RHI Seminar: Africanising African History. Decolonisation of knowledge in UNESCO’s General History of Africa(1964-1998)

Abstract:

Africanising African History examines the history of African history from an African perspective by making use of UNESCO’s General History of Africa as a case-study. The General History of Africa (1964-1998) was the most wide-ranging and one of the most influential book series on African history in the 20th century. While the book series are still used as reference works and referred to in virtually all overviews of African historiography, the literature on the series remains superficial and reproduces certain misunderstandings of its complex history, often describing it as a simple attempt by African historians to imitate European historiography. In Africanising African History I argue that the Africans working on the General History of Africa (hereafter GHA) were in fact engaged in complex debates about politics, epistemology and methodology. Although the published book series was criticized, the history of its drafting is nevertheless crucial to understanding the politics of knowledge production and the history of decolonizing knowledge in an Africanist 20th century context. This book offers a first account of the monumental work that went into drafting the GHA and analyzes it as part of the history of decolonizing knowledge in Africa, looking not just at its published results, but at the years that went into drafting the project as well.