The rest is largely darkness.īut there’s still a relatively widespread belief that not only were African societies not subject to change over time – that their ways of life remained static over the course of several centuries – but that only anthropologists have the requisite skills to study Africans and their past. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of Europe in Africa. Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. Now, most people would be horrified by the racism which underpinned Hugh Trevor-Roper’s 1963 assertion that In fact, it’s often quite difficult to persuade them that there is a pre-colonial African history to study and teach. It’s one of my favourite areas to teach, partly because students – even South African ones – tend to have very little knowledge about the continent’s past. I’ve recently finished lecturing an undergraduate course on African history up until 1914.
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