Why Did Africa’s Ruling Elite Declare War on History

One of my intellectual mentors, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, told us: “History is not everything, but it is a compass that guides a people through the uncertain terrain of existence.”

Unlike what Africa’s plantation managers and their Western curators would want us to believe, history is not the dead weight of forgotten dates, dusty archives, or the tedious memorization of kings and battles.

A people without a knowledge of their history is like a ship that has deliberately smashed its own compass and ventured into a hurricane. Such a vessel deserves neither surprise nor sympathy when it eventually crashes upon the rocks.

Marcus Garvey understood this eternal truth with prophetic ontological clarity. That is why he thundered across the twentieth century that a people without the knowledge of their history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.

A rootless tree does not negotiate with the wind; it collapses before it; any river that forgets its roots dries up.

Then came the incomparable Cheikh Anta Diop, whose scholarship demolished centuries of colonial falsehood by restoring Ancient Egypt to its rightful place within the continuum of Black African civilization. Diop did far more than settle an academic argument. He erected an intellectual bridge linking Dakar to Cairo, Kumasi to Khartoum, Lagos to Luxor. His work was a clarion call to continental unity founded not upon sentimental slogans but upon historical truth.

With their understanding of the importance of history, Pan-African giants like Bob Marley sang it. Peter Tosh proclaimed it. Fela crooned it. Garvey preached it. Clarke explained it. Diop proved it.

Yet Africa’s political class, those tragic custodians of borrowed minds and rented convictions, looked upon this priceless inheritance and concluded that the teaching of history was expendable. They committed this monumental idiocy at the dictation of their sponsors in the West!

Africa’s plantation supervisors didn’t ask themselves what civilization would voluntarily amputate its own memory and expect to retain its identity?

What people discard the map to their ancestral home and then wonder why every foreign highway leads them into another cul-de-sac of dependency?

Removing history from African classrooms was not merely an educational blunder. It was an act of intellectual vandalism bordering on civilizational self-harm.

It guaranteed the manufacture of generations who know the names of European monarchs but cannot explain the rise of Mali, Songhai, Kemet, Great Zimbabwe or Benin.

It bred citizens who identify more passionately with colonial frontiers than with African civilization itself.

It fertilized the poisonous weeds of tribalism, ethnic chauvinism and xenophobia by denying Africans the larger historical narrative that binds them together, which Diop passionately espoused in his book, “The Cultural Unity of Black Africa.”

As we have proclaimed several times on this blog, the deliberate ignorance foisted on Africa by its misrulers has never been politically neutral. It is the preferred currency of mediocre rulers who fear an enlightened citizenry.

A people acquainted with their history become infinitely more difficult to deceive, divide, or domesticate. Perhaps that is precisely why history had to disappear from Africa’s curriculum.

Africans must fight to reverse this unforgivable folly with uncompromising urgency.

Our task on this blog is very simple: educate and agitate that Africans must wake up to redeem their beautiful continent. No one will do it for us. We must agitate for history to return to every classroom, every library, and every household in Africa. History must be engaged in every public conversation.

Every African child must know that before colonialism, there was African civilization far older than Europe. Africans must be taught that, before partition, there was cultural continuity and that before colonialists introduced artificial borders, there was a shared historical destiny.

Properly educated people know that history is more than memory. It is an identity as it’s resistance and liberation. And until Africa rediscovers its historical compass, it will continue to wander in circles while mistaking perpetual motion for genuine progress.

©️ Ọdọ́fin Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀‌làfẹ̀ (1st Dan, Ọdọ́fin I of Kasoa)

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