Whose history have Africans been fed all along?

THEMBINKOSI MTONJENI

Durban — The death of Queen Elizabeth II has moved me to revisit the expression, “history is in the making”. I would start off by asking “whose history is this expression referring to?”

A plausible answer to this question will come after we have dealt with another question, “whose history have we been fed with all along?”

I must declare upfront the difficulty of addressing the people of South Africa when they are divided into two fascinating dominant groups:

• The first group consists of those former students of history who say, “I disliked history because it was concerned about events and prestigious people of Caucasian descent. It said little about the hegemony, ordinary lives and ethical leadership of the African people”.
• The second group says, “history does not prepare anyone for exigencies of the current economy, as no firm is interested in employing historians and poets by extension”.

In the first group, I find hope in their hopelessness. I reckon by the activation of the agency of the first group one would begin to move his or her children to higher order thinking spheres instead of allowing them to backslide into naïve acceptance that the absence of Africans from the annals of history is some form of normality.

Colonial pain, deliberate exclusion of Africans from the history records, and the plundering of Africa’s natural, cultural and human resources cannot be taken for granted.

The supreme act of decoloniality and of dismantling coloniality, should begin by understanding:

• how African countries were plundered by the Europeans and traders from the East;
• how Africans objectively and subjectively became conquered and underdeveloped;
• how Africans were subjugated, dehumanised and super-exploited as a result;
• how Africa was removed initially from the centre of knowledge and commerce to the margins of history;
• how the devastating impact of the slave trade, colonialism, “discovery” of minerals and the introduction or extension of the capitalist mode of production and relations in Africa caused the current state of affairs; and
• how the future role of African children in unravelling, re-organising and re-definition – the currently distorted history – will give rise to a new native and new humanism.

The two groups of former students of history, I referred to at the beginning of this article, should be encouraged or cajoled to start learning (and teaching) their heritage – understanding how their cultures, languages and philosophies were denigrated, distorted and decimated; how European missions of “educating”, “civilising” and “plundering” were valorised.

Children of Africa! You must be critical of the rationale of those, in claiming to be in power, who downplay the value of studying African history, saying it is less important and out of fashion. To learn about Gandhi, Mandela and Mapungubwe and few paragraphs about the Khoisan people, at a descriptive level, is never enough.

Critical Theory must guide the learning of African history. For example, black South African children must be taught, at home and in school, why it is them who are living in squalor. They must be encouraged to ask:

• If our land was taken by brute force and law and that 80% of the South African land is in the hands of a 30% minority of white people from Europe, is that less important to know?
• If many Africans were killed mercilessly by the British and Dutch settlers for defending their birthright and inheritance – cattle, land and children – is it right to forget and never talk about it?
• If strategies to revise, reverse, and re-humanise Africans come from history books, African literature and philosophy books, is it unconscionable to teach and learn about history, sociology and African philosophy? As Africans, we must say no to blind loyalty to our leaders and colonisers.

As inheritors of the colonial-capitalist world, we must prepare ourselves to begin the journey towards ensuring South Africa returns from Britain and America to its rightful owners where African communitarianism and scientific socialism shall gain hegemony in order to contest capitalism.

Mtonjeni is a member of the ANC branch in ward 89. He writes in his personal capacity.

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