Africa in World History: A Teaching Conference (Colorado Springs, Colorado, April 25-26, 1986)

ED 285 809 SO 018 305
AUTHOR Shaw, Bryant P., Ed. TITLE Africa in World History: A Teaching Conference
(Colorado Springs, Colorado, April 25-26, 1986). INSTITUTION Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colo. REPORT NO USAFA-TR-87-2 PUB DATE Feb 87 NOTE 211p.; Also sponsored by the Rocky Mountain Regional
World History Organization. PUB TYPE Collected Works - Conference Proceedings (021) --
Guides - Classroom Use - Guides (For Teachers) (052) -- Tests/Evaluation Instruments (160)
EDRS PRICE MF01/PC09 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Developing Nations; Diseases; Global Approach; Higher
Education; Historiography; History; *History Instruction; Instructional Materials; Secondary Education; Slavery; Social Studies; *World History
IDENTIFIERS *Africa
ABSTRACT African history is a relatively new discipline and
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Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
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HISTORY:
ENCE
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EDITOR
COLORADO 80840
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U S DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Oftc, of Educational Research and improvement
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lit This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality
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This research report is presented es a competent treatment of the subject, worthy of publication. The United States Air Force Academy vouches for the quality of the research without necessarily endorsing the opinions and conclusions of the authors.
This report has been cleared for open publication and/or public release by the appropriate Office of Information in accordance with AFR
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This research report is approved for publication.
0 RT L. JAM; Lieutenant Colonel, USAF Director of Research, Studies, and Analysis
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Africa in World History.
Proceedings of a conference held April 25-26, 1986, at the United States Air Force Academy and sponsored by the Department of History, USAF Academy aad the Rocky Mountain Regional World History Organization.
Bibliography: p. 203-205.
1. Africa--History--Study and teaching--Congresses.
2. History--Study and teaching -- Congresses. I. Shaw, Bryant P., 1945- . H. United States Air Force Academy. Department C.
History. III. Rocky Mountain Regional World History Organization. DT19.8.A33 1987 960'.07 87-6704
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The 1986 teaching conference on "Africa in World History" and the publication of its proceedings were made possible by the generous support
of the Falcon Foundation. Equally vital was the conscientious participation
of the speakers, commentators, and attendees who took the time to share their expertise and concern on an important topic.
The conference also required the collective effort many other individuals. The Superintendent of the USAF Academy, Lieutenant General
Winfield W. Scott, Jr., the Dean of the Faculty, Brigadier General Ervin J.
Rokke, and the Head of the Department of History, Colonel Carl W. Reddel, strongly supported the concept and execution of the conference. Major Spencer Way II, and Captain Paula G. Thornhill coordinated and supervised countless and complex administrative details for the event. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas P. Coakley, Associate Professor of English, and
Major Stephen D. Chiabotti, Associate Professor of History, helped proof
and polish the proceedings. Ms. Nellie Dykes supervised the typing of the
manuscripts and proved a spirited, dedicated, and professional assistant.
As is customary, the editor assumes all responsibility for stylistic matters and for the arrangement of the papers and discussions.
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B.P.S.
PREFACE
Since 1968 the United States Air Force Academy has taught a survey
course in world history to every cadet. The rationale for this course is rooted in the Academy's mission: to produce career officers for the United
States Air Force. Our graduates may serve anywhere in the world; therefore, they must appreciate the variety and value of the world's cultures, and the historical implications of contact between these cultures.
World history provides an academically rigorous and intellectually sound vehicle to help achieve this aim.
Besides its fundamentally military character, the USAF Academy is
also part of a wider academic community and welcomes the chance to share instructional expertise. Hence, since 1982 the Department of History has sponsored three world history teaching conferences.1 These
meetings have provided important opportunities for professional, mutually
benefical exchanges with historians from civilian colleges and universities.
The 1986 teaching conference on "Africa in World History" is the latest in this series of efforts. The rationale for selecting this topic derived from the frustration which many world history teachers experience
in dealing with Africa in their world history , mrses, and from the willingness of six eminent scholars to participate in this endeavor.
