How to Pedagogically Divide African History
Universities make decisions regarding how to graduate people they view to be educated enough to bear the name of the university. Schools may require a specific curriculum, enrollment in a distribution of classes, or neither, but they all require a concentration. Requirements within this concentration vary among departments and schools, attempting to determine what educational standards a student must pass to bear that department and that school’s name on their diploma. Each class taught in these departments advances the goal of creating a person educated enough to bear the name of the school. In this same vein, an African history professor and history department must educate students of African history sufficiently enough that if the student were to write or speak about African history, the professor, department, and school would be happy to bear a connection to the student’s knowledge. As most professors and history departments have agreed upon, teaching one course called African history is probably not sufficient to create the kind of knowledge they would like to be associated with. At Dartmouth, the history curriculum dictates that African history be split into two: before colonialism and after colonialism. Instead of colonialism, the dividing point in African history should be the creation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (circa 15th century). With the creation of the trans-Atlantic slavery comes two factors of African history that each demonstrate a fundamental shift: the creation of an entirely disconnected diaspora and the racial inferiority of black people, the latter of which would greatly influence African history for centuries afterwards.
The first of these phenomena, the creation of a disconnected diaspora, was an entirely new concept for Africa that doesn’t belong grouped with the history of Africa before trans-Atlantic slavery. However, the diaspora created by the trans-Atlantic slave trade was not the first African diaspora. Slave trades took place across the Sahara, across the Red Sea, and even across the Indian Ocean. Each of these trades created a diaspora of Africans separated far from their homelands. Across the Sahara, there was a diaspora of sub-Saharans that were taken to places they were deeply unfamiliar with in Islamicate North Africa and the Middle-East. Another African diaspora would have been created by slave trade across the Red Sea, as well as slave trade across the Indian Ocean to Western Asia, South Asia and possibly even farther east. Though these created diasporas, they were diasporas of a very different nature than the diaspora of Africans living in the Americas or the Caribbean.
The aforementioned Eurasian diasporas were not nearly as disconnected from Africa and Africans as the American (the continents, not the state) diaspora created by trans-Atlantic slavery. If you were a sub-Saharan African living as a slave in North Africa or Asia after your transport before the 15th century, you probably would have seen black merchants coming to the place that you lived. You saw other black people, even those not enslaved. Furthermore, you had a conception of how you got there. The African social group you had belonged to, maybe a kingdom, empire, or just a small tribal unit, had probably been defeated in war and you and your whole family had been enslaved by the nearby African social group that defeated yours. That nearby African social group participated in foreign trade and you had been brought to a place that people who had looked like you had been before. Slavery and the slave trade, especially the kind characteristic of Africa before the 15th century, wasn’t a new concept to Africans or to anybody else. It was the status quo.
Alternatively, trans-Atlantic slavery was based on a new concept: the color line. No longer were you enslaved and diasporic merely because your group had lost a war to a nearby group who happened to trade. This time, you were enslaved by people of a different race because you were black. Previous diasporas may have existed due to slavery, but this new American diaspora was differently disconnected, disoriented, and enslaved because of their race and its supposed inferiority.
This supposed racial inferiority was not only created at the same time as trans-Atlantic slavery, but it couldn’t have emerged any earlier. For one, black civilization was simply too impressive before the 15th century to allow the idea of black inferiority to permeate intellectual or remotely worldly society. In the 14th century, when Mansa Musa, a black emperor thought by some to be the richest person of all time,[1] was parading around Africa and the Middle East during his 1320s Hajj, the idea of blacks’ being inferior would have been impossible so long as you had heard of him. He brought with him 60,000 men, among them 12,000 slaves, devalued the price of gold and tanked the Egyptian economy in doing so.[2] It is extremely difficult to believe that anybody living anywhere near those regions could even consider the racial inferiority of blacks. Furthermore, a combination of factors and influences specific to the 15th century led Europeans to decide they needed to envision blacks as inferior and worthy of enslavement, especially the European discovery of the New World in 1492 by Columbus. Given that the Bubonic plague had wiped out much of Europe and given more economic opportunity to the lower classes, it was hard to incentivize low-class Europeans to labor in the Americas.[3] In addition, the Native Americans, another potential labor force, were dying by the millions thanks to disease and overwork. The natives that survived this ravaging were deemed by de Las Casas and then other powerful people to have the potential to be good Christians and were thus unethical to enslave. The doctrine of racial inferiority of blacks was a product of its time, and it was not present before, representing a fundamental shift in the history of Africans.
