Perceptions and the Reality of Africa, Part 1
A few years ago I did a set of video lectures for a certain small think tank and research group devoted to African Studies in the UK, the subject being Africa’s history and Big Media screwing over Africa. The executive director was an affable fellow I liked a lot, and he confessed to me that certain folks at his institution were surprised I was white and saying what I was saying; nevertheless, they were willing to have me. After the first live broadcasts of the lectures over their Facebook channel, to the best of my knowledge, they’ve never been uploaded on the think tank’s website nor its YouTube. I don’t understand why, and I’ve never been given an explanation, even though the guy in charge and I had been talking about my doing more content for them.
But since it’s my content and I can do with it what I please, I’ve finally decided not to waste this material and make it available myself. Several of its insights are taken from my book, The Gifts of Africa: How a Continent and Its People Changed the World. But there are insights and criticisms in these lectures as well over how big mainstream media covers Africa, which I’m including in a book that I hope will see publication in the near future.
Meanwhile, I’ll put these four lectures into a series of posts and hope followers will enjoy them and find them useful. I thought of delivering them again in podcast or video form, but it makes more sense to publish these now and hope they prompt invitations for new lectures or talk series. Here we go:
Thank you so much for having me.
Let me start with a young African woman who’s on Twitter who shared a great story about her time as a child. Her father showed her an old photo from 1936 of a Mundari man smoking a pipe. I wish I could show you the photo but I’m not sure of the copyright permissions, and it’s not really the point. Trust me, it’s a great shot. Anyway, she asked her father, Is the man in the photo a king? And her Dad answered, “No, dear, but I’m glad a king is what you see.” Isn’t that wonderful?
And to further make my point, let me play this brief clip of James Baldwin.
Now James Baldwin said that in 1965. In Cambridge, when he was debating William F. Buckley, who make no mistake, was a genuine racist who just happened to hide it well. Baldwin said those words within my lifetime, less than sixty years ago. And what he said of American history books, I’ll bet you’ll find virtually the same thing in British and Canadian school books.
You have to remind people now in our Twitter, Facebook, TikTok streaming world, that Zimbabwe only shook itself loose of white rule in 1980. South Africa only had its first free election in 1994. So when I talk about the misconceptions in Africa’s history, this is the context we’re working with: that the entire continent only technically became “free of colonialism” within a couple of generations. Think about that for a moment.
When I lived in the UK, I remember a report on somewhere in Africa, and a young BBC reporter I was hanging out with made a snide remark, the typical thing of “Look how things went to hell after we left.” And that is the Western conception of Africa. That there was little there before, and then came colonialism, and while yes, all that was very terrible, things only got worse after the British, French, Portuguese, Italians, everyone else left.
Go into a Waterstones. Or a Barnes & Noble if you’re in the States. What do you get when you look for a book on Africa? You get these slim tomes about famine, war, AIDS, corruption. I can think of only one “happy” or positive book for the general reader that’s readily available besides my own two contributions and that’s The Bright Continent by Dayo Olopade.
For more than half a century, we’ve been sold this idea that independent Africa is in a constant state of chaos. We think of Europe as comparatively stable. And that’s utter nonsense. As I point out to people, what have you had in Europe? In my own lifetime, we saw the tail end of the last great fascist dictatorship, Franco, in Spain. Which had an attempted coup in 1981, more than five years after King Juan Carlos took over as head of state. You had a coup in Greece, the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, the IRA bombings in the UK, the Aldo Moro assassination in Italy, the Balkans War and Bosnian genocide, two Chechen Wars, the takeover in Crimea, and now the war in Ukraine. Please tell me: Where is this wonderful stability in Europe, compared to Africa? And yet we don’t lack for history books every year that celebrate European civilization.
Only there’s no such thing. We know that the ancient Greeks looked to the Egyptians for their mathematics, their medical knowledge, parts of their philosophy and sciences. And now of course, there’s the reflexive impulse to think, “Oh, but that’s Egypt.” As if it’s not part of Africa. Only it was and still is. And the Nubians were even running the show in ancient Egypt for about 70 years. This is Abu Simbel.
And why do we always focus on the Egyptians interacting with parts of the Middle East when they were explorers, too, heading south? During the Sixth Dynasty, the pharaoh’s chief of scouts, a guy named Harkhuf, made four expeditions through Nubia. Thomas Schneider of the University of British Columbia has made the interesting case that the Egyptians might have travelled as far as the Chad Basin of Central Africa.
Then we have these myths about language. And we fixate on the wrong things. For instance, you have this artificial rivalry put forward by scholars of where writing first started, ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia. And who gives a damn? There’s a far more interesting and profound revelation we can make about early writing.
