Results 1 to 4 of 4

Thread: There is no African history

  1. #1
    Veteran Member The Lawspeaker's Avatar
    Join Date
    Feb 2009
    Last Online
    11-05-2023 @ 04:45 AM
    Meta-Ethnicity
    Celto-Germanic
    Ethnicity
    Dutch
    Ancestry
    Brabant, Holland, Guelders and some Hainaut.
    Country
    Netherlands
    Politics
    Norway Deal-NEXIT, Dutch Realm Atlanticist, Habsburg Legitimist
    Religion
    Sedevacantist
    Relationship Status
    Engaged
    Age
    36
    Gender
    Posts
    70,133
    Thumbs Up
    Received: 34,728
    Given: 61,129

    1 Not allowed!

    Default There is no African history


    June 9 2010
    Hugh Trevor-Roper delivered a series of lectures at the University of Sussex in October 1963 which were broadcast (televised?), and reprinted first in The Listener in November and December and then, with changes, not necessarily in the passage I am quoting, as The Rise of Christian Europe, Thames and Hudson, 1965. This is from the first lecture as reprinted in the book. He is straying, a word to which he would probably have objected, outside his main area, seventeenth-century European history and thought.

    “It is fashionable to speak today as if European history were devalued: as if historians, in the past, have paid too much attention to it; and as if, nowadays, we should pay less. Undergraduates, seduced, as always, by the changing breath of journalistic fashion, demand that they should be taught the history of black Africa. Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history.

    “Please do not misunderstand me. I do not deny that men existed even in dark countries and dark centuries, nor that they had political life and culture, interesting to sociologists and anthropologists; but history, I believe, is essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement too. It is not a mere phantasmagoria of changing shapes and costumes, of battles and conquests, dynasties and usurpations, social forms and social disintegration. If all history is equal, as some now believe, there is no reason why we should study one section of it rather than another; for certainly we cannot study it all. Then indeed we may neglect our own history and amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe: tribes whose chief function in history, in my opinion, is to show to the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped; or shall I seek to avoid the indignation of the medievalists by saying, from which it has changed?

    “For on this subject, I believe, with the great historians of the eighteenth century, whom I find very good company (the good sense of the ancients is often more illuminating than the documented pedantry of the moderns), that history, or rather the study of history , has a purpose. We study it not merely for amusement – though it can be amusing – but in order to discover how we have come to where we are. In the eighteenth century men certainly studied Afro-Asian society. Turn over the pages of the great French and Scottish writers – Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Millar. Their interest in non-European society is obvious. Indeed, in order to found the new science of sociology – one of the great intellectual contributions of the Enlightenment – they turned deliberately away from Europe. They read the accounts of European missionaries and drew general deductions from the customs of Otaheite and the Caribbees. But with Afro-Asian history, as distinct from society, they had little patience. When Dr Johnson bestowed excessive praise on a certain old History of the Turks, Gibbon pulled him up sharply: ‘An enlightened age’, he replied, would not be satisfied with ‘1,300 folio pages of speeches and battles’: it ‘requires from the historian some tincture of philosophy and criticism’. ‘If all you have to tell us’, said Voltaire, in his advice to contemporary historians, ‘is that one barbarian succeeded another barbarian on the banks of the Oxus or the Jaxartes, what benefit have you conferred on the public?’ And David Hume, pushing his way briskly through ‘the obscure and uninteresting period of the Saxon annals’, remarked that it was ‘fortunate for letters’ that so much of the barbarous detail was ‘buried in silence and oblivion’. ‘What instruction or entertainment can it give the reader’ he asked ‘to hear a long bead-roll of barbarous names, Egric, Annas, Ethelbert, Ethelwald, Aldulf, Elfwold, Beorne, Ethelred, Ethelbert, who successively murdered, expelled, or inherited from each other, and obscurely filled the throne’ of East Anglia? This is not to say that Hume was indifferent to problems of Anglo-Saxon society. His brilliant appendix on that subject disproves any such suggestion. But he distinguished between society and history. To him, as to all these writers, whig or tory, radical or conservative, the positive content of history consisted not in the meaningless fermentation of passive or barbarous societies but in the movement of society, the process, conscious or unconscious, by which certain societies, at certain times, had risen out of the barbarism once common to all, and, by their efforts and example, by the interchange and diffusion of arts and sciences, gradually drawn or driven other societies along with them to ‘the full light and freedom of the eighteenth century’.

