conference

Africa Knows! It is time to decolonise minds

Home Theme Presentations Blogs Podcasts Country profiles Kora and films

Home | Presentations | Panels and papers

Accepted Paper: D19-09. To panel D19.

Title of paper:

Author:

Bakail Moncef (University of Algiers 2).

Long abstract paper:
Through this paper, we seek to demonstrate the importance of the ancient and medieval history of Africa which has been marginalized. This Paper also tries to cast lights on what has been the role of Algerian and international institutions such as the African studies laboratory; Algiers University in establishing a historiography of Africa?

Africa attracted Greek and Arab merchants to the major African capitals, and enabled us to know the social characteristics of the Bantu farmers, the blacksmiths and potters.

It is worth noting that the history of Africa is the fruit of this balance between the short time of actors and the longtime of cultural depths.

The study of the history of Africa as an independent field of study is a recent development. Thus, until the end of the colonial period, Western historians believed that sub-Saharan Africa had no 'civilization'.

The end of colonialism witnessed a growing number of African thinkers who strongly reject this approach and relying on written sources only is an insufficient scale for writing the history of Africa, but rather than relying on other sciences such as Anthropology and Ethnology has corrected many concepts.

On this basis, many ancient people wrote about Africa, even if their writings were not systematic or objective in many cases. They were followed by the Arabs, who left an invaluable production of African societies.

The next stage in the history of Africa was dominated by the writings of merchants as well as Christian missionaries and other European adventurers, whose writings on Africa are still the main sources of many historians who specialized in the history of ancient and medieval Africa.

It can be said that with the end of colonialism, many African and European historians have emerged and rejected the idea that Africa has no ancient history and they even rejected the idea of the privilege of written sources from the one hand and insisted on including interdisciplinary sources and methods ranging from archeology to oral history.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that over the centuries, many African Kingdoms existed before the partition of Africa by the colonialists; and on this basis, we will try to analyze in depth the emergence and the fall of these kingdoms by Introducing some new terminology and concepts in order to write African history with objectivity.

Download paper