Okay, say you’re in ancient Egypt and you happen to be literate. Think about all those inscriptions about mighty pharaoh, and he conquered this, and he took that, and… it’s literally carved in stone. That means if I’m pharaoh and I want you to read all this, you have to come to me. Sure, you control that block of stone, but your amount of space is still finite, and it’s a lot of work, but your audience still has to show up in one spot.
But hey, the ancient Egyptians invented papyrus, which is where we get our word “paper.” The Greeks used it. The Romans used it. You had multiple cultures that relied on it for centuries until someone came up with better materials.
And the headline here is that even if the Mesopotamians invented writing, the Africans were the ones who freed it. They made knowledge portable. This is the greatest innovation ever in the history of mankind because it led to the democratization of learning.
It also created the privacy of reading. I don’t have to go read that stone block in public anymore. I can read this scroll or this book by myself and think over what I’m reading. And now I can authenticate what was really said. I don’t have Joe who told Sally who told Bill who says this is how it is, I can look at what Joe wrote down. Africans created that.
And we so reflexively think that most African cultures had oral traditions and didn’t have the written word that we completely forget they gave us the written word! The Ethiopians had Ge’ez. You had Arabic used across great portions of the continent. And why do we restrict ourselves to thinking in terms of only script? In Mali, there’s a people who use a mud-dyed cloth that has geometric designs and patterns which have specific names and meanings. Chiefs and warriors of the Limba people of Sierra Leone stamp intricate symbols on a traditional red gown.
Ironically, you could argue the case that Europeans of a past century respected African learning better than we do now. We know that some of the greatest scholars of the Middle Ages, including the future Pope Sylvester II, went to study at a university in Tunisia. We know that Augustine of Hippo came from Numidia and was African and more importantly, he thought of himself as African. In fact, the internal church dispute with the faction known as the Donatists — who were mostly in Africa — is why you have the Western Christian church the way it is today. I’ll explain.
In early Christianity, you had folks who hedged their bets. They worshipped Christ right alongside the old pagan gods. And who could blame them, because Diocletian was emperor, and in 303 Common Era, he liked having Christian churches burned down and rounding up these Jesus lovers and executing them. So, it didn’t hurt to put out a few pagan idols because you liked breathing and walking upright without a spear in your back. There was a Roman governor in north Africa who wasn’t that bad, and in a “I’m just doing my job” sort of way, he asked Christians to show they were willing to knuckle under by handing over their scriptures. Well, that was fine for some, but after Diocletian died, people were pissed off at those who gave in. There was a Bishop Donatus in Numidia who didn’t want the clergy who had renounced their faith to get their old jobs back. Hence Donatists.
And the Donatists got involved with peasant rebellions and backed certain local chiefs over others, and so now, the whole development of Western Christianity hinges on what happens in Africa. Augustine wrote his Confessions, and frankly, he wasn’t writing his account for his friends and supporters in Rome or Milan — why would he? They were on his side over Donatism, which he rejected. No, he was making his case to his fellow Africans. This book is considered a landmark of Western literature, but it’s really African literature.
One of the most criminally ignorant assumptions people in the West have about Africa is this notion about a lack of democracy. We talk these days casually and imprecisely about democracy when what we really mean is good governance. Centuries before the British and Americans made their leaders accountable to legislative bodies, kings in Africa had to answer to executive councils. You can find examples of this from the Congo, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and other countries.
One European missionary said this in 1866 about Xhosa legal experts: “They are equal to any English lawyers in discussing questions which relate to their own laws and customs; and the man who attempts to speak contemptuously of them only betrays his own ignorance, weakness or folly.”
And in looking over the examples of how Africans governed their affairs, especially in West Africa, you can see that they were at least as enlightened if not more enlightened than their Western counterparts. Think about the Magna Carta for a moment — it’s really about how King John gets along with his barons. Who gives a damn about the little guy, the peasant? This is supposed to be a touchstone of Western democracy, but does anyone remember what the hell is in it?
Now think about Xhosa legal scholars, these walking, talking libraries. And think about how casually we dismiss African cultures that may not have relied on the written word. And you’d think, Well, of course, these societies would have written their rules and policies down if they could. But that’s the point: unlike our societies in Europe, they didn’t need to.
For many of these West African kingdoms, civics were passed down from generation to generation. Like good manners. Sure, kings might have great power, and some were considered mystical figures, but they also knew the limits of what their advisory councils would put up with. All of this wasn’t blind ritual or because they didn’t have the written word. It evolved out of something more profound, out of the ties that bind a community.
