When Western explorers and merchants first came into contact with African populations, the idea - still all too widespread today - was born that Africa had no history. With the current anti-racist and post-colonial movements, the periods of the transatlantic slave trade and colonization are gradually gaining in importance, at the risk of summing up the continent's history in them.
Since the death of George Floyd, the Western world has been rocked by a new anti-racist movement. However laudable its foundations, this international movement, by making colonization and slavery in Africa a public issue, risks once again essentializing Africans as victims and explaining the whole of their continent by the colonial fact alone. Nor would we want to fall into a total Afro-centrism by transforming the entire history of the continent into a straight line between a glorious past and a future born of it. It remains, however, to tell the truth about African history, not just from the start of the slave trade by Europeans in the 16th century.th century, because history wasn't written by white people.
In a polemical speech in Dakar in 2007, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy declared that «the African man had not yet entered history». This is true. But only on condition that we don't talk about the history of the world, as implied in the speech, but about the history we tell. Since the XVIIth In the last century, Africa has suffered from a «denial of historicity», not only from the West, but also from regions of the world further away, such as China. Often, the historian of Africa has to justify the existence of an African history and, even more often, compare it on certain points with the rest of the world to make sure that it is worthy of interest.
Diversity is no obstacle
It's also because the first Europeans to come into contact with African societies didn't necessarily find centralized states as they were beginning to do at home, that the denial of history has taken hold. However, a quick glance is enough to challenge this observation. Just look at Egyptian civilization, which, despite a desire to link it at all costs to the Middle East and even to the Western sphere, was born in Africa and underwent numerous influences from within the continent.
This is borne out by the dynasty of the Black Pharaohs, long-standing relations with the Nubian kingdoms to the south and lively exchanges across the oases to the west. Beyond the debate over whether Egyptians were black or not, Egypt was above all an African civilization. Kingdoms were formed in every direction, from the trading cities on the Indian Ocean to the brokerage kingdoms at the gateway to the Sahara, via the Great Zimbabwe and the Mali Empire, African societies took part in world history in very different ways.
The first observation imposed by the Europeans suffered from a lack of decentralization of their gaze. Why not see a major city, even if organized differently, between several somewhat distant centers, as in the Mali Empire? Once again, in asking this question, we find ourselves comparing the traces of African history with a model of what history should be. Like nowhere else, Africa has experienced an incredible diversity of historical trajectories. It would be pointless to propose a single historical frieze representing the different phases in the evolution of societies across the continent. The great historical periods coexist and overlap, and to appreciate them, we must at all costs give up thinking of societies as evolving towards a precise goal, or wanting them to be organized from a center towards a periphery.
Solid and fluid
Throughout Africa's history, the solid has coexisted with the fluid. Centralized political formations live in close proximity to non-centralized agricultural or pastoral societies. On the bangs of the latter, hunter-gatherers take refuge in equatorial forests or mountains to escape land grabbing. Between these sedentary formations, nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples found spaces in which to develop. This entanglement, this co-presence, has meant that kings and merchants have existed alongside nomads and hunter-gatherers, the Middle Ages with prehistory, the Neolithic with the Metal Age.
African history cannot be confined to overly linear concepts. All these organizational possibilities do not prevent any of them from taking part in history, whether it be the Mali Empire, so rich in gold that it caused a lasting fall in the price of the precious metal in Cairo, or the shellfish gatherers of the Swahili coast, whose products found themselves mixed up in the global circulation of goods.
Writing is another factor that has led to this denial of African participation in history. Looking at African history, we need to distance ourselves from the hegemony of the written word. Firstly, by considering that many texts come from external sources that are not lacking in clichés (Europeans, Greeks, Arabs, etc.). Secondly, by noting that the written word is by no means absent from African societies, even in places that have not been influenced from outside.
However, borrowings from other peoples, whether African or not, such as Arabic, which has become the language of commerce in many places, should not be judged hastily. These in no way demonstrate that those who adopted them were mere recipients of a foreign culture; on the contrary, they adapted them with great creativity and disseminated them in their turn.
What's more, writing was used in a different way, and only for certain purposes. It's not that societies elsewhere than Roman and then Islamic North Africa, Egypt, Nubia and Christian Ethiopia didn't know the written word: they just reserved it for a few.
A continent that cannot be summed up
Outside observers have long argued that Africa's history was made impossible by its hostile environment. Indeed, it is undeniable that the geography and environment that the African continent has imposed on its inhabitants has been extremely harsh. The mountains of the east, the desert zones of the Sahara and the semi-deserts of the Sahel, the tropical and equatorial forests have certainly put more pressure on African societies than elsewhere. But does this mean that their geography has condemned them to remain at an early stage of development?
This would be to forget that in Africa, as everywhere else in the world, societies have adapted. Far from imposing a deterministic evolution on them, blocked by environmental factors that would make them immutable or closed societies, barriers have on the contrary stimulated local or regional exchanges. At the edge of dense forests, cereals were exchanged for forest products; at the edge of deserts, agricultural products were exchanged for salt. When observing nomadic cultures, it would be tempting to imagine that they had remained blocked at this stage due to climatic and geographical conditions. On the contrary, these diverse situations reflect social choices, resulting from interactions or specializations: sometimes people abandon the comforts of sedentary life for pastoralism. This is not the product of an evolutionary delay or of distance from the centers of technology.
Telling the story of Africa means breaking down the denial of historicity and contributing to current struggles. It's to stop reducing the continent either to the role of cradle of primitive humanity, a receptacle of the wilderness we've come to visit, or to the role of victim of global trade. It also means filling the gap that the narrative of colonial history or the triangular trade period alone cannot explain: the narrative of a diverse continent, no longer a subject, but a full-fledged player in history. A vast part of the world that cannot be summed up.
French 
German 
English