THE ROLE OF MARXISM IN SUB-SAHARAN AND SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY
2015
Writing a chapter on Marxist historiography in Africa presents problems dierent
from those on historiographies in other regions of the world. We are immediately
confronted by the question what is meant by historiography, taking into account
the unique character of colonial and pre-colonial Africa. The idea dominated
Western thought from the eighteenth century well into the twentieth century,
that Africa is a continent without a history; that it was stagnant throughout the
ages with no development. This idea had explicit racist implications. In an age of
colonialism it posited the racial inferiority of black Africans. While the English
Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time to the Present1 in the mid-eighteenth
century had devoted a special volume to ancient Ethiopia and in the modern section another volume on Ethiopia, one on the history of the Gold Coast, the Ivory
Coast and the interior, and one on the African west coast2 (thus arming that
Africans were worthy of being included in a history of humankind), David Hume
in the late eighteenth century considered “negroes to be naturally inferior to the
white.” He continued that “there never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than the white . . . No ingenious manufacturers among them, no arts, no
science.”3 Hegel, as we already saw, denied that India and China possessed a historical development, but was even harsher on Africa. “Africa”, he wrote, is “no
historical part of the World . . . . What we properly understand by Unhistorical,
Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature.”4 As late as
1968, Hugh Trevor Roper, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford,
dismissed Africa “as the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque
but irrelevant quarters of the globe.” He further wrote: “There is only the history
of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness and darkness is not a subject of
history.”5 In fact, attention was paid to Africa in European and North Americanstudies in the rst half of the twentieth century with little or no concern for the
African past but only as part of European expansion.
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