The conference was not intended to provide approved solutions or simplistic answers to the challenge of integrating Africa into world history,
Its purpose was rather to view Africa from the perspective of world history, to raise questions, and to stimulate thought and discussion on this issue among all participants--speakers, commentators, and audience. We hope that we met with some measure of success. We trust that readers of this volume will perceive new avenues of approach for including Africa in
world history courses, and that those conducting basic research in African
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history - -or in the history of any of the world's areas--will do so with a greater awareness of the implications of their work for world history.
1. For the published proceedings of the two previous world history
conferences, see Major Joe C. Dixon and Captain Neil D. Martin, eds., 1982
World History Teaching Conference (Colorado Springs: Department of History, USAF Academy, 1983) and Captain Frederick C. Matusiak, 1983 World History Workshop (Colorado Springs: Department of History, USAF Academy, 1954). See also Captain Donald M. Bishop and Professor Thomas F. McGann, eds., World History in Liberal Military Education (Colorado Springs: Department of History, USAF Academy, 1979). Each of
these documents is available on microfiche for a nominal charge from the Educational Resources Information Center, Document Reproduction Service, 3900 Wheeler Avenue, Alexandria, Virginia 22304-5110.
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Lieutenant Colonel Bryant P. Shaw, USAF
"One's Own Past: African Perceptions of African Histcry" 13
Jan Vansina
Commentary 31
Historian"
"A Schema for Integrating Africa into World History Courses" 71
George E. Brooks
Joseph C. Miller
Philip D. Curtin
R. Hunt Davis, Jr.
Discussion and Comments 163
Appendix B: Africa in World History: A Short Bibliography 203
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Lieutenant Colonel Bryant P. Shaw, USAF
USAF Academy
There's no doubt about it: incorporating Africa into a world history course
presents special challenges. African history is a relatively new discipline whose
sources, methodology, and content may be unfamiliar to those trained in European
or American history. Teachers and students alike are liable to bring to the classroom misperceptions about African history and skepticism as to its usefulness.
Those committed to the discipline of world history must confront these challenges directly. For each of us, this responsibility manifests itself in different
ways. At the Air Force Academy, we feel this obligation acutely, because our cadets may serve as professional military officers anywhere in the world and we cannot allow them to remain ignorant of its second largest continent. More
generally, if the discipline of world history js to maintain its conceptual and academic viability, teachers and students must deal with all the world's areas, even
those with which they are rot familiar. After all, as humanity's birthplace, Africa has the longest history of any of the world's continents. On yet another level, the
historical inquiry into how other human beings adapt to their particular
environments, and how they perceive themselves and set their goals within those environments, has much to teach us about what it means to be human. Finally, the
successful incorporation of African history into the discipline of world history directly challenges the notion that Africa is a historical void, a plastic continent whose historical significance was always shaped by the heat and force of external
stimuli, and to whom change always came from the outside. The implication; of
such a notion are stunning, for the denial of the significance of a people's history
constitutes a denial of their place in the human community and of their very humanity. One need only witness the bitterness engendered by racism and imperialism to appreciate the implications of this type of intellectual apartheid.
Faced with these challenges and obligations, teachers naturally turn to world history textbooks for ideas on how to integrate Africa into their courses. Just how
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practical are such texts in this task? Some are more hindrance than help. I don't claim to have comprehensively surveyed all the major world history text, but I am struck by the prevalence of two particular themes in the more popular ones. The fir :t theme emphasizes Africa's isolation; the second focuses on the transforming effect of the western impact on P riea. Both are important for their implication that sub-Saharan Africa, as far as world history is concerned, has no histo.y worth studying--if it has any history at all.
The desiccation of the Sahara Desert, beginning in about 2500 B.C., was unquestionably one of the most influential events in African history. World historians have long been quick to seize on Africa's ensuing "isolation" as e theme for discussing Africa in world history. Hegel contended more than a century ago that sub-Saharan Africa's geographic isolation bred backwardness and barbarism. Africa (outside of Egypt), he noted, had
no nistorical interest of its own, for we find its inhabitants living in barbarism and savagery .... From the earliest historical times, Africa has remained cut off from all contacts with the rest of the world; it is the land of gold, forever pressing it upon itself, and the land of childhood, removed from the light of self conscious history and wrapped in the dark mantle of night. Its isolation isnot just a result of its tropical nature, but an essential consequence of its geographical nature. It is still unexplored, and has no connections whatsoever with Eurqpe .... In this main portion of Africa, history is in fact out of the question.'
