Search For Africa’s Forgotten Past

Africa as a continent is mostly assessed by its black content, and has always borne the burden of that stigmatisation. This prejudicial assumption pitted white minorities against their fellow black compatriots in South Africa under the apartheid regime, and resulted in the decimation of millions of innocent people. It also drifted the prospects of development in that country for years.

But like the bohemian Television Preacher, Mathew Oshiomolowo will ask, what is wrong with being black? Although black people the world over had been glibly cowed into subjugation through such conceitful and ignoble campaigns, losing standard values and strutted in a battle of self redemption, their position in history has remained sacrosanct.

History has shown that the blackman’s intelligent quotient is by no means lesser than that of the whiteman. Apart from the intellectual flavour and potency of Martin Luther King Jnr’s civil rights revolution against racial discrimination in the United States, and Dr Nelson Mandela’s vitriolic revolt against white domination in South Africa, history reveals that Africa had in the past played crucial role in the evolution of modern civilisation.

Like Aldous Huxley once wrote; “life has to be lived forward but has to be understood backward?

A retrospection of past African experience reveals some truth and insight which have been reflected in our heritage but later eroded by a prejudicial and negrophobist gospel by the whiteman.

History reveals that in the very heart of Africa, there has always been a mystical spiritual undertone that gives meaning to the blackman and create such communal bond among the people.

According to a renowned Prof of African History, Bolanle Awe; “Africa’s cultural heritage suffered a  great deal of setback under colonial domination”.

Apart from destroying some of Africa’s cherished values and traditions, Awe said “the momentum and direction of indigenous development was distorted and truncated by the colonial overlords”.

The campaign of calumny and image distortion unleashed on Africa took a devastating trend when most of Africa’s valuable works were taken away and deposited in Western museums, and the ones which were held sacrosanct by the people were humiliatedly exhibited  at the altar of the whiteman’s whimsical ego. African society now spends a fortune to retrieve some of them.

However, the depletion of Africa nay black heritage museums despite efforts or pretentions to their upkeeps are also puzzling, and questions the essence of Africa’s commitment to the sustenance of their cultural sense of originality. As stated by a cultural exponent, Prof Okon Uya; “a people whose culture and heritage is lost to politics is a people with a lost sense of identity” .

Prof Uya also attributes the depletion of Africa’s cultural identity to colonial educational policies which encouraged the building of an elitist class that is alienated from the peoples culture, thereby creating a widening disparity between the elites and their existing ways of life. These elites were taught to see their culture as barbaric, accursed and mundane.

The systematic elimination of African indigenous craft and cottage industries and their replacement with foreign made goods, also nailed the coffin of Africa’s indigenous heritage. It has therefore remained a mirage for Africa to develop an appropriate strategy for integrating and synthesising the new technology into Africa’s cultural milieu. This is in spite of various indigenisation policies instituted to reclaim the lost indigenous heritage of African societies.

Research also shows that Africa had also suffered from large scale of imaginary conjecture, reconstructions of historical facts and subjective interpretations. It has also been discovered that most of African history were not written by Africans and as such a distorted version of history was presented by the colonialists to further whittle down the African sense of identity. This historical misrepresentations made Africa to be at the receiving end of sarcastic and caustic remarks from white racists.

For example, Professor Hugh Trevor of Oxford University wrote in the ‘Listener’ that “African history consisted mainly of the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in Picture-Square but irrelevant corners of the globe”.

He further contended that Africa and Asia had no history or philosophy except that which is an extension of Europe.

Such grotesque and derogatory remarks of earlier writer of African history are rooted in the prejudicial contention that Africa is a continent without a past. And as the Earl of Chesterfield puts it, “Africans are the most ignorant and unpolished people in the world, little better than the wild beasts predominant in that continent.

In this assertion by the Earl of Chesterfield, the African is depicted as somebody without morals and completely irrational. Such subjective accounts of African history have however been proven to be untrue.

History shows that the African genius had been celebrated in masterpieces, such that pioneered the ethos of modern civilisation. Drawing from the memories of Africa’s glorious past, it is on record that William Anto Amo, a Ghanaian, born in 1699, was an African legend whose intellectual prowess demonstrated the equality of the black and white races, thus bridging the artificial gap created by white extremists and relentless critics of the black race. Amo had a master of philosophy as early as 1730 from University of Wittingburg, Germany and lectured in Germany universities at a time when Emmanuel Kant, one of the most influential European philosophers and scientists was a pupil.

An Ethiopian General, Ganges, carried military expedition with thousands of soldiers to  India in Asia and which he later colonised, causing the present river Ganges in India to be named after him. Hypatia, the first woman mathematician and renowned philosopher was born in Egypt, while Patah Hotop (2000BC), an African statesman, was the first philosopher before Socrates, who postulated the idea of immortality of man.

African societies generally are therefore confronted with the onerous task of assimilating a full grasp of the enduring dynamics of their original heritage. Nigeria, being the most populous black nation on earth, has a critical role to play in this regard.

Erudite scholar and Prof of History, Prof E. J. Alagoa, believes that Nigeria can rise up to its true position in Africa, if issues of research and development are given deserving attention.

Musing over the cultural development of Rivers State nay Nigeria, Prof. Alagoa, who was pivotal to the establishment of the Rivers State Council for Arts and Culture, noted a decline in the original vision of the council. According to him, the vision of establishing the state Council for Arts and Culture was to delineate the people from a spree for westernization in cultural orientation.

Regrettably, the council today is only mobilised for public appearances, with a dismal research base for proper grooming and sustenance of the peoples culture. A visit to Rivers State branch of the National Museum in Port Harcourt also reveals shallow state in the management of artifacts and other strident marks of assessment of standards.                        The fact remains that the development of our sense of identity at every level of government must go beyond peripheral public gesture to sustainment of the original vision and ingenuity of our heroes. And like Martin Luther King Jnr stated; it is now time to lift our mind from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

Taneh Beemene