Truncated History: Presentism And the Narrowing Of Perspective In The Writing Of African History

The Paper Past And Presentism: The Precolonial And The Foreshortening Of African History Past And Presentism: ThePrecolonial And The Foreshortening Of African History Begins From A Deep Anxiety Felt By The Historian Who Spent Long Years In The Archives Of East Africa, And That African History Itself Is Being Diminished Before Our Eyes, Not By The Action Of External Forces Hostile To History, But By Internal Transformations In The Profession Of Historiography, And In Research Funding, And In Public Taste, And In Academic Politics. The Central Idea Formulated By Reid Is Two Intertwined Concepts: Presentism Or Presentism, That Is Reading The Entire Past Through The Lens Of The Present And Its Problems, And Foreshortening Or Shortening Of Historical Perspective, That Is Reducing Thousands Of Years Of African History Into Only A Century And A Half Which Is The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries. What Happens, In Reid’s View, Is That Long, Deep, Precolonial African History Is Being Folded And Pushed To The Margins, While The History Of The Atlantic Slavery, Colonialism, And Post-Colonialism, And Even Contemporary Crises Such As AIDS And War And Development, Swells To Occupy All The Space.

Richard Reid Is Not A Marginal Researcher Writing From Outside The Field, But He Is One Of The Most Prominent Contemporary Historians Of Africa, Specialized In The History Of Ethiopia And Eritrea And Uganda And The Great Lakes Region, And He Has Books On War And Violence In Precolonial Africa, And Therefore He Writes From Inside The Academic Kitchen And He Sees How Funding And Publishing Priorities Transform. He Opens His Paper With A Simple But Revealing Quantitative Observation: If You Reviewed The Titles Of Books And Articles And Theses In African Studies During The Last Two Decades, You Would Find That The Overwhelming Majority Focuses On The Period After Approximately 1850. Even When Historians Write About The Slave Trade, They Write About It As A Gateway To Understanding The Present, About Diaspora And Identity And Racism, Not About The Structure Of Internal African Societies That Produced And Interacted With That Trade Over Centuries.

Reid Returns To The Sixties And Seventies, Which He Calls The Short Golden Age Of Precolonial History. In That Historical Moment, There Was An Urgent Political And Intellectual Need To Prove That Africa Had A History Before The Arrival Of The European. The Wave Of Independence Required A National Narrative, And A Generation Of African And British Historians Emerged Such As Bethwell Ogot And Kenneth Dike And Jan Vansina Who Used Oral History And Linguistics And Archaeology To Reconstruct Kingdoms And States And Trade Networks That Were Centuries Old. Precolonial History At That Time Was The Heart Of The African Project. But This Project Soon Receded. Reid Lists Four Interrelated Reasons For This Recession.

The First Reason Is Political Disappointment. The Post-Independence African National State Did Not Fulfill Its Promises, And Entered Into Crises Of Coups And Civil Wars And Economic Collapse In The Seventies And Eighties. So Historians, Especially From The Left, Began To Raise A Different Question: Why Did The State Fail? And This Question Forcibly Dragged Them Towards Studying Colonialism Itself, Because It Is The One Who Drew Borders And Designed State Institutions. And Thus The Focus Shifted From The Kingdoms Of Buganda And Asante And Zulu In The Eighteenth Century To The Study Of British And French Colonial Administration.

The Second Reason Is The Theoretical Transformation In Western Academia In General. With The Rise Of Postmodernism And Cultural Studies And Discourse Studies, Interest Became Focused On The Representation Of Africa, And On Orientalism, And On How To Write The Other. It Became More Attractive To Write About The Narratives Of European Explorers About Africa, Than To Write About The Irrigation System In The Highlands Of Ethiopia In The Fifteenth Century. History Became A History Of Representations More Than A History Of Facts And Societies.

