My entire high school history curriculum comprised of European history; the World Wars and a yearly smidgen of South African history. The beginning of South African time always neatly coincided with 1652, the year of Van Riebeeck’s landing. For the longest time, I subconsciously believed that nothing of historical significance took place on the African continent (except of course in pseudo-Arabic Egypt) prior to colonialism.
I refer here to the supposedly good education I received between the years 1998 and 2002. It’s not all that long ago. I can’t speak for the current curriculum but I can surely attest to the fact that our history curriculum harmed our sense of self. Despite our wanting to believe that Africans were capable of great things, we couldn’t reconcile the fact that from the time that Jesus traipsed across Jerusalem to the time that Shakespeare invented words like bloody and lonely; from incredible architecture to automation in all this time and through all this invention and innovation, Africa stood still.
But here’s a glimmer of hope. I recently befriended a Zulu historian who has, if nothing else, restored my faith in African history by grounding it in some concrete tales that I’m now working on corroborating. Amongst the lessons I’ve gleaned from him have been some fascinating tales about the diplomatic relations between the Zulu Royal House and Central African Kingdoms which culminated in Nguni cattle being imported to KwaZulu in the early 19th century. Perhaps the necessary caveat to this story is that it took eight years, by foot, to make the return trip to and from the heart of Africa. Given that Shaka may have sent about 4 envoys over the space of 2 years and considering also that 3 of these envoys returned within his reign, we can safely deduce that he was probably in power for longer than the 10 years stated in official history. Changing ‘official’ records to reflect this will take some convincing historical analysis and I look forward to the day that the alternative account is raised beyond folk lore status.
What I love about this tale is that it challenges many other notions about dark, stagnant Africa. While today, thanks to a distorted sense of history, many South Africans have a nuclear sense of their identity, this tale shows that inter-African relations existed prior to the colonial era. It speaks also to a sense of cooperation amongst Africans — Nguni cows were sought and hence given to the Zulu envoys because of their incredible resilience to trying conditions and diseases. I also learnt that the final envoy did not return to KwaZulu because news of Shaka’s death reached them on their return. They thus decided to settle in parts of what we know today as Malawi and Zambia, which explains the existence of languages which sound very much like Zulu in these countries today. The richness of our pan-African history doesn’t stop there. One has to wonder what the many Mthembus for example, some of whom perhaps partake in vilifying Mozambicans as criminal makwerekweres, would say if they knew that they originate from the Tembe Royal House in what is modern day Mozambique? This is the stuff that’s not taught in schools — it doesn’t qualify as mainstream history and therefore, doesn’t feature significantly in the culturally generated African narratives of our past. In this sense, our historical identity is betrayed both by the colonial project and what has become a complicit cultural account of who we are.
However, thanks to my historian friend and mentor, I am now convinced that there is a vast, rich and concrete enough past from which to draw our historical positioning. The task that lies ahead is one of researching our past and conveying our findings in a way that is physically and linguistically accessible to the masses. This task requires passionate historians — all of whom lie amongst the dispassionate students who populate our school-desks in complete oblivion to the relevance of history. We rely on you, the teacher, to mould the historians and story-tellers that will restore our sense of history, our sense of self.
Fumani Mthembi is a researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria