Broadening the Spectrum by Including Difference: My Vision of African History

History, progress and purpose

History has often assigned itself the mission of discovering the truth of human activity and its path through time. It assumes that this activity, preserved in documents, is necessarily cumulative and progressive. History itself is consequently confused with upward movement, called ‘progress’.

To progress has become synonymous with moving forward in a single direction, while crisis appears only as a temporary pause containing elements necessary for acceleration. History, progress, meaning and purpose are associated to signify becoming. Hegel’s philosophy of history made this conception explicit, and Marcien Towa employed it in his Essay on the Problematic of Philosophy in Present-day Africa.

The exclusion produced by a linear history

Once progress is equated with history, periods displaying no progress are assigned to prehistory and to the alleged fixity of prehistoric peoples. They supposedly leave it only when an event breaks the circle of traditional time and separates a ‘man of the past’ from a ‘new man’ aligned with the event.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow

Nietzsche shows that distinguishing yesterday’s person from today’s cannot resolve the question of history. There is also tomorrow’s person. The issue is therefore whether continuity or rupture links people of the past, present and future.

What do we truly know about people of the past when history cannot be reduced to a hero’s story? What does the historian do with everyone else and with the non-eventful? Does political history sum up local human history? Do universal canons give us definitive knowledge of people today? What do we know of tomorrow’s people, here and elsewhere? Can history offer lessons to everyone beyond those it currently proposes, and is its essence anything other than narrative?

The limits of prediction

Rather than leading us to a universal science, history continues to show that human beings change and cannot be judged in a fixed manner. It does not provide a complete account of the relationship between the economic and social, nor can it affirm that event B will inevitably follow event A.

History advances by widening

History’s only conceivable progress lies in broadening its perspective and developing a finer understanding of the originality of events. This quiet progress appears through the enlargement of a treasury of local experience.

Every other alleged advance tied to genre conventions, current trends or methodological opportunities is merely superficial development. History does not advance in a straight line: it advances by widening.