The Third Reason, Which Is The Most Important In Reid’s Analysis, Is The Economy Of Research Itself. Reid Says That Historical Research In Africa Today Is Funded Mostly By Developmental Institutions, And By Non-Governmental Organizations, And By Western Research Councils That Want Answers To Immediate Problems: Poverty, Conflict, AIDS, Democracy, Human Rights, Reconciliation. The Funder Does Not Want To Know How The Kingdom Of Burundi Managed Justice In 1700, But Wants To Know Why The Genocide In Rwanda Happened In 1994, And How It Can Be Prevented. And This Creates What Reid Calls NGO-ization Of History, That Is Transforming History Into A Tool For Solving The Problems Of Non-Governmental Organizations. So You Find Countless Theses About Sexual Violence In Civil War, And About Child Soldiers, And About The Memory Of Colonialism, While Research About Precolonial Governance Systems, About Agriculture, About Local Technology, About Internal Religious Thought Disappears.

The Fourth Reason Is Ethical And Political, And It Is The Feeling Of Western Guilt. After Decades Of Ignoring The Slave Trade, There Has Been A Huge Rush To Study It, But It Is A Study Centered On Western Guilt And Compensation And Apology. Once Again, Africa Becomes A Subject Of European Guilt, And Not An Independent Historical Actor. African History Becomes Just A Long Introduction To The Slave Trade, And The Slave Trade An Introduction To Western Racism.

Here Enters The Concept Of Visual Foreshortening Or Foreshortening. Reid Borrows The Term From Drawing, Where The Near Body Appears Huge While The Distant One Shrinks. Thus The Twentieth Century Became Huge, Filling All The Books, While The Centuries From The Fifth To The Eighteenth Appear Small And Distant And Blurry. The Dangerous Result, As He Argues, Is That We Have Lost The Ability To Understand The Roots Of Contemporary African Phenomena Themselves. You Cannot Understand Why The State In Somalia Collapses Today Without Understanding Pastoral Patterns And Conflict Over Water In The Sixteenth Century, And You Cannot Understand The Nature Of Power In Uganda Without Understanding The Concept Of Kabaka In The Kingdom Of Buganda. When We Cut History, We Do Not Cut Only The Past, But We Cut Our Ability To Interpret The Present In Depth.

Reid Devotes An Important Part Of The Paper To Criticizing What He Calls Afrocentric Literature Afrocentric Which Filled The Vacuum Left By Serious Research. When Professional Historians Withdrew From The Study Of The Deep Past, Non-Specialist Writers Came Forward To Write Glorious Stories About Ancient Africa, About Pharaonic Egypt, About Great Kingdoms, But They Are Stories Without Method And Without Archive, Replacing Myth With Research. And He Distinguishes Between This Popular Literature And What The Masses Want. He Notes That Ordinary Readers, Even In Britain, Are Still Fascinated By Stories Of The Nineteenth-Century African, By The Story Of Emperor Tewodros In Ethiopia, Or By The Zulu War Of 1879, Which Alone In 2010 Had Four Books Directed At Military History Enthusiasts. There Is A Thirst For The Heroic Story, For The Noble African Warrior Defeated In The End, But Academia Does Not Satisfy This Thirst With Solid Research, So It Leaves It To Commercial Journalism.

At This Tension: Between A Popular Market That Wants The Dramatic Past, And An Academia That Wants The Useful Present, And Between Them The Long African History Is Lost. He Paves In The Following Pages To Provide Concrete Examples From East Africa, Specifically From Uganda And Ethiopia, To Show How Ignoring The Deep Past Leads To A Catastrophic Misunderstanding Of War And Violence And Power Today.

Richard Reid Moves After His General Diagnosis Of The Phenomenon Of Historical Foreshortening To Dissect The Institutional Mechanism That Produces This Foreshortening, Which Is A Mechanism That Is Not Related To Bad Intentions Among Historians As Much As It Is Related To The Structure Of The Knowledge Economy Itself. Reid Describes How Western Universities, Especially In Britain And America, Have Turned Into Institutions That Increasingly Depend On Conditional External Funding. The British Economic And Social Research Council, And The Wellcome Foundation For Medical Research, And The European Union, And The United States Agency For International Development, All Of Them Do Not Fund A Project Titled Governance Systems In The Kingdom Of Bunyoro 1650-1800. They Fund A Project Titled Conflict And Governance And Public Health In The Great Lakes Region: Lessons For Reconciliation. And Thus The Young Researcher Finds Himself Forced To Rewrap His Passion For The Deep Past In The Language Of The Present. He Writes A Proposal About War In The Nineteenth Century, But He Justifies It As It Will Help Us Understand Child Recruitment Today. He Writes About Traditional Medicine In The Seventeenth Century, But He Says It Will Contribute To Understanding The AIDS Epidemic. At First This Is Just A Linguistic Strategy To Obtain Funding, But With Time It Transforms Into A Way Of Thinking. The Researcher Himself Begins To Believe That The Past Has No Value Except To The Extent That It Serves The Present, And That Is Presentism In Its Most Dangerous Form.

And Reid Gives An Example From His Experience In Uganda. When He Began Work In The Archives Of Buganda, He Was Interested In The History Of The Institution Of Kabaka, The Sacred Kingship, And How It Evolved Over Four Centuries From A Governance System Based On Kinship And Rituals To A Centralized Military State. But He Found That All The Questions Asked To Him In Conferences, And All The Reviewers’ Comments On His Papers, Were Revolving Around One Question: What Is The Relation Of This To Idi Amin? What Is The Relation Of This To Milton Obote? What Is The Relation Of This To The War Of The North With The Lord’s Resistance Army? As If Four Centuries Of History Gain No Legitimacy Except If They Were An Explanation For Two Decades Of Dictatorship. And This Is Exactly What Reid Calls Hijacking The Past To Serve A Turbulent Present. Rather, This Hijacking Produces A Distorted History, Because When We Read The Kingdom Of Buganda In The Eighteenth Century As Just An Introduction To Idi Amin, Then We Transform It Into A Fatalistic Story About African Despotism, And We Neglect All That Is In It Of Flexibility And Negotiation And Balances And Political Innovation.

Then Reid Moves To The Impact Of The Field Of Memory Studies And Genocide, Which Is A Field That Grew Hugely After The Tragedies Of Rwanda And Bosnia. He Says That There Is Today An Entire Library About The Genocide In Rwanda In 1994, Which Is A Tragedy That Deserves Study Without Doubt, But The Problem Is That This Library Began To Swallow All Previous Rwandan History. The History Of Rwanda All Became Read As A Fatal Path Towards Genocide. Historians Search In The Kingdom Of Rwanda In The Nineteenth Century For The Roots Of The Division Between Hutu And Tutsi, And Ignore That This Division Itself Was Flexible And Transformable And Was Not A Solid Identity In The Modern Sense. The Result Is That We Write A Teleological History, A History That Sees The End Known In Advance, So It Interprets Everything In The Past In Light Of That End. And He Recalls Here The Saying Of The British Historian J. H. Plumb J.H. Plumb Which Says That The Past Dies When It Becomes Just A Commentary On The Present.

And Reid Provides An Illuminating Comparison: He Says That What Happens To African History Resembles What Happened To European History For A Brief Period After The Second World War, When All German History Became Read As A Fatal Road Towards Hitler. German Historians Took Decades To Get Out Of This Trap, And To Write A German History That Is Not Just An Introduction To The Third Reich. Africa Today Is Stuck In The Same Trap, But The Trap Is Wider, Because The Tragic End By Which We Interpret Everything Is Not One Event, But A Series Of Tragic Ends: Slavery, Colonialism, Failure, War, Disease.

In The Middle Pages Of The Paper, Reid Stops At Two Concepts That He Sees As Victims Of This Foreshortening: The Concept Of The State And The Concept Of Violence. In Popular Writings Today, The Precolonial African State Appears As A Fragile Entity, Despotic, Unable To Protect Its People, And Therefore It Paves The Way For The Idea Of The Contemporary Failed State. But The Archive Says Exactly The Opposite. Reid Takes The Example Of Ethiopia Which He Knows Well. In The Sixteenth And Seventeenth Centuries, The Ethiopian Empire Was Running A Complex System For Mobilizing Resources, And A Mobile Judicial System Accompanying The Emperor, And A Network Of Monasteries Preserving Knowledge. It Was A Strong State By The Standards Of Its Era, Capable Of Repelling The Ottoman And Portuguese Invasion. But You Will Not Find This In Textbooks That Reduce The History Of Ethiopia To The Famine Of 1984 And Its War With Eritrea.

And The Same Applies To Violence. Today, Many Write About Violence In Africa As If It Is Part Of An African Nature, Or As A Direct Product Of Colonialism. Reid, Who Wrote His Famous Book War In Precolonial East Africa, Argues That Violence Had A History, And Had A Logic, And Had Ethics. War In The Kingdom Of Bunyoro Was Not Chaos, But Was An Organized Social Institution That Had Its Seasons And Its Rules And Its Rituals For Reconciliation. When We Ignore This History, Then We Transform Contemporary Violence Into Something Mysterious And Incomprehensible, Or We Attach It To Colonialism Alone, So We Lose The Ability To See Real Continuities. Continuity Is Not That Africans Are Violent By Nature, But That There Are Old Military Cultures That Were Destroyed And Distorted Then Re-employed In A Distorted Manner In The Modern State.

Then Reid Reaches A Sharp Point Related To The Audience. Who Reads African History? He Says That There Is A Growing Separation Between What Academics Write And What The Public Wants To Read. The Public, Whether In Africa Or In The West, Still Wants Stories About Kings And Warriors And Journeys. And The Evidence Is The Huge Commercial Success Of Popular Military History Books About The Zulu Wars Or About The Mahdi Resistance In Sudan. But Academia Despises This Type Of History And Considers It Old And Masculine And Military. So It Leaves The Arena To Amateur Writers Who Write Exciting Stories But Full Of Errors And Colonial Romanticism, While Academics Retreat To Writing Complex Articles About Discourse And Body And Representation That Only Five Of Their Colleagues Read.

This Gap, In Reid’s View, Is The Most Dangerous Thing, Because It Means That Deep African History Dies Twice: Once When No One Funds It, And Once When No One Reads It. And He Warns That The Final Result Will Be A Whole Generation Of African Students Themselves Who Know Everything About The Transatlantic Slave Trade, And Know Nothing About The Trade Of Gold And Salt Across The Sahara That Lasted A Thousand Years Before It, And Know Everything About The Berlin Conference 1884, And Know Nothing About The Conference Of Kings In Ethiopia In The Fifteenth Century.

And He Ends This Part Of The Paper With An Indirect Appeal To His Colleagues: If We Want To Truly Understand Africa, We Must Recover The Courage Of The Early Historians In The Sixties, But With Today’s Tools. To Return To The Archive, To Local Languages, To Archaeology, And To Write A History That Does Not Apologize For Being Old, A History That Believes That The Past Has Value In Itself, And Not Only Because It Explains AIDS Or War.

Richard Reid Moves In The Last Third Of The Paper To What Can Be Called The Geography Of Knowledge Production, And Asks A Simple But Painful Question: Where Is African History Studied Today, And Who Studies It, And In What Language? In The Sixties, The History Department At Makerere University In Kampala, Or At The University Of Ibadan In Nigeria, Or At The University Of Dar Es Salaam, Was The Beating Heart Of Production Of Precolonial History. Students Were Learning Their Local Languages As Archive Languages, And Going To Villages To Record Oral History From The Mouths Of Elders. There Was A Belief That The African Is The Owner Of His History. Today, Reid Says, The Picture Has Reversed. History Departments In Many African Universities Suffer From Severe Shortage In Funding And Cadres And Libraries, And Have Become Dependent On Imported Curricula Focusing On Topics Including Development And Human Rights, Which Are Important Topics But They Come At The Expense Of Deep Historical Specialization. The Student In Makerere Today May Graduate Without Reading A Single Book About The Kingdom Of Buganda Before 1900, But He Read Dozens Of Reports About Good Governance. And Thus A Generation Of African Historians Themselves Is Produced Who Does Not Know The Deep History Of His Country.

On The Other Hand, In Western Universities, Especially In North America, Another Demographic And Institutional Transformation Occurred. Jobs In African History No Longer Necessarily Go To Historians Specialized In Archive And African Languages, But Have Come To Go To Researchers Coming From African Diaspora Studies, Or From African American Studies, Or From Slavery Studies. This Is Not Underestimating The Importance Of Those Fields, But It Means That The Person Who Studies The History Of Uganda May In Fact Be Specialized In The Transatlantic Slave Trade, And Reads Uganda Through The Eyes Of Archives Of Liverpool And Caribbean Islands, Not Through The Eyes Of Archives Of Uganda Itself. And Here The Concept Of Foreshortening Returns: Africa Becomes Just An Appendix To The History Of Diaspora, And Not A Historical Center Standing By Itself. Even Language Itself Changes. Very Few Doctoral Students Today In The West Learn Amharic Or Luganda Or Tigrinya Or Old Swahili. They Learn Critical Theory, And Read Foucault And Agamben, But They Cannot Read A Single Local Document. How Can You Write A Deep History For A Society Without Understanding Its Language?

