Amy Niang (2006-05-25)
Graduate student Amy Niang meets well known history professor Joseph
Ki-Zerbo at his home in Burkina Faso.
There is an incommensurable gap between the old and younger generation of
Africans. We - African youth - have grown up, been made to believe that
anything ‘traditional’ or ‘old’ is necessarily retrograde, often
‘unreliable.’
Young Africans, especially children of the Diaspora, do not have the
advantage of communicating with their past, a handicap that inhibits a
corrective study of African history and deepens their incapacity to take
their destiny in hand. According to an African proverb, “he who is lost
doesn’t know where he comes from.”
I had the immense honor to meet the first African to qualify as professor of
history, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, at his house in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (West
Africa). At 84 today, weakened by age and sickness, Ki-Zerbo still draws
amazing strength and vitality from his deeply-rooted convictions. He may
have been preaching in the desert for decades but men like him live by their
principles and his writings find resonance. African and world scholars have
understood his message.
Ki-Zerbo deplores the increasing extinction of African identity. According
to him, the curse of Africa is not the chronic poverty of its countries but
the ignorance of its children of the true history and the true values of the
continent. Unless Africans start learning about their own continent, their
own thought system and the essence of its traditions, they will remain
locked into the stranglehold of cultural identity.
It’s high time Africans liberate themselves from cultural asphyxiation, high
time they went in search of what it is to be African, to draw the necessary
lessons from their own traditional history in order to apprehend the future
with confidence. The approach will consist, for Africa, in re-conquering its
confiscated identity for, according to Ki-Zerbo, “without identity, we are
just a mere object of history, a prop in the play of globalization, an
instrument used by the others. A utensil.”
Ki-Zerbo narrates African past not in the way of a nostalgic chronicler who
wallows in past glory or dwells into an imaginary fantasyland of
pre-colonial Africa. He uncovers the history he was not taught at La
Sorbonne University in France.
According to Ki-Zerbo, throughout history strong beliefs in simple
principles such as the importance of family over the individual, the respect
of elders, the spirit of sharing and good neighborliness, human communion in
joy and sadness, etc, have been the bedrock of existence for Africans.
Unfortunately, the degradation of these principles has blighted prospects
for Pan-Africanism and development. But Ki-Zerbo warns us that “liberation
for Africa will be Pan-African or will not be.”
Today, the debate over Africa is enmeshed in endless and ineffectual
squabbling over the legitimacy of pseudo-democracies and misleading
conflicts. But Ki-Zerbo argues that “the conception of power as well as its
management in today’s Africa has nothing African to it.” In fact, political
formations in pre-colonial Africa are rich with institutions based on a
division of power with the greater possible number of people.
Africans, he says, “believe that power should be divided among its
incumbents. They also believe that stability could be preserved in the
multiplication of power.” He debunks misconceptions about African history
and dominant theories that deliberately confine the history of the continent
to the slave trade and the colonial experience. He adds that historical
knowledge is a condition to collective liberation as the linkage between
historical knowledge and self-worth is undeniable. In Africa, the lack of
this knowledge has greatly contributed to underachievement and ‘mental
underdevelopment.’
Ki-Zerbo is a man of vision and a soothsayer but he does not read Africa’s
future in the sand of its drying soil; he uses the dialectical process of
history as an investigative method to uncover the true past of the continent
in order to understand the underpinnings of Africa’s value systems. He then
tells us what a de-structured society can expect to see: the import and
application of values that do not fit its peoples, which eventually will
lead to the destruction of cultural identity.
His unsparing analysis and sharp, perceptive, riveting, pertinent, careful
and thorough study of Africa’s history as well as its relations with the
West has yielded a great number of articles and monographs, among which have
been the comprehensive “History of Black Africa” (1972) that laid the
foundation of a lifetime of scholarship and commitment to restoring the
history of Africa by Africans. He also supervised the publication of two of
the monumental eight-volume “General History of Africa” (Méthodologie et
Préhistoire Africaine, 1981) as a member of the Scientific Committee for
UNESCO.
He explores Africa’s past, drawing from oral tradition that is, in essence,
the source of history and traditions for many African writers such as Mali’s
late Amadou Hampaté-Bâ, who once said: “When an old man dies in Africa, it
is like a whole library burning down.”
Ki-Zerbo’s life struggle and relentless social and political activism are
not just a message of hope for Africa. It is the deep conviction of a man
who knows that African development cannot be elusive forever and that it
will be ‘African’ in conception and application or will not be. This
knowledge is what he wishes young Africans to oppose against heavy odds and
unacceptable immobilization, against institutionalized ignorance and empty
rhetoric.
* Amy Niang is a Senegalese graduate student at the University of Tsukuba in
Japan. E-mail her at [log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html
To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
|