‘Ancient Africa – A History Denied’

At school we learn much about colonialism. The beginning and the lingering end of Africa’s subjugation by western forces whose reigns were largely brutal, racist and erasing.

To hear textbooks primarily written by white men tell it, Africa has no history.

Anchored to interruption, Africa is defined only in as much as it was colonised, ‘civilised’ and carved up and any interest in what the continent was like before is indulged outside the classroom.

Perhaps, in documentaries like Time Life’s ‘Africa: A History Denied’ (1995).

Still racking up views and heated debate on YouTube, the documentary is narrated by Sam Waterston and tells two stories that a curious many are familiar with: The legend of Great Zimbabwe and the lure of East Africa’s ‘Swahili Coast’.

Beginning with Great Zimbabwe, the film delves into scenes of active erasure in which white settlers exploring the area and finding structures more sophisticated than what they the thought capable of African people began a campaign of denial.

A campaign made possible by a lack of written records as a result of Africa’s oral tradition in which stories of great conflicts, chiefs and civilisations are passed down from generation to generation and ultimately fade with time.

“So much of Africa’s history has been lost. It is a land of forgotten kingdoms,” says featured academic professor and political writer, the late Ali Mazrui.

Though afforded little acknowledgement, the documentary posits that great African empires of the middles ages provided the gold and the ivory which fuelled the renaissance in Europe and in later centuries both Arabs and Europeans sought to deny Africa its great legacy.

The latter believing Africans were capable of nothing more than mud huts and paganism justified their exploitation of the ‘dark continent’ by claiming Africa’s lost civilisations as white ancestors including a pale Queen of Sheba and the former capitalising on the Swahili Coast’s conversion to Islam to claim Arabic origins.

An exploration of fictitious African history, the squirreling away of artefacts and the strides made both in history and currently to rewrite the continent’s narrative, the documentary runs at just over 50 minutes and touches on the role Africans themselves had to play in their own erasure.

“All societies select what they want to remember but only Africans have been totally denied a history of their own for so long,” says Mazrui.

“But this is where our species began, where the first humans walked on Earth. The first habitat of human species seems to be the last to be properly understood.”

Sobering, educational and the beginning of Google searches lasting deep into the night, ‘Ancient Africa – A History Denied’ though over 20 years old, remains entirely worth one’s time, attention and dissection.

‘Ancient Africa – A History Denied’ can be watched on YouTube.

– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter and Instagram; marthvaderlive on Snapchat

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