Reid Devotes A Paragraph To Talking About The Death Of Oral History As A Method. In The Seventies, Jan Vansina Was Setting Strict Rules For How To Collect And Evaluate Oral Narrative, And Historians Were Spending Months In Villages. Today, This Work Is Considered Expensive And Slow And Not Fashionable. It Is Easier To Go To A Digital Archive In London And Download Documents Of The Ministry Of Colonies, And Write About Them Using A Program To Analyze Discourse. The Result Is That The Colonial Archive Itself, Which Early Historians Were Trying To Bypass And Search Behind, Returned To Become The Only Source. We Write The History Of Africa Again Through The Eyes Of The Colonizer, But This Time With A Critical Dress. We Write About How The Colonizer Represented The African, Not About How The African Represented Himself.

And Here Reid Raises A Central Idea He Calls Restoring The African Political Body. He Says That Precolonial History Was Not Just A History Of Kings, But Was A History Of Authentic Political Ideas. There Were African Theories About Justice, About Legitimacy, About The Relationship Between Ruler And Ruled, About Wealth And Poverty. In The Kingdom Of Burundi For Example, There Was A Concept Of Ubugabo Which Means Balance Between Power And Mercy, And The King Who Fails To Achieve This Balance Loses His Legitimacy And Is Killed Ritually. In Ethiopia, There Was A Concept Of Zion As An Idea About Divine Justice On Earth, And The Church Was Playing The Role Of Constitutional Court. These Political Ideas Did Not Come From Europe, And Were Not Primitive, But Were Complex Intellectual Systems Developed Over Centuries. When We Neglect Studying These Systems Because They Are Old, Then We Establish The Idea That Africa Had No Political Thought Before The Arrival Of Colonialism, And That All Concepts Of Democracy And Justice Are Imported. And This Is A Grave Historical And Political Mistake, Because It Deprives Africans Today Of Local Intellectual Resources That Can Help Them Build More Authentic Governance Systems.

And Reid Continues To Refute The Common Argument That Says Focusing On The Present Is More Useful And Ethical. Many Young Researchers Say To Him: Why Do I Waste My Time Studying A Kingdom From The Seventeenth Century While There Are Children Dying From AIDS Today? And Reid’s Answer Is Not Denial Of The Importance Of The Present, But That The Present Itself Cannot Be Understood Without The Deep Past. He Takes An Example From Health. Many Studies About AIDS In Uganda Talk About Stigma And Culture As Obstacles To Treatment, And Blame African Culture. But If We Studied The History Of Medicine In Buganda, We Would Find That There Is A Long Tradition Of Quarantine, And Of Organizing Markets To Prevent The Spread Of Diseases, And Of The Role Of Traditional Healers As Part Of An Integrated Health System. Culture Is Not An Obstacle, But Is A Resource, But We Do Not See This Resource Because We Do Not Know History. The Same Applies To Agriculture. Development Projects That Fail In East Africa Often Fail Because They Ignore That Local Farmers Have Accumulated Knowledge Over Centuries About Soil And Rain And Seeds, Knowledge That Does Not Appear In World Bank Reports.

Then He Moves To Criticizing What He Calls The Worship Of The New Archive. He Means By That The Current Obsession With Huge Digital Archives Of The Slave Trade, Such As The Voyages Database, Which Counted Ship Voyages. These Databases Are Amazing, But They Created An Illusion That We Know Everything About The Slave Trade, And Therefore We Have Focused All Our Efforts On It. While In Contrast, There Is Not A Single Database For The Salt Trade Across The Sahara That Lasted A Thousand Years, Nor For The Iron Trade In The Great Lakes Region, Nor For The Migrations Of Herders In The Fifteenth Century. The Available Digital Archive Determines What We Study, And What Is Available Digitally Is Mostly The European Archive, Because Europeans Are The Ones Who Digitized Their Documents. And Thus Again, The Technology That Is Supposed To Expand Our Knowledge, Reduces It And Directs It Towards European Topics.

