Timbuktu and African History

Historians of Africa have long tilted against some of the hoariest, most insidious false assertions made about Africa. Three men who were giants in their fields and in Western intellectual life generally embody the representation of Africa as a land without history, and thus as a land unworthy of attempting to understand. In the eighteenth century the Scottish philosopher David Hume said, “I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There scarcely ever was a civilised nation of that complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or in speculation. No ingenious manufacture among them, no arts, no sciences.” In the nineteenth century the German philosopher Hegel similarly dismissed Africa when he blithely asserted, “Africa is no historical part of the world.” In 1963 Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who ought to have known better, repeated this calumny when he dismissed Africa as having "no history" but rather “the unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.”

Of course we know these assertions not to be true. By any definition, even the most rigid, Africa has a long, vibrant, and varied history. And of course for those of us engaged in contemporary or modern history, Africa provides a rich tapestry of sadness and loss, hope and promise, a chronicle of human frailties and human strengths, of humankind's capacity to inflict severe harm or to attain dizzying heights.

Even the seemingly more innocuous version of the libels of Hegal and Hume and Trevor-Roper, the idea that African history is somehow different from that of the West because the written word supposedly eluded the continent and its people and thus shrouded the vast landscape from the Cape to Cairo in epistemological darkness is the stuff of mythology, not reality. Recent discoveries throughout Africa, but centered in the ancient center of learning at Timbuktu, help to demonstrate that Africans have long had a written record, even if that record is not as vast as in some other parts of the world. Discoveries in recent decades have accumulated so quickly that some hope that Mali's Timbuktu will become the site of a new library akin to the legendary lost library at Alexandria. We can see some of these discoveries through an online exhibition sponsored by the Library of Congress and through a multimedia presentation courtesy of The New York Times.

The vast panoply of African history is increasingly available to all of us. One wonders what Hegel or Hume or Trevor-Roper might have to say about a continent they little understood and barely knew but felt free to dismiss in light of what historians have continued to prove in recent decades. No longer can serious people accept their “unedifying gyrations” and authoritative assertions. History is about nothing so much as change over time. There is a certain glorious irony that history itself has shown how much has changed to refute those who disavowed African history.