The Discovery of African HistoryAuthor(s): Basil DavidsonSource: Africa Today, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Mar., 1960), pp. 5-6Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4184058 .

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.. . nothing remarkable... except that one day the sun went out."

TheDiscovery of African History

By BASIL DAVIDSON

A LITTLE OVER a hundred and fifty years ago a young Scots surgeon named Mungo Park, more

dead than alive from months of quenching travel, rode through Saharan sand and thorn into the remote city of Segu on the upper reaches of the river Niger.

"Looking forwards," he would write, "I saw with infinite pleasure the great object of my mission-the long sought-for majestic Niger, glittering to the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing slowly to the eastward."

The italics were his own, and they were understand- ably triumphant. Ever since Ptolemy, sixteen cen- turies before, men had written on maps that the Niger flowed to the Westward. Arabs of the Middle Ages, true enough, had known the middle course of the Niger for what it really was; but Europe, newly con- sidering Africa in times of mercantile expansion, could be sure of nothing of its geography but the outline of the coast, and a little, here and there, of the obscure lands beyond.

"The course of the Niger, the places of its rise and termination, and even its existence as a separate stream are still undetermined," declared the pros- pectus of the African Association, founded in London in 1790 for "Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa," and it resolved that one of its explorers "should ascertain the course, and if possible, the rise and termination of that river."

Mungo Park perished on the Niger before he could plot its course to the sea, but others followed. Within seventy years or so the main geographical facts were fixed and clear upon the continential map, and one rmisconception after another was corrected, one zone

of ignorance after another filled with detail. African discovery took its place among the triumphs of thE nineteenth century. The geographical myths and le- gends disappeared; in place of these, mapmakere could record the knowledge of sand and swamp, forest and savannah, snow-capped mountain range and brac- ing highland that the discoverers had won.

A similar process of discovery is now occurring, about a hundred years later, in the field of African his- tory. Historians and archeologists-British, French, African, Italian, Belgian, American-have embarked on journeys of historical discovery that parallel the geographical ventures of Park and Clapperton, Cail- lie and Barth, Livingstone, Stanley, and so many more. What the nineteenth century achieved for the geogra- phy of Africa the twentieth is well towards achieving for its history; and once again the truth these pio- neers are finding has proved, often enough, the re- verse of what the outside world had generally believed.

Thus the chart of African history, so lately bare and empty and misleading as the maps once were, begins to glow with illuminating detail. Bearded mon- sters and "men whose heads do grow beneath theii shoulders" begin to disappear; and humanity, in all its smallness and its greatness, begins to emerge. And it begins to be seen, if fleetingly and partially as yet, that the writing of African history is not only possible and useful, but will be as well a work of rediscovery- the rediscovery of African humanity.

The Negro, many have believed, is a man without a past. Black Africa-Africa south of the Sahara desert-is on this view a continent where men by their own efforts have never raised themselves much

MARCH 1960 5

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above the level of the beasts. "No ingenious manu- factures among them, no arts, no sciences," com- mented David Hume. "No approach to the civilization of his white fellow creatures whom he imitates as a monkey does a man," added Trollope. Even within the last ten years a former Governor of Nigeria could write that "for countless centuries, while all the pag- eant of history swept by, the African remained un- moved-in primitive savagery." Even in 1958 Sir Arthur Kirby, Commissioner for British East Africa in London, could tell the Torquay Branch of the Over- seas League that "in the last sixty years-little more than the lifetime of some people in this room-East Africa has developed from a completely primitive country, in many ways more backward than the Stone Age. . . ."

Africans, on this view, had never evolved civiliza- tions of their own; if they possessed a history, it could be scarcely worth the telling. And this belief that Af- ricans had lived in universal chaos or stagnation until the coming of Europeans seemed not only to find its justification in a thousand tales of savage misery and benighted ignorance; it was also, of course, ex- ceedingly convenient in high imperial times. For it could be argued (and it was; indeed, it still is) that these people, history-less, were naturally inferior or else they were "children who had still to grow up"; in either case they were manifestly in need of govern- ment by others who had grown up.

This view of African achievement, or lack of achievement, is now with increasing knowledge seen to rest on no more solid a foundation in truth than that earlier belief about the Niger's flowing to the westward. Geographical discovery has proved that the Niger really flows to the eastward. Historical dis- covery is now proving that the development and growth of society and civilization in Africa really contradict this stereotype of "centuries-long stagna- tion." The world is changing its mind about the past of Africa.

What can be said about this past-about the form- ative fifteen or twenty centuries, that is, before European discovery and conquest? What can be said and what, where present knowledge fails, is it reason- able to believe?

* * *

Some fifty years ago, in a clearing of the Congo forest, a Belgian sat making notes. For the time and place this Belgian, whose name was Emil Torday, was an unusual sort of man, an unusual sort of European. What he wanted was neither rubber nor ivory nor con- script labor, but information about the past.

And he had come far in search of it. After traveling for many hundred miles up the Congo River from its Atlantic mouth he had continued on his way into the heart of Africa. He had traveled up the Kasai River and then along the banks of the Sankuru, and now,

BASIL DAVIDSON is the author of numerous books and articles on Africa. This article is excerpted from his latest book, The Lost Cities of Africa, with permission of the publisher, Atlantic-Little, Brown. Boston: 1959. 366 pp. plus photographs. $6.50.

somewhere in the dense green middle of an Africa that was almost completely unknown to the outside world, he had reached the Bushongo people, and sat listening to their chiefs and making notes.

For the benefit of this European, one of the first they had ever set eyes on, the elders of the Bushongo recalled the legend and tradition of their past. That was not in the least difficult for them, since remember- ing the past was one of their duties. They unrolled their story in measured phrases. They went on and on. They were not to be hurried. They traversed the list of their kings, a list of one hundred and twenty names, right back to the god-king whose marvels had founded their nation.

It was splendid, but was it history? Could any of these kings be given a date, be linked-at least in time -to the history of the rest of the world? Torday was an enthusiast and went on making notes, but he longed for a date. And quite suddenly they gave it to him.

"As the elders were talking of the great events of various reigns," he remembered afterwards, "and we came to the ninety-eighth chief, Bo Kama Boman- chala, they said that nothing remarkable had happened during his reign, except that one day at noon the sun went out, and there was absolute darkness for a short time.

"When I heard this I lost all self-control. I jumped up and wanted to do something desperate. The elders thought that I had been stung by a scorpion.

"It was only months later that the date of the eclipse became known to me . . . the thirtieth of March, 1680, when there was a total eclipse of the sun, pass- ing exactly over Bushongo. ...

"There was no possibility of confusion with another eclipse, because this was the only one visible in the region during the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies."

Torday's achievement was to reveal the possibility of African history in the centuries-the protohistoric centuries-before written documents occur.

In the Periodicals

"Intentional Community in Nigeria," by G. McLeod Bryan. The Christian Century. Dec. 30, 1959.

"Africa: Its Educational Problems and Promises," special issue of Phi Delta Kappa, January, 1960. 50?. (PDK, Bloomington, Indiana.)

"Africa-A Continent Afire," by John B. Oakes. New York Times Magazine. January 3, 1960.

"South Africa Treason Trial," by Alan Paton. The Atlantic, Jan. 1960.

"Africa Against the Bomb," by A. J. Muste. Libera- tion. Jan. 1960.

"Dictatorship in Ghana?" New Republic. Feb. 1, 1960.

"The Portuguese Colony of Angola." Congressional Record, pp. A 887-92. Feb. 2, 1960.

6 AFRICA TODAY

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