Are you familiar with the extensive history of the African continent? I'm asking because a surprising number of people seem to lack knowledge about the pre-colonial history of the Continent. It doesn't help that some of them go of on the popular stereotype of African history just being about tribes and mudhuts.
I have some knowledge of Africa but not of the whole Continent, Africa is huge and has the oldest history of humanity in the world, so I would not say I have extensive knowledge of the whole continent, rather I know a few periods of some parts of Africa. I”m pretty good at North African History and certain parts of Colonial Africa (Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Nigeria, South Africa, the Belgian Congo) so compared to most white Americans i probably now more than most its still pretty shallow honestly, and there are whole sections of the continent where I don’t know any history prior to decolonization. I’ve only taken 1 Grad school class on Africna history and a sub unit of an Undergraduate class in terms of the history rather than just contemporary politics.
African history is really complicated and horrifically neglected (Outside of Egypt), and there are a few reasons for that
1) Racism. For the last 500 years, European Culture has been built upon the lie that African culture is not valuable, and that anything made by black people is just worthless. So Africa is usually dismissed as just primitive or savage, but even among people who aren’t consciously racist, there is this notion that African history isn’t important. If you make any effort to lean history, a lot of civilizations will jump out as “OMG SO IMPORTANT” like China or Mongolia or Persia, but SubSaharian Africa is usually just seen as “They fucked around until Colonialism happened (Ethiopia being the one exception). And that racism is self perpetuating, the more worthless a region is seen, the less people go in to study it, which makes it more neglected, which means less people go to study it ect
2) A limited notion of what is worth studying. One of the most constant rules of history is that centralized states which build giant monuments and have standing armies tend to only respect other centralized states with giant monuments and standing armies. So Rome respected Egypt because “Hey, they also built giant monolithic structures just like we do, and they have a capital city, and a standing army and a central administrative bureaucracy and a writing system and a legal code, and a ruler who commands it, sweet we get that. Sure they are inferior to us, the Greatest Empire in the history of the world, but still they are in the club. So civilizations that don’t have those features, which are decentralized or never invented a writing system or didn’t build huge structures often are just dismissed as...not worth studying. And since this includes a lot (but to be clear, no where near all) of pre Colonial African civilizations, there is this notion that “Nothing important happened in Africa until whitey showed up”
3) Deliberate cultural erasure. Of course we know that many parts of sub saharan Africa did have centralized states, and big buildings, and standing armies and writing systems, all that good stuff. However when Colonialism happened, alot of the records of that were deliberately or accidentally destroyed by the Europeans, meaning that future historians can’t study them. This is espicically true in regions where there were major colonial wars...and also the Belgium Congo. Fuck you Leopold II. There has also been some similar cultural erasure done by the post Colonial governments, though no where near as extensive.
Ok so now unto the less malicious reasons Sub Saharian Africa gets neglected (though racism plays a role). Note that North Africa isn’t included, it gets a lot of love actually.
4) Lack of primary sources. Historians are defined by the sources they study and unfortunately for many (but not all) parts of Africa...there aren’t as many. Many parts of pre Colonial Africa (but I can’t empathizes this enough, not all) didn’t develop a writing system, which means we have to rely on Oral history. and with several centuries of cultural erasure and genocide that makes it more difficult. Now Oral history is often looked down upon by Historians which isn’t fair it has a lot of value, but it is a lot less...precise than written. With a document we can say “this was written in 400 BCE” while with a story we can say “it looks like certain elements were added but where...who knows”. its possible but it is a lot more difficult. Now many parts of Africa did have written sources and we tend to know more about them (Mali, Ethiopia, Ghana) but a lot of those records were destroyed during colonialism or the civil wars that followed, or just the usual difficulties in preserving records every culture faces. Also many (but not all) parts of Africa didn’t have paper, but substances that didn’t last as long (Palm leaves for example) and so the records are lost or more damaged.
You can rely on Archaeological evidence but that is more expensive.
5) Poverty and war. Now we need to be super careful about generalizing Africa as a war torn improvised Continent because again..its a fucking continent, its huge and super diverse. A lot of parts of Africa have had problems with war and poverty and unfortunately, those are not circumstances that create historians. Places that have a degree of stability, wealth, and established education systems produce historians. And since a mix of Colonialism, Post colonialism,, Neo Colonialism, and Nationalism can create consistent wealth issues for many parts of Africa, it means you have less historians. There are still thousands of historians from Africa so I don’t want to over state this.
6) Difficulty studying places. The parts of Africa which are currently in a state of war, climate disaster, extreme poverty or just general instability are less likely to get historians to go there to study. Like studying French history unusually means that you go to France, which isn’t so bad. It still does happen though, I don’t want to over state it there are thousands of Africans of every region.
7) Funding. A lot of African countries have their own historical traditions, but many (not all) of those governments tend to encourage historians to study the stuff that gets more funding, which is usually the Colonial/Post Colonial period. Or to even go into Europeon history. There is a lot more money and attention studying Apartheid or the Zulu Empire than South Africa in 1000 CE. This is to say nothing of when regimes are actively nationalistic and limit what historians can study or try to force them to work within specific narratives. This is even more true when it comes to European historical societies which have research grants and they want to give it to place that they already know about, which means that like 90% of African historians focus on the colonial era (which to be fair, is super important to study.
8) Incompetence. A lot of early historian of Africa were Europeans who were...well they were bad. And their mistakes have made it more difficult for everybody else following in their example.
9) The Language thing: Finally, it is important to note that despite all of the above mention factors...there are millions of books written on African history. There are tons of African historians who talk to each other and write works on every element of African history. But here is the thing...not all of it is in English. A ton of it is written in various native African language, or in the other major non African languages (French, Dutch, Arabic, Hindi, Spanish, Portuguese). There is a lot written in English don’t get me wrong, but Africa has several million languages and so a ton of the material out there can’t be easily translated, which means that much of the info is inaccessible to other Historians. Like if I wanted to study African history in serious depth, I would have to first improve my French and then learn a bunch of African languages, none of which are part of the English Language family. So that would take years of study before i could even make a serious start. Which limits it all.
Now again, even with all of those factors, there is a lot of African history out there, and a lot of it in English. But most of it is high level academic history that you read at Grad schools or historical journals, not much of it has trickled down into “popular history” for the lay person. Like a history enthusiast can get a pretty good understanding of the Byzantine Empire without ever going to college for it if they read the right popular histories of the period. Most of Africa doesn’t have that, its basically starts (in the US at least) with the high level stuff.
Also remember many of these African countries are quite young, so presumably they will produce more historical traditions given time.
