Pre-colonial Africa? Nonsense!
Adeshina Afolayan
"We would benefit from remembering the Nigerian historian J F Ade Ajayi’s corrective that colonialism is an episode in African history, not its principal, much less sole, shaper. Take any of Africa’s native civilisations. We have evidence for Yorùbá civilisation going back 1,000 yearsat least. Benin history also goes back at least 1,000 years. Then, in 1897, the Bini lost a war to the British and came, as war booty, under British control, and not even as a colony or a protectorate. All of a sudden, Benin’s whole history – with its dynastic calendar, its imperial records and reaches, including control of Europeans within its borders for centuries till that fateful incident – was subsumed under ‘precolonial Benin’. Thenceforth, Benin was to be understood primarily, if not solely, in terms of its relation to one European conqueror. All that came before 1897 is now ‘precolonial Benin’.
Ironically, this dominant organising principle of African history hinders our understanding even of European colonialism in Africa. It encourages us to ignore the many important continuities in African phenomena. It asks us to neglect why and how some African groups welcomed European intervention and embraced modern forms of rule, in part, as their escape from local colonial overlords or from certain ways of ordering life and thought in their original cultures. We paper over many long-standing hierarchies among groups and the dynamics of intergroup relations that had previously structured ideas of citizenship, political legitimacy, succession systems, even geopolitical boundaries, and we wonder why the limited toolkit bequeathed by scholarship that takes colonialism as its singular pole for periodisation does not avail in our contemporary situation. We saw previously that, in coming together to give themselves a new constitution, the Fanti were trying to ally with the British and against the Dutch as well as their local threat, the much bigger and stronger Asante kingdom. Many women utilised the new private laws birthed by colonialism to breach local regulations respecting marriage, child custody, and inheritance rules.
Organising the history of Africa in relation to European colonialism also conceals local versions of colonial state relations and the different models of citizenship in Africa’s long history of states, nations and constitutions. Many of these models need a more sophisticated calendar and dating system to lead us to their relevance and complexities. Ethiopia, for example, has always been an agglomeration of once-independent states under Amharic hegemony. But to speak of ‘precolonial Ethiopia’ would be to commit to something that never happened. Unlike Ethiopia’s colonisation of Eritrea and Somalia, which lasted far longer, Italy’s so-called colonisation of Ethiopia barely lasted five years! How then do we conceive of Ethiopian history such that we grasp its evolution as a multination state, some of whose internal strains and stresses owe to the dynamics of local colonisation when it comes to ‘Western Somalia’ (previously Ogaden), Eritrea (now independent), or Oromia? After all, two of these and other components are constituent units of present-day Ethiopia"
Toyin Falola
It is an old debate, nothing new about it. We held seminars on it at Ife in the 1980s. But no one has come up with an alternative label and chronological timeline. Molefi Asante comes close to working out an alternative chronology. Ogundiran tried it for the Yoruba in one of his best essays presented at Austin twenty two years ago. We have agonized over the subject without resolution.
In all fields, people contest those terms, more so in European history…what is modern, early modern, enlightenment, etc. But they don’t have a choice as no one has come up with something that works.
All labels, as bumper stickers, are no more than entries to windows, and you use and define clearly what you mean. An historian who is writing on Benin in the nineteenth century says that with precision. Or you say Oyo Empire in the 18th century. You say Egypt of the pharaohs.
In that argument, abolish AD, BC, Medieval, Feudal, University, etc. Philosophy as a label does not work, just as Geography or Literature, since they are all plastic. Yoruba, as a label, did not exist in the 18th century, so abolish the use of Yoruba; the original meaning of Igbo is not the the Igbo that we define today, so abolish Igbo. The state of Israel was not created by those who left Israel, but by the Zionist movement, so abolish Israel. Abolish Ibadan as those who were there since 1829 were Oyo, abolish it. The Egba used to live in the area of Ibadan before they were forced to relocate to Abeokuta, so abolish it.
Once you have colonial, you have post-colonial, and you have pre-colonial. It is how you then define it that matters.
And there was even no Africa, the way we now use it. So abolish Africa itself as a label as we had only the Kikuyu, Nubia, etc.
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Abimbola Emmanuel
Abímbọ́lá
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Harrow, Kenneth
Sent: Thursday, February 9, 2023 10:16:09 AM
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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Pre-colonial Africa? Nonsense!
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
There is a world of difference between the significance of periodization schemes in Western history and the ''colonial/post-colonial'' binary in scholarship on Africa.
Is Spanish civilization after the long Moorish colonization known as post-colonial? What of the American colonies after the English were driven off through the American Revolution? If not, why? If not, why should African experience after the colonizers left be necessarily named as ''post-colonial''?
I am deeply suspicious of the term ''post-colonial.'' I do my best to never use it.
The terms I use are ''classical'' and ''post-classical''. I use ''classical'' to refer to African civilizations in their endogenous formations, developments that persist into the present.
I am suspicious of the term ''post-colonial'' because I dont see why my existence and that of my fellow Africans should be defined primarily in terms of our relationship with Europe.
Whatever realities are mapped by the concept of the ''post-colonial'', I acknowledge the right of others to use it but I am not using it.
The West is both the one time eroder of African epistemic integrity and one of, if not the greatest contemporary enabler of that integrity within scholarship.
If one makes a listing of the journal articles and books pursuing this decolonization project, are they published more in Africa or in the West?
Where are the scholars located?
Falola's location at UTexas is strategic for the kind of work he does. Same for Wariboko, Ogundiran etc within their respective universities. Yet they are all working primarily on Africa.
Perhaps when I'm better grounded in the relevant literature on post-colonialism and decolonization I could have a clearer view on these subjects.
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Toyin Falola
Sent: Thursday, February 9, 2023 11:02:37 AM
To: Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>; usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Harrow, Kenneth
To: Abimbola Emmanuel <abimbolae...@gmail.com>; usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Toyin Falola
Some of these issues had consumed an earlier generation. Nothing here is new, part of the framing of the UNESCO volume, and they resorted to using dates and some other terminologies. Examination bodies struggled with this.
Those who create national curricula struggled with this. I was a guest in Brazin where it took us six weeks to create three labels.
What is classical?
If you refer to a revolution, people will question that term.
Democracy in Nigeria? People will say there is no such a thing?
There is colonial India
There is Chinese colonial history
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