Though the doctrine of black racial inferiority had not existed for long before trans-Atlantic slavery, it would exist long after, profoundly influencing African history for hundreds of years afterwards. The phenomenon which occurs immediately after the completion of a course on pre-colonial African history, as the name suggests, is colonialism. African colonialism, for the purposes of this paper, will be reduced for clarity and brevity to the economic and cultural domination of Africa by European powers. The economic domination was largely characterized by the forced or coerced extraction of a huge amount of raw materials from Africa, coupled with the successive sale of the finished goods those raw materials had become right back to Africa. In order to set up a region’s economy with the goal of a massive trade deficit with no foreseeable way out of it, one must believe that the people living in the region are inferior. We know this because when only a hundred or so years later, when several industrial centers in Europe were destroyed by world wars, their rebuilding was always aided by other Western powers. If countries filled with white people that started world wars can have built for them a thriving self-sufficient industrial sector, then surely a country filled with black people that have not started any world wars would be worthy of some industrial development. The doctrine of black inferiority made this impossible.
Cultural domination, the second key aspect of colonialism that will be discussed, was also predicated on the doctrine of black inferiority. Cultural domination involved the suppression of indigenous African cultures and religions in favor of forced Western culture and Christianity. Europeans believed so truly in the inferiority of blacks that black cultural and religious inferiority was one of the main reasons for colonialism in the first place. Many colonizers believed that Africans were simple savages needing to be saved by European Christians. This is the same idea that was best articulated by Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” in 1899, when he called native Filipinos “half-devil and half-child.”[4] Though Kipling wasn’t speaking about Africans, his sentiments were no doubt shared by European colonizers. Colonization and its dominating force over culture and religion were predicated on black inferiority, which was fundamentally a doctrine that emerged with trans-Atlantic slavery.
To summarize, a class that teaches the ‘beginning’ of African history should end before the development of the trans-Atlantic slave trade because the creation of both a disconnected black diaspora and the doctrine of black inferiority were paradigm shifts in African history. First, neither phenomena were present before the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Earlier diasporas weren’t nearly as disconnected as the one created by trans-Atlantic slavery. Black inferiority was impossible during the height of Mali only a hundred or so years earlier and a clear product of timely developments in the Americas and Europe. This newly created doctrine of black inferiority would go on to greatly affect African history, making possible the economic and cultural dominations that characterized colonialism. Ending an early African history class at trans-Atlantic slavery would emphasize how profound a shift these two phenomena were and allow us to separate African history before these two shifts from African history after them.
Bibliography
Mohamud, Naima. 2019. “Mansa Musa: The Richest Man Who Ever Lived.” BBC News. BBC. March 10, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47379458.
“‘The White Man's Burden’: Kipling's Hymn to U.S. Imperialism.” n.d. HISTORY MATTERS - The U.S. Survey Course on the Web. Accessed March 14, 2019. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5478/.
[1] Mohamud, Naima. 2019. “Mansa Musa: The Richest Man Who Ever Lived.” BBC. March 10, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47379458.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Dell, Jeremy. Lectures in Pre-Colonial African History (HIST 5.01/AAAS 14). Dartmouth College.
[4] “‘The White Man's Burden’: Kipling's Hymn to U.S. Imperialism.” n.d. HISTORY MATTERS - The U.S. Survey Course on the Web. Accessed March 14, 2019. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5478/.