After the conference, a friend took me on a trip to one of the old trading posts that dotted the Gambia river and its tributaries from the 16th century onwards. Bintang was on a wide tributary, a couple of hours from Banjul; it had been settled by a few Portuguese men who had intermarried with African women and established trading links. We arrived in the early afternoon, and drove down to the fishing port where canoes were piled up at the jetty. My friend asked where the ruins of the old settlement were, and someone gestured beyond the jetty. We walked past a large midden of shells betokening ancient settlement, and soon saw the clear signs of the fortifications that had been built here more than 400 years before.
Back in the town, I began chatting to some of the fishermen. Yes, they knew all about the settlement here. The ruins were all over the place, and some of the houses were built with the old stones that had been brought from Lisbon. The history was there, known about, but not taught or discussed in schools, in universities, or in shaping a sense of the complexity of the African past. In fact, in most cases, history was taught with a syllabus that was 50 years old.
This picture is mirrored across the continent. One time, many years ago, I was discussing the past with a Senegalese friend, who said that it was better to forget it: I was not a slaver, and he was not enslaved, so what use was there in discussing it? I rehearsed the historian’s comfortable canard, that if we forgot the past we would be condemned to repeat it. But if I remember, he said, I’m going to get angry.
And yet there is so much more to African history than stale narratives of slavery and colonialism. One of the most insidious consequences of European colonialism was the devaluing of precolonial history and cultures. As the revolutionary Amílcar Cabral from Guinea-Bissau wrote in a key essay in 1966, colonial force required not only military control but also an ideological conquest, and this necessitated the undermining of older histories and cultures on the continent. The legacy of this lurks in the continuing devaluation of African history and the need to update the way it is taught and studied, both inside and outside the continent. Long into the postcolonial era, the effects of this colonial effort live on in the migration crisis, and the loss of former ways of knowledge that – like those related to ecology, and many other things – have much to offer the world in the 21st century.
by Toby Green, aeon
