The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith

by the Left Book Club, offered a radical Leninist analysis of such expansionism, and by 1962 Melville J. Herskovits, whose Myth of the Negro Past had appeared in 1941, would write:

      Africa, when seen in perspective, was a full partner in the development of the Old World, participating in a continual process of cultural give-and-take that began long before European occupation. Neither isolation nor stagnation tells the tale. It is as incorrect to think of Africa as having been for centuries isolated from the rest of the world as it is to regard the vast area south of the Sahara as ‘Darkest Africa’, whose peoples slumbered on until awakened by the coming of the dynamic civilization of Europe (cited by Ngũgĩ, 1972, 3–4).

      As the present study will show, Herskovits’s upbeat reading of pre-colonial African society, inspired by new visions of African historiography and quoted affirmatively by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in 1972, was itself an oversimplification of complex transcultural and historical dynamics, but for the next three to four decades, such assumptions would be foundational in the writings of a generation of revisionist historians of Africa, whether from the West or from Africa itself.

      The disarticulation of colonial authority, both in politics and in colonial discourse, became the widely shared project of a new African historiography. The ‘real’ African past had to be recuperated, and the indigenous rather than the Eurocolonial rendering of that past had to be promoted. That process, and the new images of Africa consequently devised, are not a material part of the present study, as my focus is precisely on those perceptions – and their sources – that promoters of a revisionary African history wished to discredit. Nevertheless, a brief survey of some of the tenets of this polemic will help to contextualise the key issues that concern me, and must preface a more serious interrogation of how and to what extent the operations of discourse theory may be a help or hindrance in our reading – at present – of the European library of Africa.

      The first wave of revisionist African historiography, more or less up to the appearance of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, tended to be content-based, concerned with providing new information, unproblematically considered as ‘correct’, about the European exploitation of Africa. Behind many such works lay a conviction that an emergent postmodernism would soon regard as naïve, namely that the ‘truth’ of colonialism could readily be ascertained, and that the attitudes and perceptions of the past could be ‘corrected’ by the provision of more information from indigenous sources in particular. Richard Gray, reviewing an important later contribution to this enterprise, David W. Phillipson’s African Archaeology (1985), summed up the iniquities to be addressed, yet also the problems posed by the proposed remedies:

      Africa invites stereotypes. Few Europeans and North Americans would dare to generalise so confidently about their own continents as they have so often done about Africa. The first modern, colonial, stereotype was that of a barbaric continent, one without history until quickened by outside forces. The second, which accompanied the process of decolonisation, was of an original Arcadia, prosperous and progressive until engulfed by the slave trade and European conquest…. Inevitably, the disillusionment which has often accompanied the decades of independence is provoking another reassessment (1985, 646).

      Between the end of colonialism and the above comment lay a revolution, not only in liberationist political terms, but in our understanding of how notions of ‘truth’ and the ‘correct’ rendering of historical events, including those of colonialism, are themselves contingent and historically determined. What we shall see is that the sceptical and agnostic imperatives of postmodernist insights, engaged by many a postcolonial campaigner, would have the startling effect of rendering the optimistic hopes and convictions of a recuperative postcolonial project highly problematic, if not downright forlorn.

      In the meantime, a number of new works had set about reviewing the colonial history of Africa, and had managed to uncover much new or neglected information. In 1950, John W. Blake, afterwards Lord Blake, read a paper to the Royal Historical Society making a plea for ‘an integrated study of African history from the point of view of Africans’ (69). That such a history ‘from the point of view of Africans’ could be written by non-African outsiders we might now regard as a contradiction in terms, but it was an enthusiastic call.

      Launched at the same time and beginning publication in 1950 was the massive Ethnographic Survey of Africa, which eventually ran to some forty parts of 100–200 pages each, with prominent contributors such as Hilda Kuper, Daryll Forde, Edwin Ardener and G.W.B. Huntingford. There was not a black African among them. Titles such as Africa Emergent (Macmillan, 1949) and The Emergent Continent (Halladay, 1972) became popular among authors who appreciated the urgency of revision, but nevertheless regarded Africa as a distant planet – in the words of W.M. Macmillan, former Professor of History at the University of the Witwatersrand, ‘If in any sense there is a single “African problem” it is nothing less than the bringing of civilization to Africa’ (1949, 9). Colin M. Turnbull’s The Lonely African (1963) attempted to bridge the gulf by sentimentalising its subject, but Basil Davidson, in a series of seminal and still highly readable works starting with Old Africa Rediscovered (1959), set about opening up an astounding but persuasive history of a continent effectively ‘lost’ to Western readers since before the Renaissance. Davidson described here and afterwards (1961, 1966, etc.) an Africa that by 1000 CE had developed mighty kingdoms, iron smelting and working, and extensive trade links across the Sahara with Mediterranean countries, and across the Indian Ocean with Arab states, India and even China. His Black Mother (1961, revised 1968) became an inspiration for students in South Africa, both white and black. For me, it was one of the earliest spurs towards the present study.

      In 1962, Roland Oliver and J.D. Fage published the first edition of their Short History of Africa, which would remain over many editions a standard introduction to its subject, its approach adumbrated by Ronald Segal in the Penguin African Library version of 1975: ‘Much of Africa’s past has now been excavated from ignorance and error. Yet the study of African history has hardly begun’ (1975, 10). A similar service was rendered by Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher and Alice Denny in Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (1961/1970), which presented ‘the paradoxical nature of late-Victorian imperial expansion in Africa’ (1970, 25) as a process that neither matched the visions of the proconsuls of empire nor wholly deserved the chastisements of Afrocentrist critics.

      The balanced assessments characteristic of such works have not fared well. Oliver and Fage would go on to become the doyens among English historians of Africa, co-responsible for the editing of the eight-volume Cambridge History of Africa that began publication in 1974. Their version of a recuperative history of Africa would, however, fall short of the expectations and agendas of indigenous historians of the very continent that the work was designed to promote. The rival UNESCO General History of Africa began publication in 1981, and in Chapter 1, I deal with its questionable representations of ancient Egypt’s relationships with the rest of Africa. When in 1985 Roland Oliver felt obliged to write a sharply dissident review of such fanciful historiography (867–8), this time as exhibited in Volume 7, Africa under Colonial Domination 1880–1935, he was savaged by the Nigerian historian, Chinweizu, as a lackey of ‘colonialist ideology’ and as now redundant: ‘Oliver’s review is the sort of attack which a jaded orthodoxy is liable to make on its supplanters as it is being pushed off the stage’ (1985, 1062).

      The impulses of reaction and rejection that marked the emergence of an indigenous African historiography between the 1950s and the 1980s, and inspired such hostile responses to its Western counterpart (however sympathetic), will remain a theme of the present study. As we shall see, such dissent was rendered increasingly inevitable in the wake of broader controversies and contradictions generated by the uneasy league between postcolonial and postmodernist onslaughts on the ‘master narratives’ of Western colonialism and imperialism.

      More orthodox literary, historical and ethnographic research continued to open up new stopes of information on the Euro-African past. The first volume of Robin Hallett’s The Penetration of Africa: European Enterprise