For Hegel, the temperate zone was world history's theater; Africa's "firey heat" was incompatible with "spiritual freedom" and what he termed a "fully developed mastery of reality."2
In 1963, Hugh Trevor-Roper echoed Hegel's remarks, declaring that
Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at the present there is none: there is only the history of Europeans3in Africa. The rest is darkness . . . And darkness is not a subject of tnstory."
Six years later this well known historian still felt confident enough to refer to Africa as "unhistoric. "4
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Even the more perceptive and influential world historians are not much help
here. William McNeill, for example, treats sub-Saharan Africa as an area totally
peripheral to world history. His cryptic references to sub-Saharan Africa
characterize it as a region "on the outer fringes" of the world ecumene, consisting
of "semi-civilized Negro kingdoms based in the rainforest of west Africa," and as an
area which, in 1850, "constituted IT. far the largest single barbarian reservoir left in
the world "; m^reover, he refers to the "obstacles of geography, reinforced by
African tropical diseases and by political rivalries among the Europeans powers"
which "preserved a degree of autonomy and cultural independence for African
barbarian and savage communities 1,-.4o the second half of the nineteenth century." 5
By the mid-1970s the discipline of African history was considerably better
established than in the early 1960s, when McNeill's work appeared. Nonetheless,
remnants of the image of "unhistoric Africa" persisted. For example, Leften
Stavrianos' third edition of The World Since 1500 described precolonial Africa as a
schizophrenic continent consisting either of a few well developed West African
empires stimtgated and sustained by trade, or of undefined "primitive tribal
peoples."6 Colonial and independent Africa was characterized as "apathetic,"
"lethargic," dominated by "dynamic" Europeans, yet ready at any moment to revert
to ancient "tribal" warfare. 7 (Happily, these stereotypes were removed from the
book's fourth edition.) Underlying this view is the assumption Africa faces a
Hobson's choice between western "modernization" or disintegration into those
atavistic "unrewarding gyrations" which characterized the continent from time
immemorial. "Progress," in short, comes to isolated Africa only from the West.
Besides conforming to the notion of "unhistoric" Africa, this assumption ignores both
the situational and dynamic nature of internally generated social and political
change.8 It also ignores the well documented fact that heightened ethnic
awareness--or "tribalism " - -often results from competition for the "benefits" of
Western political, economic, and technological modernization.9
The notio. that meaningful change came recently and largely, if not entirely,
to Africa from the West, and that there is a total bifurcation between "traditional"
and "modern" societies, are made explicit in R. R. Palmer's 1950 edition of The
History of the Modern World. Palmer contends that
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. .. the greatest social development of the eighteenth century with the possible exception of the progress in knowledge, was the fact that Europe ... became incomparably more wealthy than any other part of the world. The new wealth . .. was produced by the increasing scientific and technical knowledge, which in turn it helped to produce; and the two together, more wealth and more knowledge, helped torm one of the most far-reaching ideas of modern times, the idea of progress.'"
In their 1984 edition, Palmer and Colton emphasize that " ... most of what is now meant by 'modern' made its first appearance in Europe," that Europe created "the most powerful combination of political, military, economic, technological, and scientific apparatus that the world had ever seen," and in doing so "radically developed an overwhelming impact on other cultures in America, Africa, and Asia, sometimes destroying, sometimes stimulating or enlivening them, and always presenting them with problems of resistance or adaptation.' ,11 In their view, "modern" is different from, more "advanced" than, and profoundly destructive of "traditional" societies:
"In most modern countries there have been pressures for increased democracy . ... In a modern society old customs loosen, and ancestral religions are questioned. There is a demand for individualliberation . ... Everywhere there is a drive for more equality in a bewildering variety of meanings .. . movement of some kind is universal. Such are the few indexes of cryodernity ... (and) they appeared first in the history ofEurope ...."
