Two interlinked but unfinished revolutions – one intellectual and one overtly political – have been playing a central role in Africa and the diaspora. Together they will help shape the trajectory of the continent, where as many as 40% of the world’s people will live by the end of the 21st century.
One is the scholarship and research revolution, which has systematically dismantled those predominantly Western arguments that treated Africa as beyond mainstream ideas of history and progress.
On that reading, European colonialism was the fulcrum from which Africa’s trajectory could be understood, as the continent was ‘integrated’ into world history. Such arguments assumed importance because for years they dominated the research agenda in many of the world’s biggest academic institutions.
The debunking of those ideas started in modern times with the pioneering work of African historians such as Nigeria’s Professor Ade Ajayi, Kenya’s Bethwell Ogot and Ghana’s Adu Boahen. Activist intellectuals such as Guyana’s Walter Rodney and Senegal’s Cheikh Anta Diop lent political urgency to the research project.
The other revolution centres on the growing calls for more voting rights to be accorded to Africa’s 54 states in the world’s leading political and economic fora, such as the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the Group of 20 most important economies.
This is premised on African states’ expanding demographic weight and their development of new trading and diplomatic networks, pivoting away from the old colonial linkages to the more dynamic economies in Asia and South America.
It also calls for a reckoning of Africa’s history with the West, the human and economic costs of the transatlantic slave trade and colonial extractive regimes, and the current debate over compensation for the damage to the global climate by the rich, industrial economies.
New knowledge
Many of the critical voices in these international debates, such as Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo and South Africa’s former president Thabo Mbeki, are serious students of African history. Their intellectual ammunition has drawn heavily on a closer reading of historical research by a new of generation of African and diaspora scholars.
One of the books that is likely to land on their desks is a collection of analytical and historical essays – Great Kingdoms of Africa – edited by John Parker. It examines the nature of royal power and its complexities in nine regions in Africa. It ranges back millennia to the kingdoms in Egypt and Nubia, and forward to the more recent Zulu monarchies in Southern Africa.
![© An engraving of Shaka, from the book “Travels and Adventures
in Eastern Africa” London, 1836. (Nathaniel Isaacs)](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=398,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/05/shaka-e1704456221368.jpeg)
in Eastern Africa” London, 1836. (Nathaniel Isaacs)
Twenty years ago, the book would have been very different, according to Parker, who teaches history at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
“The way that African politics and state-building have been viewed has changed over the two or three generations that African history has been studied as a serious discipline. Part of the reason is that there is a new generation of up-and-coming African historians who are doing novel types of research,” he says.
Parker says he wanted the collection to provide a venue for younger scholars. They include Nigerien political scientist and historian Rahmane Idrissa, who examined the Sudanic empires in Ghana, Mali and Songhai in medieval West Africa, and the Nigerian historian Olatunji Ojo, who wrote about the Yoruba and Benin Kingdoms.
Ethiopian historian Habtamu Tegegne co-wrote the chapter on the Solomonic Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia; and the Martiniquaise art historian Cécile Fromont wrote about the Kongo Kingdom.
These historians gathered their material from a wide range of sources, including inscriptions on stone, archaeological and artistic evidence, oral traditions and a more objective interpretation of existing written works. They also traced how a language changed in the various branches of a linguistic family.
Sacred aura
In Idrissa’s chapter on the Sudanic Empires, he explores research that questions an established narrative of an external “Arab stimulus” to Sudanic state building.
![© A pyramid field at Jebel Barkal in present-day Sudan, near the ancient city of Napata. (© AGF Srl/Alamy Stock Photo)](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=944,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/05/jebel-barka.jpeg)
present-day Sudan, near the ancient
city of Napata. (© AGF Srl/Alamy Stock Photo)
Archaeological evidence from Jenne near the Niger River in present-day Mali, for example, shows that social complexity, urban development and flourishing networks of regional commerce existed long before the arrival of North African traders.
One of the core issues was the simple question of ‘How do we, as Muslims, live with non-Muslims?’
These mercantile city-states were similar to Italian trading cities such as Venice or Genoa, which grew wealthy, thanks to commerce with the Islamic world.
Ghana’s kingdoms and its rulers, who were invested with a sacred aura, were strengthened by their highly sophisticated political culture, which influenced empires in Mali and Songhai.
![senegal griot © A photograph of a griot holding a kora, c. 1900. (Edmond Fortier)](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=454,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/05/senegal-griot.jpeg)
Africa’s leading photographer and
postcard producer in the early colonial
period. (Edmond Fortier)
Rich oral traditions sung over the centuries by griots helped develop research about kingdoms in Mali. Idrissa calls for more critical awareness of these in the readings about the history of Songhai, which has traditionally been studied via the Timbuktu Chronicles. The Chronicles, Idrissa reminds us, were written in the aftermath of the breakdown of the Songhai imperial rule.
One of the core issues in the area, Parker says, “was the simple question of ‘How do we, as Muslims, live with non-Muslims?’ Should they be tolerant or seek to impose what they thought was their view?”
![horse statue © A terracotta figure of a mounted warrior from Mali, 13th to 15th century. (Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington)](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=514,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/05/horse-statue.jpeg)
African Art, Washington)
More often than not, tolerance predominated because Muslims were in the minority. In Mali and Songhai, for example, “the question was how to create a state system in which the majority isn’t Muslim”.
