Primer: Rewriting of Sub-Saharan African History

The movement to rewrite the history of Black Africa (sub-Saharan) was of singular importance, built by African intellectuals in the 1960s. The epistemological base of this intellectual and political renewal was developed by African-American intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century. These intellectuals, such as Frantz Fanon, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Cheink Anta Diop, began to question fiercely the ways in which white European and American intellectuals appropriated the prerogative of writing the history of the whole rest of the world without giving voice to the histories and cultures of the ancient African and indigenous peoples. Such a prerogative began in the Enlightenment period when European intellectuals and scholars asserted that they were better qualified to construct and determine what is and is not history, while also assuming that Europe was the highest and best of all human cultures ever produced. The educational centers of the European continent and in the United States perpetrated this idea of cultural and historical superiority. It was in these educational centers that African-American and African intellectuals were trained as well. African intellectuals sought to break with historical interpretations that placed the history of sub-Saharan Africa as dependent on European history. African historians proposed a rewriting of the history of the African continent based on their regional and cultural experiences as historical subjects. Black Africa in many ways resembled Edward Said’s formulation of the "East" as “almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.” This new stream of African historians Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Boubo Hama, Djibril Niani, Amadou Hampate Bâ, proposed a new approach that demystified and deconstructed harmful European inventions about the history of Black Africa. Termed the “Inverted Pyramid” by historian Carlos Lopes which describes the phenomenon of when an inferiorized group manages to modify its inferiorized situations. This focus on Africanism was further encouraged by the project of the General History of Africa Collection sponsored by UNESCO in the 1960s.

If we can propose a historical investigation on the African continent, by means of methods and paradigms focused on the particularities of the continent, it is because there was a strong Black intellectual mobilization. This mobilization proposed, in a very emphatic way, a revival of Afrocentric theoretical and methodological assumptions connected to but distinct from Eurocentric theoretical and methodological assumptions. Since the 1960s we have witnessed the emergence of Africanist analysis by Africans committed to a new internal vision where Africans become writers and protagonists of their own stories. These new historical perspectives seek to recover and preserve oral traditions as one of the fundamental bases for the construction of narratives and glimpse interpretations on the constitutive processes of social institutions and African identities. When we look at the contemporary movements of decolonization of postcolonial ideas and writings, we will see a strong political and ideological trait, especially in the works written and published by African-American and African intellectuals. These traits marked the entire generation of African researchers in the nineteenth century who tried to establish an epistemological distance between African Studies, which prioritize an epistemology focused on African values, and Eurocentric, which prioritize an epistemology focused on European values. Such distancing has become the basis for the promotion of specific academic courses and chairs within the higher education centers of the North American and European Academies.

Mariana Gino is a PhD student in Comparative History from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; General Secretary of the Joseph Ki-Zerbo International Center for Africa and the Diaspora; Researcher at the Center for Articulation of Marginalized Populations (CEAP).