ABSTRACT
We are a long way from gaining complete and accurate knowledge of Africa’s rich history. To proponents of the colonial enterprise, pre-colonial Africa was nothing more than a ‘dark continent’ inhabited by a bunch ‘primitive warring tribes,’ who wandered in the jungle without any sense of human organization. Thus, those who are wont to present pre-colonial Africa in this light often go on to extol colonialism for freeing the continent from its tribulations. For instance, a recent article in the Daily Mail (2005), one of Britain’s premier newspapers, opined that were it not for British colonialism with the concomitant introduction of a system of laws and government, Africa would have remained a land turgid with endemic intertribal wars and massacres (Dalgleish, 2005).