He Raises A Question: Can African History Survive As An Independent Field, Or Will It Dissolve Into Other Fields? Will It Become Just A Branch Of Development Studies, Or A Branch Of Diaspora Studies, Or A Branch Of Human Rights Studies? And He Fears That The Answer Is Yes, If The Current Path Continues. And He Cites An Unofficial Statistic He Collected From Programs Of Conferences Of The American African Studies Association: In 1980, More Than Half Of Papers Were About The Period Before 1900, And In 2010, The Percentage Did Not Exceed Ten Percent. This Is Not A Natural Change In Interests, But It Is Extinction.

Reid Begins His Therapeutic Program With A Simple Idea But Revolutionary In The Context Of Current Academia: We Must Recover The Courage Of Writing Long History, What The French Call La Longue Durée. He Does Not Mean By That Writing Boring Encyclopedias Listing Kings Year After Year, But Means Recovering The Ability To Link Centuries With Each Other Without Falling Into The Trap Of Determinism. Long History Is Not A Straight Line From Past To Present, But Is A History Of Layers, Each Layer Leaves Its Trace In The One That Follows It. And He Gives An Example From Uganda Again: You Cannot Understand Why The King Of Buganda Today, Although He Has No Formal Political Authority, Enjoys This Overwhelming Popularity, Except If You Understand How Kingship Transformed Over Four Centuries From A Bloody Military Institution To A Moral Institution Preserving Culture. This Transformation Did Not Happen In 1962 With Independence, Nor In 1966 With The Abolition Of Kingdoms, But Began In The Seventeenth Century When One Of The Kings Decided To Reduce The Authority Of Clan Leaders Through Creating A New System Of Officials. This Old Decision Is What Explains A Scene You See In Kampala Today. Without That Deep Layer, The Current Scene Appears Just As Folklore.

And In Order To Write This Long History, Reid Says That We Need A Methodological Revolution. First, Return To Languages. We Cannot Write A Deep African History In English Alone. Ethiopian Documents Are Written In Ge’ez And Amharic, And Old Swahili Documents Are Written In Arabic, And Oral Traditions In The Great Lakes Are Preserved In Luganda And Runyoro. Reid Humbly Admits That His Generation Is The Last Generation That Learned These Languages Seriously In Britain, And That Doctoral Programs Today Do Not Encourage Students To Spend Two Years Learning Amharic, Because That Delays Graduation And Reduces Productivity Measured By Number Of Articles. But He Argues That Without Language, We Will Remain Prisoners Of Colonial Translation. One Word Like Omwami In Rwanda Was Translated In The Belgian Archive To King, But In Reality It Means Something More Complex: It Is A Mixture Of Judge And Priest And Army Commander. When We Translate It To King, We Impose A European Model On An African Institution.

Second, Return To Alliance With Archaeology And Linguistics And Historical Anthropology. In The Sixties, This Alliance Was The Base. Historians Were Working With Archaeologists To Excavate Sites Of Ancient Cities, And With Linguists To Track Migrations Of Peoples. Today, These Fields Separated From Each Other. African Archaeology Became Focused On Prehistoric Ages, And Linguistics Became A Theoretical Field, And History Became Textual. Reid Calls To Rebuild Bridges. He Mentions How Recent Excavations In Ethiopia Revealed Complex Irrigation Networks From The Twelfth Century, And These Networks Explain Why Certain Regions Were More Capable Of Withstanding Famines Than Others, Which Is A Direct Lesson For Development Projects Today, But A Lesson That Cannot Be Reached Through The Archive Of The Ministry Of Colonies.

Third, Which Is The Most Important Politically, Rebuilding The Relationship With African Universities On A New Basis. Reid Severely Criticizes The Current Research Model Which Resembles Extraction: A Western Researcher Comes, Collects Documents, Takes Them To London Or New York, Writes A Book, Then Returns To Present A Copy To The Host University. This Model Is Colonial Par Excellence. The Alternative He Proposes Is Long-Term Joint Research Projects, Where African Students Are Trained On Digital Archiving In Their Languages, And Where Local Archives Themselves Are Preserved Before They Are Damaged. He Mentions That Many Archives In Uganda And Ethiopia Are Exposed To Damage Due To Humidity And Insects And Neglect, And That Saving Them Is A Historical Work In Itself. Rather, Much Of Oral History Dies Every Day With The Death Of Elders. Saving This History Is Not A Romantic Work, But Is An Urgent Work.

