Is the European man sufficiently entered history ?

Does Africa has an history ?

Here's a question that would smile many historians today. I acknowledge myself that I would have not address this question whether there was the famous Dakar speech delivered by the French president, Nicolas SARKOZY. This speech shows that this issue remains under debate in some European academies. "The tragedy of Africa, said the frank and sincere friend of Africa, is that African man has never really entered history." Many intellectuals, surprised by such remarks, advocated that this sentence was in a straight line part of Hegel and his sophistry which made Africa a continent without history. This was largely the case in the collective work entitled The Africa responds to Sarkozy, in which Theophile Obenga stresses that: “The President of the French Republic (...) has taken over the whole western africanist and racist ideology. It has corrected nor Montesquieu, nor Voltaire, nor Hume, nor Kant, nor Hegel in their racist messages”. According to the famous Congolese linguist, “the President has deliberately misled by putting brackets on universal traditions of courtesy and hospitality”. Certainly, the French president was not on his first attempt, but is the argument of racism sufficient to explain the reasons for such speech?

Already, May 18, 1879, at a banquet given in honor of Schoelcher, Victor Hugo said: “(...) The time has come to say to the four nations where does the modern history come: Greece, Italy, Spain, France, that they are still there, their mission has changed without transforming, they still have the same situation and sovereign responsibility to the Mediterranean Sea, and, if added a fifth nation (...) England, we  have the every effort of the ancient human race to work, which is progress, and to unity, which is life. The Mediterranean is a sea of civilization, it is certainly not for nothing that the Mediterranean on one edge has the old universe and the other the ignored universe, that is to say all the civilization in one side and barbarity in the other side. The time has come to say to this illustrious group of nations: Unite! Go south. Don’t you see the dam? It is there before you, this block of sand and ash and the heap inert passive for six thousand years that precludes the universal process, this monstrous Cham who stops Sem by its enormity, Africa. What land that Africa! Asia has its history, America has its history, Australia itself has its history, Africa has no history. A kind of legend and large obscure envelope it. (...) Redo a new Africa, making the old Africa handy to civilization, so the problem will solve Europe. Come on, People! Seize this earth. Take it. Who? anyone. Take this earth to God. God gave the earth to men. God offers Africa to Europe. Take it. (...) Put your overflow in this Africa, and thereby solve your social issues, change your proletarians into proprietors” .

This single statement calls for several remarks. Thus, according to the Romantic poet's, Europe is the whole effort toward progress and life, the universe ignored is Africa, all the barbarous past six thousand years, impedes the universal progress ! We have here a perfect example of bad faith which characterizes the nature of the allegations produced by most European authors of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century when they were talking about Africa and its people. The author of Bug-Jargal, a novel wrongly presented as an indictment against the enslavement of Blacks, was surprisingly mistaken about the meaning of history. Africa, frankly, was undoubtedly the original matrix of life, progress and civilization. Greece, as Victor Hugo recognized as the first civilized nation of Europe, emerged in history, by the confession of the ancient Greeks themselves, as African colony. The first known dynasty of mainland Greece was founded by Cadmus, an Ethiopian. Crecops, Aegyptus, Danaus, Egyptians are known to have introduced agriculture and metallurgy in Greece. Erechtheus, an Egyptian also, is the one who realized the unity of Attica. As noted Cheikh Anta Diop in his book Civilization or Barbarism: "Egypt (has) been a teacher almost exclusively of Greece in all periods in the path of civilization (...)". This Egypt-there was negro. Did Victor Hugo ignore it?

The most famous philosophical works of Plato, Timaeus, well-known by the European authors of the nineteenth century, that is to say contemporary of Hugo, addresses the question of priority of African civilizations on Greek civilization. Here's an excerpt: "(...) Solon (1) said that, arrived at them (the Egyptians), he had been well received, he was asked about antiques priests most versed in that science, and acknowledged that neither he nor anyone among the Greeks knew, so to speak, the first word of these things. One day, wanting to hire priests to explain the antiques, he began to tell what we know about older (...) But one of the oldest among the priests cry - Solon, Solon you Greeks, you will always be children and there are no old people in Greece! - What do you mean? Solon replied "You are young in their souls," replied the priest, because you have no ancient tradition, no knowledge bleached by time. (...) Let you, either here or in any other country known to us, it has done nothing good or great or remarkable in any way, which has long been documented, and only be preserved in our temples. But with you and other people, just use letters or all things necessary to the States it is established, behold, at certain intervals, like a plague, torrential rains came down upon you, which leave to survive than men illiterate and alien to the Muses, so that you become young again and again, without knowing anything happened to this country or your dating back to ancient times. And certainly, these genealogies that you have outlined, Solon, very similar to stories of children (...) full of surprise and curiosity, Solon said he had asked the priests to explain in his suite and its accuracy the history of his ancestors. To which the priest replied: - With pleasure, Solon; I will... not just for you and your country that I respect, but especially in consideration of the goddess who has taken your country under his protection, raised and educated your city and ours. "

In his opening speech at the College de France May 10, 1831, Jean-Francois Champollion, a contemporary of the author of Notre-Dame de Paris and hieroglyphs deciphered, said: "the introducers of the first forms of civilization, a little advanced among the Hellenic tribes of Argolis and Attica, were men who came by sea from the shores of Egypt, that from that point Egypt became a school where all the legislators of Greece and the reformers of his cult went for instruction, and especially the Greeks of Europe or Asia, which hastened the development of Greek society, spreading primarily by their example, the study of science, history, and philosophy. Therefore a thorough knowledge of the monuments of Egypt, noting especially by factual evidence, the antiquity of civilization on the Nile before even the political existence of the Greeks and many more relations with Greece and Egypt nascent already old, as we trace the origin of the arts of Greece, the source of much of its religious beliefs and external forms of worship ".

