ABSTRACT
In an interview with MARHO (The Radical Historians Association) in 1982, the late Vincent Harding was asked how he felt about the “varied responses” to his newly published masterpiece, There Is a River.1 Harding expressed disappointment at what he perceived to be the failure, or refusal of critics, “to engage the work intellectually at the level of some of my basic ideas and questions.”2 The fundamental problem, according to Harding, had to do with “rethinking of the central issues of the history and role of our community in the United States.”3 Harding’s response constituted a telling indictment of the Eurocentric character of American historiography, especially as it pertains to “interpretation of the Black and white struggle in and for America.”4 He decried the failure of the “mainstream scholarly community” to address what he considered “some of the fundamental elements.”5 It seemed to him that there was what amounted to a conspiratorial reluctance “to see this America through a variety of eyes” as opposed to the perspective of the dominant white society.6 There was consequently a gaping hole in the historiography reflective of the absence of the perspectives of women, Native Americans, Blacks, Hispanic and Asian Americans. Harding then asked a fundamental question: How shall we see America through all these eyes? Broadening the historiography would in Harding words require “breaking beyond past Western traditional understandings to some new understandings of our identity, our history, and our destiny as human beings.”7 Harding’s critique of American historiography, in fact, reflected a deeply rooted historical problematic that had informed historiography generally, particularly in relation to the broader encounters between Europeans and nonEuropeans, especially Africans. The problem Harding highlighted was not a late twentieth century phenomenon. This tradition of writing history from the perspective of the dominant Europeans had informed how Africa, Africans and peoples of African descent in the Diaspora were constructed dating back to the eighteenth century. Their “eyes” had never influenced how world history or even the history of their own immediate societies and cultures were written and
interpreted.8 Historiography had never addressed what Harding described as “the magnificent largeness of human life, and the richness of human experience.”9 On the contrary, Africans were never considered part of the “human experience,” and if they were even included, they were usually represented in the most abject, negative and demeaning forms-certainly not “magnificent” and not “rich.” Such historiography helped soothe Western/European conscience as they enslaved Africans, and plundered the human and natural resources of the continent. Africa and Africans were passive objects, “backward, primitive,” with negligible contributions to history and civilization. In short, Africa was the “Dark Continent” of barbarism and heathenism, a static, ahistorical environment. According to this genre, civilization and history came to Africa with the arrival of Europeans.10 Even when European scholars later acknowledged the historical heritage of Africa, they portrayed that heritage, in all its ramifications, as fundamentally negative and evil. Africa, they insisted, made no significant contributions to human development. Renowned Oxford historian Hugh Trevor Roper reflected this worldview in his response to a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) interview question on African history. Rebutting angrily, Roper declared that there was nothing historical in pre-colonial Africa. What existed, he pontificated, was, “the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes on picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.”11 The rejection and caricaturing of African history was meant to legitimize Europe’s rape and pillage of the continent. The alleged backward and primitive character of pre-colonial Africa justified the enslavement and transplantation of Africans across the Atlantic. To strengthen slavery in the New World, Europeans again invoked history to facilitate the mental and psychological domination of the enslaved. The portrait of Africa as the “Dark Continent” was deeply and indelibly imprinted into the consciousness of enslaved blacks. When slavery ended and Europeans embarked upon what some called “the second great enslavement,” (that is, Colonialism), history again became a prized weapon of justifying and strengthening Europeans rule. Indeed, history became part of a broader repertoire of control and domination. Education was carefully structured, strictly controlled and used to create and nurture in Africans and Diaspora blacks mental and psychological dependency and inferiority complexes. In its coverage of Africa, therefore, colonial historiography denied and denigrated African history and culture. As the late J. M. Blaut argued, Europeans perceived the world through a Eurocentric diffusionist lens that reflected Europe as the epicenter of the universe, and nonEuropeans as peripheral recipients of “superior” European values and influences.12 History was used to circumscribe the epistemological horizon of Africans/blacks. The dominant narrative among European scholars portrayed colonialism as a civilizing force, designed to bring Africans into the orbit of civilization and history. During both slavery and colonialism Europeans mythologized and misrepresented Africa as a strategy of destroying the self-esteem of Africans and ridding them of any positive self-deterministic and potentially subversive consciousness.13 Attempts to break “beyond past Western traditional understandings” could, in fact, be traced back to the early nineteenth century efforts of those whom Earl
Thorpe described as “pioneers in protest.”14 Even in this early period, when there did not exist the semblance of an intelligentsia class, black activists clearly understood the damages of Eurocentric historiography and most importantly, the linkage between knowledge and empowerment. Denied any credible place in human history, Africa and Africans were relegated to the bottom rung of the historical and cultural ladders. It became clear that the battle for Africa had to be waged as well on the intellectual terrain. The “pioneers in protest,” in modest, but profoundly significant ways, helped lay the foundation for Black History upon which future generations of black historians and other scholars and activists would build their own intellectual counter narratives. They deemed historical studies crucial to their resistance.15 Consequently, long before the appearance of a professional class of black intellectuals, the challenges of historical racism compelled some blacks to seek historical knowledge. Also, among the earliest to identify history as a discipline of resistance was G. N. Grisham, a Professor and Principal of a High School in Kansas City, Missouri, described as “one of the ablest educators and most practical philosophers in the country.”16 He delivered a speech in December 1897 in which he stressed the importance of historical scholarship and urged the black scholar to “do something for his race” by helping to develop a revolutionary historical consciousness and forging “the connection between his race and civilization.”17 Grisham wanted black intellectuals to reclaim that link between Africa and civilization that leading European intellectuals had severed.18 Grisham’s motivation and vision were consistent with those of the early “pioneers.” William E. B. Du Bois, the first Black American to earn a PhD History degree from Harvard both exemplified and strongly articulated the role of the intellectual in the black struggle. As he explained it,
The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among the Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth . . . the best of this race that they may guide the Mass.19
