or indirectly educated in accordance with Western academic traditions and curriculums.
Whether we like it or not Africa is now rising and proving itself capable of not only writing its history but also acting according from its own script.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD SUNDAY EDITION 8 JANUARY 2023