How many of us have read the speech by Segolene Royal in Dakar? Is it the snub of the French president or the priority of African civilizations that she noticed which has angered some French intelligentsia? To read in full, you may find reducing the suspicions of electioneering and demagoguery proposed by the majority of the French media. In addition to apologizing to Africans in the wake of Sarkozy's "slippage", the former candidate for the French presidency said: “(...) the works of historians Cheikh Anta Diop of Senegal and Joseph Ki-Zerbo from Burkina Faso are not only a high of science but also a peak in the fight for freedom. That's why it was so important to demonstrate as they did that ancient Greece owed much to ancient Egypt, which itself owed much to Africa. They have shown that African languages allow the deployment of human rationality as European languages. They have often been accused of being partisan by insisting on their independence and Pan-African commitment, we wanted to question the scientific rigor of their research, but today, every day, the Egyptology validates the Cheikh Anta Diop theses”. This declaration is a new sweeping cuff against the truths contained by Hugo and his company on the question of the origin of civilization in Europe.

The impressive ruins of Zimbabwe "discovered" by Karl Mauch in 1871 were the subject of several studies. Initially, the German adventurer claimed that these were the ruins of the biblical city of Ophir whence it was extracted gold offered by Queen of Sheba to King Solomon. He considered it impossible that this brilliant civilization is African, which has been demonstrated so far. In 1933, in the region of Kenya and Tanganyika, Huntingford "discovered" a civilization that is between the eighth and the fifteenth century. He named the Azanian civilization as we named this region in antiquity. The region of Lake Chad, with research by Theodore Monod, shows the remains of a civilization which was established there for several centuries. Many terracotta objects were discovered. In 1935, when conducting research in Engouraka, a region located between Kenya and Tanganyika, Leakey updates the ruins of an ancient city with more than 6,000 homes. All these "discoveries" do not exclude the Cornevin’s remark about the treatment that some unscrupulous archaeological missions reserved for African artifacts: "We shudders, he writes in History of the peoples of black Africa, we shudders in evoking providential circumstances which did find such a station masks and number of documents that were lost or destroyed. It is mainly in the late nineteenth century that the looting was done in appalling conditions: some trivial gifts, a bottle of gin given to heads or fetish and unscrupulous explorer could carry very beautiful vases or masks. In 1895, a society, the Ancient Ruins Company Limited, proposed simply to sack the stone ruins of Rhodesia. The damage from this edifying company were considerable: its employees looking especially gold which could be found in the African objects. It follows that support objects were treated with the utter contempt".

The population of Africa has not always been the one we know today. In an article published in 1952 in The Voice of Black Africa, Diop wrote: "There has been a real irradiation of negro people from the Nile Basin. The current demographic structure of Africa differs from what it was once. The Serer, the Toucouleurs, Peul, Laaubes, the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Fang, Saras, the Tutsi, the Zulus, Sohongos and all other peoples of the Congo, etc., are reached during the last centuries in places where they are now. Three centuries ago, the Zulus, in particular, had not yet reached the Cape, the Fangs had not yet reached the coast in the last century. The legends, languages, customs, beliefs of all these populations belong to a primitive cradle, which is common in the Nile valley, and this area must be sought to some extent the continuity of our history and not in depth at the scene of present habitats. This is exactly the opposite of what all Western historians who have applied for a wall between Egypt and the African continent to allow the declaration that Africa has no past, so doing they were confident of being able to kill the soul of a people, as long as it remains a victim of their deception and was not interested in the question (...). The Negro does not know that those ancestors who have adapted to the material conditions of the Nile valley, are the oldest humanity guides in the path of civilization, it is they who create the arts, religion (in especially monotheism), literature, the first philosophical systems, writing, sciences (physics, mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, calendar ...), medicine, architecture, agriculture, etc.. at a time when the rest of the Earth (Asia, Europe: Greece, Rome ...) was plunged into barbarism. Ignoring the historical fact that takes care to conceal or distort before you teach him, he came to espouse the view that the colonial education has consistently sought to inculcate to ensure docility : namely, that he has no history or culture comparable to that of Europe, he is therefore to obey and not to organize or take responsibility. The result was a lack of confidence in himself and in its own possibilities, which is fatal to a work as a positive struggle for national liberation. (...) Of course this will not be easy after so many imperialist efforts to alienate our people. But we are confident in the final outcome, because we are sure to be able to denounce the most monstrous falsification of the history of mankind, the most blatant lie that modern historians and Egyptologists in particular, have sought to construct in conjunction with the needs of imperialist exploitation. (...) the mission (of the modern historians) was difficult because it is impossible to prove the opposite of the truth. We now passed over in silence the disturbing testimony of the ancients, who were contemporaries of the Egyptians, who saw in Egypt even when traveling and have written, unanimously, without equivocation that the Egyptians were Negroes and that Egypt was the classic land where all peoples of the Mediterranean has drawn the light of civilization. We could not ignore that evidence too formal and too contrary to the economic demands of the moment. That was not enough: despite all the historical documents that reflect a sense universally undesirable for historians of imperialism, they postulated a history of the origins of Egyptian civilization with the fictions of "Hamites" Oriental Libyans, of Libyco-Berbers, Libyans ... Creto-all concepts voluntarily nebulae in the writings of specialists whose whole mystery will be unveiled (...) ".

All ideology aside, as the Senegalese scientist used to say, from all continents, Africa has the richer historical liabilities, and by far the most comprehensive dating back to the very appearance of the first human on Earth. Then, is the European man sufficiently entered history? It would seem so, since it is the African who pushed him into history.

Kenya Suwedi

(1) Solon is considered the inventor of democracy. It became one of the seven sages of ancient Greece.