The Reclaimed History Man - Cameron Duodu

Ever since I reported the death of Professor A Adu Boahen, history professor at the University of Ghana on May 27 2006, I have been researching his life and work.

I have discovered that some of the prejudices he and other pioneering African historians encountered as they began their studies were astonishing. I have written a full-length obituary of Adu Boahen detailing some of these, and his answers to them, but it is worth reviewing a few of them now.

When Adu Boahen started to study history at the University of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) at Legon in 1951, the syllabus of history was prepared by expatriate historians working in close collaboration with their colleagues at the Universiity of London. This was because the University of London had benignly agreed to lend its reputation to degrees awarded by Legon. Almost all the Legon lecturers were therefore British, and they oversaw the work of students and marked their exams.

My student friends of that time used to rail against the expats because many saw Africans only as "hewers of wood and drawers of water" on their own land. The expatriate historians' speciality was to teach something derided by my friends as the "Hamitic theory" of African history, whereby everything that appeared to have been done by "civilised" people in Africa, such as the pyramids in Egypt, was the work of "Hamitic" (non-black) peoples who had come to Africa from elsewhere, notably Europe. If you read Black Athena by Martin Bernal, you'll get the picture.

Now, Adu Boahen had obtained a grade one pass at the Cambridge School Leaving Certificate in 1950 and passed his London Matriculation examination at the age of 16 before entering Legon. He was, by all accounts, quite brilliant at Legon, too, but he graduated without the first class honours degree in history expected of him by his friends; he got only an upper second. A question that must be asked is this: would he have got a first, had his tutors been less prejudiced?

For even as a student, he had begun to question the Eurocentric view of African history exemplified by the regius professor of history at Oxford, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who declaimed, famously: "Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none: there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness."

Before Trevor-Roper's idiotic display of ignorance (he had most probably never set foot in Africa when he wrote this nonsense) David Hume had also written, 100 years or so earlier: "I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the white. There never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white."

Adu Boahen's lecturers, including the "authoritative" JD Fage, were fed on this diet of racist presumption, and their African students had to endure the noxious burden of having it represented to them as the truth about African history.

Adu Boahen, however, managed to shake off the infection of African inferiority that his education at Legon had sought to inflict on him, and when he obtained a scholarship to do a doctorate at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, he chose as the thesis of his studies the political system that existed in western Sudan and the Sahara at the time when the British were trying to colonise the area.

He discovered that the Asante empire, in present-day Ghana, had established a well-organised trading system carried out by caravan across the Sahara to north Africa and thereafter to Arabia and Asia, and that Asante gold had reached Europe long before the Europeans ever set foot on African soil. Silk and other important imports had also come through that northern route, but above all, political relations had been forged with kingdoms there, leading to the supply of weapons. Asante military prowess in the area was thus enhanced by countries to the north, not only through the coast, where the Europeans came from.

Adu Boahen found that once, when Queen Victoria offered to make Asante a British "protectorate", the Asantehene (king of Asante) sent her a note telling her politely that his country was "progressing" fine just as it was and had been doing since his ancestors' days, thank you very much.

The Moro Naba (king of the nearby Mossis, in what is now Burkina Faso) was even more "accommodating" when the French sent an envoy to propose a protectorate to him: "You must count yourself lucky that I have not had your head cut off," the Moro Naba told the French envoy. "Now, go away and above all, never come back!"

Yet the expatriate historians were teaching in African schools that Africans welcomed the advent of colonialism because it brought Christian civilisation and progress. Gunboats were only mentioned in passing and the slave trade was passed off - despite having funded the prosperity of British towns such as Bristol and Liverpool and, of course, British companies in North America and the Caribbean - as an African enterprise fuelled by the barbarity and greed of the "natives".

Adu Boahen's 15 or so books, including the pioneering Topics in West African History, became school and university textbooks, and have influenced students throughout Africa, freeing their minds from the prejudiced history taught in Africa by European teachers. But it was as president of the scientific committee for the drafting of a general history of Africa, a Unesco project, that Adu Boahen came into his own.

The project has produced a fantastic eight-volume set of books on African History, written mostly by African historians but also by some European and US historians. It is amazing in its scope. Adu Boahen edited the seventh volume: Africa Under Colonial Domination 1880-1935.

Adu Boahen's supreme crowning moment, however, came at the Royal Commonwealth Society in 1966, when in a lecture chaired by one of the Eurocentric school of African history, Roland Oliver, he named and shamed the Eurocentrics, and dethroned them from their perch on African history for ever.