    “Today, though it is fashionable to be more sceptical about the light and freedom, I do not think that the essential function of history has changed. And if the function has not changed, the substance has not changed either. It may well be that the future will be the future of non-European peoples: that the ‘colonial’ peoples of Africa and Asia will inherit that primacy in the world which the ‘imperialist’ West can no longer sustain. Such shifts in the centre of political gravity in the world, such replacement of imperialist powers by their former colonies, have often happened in the past. Mediterranean Europe was once, in the Dark Ages, a colony of Islam; and northern Europe was afterwards, in the Middle Ages, a colony of the Mediterranean. But even if that should happen, it would not alter the past. The new rulers of the world, whoever they may be, will inherit a position that has been built up by Europe, and by Europe alone. It is European techniques, European examples, European ideas which have shaken the non-European world out of its past – out of barbarism in Africa, out of a far older, slower, more majestic civilization in Asia; and the history of the world, for the last five centuries, in so far as it has significance, has been European history. I do not think we need make any apology if our study of history is Europa-centric.”






    Wake up and smell the coffee.


  2. #2
    Veteran Member arkas's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jul 2018
    Last Online
    03-24-2024 @ 04:28 AM
    Location
    The land down under
    Ethnicity
    Eurasian
    Country
    Australia
    Y-DNA
    I2 (I-Z17855)
    mtDNA
    R30
    Politics
    Where the wind blows
    Religion
    Awaiting the return of Sikeliot our saviour!
    Gender
    Posts
    4,396
    Thumbs Up
    Received: 3,176
    Given: 3,161

    0 Not allowed!

    Default

    Lol there is plenty of history in Africa, it is just not as interesting due to their being little advancement in civilisation. That is why European history is the most interesting, in Australia most people tend to find Australian history prior to colonisation boring as well.

  3. #3
    Banned
    Join Date
    Jun 2014
    Last Online
    02-13-2024 @ 02:18 PM
    Location
    In the absence of omnipresent
    Ethnicity
    Brazilian
    Ancestry
    Diverse
    Country
    Brazil
    Region
    Minas Gerais
    Taxonomy
    North Pontid-Iranid-Faelid
    Politics
    Pragmathic
    Gender
    Posts
    8,453
    Thumbs Up
    Received: 4,154
    Given: 1,061

    2 Not allowed!

    Default


  4. #4
    Son of the Umayyads
    Apricity Funding Member
    "Friend of Apricity"

    StonyArabia's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2011
    Last Online
    03-19-2024 @ 04:11 AM
    Location
    Oman
    Meta-Ethnicity
    Semitic-Caucasian
    Ethnicity
    Kavkazian(Paternal) Iraqi Bedouin(maternal)
    Ancestry
    Adyghea, Urals, Yemen, Syrian Desert
    Country
    Adyghea
    Region
    New Jersey
    Y-DNA
    T(Adyghean ancestors)
    mtDNA
    J1b(Arabian Bedouin)
    Taxonomy
    Alpinized-Arabid
    Politics
    Arabian peninsula nationalism. Unity our strength division our weakeness
    Hero
    Omar Al-Mukhtar, King Fisal Al-Saud, Queen Mavia, Queen Sheba, Sultan Bin Saif, Abeer Al-Janbai,
    Religion
    Bedouin Animism
    Relationship Status
    Married
    Gender
    Posts
    23,684
    Thumbs Up
    Received: 13,489
    Given: 13,022

    0 Not allowed!

    Default

    Nah Africa has a lot of history, but it's just not focused upon
    My genetic results
    1 50% Azeri_Dagestan +50% BedouinA @ 2.879975


    One nation and one destiny



Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Similar Threads

  1. Replies: 6
    Last Post: 02-12-2019, 12:21 AM
  2. African migrants in Israel. A very racist history.
    By B01AB20 in forum Race and Society
    Replies: 30
    Last Post: 11-22-2016, 08:04 PM
  3. Replies: 8
    Last Post: 06-04-2013, 12:40 AM
  4. Replies: 20
    Last Post: 06-03-2013, 01:10 AM
  5. Replies: 0
    Last Post: 08-28-2010, 05:37 AM

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •