In 2007, French President Nicolas Sarkozy delivered an address before an assembly of carefully selected academics at Cheikh Anta Diop University in the Senegalese capital. The speech was a diplomatic attempt to stitch the frayed seams of the relationship between France and Africa. Sarkozy’s infamous Discours de Dakar invited Africans to engage in self-critique, acknowledging both the crimes of the transatlantic slave trade and European colonisation while simultaneously suggesting that Africa had somehow been complicit in its own tribulations. ‘The tragedy of Africa,’ Sarkozy declared, ‘is that the African has not fully entered into history […] they have never really launched themselves into the future’. His view of African progress was typically colonial and condescending. An all-too-familiar perception which has been propagated by a litany of western narratives that have, over decades, oscillated between depicting Africa as a land ensnared in perpetual conflict and as a continent on the precipice of a renaissance. The response from Africans to such perception has always been, and continues to be, instant, incisive, and inexorable. Sarkozy’s suggestion, however, that Africa ‘has not fully entered into history’ was particularly incendiary. This was not borne out of harmless ignorance of African history and civilisations (les obélisques de Louxor are a constant reminderof such history even if a trip to the Louvre were too prohibitive for Monsieur le Président). It was representative of a deep-rooted and lingering bias that has long viewed African history through the lens of racism, reductionism, and repudiation. And so brazen to see this preposterously displayed within an institution that has the distinction of being named after a figure who is widely regarded as the preeminent African historian of the last century: Cheikh Anta Diop (1923 – 1986). ‘Imperialism, like the prehistoric hunter’, Diop wrote in his groundbreaking Civilisation ou barbarie: anthropologie sans complaisance (1981), ‘first killed the being spiritually and culturally, before trying to eliminate it physically’.
Sarkozy’s address reflected standard polemics about Africa in the European academe. Consider, for example, Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914 – 2003), erstwhile Regis Professor of Modern History at Oxford, who stated in his book The Rise of Christian Europe (1963) that ‘Africa had no history prior to European exploration and colonisation, 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’. Such views, derived from the European (mis)conception of world history, presented Africa as a historical vacuum. The absence of written records in many ancient African societies was mistakenly interpreted as a lack of history. For Europeans, only certain sources were worthy for historical documentation. Oral and other intangible cultural traditions were therefore ahistorical and unhistorical. African history, framed by a European paradigm and predominantly penned through an exogenous perspective reliant on non-indigenous sources, entrenched such misconceptions. A narrative continuum extending from antiquity’s
Zeinab Badawi, An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence, WH Allen, London, 2024.
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