Think about the way we fetishize the documents of our own societies. Consider the American obsession with the Constitution. We talk about the letter of the law versus its spirit, and how it might be ignored because of corruption or the rise of fascist populist movements. Now consider that for some of these African cultures, there might have been no letter, but there was still law, the spirit of the law was contained in the tradition — you didn’t need to refer back to a document. And if you dig deep into how civilizations crumble, you’ll notice the good manners and the implied social contract die first then the laws.
One of the great lessons of traditional African culture is that social cohesion is possibly the true fulcrum underneath a government and a society that lasts.
A final word about democracy. Check the books and review the suffrage laws regarding property and income for male voters, plus how the voting laws pertained to women. The West didn’t have pure democracy in the 19th century — if it even still arguably does now — and the one person-one vote system didn’t take root until about twenty years into the 20th century. Check the math. That’s only about 40 years, give or take, before Africans had it in the post-independent era. So we shouldn’t be feeling too smug about our Western democracies.
And we can go on. Ibn Khaldun of Tunis is the true father of sociology and the study of history. Zera Yacob, a philosopher of Ethiopia, developed critical ways of thinking and several of the same ideas as Rene Descartes. He asked probing questions, such as “Is the inventor of the ear unable to hear?” Everything for him was about rational inquiry. He was raised within the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, but he asked if the scriptures were true. “If I had asked the Mohammedans and the Jews, they also would have interpreted according to their own faith… As my own faith appears true to me, so does another one find his own faith true; but truth is one.”
And there are other brilliant innovations we can think about. Somalis were inoculating people against smallpox long before Europeans, and Ugandans in the 1800s were performing caesarean sections with mothers surviving, well before Joseph Lister promoted antiseptic practices for surgery. The residents of Benin City in the 1600s enjoyed public street lighting with metal lamps running on palm oil.
Now I’m giving you an outline with a pretty broad brush, and there is a wide spectrum — no, scratch that — a great sweeping panorama of African innovation and accomplishment that is yours to discover if you choose.
It’s my personal opinion that this is the stupidest oversight in human education. Ever. Pretty much ignoring an entire continent. You remember the James Baldwin clip I played? Well, when I was a child, one of the first things they taught us was that the Chinese were using moveable type centuries before Europe. So, of course, we thought, Oh, wow, impressive. Instant respect. On the part of a child. Not just for China but Asia. If you had told seven-year-old me, Hey, Africans were inoculating against smallpox ahead of Europeans. Of course, you would have changed my world view. But we still don’t tell kids that. We still don’t teach how Africa has changed the world.
Worse, we perpetuate this common narrative — even if it’s well-intentioned — that colonialism robbed Africa of the chance to develop all the cool stuff that Europe did. Well, a moment ago, I just gave you a whole list of examples where Africa was already civilized. The colonial invaders didn’t pre-empt African civilization, they interrupted it and replaced it in many ways with their own.
Take the Benin Bronzes for instance. Yes, they should be given back. Yes, it was a horrific crime. For the sake of time constraints, I’ll assume most of you know the essential facts, that the British looked for an excuse to go plunder a kingdom, and they used Maxim guns and rockets and shelled villages and robbed the kingdom blind.
Soldiers took away thousands of examples of precious sculptures and plaques, carved ivory tusks and coral beads. One officer, Captain Herbert Walker, casually mentioned how he was due to leave the site soon and wrote in his diary, “Busy packing loot!”
And these soldiers knew they were taking away exquisite examples of art and craftsmanship. But they couldn’t make the leap to thinking these works of art reflected a sophisticated culture. But then neither do we, really. We look at the sculptures in photos or in museums, and we say, “Oh, that’s very nice,” but what do we know about the culture that produced them?
And this is the point that I think so many people miss. How the British invaded and ransacked the treasures had to do with economics. They weren’t there on some grand moral mission, they wanted to get at the good stuff: palm oil, rubber, gum, minerals. But the Oba of the Benin people insisted on payment of custom duties — what both sides called presents. And now and then just to show them a lesson, the Oba imposed an occasional embargo on maybe kernels of palm oil. It was his kingdom, it was his right.
The British didn’t like that, so they made up excuses of the need to crack down on what they called “fetish practices” of religious worship of ancestors and the way the Benin people used human sacrifice, which was often of criminals. Keep this in mind, because in the next lecture, I’ll give you an example of how some people are still trying to use that to rewrite history. And okay, we can all hopefully get the hypocrisy of the colonizer, but we lose track of the civilization of the Africans. This is an African people who knew what they had in terms of trading goods. They followed diplomatic protocols. You don’t have the full story unless you understand that their responses to the British were decisions based on traditional but highly developed administrative practices to protect their own economy and to control their own trade.
