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Showing Original Post only (View all)The idea of a 'precolonial' Africa is theoretically vacuous, racist and plain wrong about the continent's actual history [View all]
We should expunge, forever, the epithet precolonial or any of its cognates from all aspects of the study of Africa and its phenomena. We should banish title phrases, names and characterisations of reality and ideas containing the word.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-precolonial-africa-is-vacuous-and-wrong
To those who might be put off by the severity of the proposal, or its ideological-police ring, I hear you and ask only that, with just a little patience, you hear me out. It will not take much to jolt us out of the present unthinking in assuming that precolonial or traditional, and indigenous, has any worthwhile role to play in our attempt to track, describe, explain and make sense of African life and history. When precolonial is used for describing African ideas, processes, institutions and practices, through time, it misrepresents them. When deployed to explain African experience and institutions, and characterise the logic of their evolution through history, it is worthless and theoretically vacuous. The concept of precolonial anything hides, it never discloses; it obscures, it never illuminates; it does not aid understanding in any manner, shape or form.
Let us begin with the fact that the ubiquitous phrase is almost exclusive in its application to Africa: precolonial Africa. How often do we encounter this designation in discourses about other continents? If not, what explains the peculiar representation treating the continent as if it were a single unit of analysis when it comes to Africa? I am afraid it comes from a not-so-kind genealogy that always takes Africa to be a simple place, homogenises its peoples and their history, and treats their politics and thought as if they were uncomplicated, each substitutable for the other across time and space. Once you are thinking of Africa as a simple whole, it becomes easier to grossly misrepresent an entire continent in the temporal frame of precolonial.
In reality, precolonial Africa never existed. It is a figment of the imagination of scholars, analysts, political types, for whom Africa is a homogeneous place that they need not think too hard about, much less explain to audiences. It was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a racist philosopher, who argued in the 1820s that Africa was a land outside of Time and not a part of the movement of History. Our intellectual forebears in the 19th century fought against this false characterisation. They were the first to remind people of the fact that Africa had always been a part of the movement of history and the global circuit of ideas. They knew what was behind Hegels effort to divide Africa into Africa proper, or Black Africa, and European Africa it was his need to reconcile his idea that Africa stood outside of history with the undeniable reality of the attainments of ancient Egypt. His solution was to identify the achievements of Egyptian Africans as coming from exogenous sources and to remove it from Africa proper.
All who talk glibly about precolonial Africa, insofar as the designation bespeaks a temporal horizon, award an undeserved victory to the racist philosopher. Of course, the pre in precolonial supposedly designates a time before colonialism appeared on the continent. But how do we deign to describe a period from the beginning of time to the moment when the European, modernity-inflected colonial phenomenon showed up? It accords more of a mythological than a historical status to the arrival of modern European colonialism in Africa and its long and deep history. The precolonial designation, in practice, even excludes two earlier European-inspired colonialisms in Africa. After all, for those of us who know our history, Roman and Byzantine/Ottoman colonial presences on the African continent were not without legacies on the continent, too.
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