World history in this context is the development of these "indexes" in the West and their diffusion to other areas of the world: "But whatever their backgrounds, and willingly or not, all peoples in the twentieth century are caught up in this process of modernization or 'development,' which usually means acquiring some of the skills and powers first exhibited by the Europeans."13
Only because the colonized were "forceably" introduced to the West did they come to "feel a need for modernizing and industrializing their own countries."14
And under modernity's weighty impact the "traditional" begins to crumble, and in the worst cases nothing replaces it. World history, then, deals entirely with European initiatives and the implications thereof; Africans are history's objects, irrelevant and peripheral to the mainstream of world history.
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Other authors of world history texts, while more kind, still subscribe to this
traditional-modern dichotomy. Wallbank and Taylor, for example, regard highly the
complexity and variety of precolonial African political, social, and economic
organizations, laws, governments, and intellectual and artistic achievements. 15
Following the "trade and state formation" thrust which has characterized much of
African historiography, they contend that Europe was isolated from and ignorant of
Africa instead of the other way round. Yet th"y too mention that the late nineteenth century found Africa "helpless" in ttie face of the European imperial
advance, that urbanization and wage labor weal'ened kinship ties, and that "tribal
life" is crumbling in the face of modern economic imperatives, new systems of land
tenure, and new legal systems. "As a result," they note, "some (Africans) became
'detribalized' and often bewildered as they were alienated from their traditional
culture but unable to understand fully and be part of the new." 16
More recent world history textbooks appear to take greater advantage of the
scholarship in African history. Anthony Es ler, for example, emphasizes that "the
history of Africa had been closely interwoven with that of Europe and Asia for many
centuries"; that East Africa was part of the Indian Ocean trading complex from the
beginning of our era; that "purposeful" change was present in Africa prior to 1500;
and that sub-Saharan Africa, though isolated, was in 1500 "a world unto itself, living
by its own rhythms and growing according to its own patterns of social evolution." 17
Although Asians and Europeans were ignorant of events in the interior, nonetheless
"political growth and development were mushrooming in the centuries around
1500."18 Here, hen, is an affirmation of the existence of African history prior to
European contact; the validity of this history is evident in Esler's frequent
comparisons of African empires with those of their European and Asian
counterparts. 19 Further, he implies strongly that Africans responded to commercial
opportunities in ways similar to those found in the West, and he infers that such
responses altered political and social ideologies in a manner which contradicts the
notion that precolonial Africa consisted of static, separate, and hostile "tribes."
Unfortunately, Es ler misses an important opportunity by dropping this theme
instead of pursuing it into the early and mid-nineteenth century, when increased
European commercial contacts produced a profound economic and social revolution
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in equatorial Africa well prior to the European occupation--a process which forcefully illustrates the dynamic nature of changes in African political and social ideology.20
Africans, too, could be economically and politically "imperialistic"; examples abound of Africans competing both with each other and with Europeans to establish commercial and political monopolies. In short, Africans had the capacity to retool their own economic, political, and social ideologies in response to changing circumstances; Africa's history is therefore not simply the history of what the Europeans did in Africa, and world historians must take this into account if they are to maintain the integrity and credibility of their discipline.
Nonetheless, it is undeniable that the European impact on Africa was significant and that Europe brought western-style "modernity" to that continent. It is also true that Africans could not expel the colonizers and that some of the colonized were physically or psychologically crushed, as Chinua Achebe's novels remind us. Yet it is quite another thing to conclude that Africans were an inert mass who did not or could not react to the European presence, who did not care to react to it, who did not have their own opinions about what the European presence meant, or who did not manipulate the Europeans for their own ends.
The reliance on "isolation" and "progress" as organizing principles for incorporating Africa into world history raises much larger questions. Should "world history" be coincident with the history of the "dynamic" European middle class, expanding markets, nation-states, the growth of technology, and what westerners see as the purposeful, progressive spread of western civilization? Is internally generated change less "significant" than change produced from external stimuli? And where does one draw the line between "internal" and "external"? Certainly all history--and especially world history, as William McNeill reminds us--requires coherent organizational criteria.21
I am not advocating the complete elimination of "westernization" as an organizing principle f world history. i do plead for the recognition that this paradigm--like all paradigms--has limits, that such limits are not merely of academic importance, and that the implications upon which this paradigm is based, or the assumptions which teachers and students…