The problem is that when we rattle off all of the African accomplishments they sound like a trivia list, what I call the parade of “honorable mentions.” We should consider and teach African history as adding up to a whole the same way the Europeans treat their past. Because acquired knowledge has a cultural momentum. There is an African intellectual heritage for the world. And we can trace that momentum.
Edward Wilmot Blyden was born in what was the Danish West Indies — now the U.S. Virgin Islands — but he became a statesman of Liberia, and he’s considered one of the fathers of Pan-Africanism. Why, he asked, should Black people and Africans worship a Jesus depicted as white? What was the relationship that Africans had with Islam?
He wanted to see Black Americans go back to Africa and help develop it, and his ideas strongly influenced Marcus Garvey. From Garvey you find a counter-response in the work of CLR James and George Padmore and then you have Eric Williams and Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, debating and collaborating in London in 1935 all to save Ethiopia from Italian Fascists. And you know these men as the fathers of the independence movement in the post-war era.
CLR James thought Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement was “pitiable rubbish” — his words. One of his more famous quotes is this: “I didn’t learn literature from the mango tree, or bathing on the shore and getting the sun of the colonial countries; I set out to master the literature, philosophy, and ideas of Western civilization.” And he did. And yet CLR James was devoted to the cause of trying to save Ethiopia. He was willing to go over and fight for an African nation, but the Ethiopian ambassador told him, No, you’re more useful to us here in London with your words and your activism. And I find this very interesting, because even for his classic book on the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins, he admitted that he “had reached the conclusion that the center of the Black revolution was Africa, not the Caribbean.”
Yet he and George Padmore would go over to Hyde Park and heckle Marcus Garvey.
Now it doesn’t matter to me who was right, Garvey or James and Padmore, what’s interesting is the back-and-forth, the cut-and-thrust, the development of ideas, because acquired knowledge has a cultural momentum. Here is Africa inspiring great minds. And this is a reminder that the momentum has kept going all this time. It didn’t stop just because of colonialism. We shouldn’t think of the African intellectual heritage as this great collection of ideas and inventions that are only from centuries ago. No. Here is Blyden and here is CLR James, and we can talk about the economics ideas of Gebrehiwot Baykedagn or the Green Revolution of Wangari Maathai.
If you want to educate yourself on a subject, set out to write a book on it. And one of the most delightful discoveries I had personally for The Gifts of Africa was learning about Ben Enwonwu, the sculptor and artist. Here’s a man who didn’t just express himself in visual terms — he was an eloquent writer who made profound observations about culture.
There’s an essay he wrote titled, “The Problems of the African Artist Today,” and let me read you some of what he wrote:
“It would not have been necessary for the African artist of today to prove to the world that he can create objects of great beauty had the political problems that he has had to face not affected him so deeply, and his art as well.”
And this — this really leaps out at us:
“And while Europe can be proud to possess some of the very best sculptures from Africa among museums and private collectors, Africa can only be given the poorest examples of English art particularly, and the second-rate of other works of art from Europe.” To Enwonwu, the African artist “faces the humiliation of having to listen to lectures on African Art in foreign art galleries and museums. He visits foreign museums in order to see a collection of the art of his own country, and very often he is shown round the museum by European curators.”
He wrote that in 1956. No one back then, at least not on television or in the newspapers, suggested giving back works of art or archaeological treasures — not yet. And I’m not saying Enwonwu did either. But I think he deserves a lot of credit for perfectly expressing the emotional impact that stolen artifacts have for African people. And I would go so far as to say that the repatriation movement owes him for that.
Educated people know about ubuntu, yet it has so many definitions and contexts, but then you get to Steve Biko. And folks know about Steve Biko because he’s an anti-apartheid martyr, he’s an icon, the great brain of Black Consciousness. But do they read him anymore? Do they pick up his works? Do they check out his speeches? They should. Listen to these lines he wrote for an address to a conference:
“One of the most fundamental aspects of our culture is the importance we attach to Man. Ours is a Man-centered society. Westerners have in many occasions been surprised at the capacity we have for talking to each other — not for the sake of arriving at a particular conclusion, but merely to enjoy the communication for its own sake.”
Ours is a Man-centered society. That’s right up there with the line we all learn in North American and European classrooms: “Man is the measure of all things.” Take out the unintentional sexism of the time and you can keep the same point: emphasis on humanity. But Biko goes further because he talks about a stranger who knocks on your door, and our response in the West will usually be, “Can I help you?” Which is code for “What are you doing here? Why are you in my space?” Biko pointed out that Africans, at least South Africans, didn’t think like this: “This attitude to see people not as themselves but as agents for some particular function either to one’s disadvantage or advantage is foreign to us.”
