Ethiopia puts paid to Western perceptions that African people lack history and are incapable of poetry, philosophy and science. Photo: File
Western images of black Africans in earlier centuries portrayed them as people without history, incapable of poetry, too intellectually retarded to philosophise and too mentally slow to be scientific. Ethiopia’s historical experience unequivocally disproves these misconceptions, according to the late, great Kenyan scholar, Ali Mazrui.
It is worth noting from the outset what Mazrui was taking issue with: the distorted Western images of black people in earlier centuries. From his point of view, there have been improvements in Western understanding of Africa in the 20th and 21st centuries. As Mazrui put it in his Cultural Forces in World Politics (1990): “Blatant racial discrimination is on the defensive. The language of racial abuse is looking around for euphemisms. The racists have never been more reluctant to proclaim their prejudice in public. Racism on the world scene is at best declining and is at worst in search of disguise and camouflage.”
Sadly, the world today is quite different from the one Mazrui portrayed before he died in 2014. This is what adds greater significance and meaning to Mazrui’s reflection on this issue and makes it all the more timely and relevant for today.
Thomas Jefferson, president of the US from 1801 to 1809, should have known about Ethiopia, Mazrui suggested in his keynote address to a conference held at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 2007. I assisted Mazrui with research for that address, in which he grappled with the issue in question. I later drove him to Ithaca, where I listened to his presentation as he reflected on Ethiopia and Africa, and did so with his characteristic imagination and sensitivity to history.
To allow the reader to take pleasure in the ease with which Mazrui clarified complicated concepts, qualities for which he had earned worldwide recognition, I present below an excerpt from his Cornell address, in his own words, with minimum adaptation.
For a long time, Ethiopia was in reality the one black country, which could demonstrate to Europeans that it had a recorded history of many centuries, that it had a heritage of written as well as oral poetry, that it had centuries of recorded philosophy and theology, and that it had demonstrated feats of science and engineering in its monuments.
Let us explore this remarkable story of cultural achievement in the context of the four intellectual charges, which Westerners have long levelled against the African people: lack of history, lack of poetry, lack of philosophy and lack of science and technology.
Does Africa have history?
The charge that Africans were a people without history goes back to German philosopher WG Hegel and beyond. There was no room for the African continent in Hegel’s Philosophy of History (1821).
This belief that black Africa was ahistorical continued well into the second half of the 20th century. As late as 1968, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, Hugh Trevor-Roper, proclaimed his infamous dogma: “Maybe in the future there will be African history. But at the moment there is none. There is only the history of the European in Africa … The rest is darkness — and darkness is not a subject of history.”
Anybody with the remotest familiarity with Ethiopian history would surely not have made such a remark. Even if Trevor-Roper knew nothing about Menelik I, or rejected the Solomonic credentials of the Royal Dynasty of Ethiopia or accepted that the Queen of Sheba was part of Yemeni history rather than Ethiopian, he should at least have known that the army of Menelik II defeated a European army from Italy at the Battle of Adowa in 1896. If Ethiopians were a people without history, would they have been strong enough to defeat a European army early in the 20th century?
Indeed, as an expert on European Nazism and fascism, Trevor-Roper should surely have been more familiar with the rich history of Ethiopia long before Italy invaded and occupied it from 1935 to 1941.
Are Africans capable of poetry?
With regard to the charge that black people were incapable of great poetry, perhaps the most eloquent witness against the black muse was Thomas Jefferson, the author of the phrase “all men are created equal” in the American Declaration of Independence, who later became the third president of the US.
In Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (Paris, 1784), there occurs the following astonishing observation: “Never yet could I find that a black man had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration, never saw even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive rhyme or melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved.”
Jefferson goes on to make interesting observations about the link between pain and poetry. He argued that pain is often the mother of poetry — anguish a stimulant to the muse. In Jefferson’s own words: “… Love is the peculiar nostrum of the poet. [Black] love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion has indeed produced a Phyllis Wheatley; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”
He was referring to the enslaved woman who is considered the first African-American author of a published book of poetry.
Again, Jefferson knew almost nothing about Abyssinia-Ethiopia. While he was proclaiming that black people were a people without poetry, he seemed supremely ignorant of the historical fact that Ethiopians were writing poetry long before Jefferson’s ancestors in the British Isles were taught the Latin alphabet by their Roman conquerors.
And so enterprising is the poetic tradition in East Africa today that local newspapers receive not merely “letters to the editor” but also “poems to the editor” – from Dar es Salaam to Addis Ababa, from Mogadishu to Mombasa.
What about African philosophy?
The third European allegation against the African people is that they were a race devoid of philosophers. Less candid than Trevor-Roper there were Westerners who believed the following: “Maybe in the future there will be African philosophy, but at the moment there is none. We only have Europeans philosophising about Africa — the rest is ethnology, and ethnology is not really philosophy.”
Belgian Franciscan missionary in the Congo Father RP Tempels’ seminal book Bantu Philosophy (1949) was supposed to be a great revelation that the African cultural heritage included collective philosophy but not necessarily individual philosophers. Once again the debate about whether Africa had philosophers almost totally ignored Ethiopia as a source of great thinkers and great theologians across the centuries.
Technical innovations in Africa
The fourth basic European assumption was whether the African peoples were a pre-technological ethnicity, incapable of scientific feats. Indeed, negritude as a modern philosophical and literary movement virtually takes pride in Africa’s pre-technological innocence. As poet Aime Cesaire of Martinique put it: “Hooray for those who never invented anything, who never discovered anything, who never explored anything. Hooray for joy, hooray for love, hooray for the pain of incarnate tears. My negritude [my blackness] is no tower and no cathedral, It delves into the deep, red flesh of the soil.”
In reality, Ethiopia had built the equivalent of cathedrals. Its people had carved out the sunken churches of Lalibela, a major engineering achievement. They had built the castles of Gondar. They had built impressive obelisks that were attractive enough to be stolen by conquerors like Italy — at least for a while.
As compared with 19th century European industrialisation, Ethiopia was still technologically marginal. But, compared with earlier estimates of what black people were capable of achieving, Ethiopia had the credentials of a technological vanguard.
Ethiopians were thus a black people who could successfully refute racist allegations that black people were fundamentally ahistoric, non-poetic, pre-philosophical and pre-scientific.
Let us summarise. People of African ancestry worldwide have historically been accused of four congenital incapacities. Each of those alleged incapacities has, across the centuries, been contradicted by Ethiopia’s own demonstrated performance.
The ultimate refutation of the four alleged incapacities has been the achievements of Ethiopia. Are black Africans a people without history? Ethiopians have a recorded history across at least two millennia.
Are black Africans a people capable of composing great poetry? Ethiopians have been dazzling each other with great poetic compositions even before some of them were Christianised in the fourth century of the Christian era. And when persecuted Arab Muslims sought asylum in Ethiopia in the seventh century, the refugees and their hosts probably recited to each other their respective sacred hymns. The Ethiopian legend of Solomon seducing Sheba was itself pure poetry.
Are black Africans a people capable of philosophising? Ethiopians philosophised about nature, God, the Ark of the Covenant, love, sex and family long before Western Europe was introduced to the ancient works of Plato and Aristotle.
Are black Africans capable of feats of science and engineering? Ethiopians have left us obelisks, which tempted the greed of Italian invaders, and inspired the Washington monument in the American capital. Ethiopians have also left us the miraculous sunken churches of Lalibela.
May Ethiopians continue to inspire others.
Dr Seifudein Adem is a research fellow at JICA Ogata Research Institute for Peace and Development in Tokyo, Japan. He is also Ali Mazrui’s intellectual biographer.