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Get Africa's history out of explorers' diaries

[ Posted On: 2007-10-14 ]

Last month, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got a rare chance while in New York for the United Nations General Assembly.

Amid protests, Columbia University authorities invited him to address students.

Perhaps to shut critics up, the university's president opened the floor with scathing attacks on the character Ahmadinejad.

"Mr President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator... You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated," said the university's president. He went on to wonder whether the Iranian president would have the intellectual courage to answer questions that would be raised.

The Iranian President refused to be dragged into discussing his education credentials.

However, in repeated clashes with his hosts, Ahmadinejad accused the US of supporting terrorist groups. He also insisted only more research could actually tell the real events of the Holocaust, "if it happened at all." Of course he was lashed out at.

Yet his appearance also offered evidence of why he is widely admired in the developing world especially for his open defiance to American power.

Whatever anyone thinks of Ahmadinejad, he had a valid point about research on historical events.

No matter how well researched a subject is, inquiry should never be closed. This is why the wily Iranian president beat his interlocutors who clearly had underestimated him. Had they bothered to undertake even cursory fact-finding, they would have stumbled upon the nugget of information that Ahmadinejad was among the top students among nearly half a million candidates that took university entrance examination in his country that year. He has a PhD in urban planning.

Ahmadinejad qualifications aside, African scholars could borrow something from him on proper documentation of events.

The continent's historiography is riddled with gross misconceptions and outright falsehoods. The tragedy is that purveyors of some of these myths do not realise what they are conveying is utter nonsense. Take the "celebrated" adventures of one Dr. David Livingstone, the "great" explorer whose supposed exploits are dated — some us were forced to memorise them and regurgitate during examinations.

Recently these accounts have been questioned. It turns out that much of his so-called epic life in Africa is but imaginative tales. Research has revealed that Livingstone was far from being a pious missionary with unshakable faith who "brought Christ to Africa."

His reputation was built around the fables woven by the fabulist extraordinaire, Mr. Henry Morton Stanley, one of those mythic figures who strode the continent during its so-called dark days and scripted a fictitious narrative about himself, others, and the place.

According to a just published volume, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer, by Mr Tim Jeal, few things that are believed about Livingstone and Stanley, do not pass. For instance, it turns out that the famous words: "Dr Livingstone, I presume" that Stanley allegedly uttered when he found the 'missionary' in a mud-hut somewhere on the shores of Lake Tanganyika were made up.

He lied about his upbringing–he was never adopted as he claimed. Instead, from age six till 15 he was in facility for the poor. He also fought in American Civil War. What better place than Africa to re-invent himself like so many have done after him? Sent by The New York Herald newspaper to find Livingstone in a headline generating enterprise, Stanley (Rowlands) found the Scotsman whom he promptly canonised, without a shred of evidence, as a great missionary. This was a deliberate ploy to create an epic story for readers back home for whom Africa was the great unknown with strange goings-on.

Perhaps Paul Theroux in his review of the title in the New York Times makes the more general summative point about visitors with attitude to Africa. "A common denominator in this assortment of foreign visitors is the wish to transform themselves while claiming they want to change Africa."

This, Africa can do little about. What it its scholars and educators can and should do, is assiduously to revisit what is being passed as truth about the continent's past.

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author: John Mulaa is a Researcher and Consultant (World Bank) based in Washington DC. He is also a columnist with the East African Standard. Earlier in his Journalism career, he worked with the Weekly Review (defunct) and the Daily Nation publications in Kenya, as a foreign correspondent.

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