We all remember the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in South Africa. Instead of the Nuremburg Trials, you have an African model for justice, one that’s been adopted over the years by several countries for special circumstances, including my own, Canada.
Why should we care about all of this? Yes, of course, there’s a natural interest in setting the record straight and in fact, bringing us full circle back to James Baldwin’s speech, and how no African or African American child or Black British child should ever think that they’re descended from savages and that they have no history. But I believe the Gifts of Africa can be for everyone, and I don’t think of the African intellectual tradition as a revisionist historical product — these things were always there, but never got their proper due.
White, Western people, Asian people, people from South America, Australia — everyone benefits by our celebrating this pantheon of thinkers and innovators from Africa. We have to get past this incredibly stupid and short-sighted notion that there’s any competition between what some call the Western Canon and the Gifts of Africa. And this ties into the themes that I want to explore with you in the three additional lectures I’ll give in this series.
For instance, the process of marginalization of African history has not stopped. It still merrily goes on, as the recent Trump crackdown on Critical Race Theory shows. But don’t kid yourselves, the warping of Africa’s history is being done by both sides of the political spectrum, left and right. What’s grotesque and indeed infuriating is that they both do it for political ends, and they both end up denying Africans the right to speak for themselves, and both — whether consciously or unconsciously — want to keep Africans in their place.
Think about all that I laid out over this talk, the Gifts of Africa, its intellectual legacy to the world. And let me show you the jaw-dropping ignorance and arrogance that we have to fight. Here is Ben Shapiro in a short video that’s a commercial of sorts for his book, The Right Side of History, which in terms of depth is maybe ten pages away from a pop-up or a Where’s Waldo? I’ll play all the clips in succession to avoid time lag, and you’ll get the idea soon enough.
Okay, I use the term “West” myself because everyone does, but let’s be clear, it’s a ridiculous term, because what’s it west of? To the ancient Romans, for instance, Greece was the east. And if you’re going to borrow stuff from Jerusalem, that’s the “Middle East,” in which case, you’re cheating if you don’t mention Islam, and the whole thing breaks down. The sources he cites for this video are an Encyclopedia Britannica page, the National Review, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, and his own articles.
In his book that he’s promoting, The Right Side of History, he refers to Augustine and Donatism, but never once mentions that Augustine was African. In fact, there’s not a single index entry for Africa. He trots out Plato’s ideas to help his case for Greek democracy, but Plato had nothing to do with that, and Greece’s democratic model was influenced by Pericles, who lived and died before Plato was even born. He wants to pretend the American Founding Fathers were influenced by Judeo-Christianity when they were a bunch of deists. It’s not even an honest book in terms of what it does cover.
But the billboard is out there: Give the West credit for everything. And be so self-absorbed that you think the rest of the world wants to be you.
It’s this backdrop of marginalization, that huge vacuum created over African history, that we’ll discuss next time, and from there, we can better understand the appalling state of Western journalism on African current affairs. Because just like the books that come out every year, Western journalism seems to be in the business of telling you that Africa is a disaster, that it’s irredeemable. And it’s also in the business of peddling the narratives of those who want regime change. I had the opportunity — or the misfortune — of getting a front row seat to how that process works, and I can tell you that Africa needs to get its own Al Jazeera or CNN-style international network now, as soon as possible.
Which will take us to the fourth and final lecture on the partners in crime of Western journalism: the human rights organizations, the aid agencies, and what I call the “conflict merchants,” the analysts who often have degrees in conflict resolution and not history. Time and again, you’ll find news stories about Africa full of quotes from these different actors — because hey, if you’re sitting on your ass at the bureau in Nairobi or in the main newsroom of New York or London, why should you go speak to an African person when you get a white guy to interpret Africa for you?
All of this is a lot of ground to cover, but I think it’s worth the journey. We need to show Africa and its history more respect because, if nothing else, we are literally killing ourselves through climate change and guess where all the last groceries to be found will be? And of course, those who are stupid and powerful will want to disregard the people living there and just take what they have, ignoring the fact this is a whole continent full of knowledge. It has architectural techniques and innovations that work in rhythm with Nature, it has farming skills learned over centuries for specific crops, it has the wisdom and ways of looking at the world that those of us in Europe, North America, Asia, haven’t bothered to fully explore and dismiss all too quickly, because my God, aren’t we sophisticated!
That’s why I wrote in The Gifts of Africa:
“The West will begin to understand Africa when it realizes it’s not talking to a child, it’s talking to its mother.”
And if we are going to save this planet, we better start listening to those who live where we all began. After all, they’ve already given us so much.
