![]() That Africa abounds with a rich history and had complex civilisations long before the encounter with Europe has been obscured by centuries of prejudiced assertion and poor scholarship, all other views being deemed a kind of compensation fantasy.ĭespite the attempted corrective of scholars such as Rodney and Ibekwe, the orthodoxy of this negative perception is still entrenched, discernible in the remarks of politicians, thinkers and even travel writers, like V S Naipaul, who should be better informed. This is a gross slander, as the African continent’s littérateurs, poets, polemicists and artists have long maintained, but one that has attained the level of a universal truth. Hegel famously wrote, with a complete absence of study into the field, that “Africa is no historical part of the world”. Another, more polemical, is Chinweizu Ibekwe’s The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite (1975). ![]() One such book is Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). ![]() Then, with time, their challenge to the orthodoxies of history nibbles away at the edges of the defined picture until that picture is no longer tenable. ![]() When such books are written by those to whom history has been unjust, they tend to be ignored by the mainstream. Ben Okri reviews A Fistful of Shells by Toby Green (Allen Lane)Įvery now and again, a book comes along that shakes the received perception of history. ![]()
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