Multiple identities
As you explore the book’s essays, it becomes clear that many kingdoms accommodated multiple ethnic, religious and cultural identities.
African kingdoms didn’t operate like territorial kingdoms in European or Asian history, says Parker. “They had dynamic and more fluid ways of operating, and there was a distinction between the core area and a much larger periphery where people of different ethnic groups were joined into the power of the state more creatively.”
Rather than more oppressive forms of instrumental power, which would involve the military, warfare, taxation – or a bureaucratising state as in the Ottoman Empire – African empires harnessed the idea of “creative power”, according to Parker.
“At its essence was the notion that kingship appeared as a sacred institution. It was about religious practice and belief and the idea that kings and queens personified the sacred realm.”
This sacredness of kingship was used in imaginative and innovative systems, “formulating different ways of political control that didn’t involve just dominating people militarily”.
Aspiring state builders who lacked military superiority would – rather than setting out to conquer people – draw them into a state system through culture, religion and the attractiveness of a centre, seen to be a focus of civilisation, Parker explains.
![beaded mask © An ade or fringed beaded crown from
the Ekiti region of Yorubaland, c.
1920 (Nigeria). (Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Fund)](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=287,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/05/beaded-mask.jpeg)
the Ekiti region of Yorubaland, c.
1920 (Nigeria). (Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Fund)
Over time, Africans have debated and experimented with many different ways on how to deal with politics, says Parker.
“African state builders have a lot to teach us in the modern day, incorporating people who speak different languages [and are members of] different religions and different ethnic groups.”
Christian roots
Ethiopia was an ancient multicultural and cosmopolitan region that developed ties outside the continent. As early as the first millennium BC, a “zone of connectivity stretching from the Mediterranean down both sides of the Red Sea and the Nile River Basin” was created, according to Habtamu Tegegne and Wendy Laura Belcher in their essay.
Ethiopia was already a major hub for trading as classical Greek civilisation was emerging. In the early 13th century, the Solomonic monarchs came to power and ruled Ethiopia for seven centuries – one of the longest dynasties in history.
The Solomonic ideology in Ethiopia was “grounded in a founding myth of biblical descent”. Its rulers claimed they were the descendants of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.
![Lalibela © The excavated rock-cut church of Bete Giyorgis (St George) at Lalibela, Ethiopia, 13th century CE. (© Matyas Rehakhak/Shutterstock)](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=944,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/05/lalibela.jpeg)
Giyorgis (St George) at Lalibela, Ethiopia, 13th
century CE. (© Matyas Rehakhak/Shutterstock)
Christianity was a pillar of their national identity and global networks uniting Christians created an international exchange, in trade or ideas. The power of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church in today’s Ethiopia is a legacy of those spiritual tributaries.
Alliances and warfare
Far less widely researched than Ethiopia is the Kongo Kingdom (stretching across today’s Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo), which is the focus of Cécile Fromont’s essay.
The history of Kongo before 1500 is still being examined and debated, writes Fromont. Anthropological work, archaeological fieldwork and historical linguistics are all part of the interdisciplinary endeavours to better understand Kongo’s history.
Just as Islamic forms of power have proved critical to the continent’s history, the same can be said about Christianity, says Parker.
Visitors to the region from the 13th century onward remarked on the sophisticated political ideology of the Yoruba and Benin Kingdoms
Kongo was a very early case: the importance of Christianity runs very deep, as far back as the 16th century, he says: “When European Christian missionaries turned up at the mouth of the Congo River, they were astounded to find that the villages were already Christian.”
The historic kingdom probably emerged from the consolidation of several older polities, expanding first by negotiated alliances, and then, after it had accumulated a degree of centralised power, through warfare, says Parker.
By the time Afonso Mvemba, a Nzinga, became ruler in 1506, traces of these political and spiritual foundations were those on which King Afonso built the new Christian order.
Diaspora trail
Another example of the new way the African past is being studied is via its diaspora, says Parker. “We couldn’t consider the Americas in the book. But African cultures were projected onto the Americas,” he says.
Olatunji Ojo’s chapter on the Yoruba and Benin Kingdoms tracks their sophisticated political ideology and urbanised civilisation, which was remarked on by serial visitors to the region from Europe and Asia in the 13th century onwards.
![Oba of Benin © The oba of Benin emerges from his
palace, accompanied by
leopards, musicians, armed retainers and
court notables, from Olfert Dapper,
Naukeurige Beschrijvinge de
Afrikaensche Gewesten (Amsterdam,
1668).](https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/cdn-cgi/image/q=auto,f=auto,metadata=none,width=944,fit=cover/https://prod.cdn-medias.theafricareport.com/medias/2024/01/05/oba-of-benin.jpeg)
palace, accompanied by
leopards, musicians, armed retainers and
court notables, from Olfert Dapper,
Naukeurige Beschrijvinge de
Afrikaensche Gewesten (Amsterdam,
1668).
Ojo also explains how Yoruba culture created African identities in the diaspora in the Americas – whether in Brazil, Cuba, Haiti or Trinidad and Tobago.
It is these historic exchanges that have been reimagined and enlivened on both the intellectual and international political fronts. The African Union, as well as member states such as Ghana and Kenya, have been promoting far stronger ties between the continent and its diaspora.
If Mia Mottley of Barbados, with her agenda of reforming the international financial system, succeeds in becoming the next UN Secretary General, with the solid backing of African member states, it may be yet another case of pioneering historical research informing present-day political realities.
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