Then Reid Reaches A Thorny Point But He Treats It Frankly: Should We Return To Political History? For Decades, Political History, The History Of Kings And Wars And States, Was Considered A Reactionary History, Masculine, Elitist. And The Wave Of Social History Came To Write The History Of Peasants And Women And Slaves, Which Is A Necessary And Important Wave. But Reid Argues That We Threw The Baby With The Bath Water. When We Ignored The History Of The State, We Did Not Ignore Only The Elite, But We Ignored African Political Thought Itself. The Precolonial State Was Not Just A Tool Of Oppression, But Was An Arena For Debate About Justice And Legitimacy. Ignoring It Means That We Left A Vacuum Filled By Imported Failed State Theories. We Must Write A New Political History, Not A History Of Victorious Kings, But A History Of Political Ideas, Of Struggle For Power, Of Resistance, Of Negotiation. A History That Sees The African State As A Living Being With Its Own Logic, And Not As An Early Failure Of The European State.

And He Devotes A Part To Defending Military History, Which Is His Specialization. He Says That There Is An Understandable Fear Of Writing The History Of Wars In Africa, Because That May Feed The Image Of Africa As A Violent Continent. But Ignoring The History Of War Is More Dangerous. War In Precolonial Africa Had Rules And Ethics, And Was Linked To Economy And Religion. When We Study It, We Understand That Contemporary Violence Is Not A Continuation Of Old Barbarism, But Is A Result Of Destroying Those Old Rules. In The Nineteenth Century, The Trade Of Firearms And Slavery Introduced A Radical Change On The Nature Of War, Transforming It From Limited Conflict Over Cattle To A War Of Extermination For Control Over Humans. This Transformation Is What Explains Much Of The Violence Of The Twentieth Century, But We Do Not See It If We Jump Directly From 1800 To 1990.

And Finally, He Talks About Writing For The Public. Reid Does Not See A Contradiction Between Solid Academic Research And Attractive Popular Writing. He Himself Wrote Academic Books And Books Directed To General Readers. And He Argues That Historians Must Recover The Art Of Narrative. African History Is Full Of Stories No Less Exciting Than Any Novel: The Story Of Queen Nzinga Who Fought The Portuguese For Thirty Years, The Story Of Emperor Tewodros Who Committed Suicide On Top Of Mount Magdala Instead Of Surrendering To The British, The Story Of The Maji Maji Revolt. These Stories Are Not Just Entertainment, But They Are The Way History Enters Public Consciousness. If We Do Not Write Them With Solid Methodology, Others Will Write Them With Myths.

Reid Summarizes His Position: Historical Foreshortening Is Not Just An Academic Problem, But Is A Political And Ethical Problem. When We Shorten The History Of Africa, Then We Say Implicitly That Africa Has No Depth, And That Its Present Has No Roots, And That Its Future Cannot Be Built Except On Imported Models. Re-Extending History Is In Its Essence A Liberating Act, Because It Returns To Africa Its Right To Have A Complex And Long Past Full Of Contradictions, Like Any Other Continent.

What Reid Proposes Is That The Task Of The Historian Today Is To Be The Guardian Of Depth. In A World That Wants Everything Fast And Useful And Applicable, The World Needs Someone To Remind It That Humans Lived For Thousands Of Years Before Non-Governmental Organizations, And That They Innovated Solutions To Their Problems Without International Experts. This Does Not Mean Escaping To The Past, But Means Using The Past To Expand Our Political Imagination. When We Know That The Kingdom Of Buganda Had A Mechanism To Isolate The Unjust King, Then The Idea Of Accountability In Uganda Today Does Not Appear As An Idea Imported From The West, But Appears As A Restoration Of Local Memory. And When We Know That Ethiopia Was Running A System For Social Care Through The Church And Monasteries, Then The Idea Of The Social State Does Not Appear As An Imported Socialist Idea.

The Paper Of Reid Ends With An Indirect Quotation From J. H. Plumb Saying That The Past Dies When People No Longer Want To Hear It. Reid Fears That We Have Reached That Moment For Precolonial Africa. But He Also Ends With A Quiet Call For Action: Go To The Archives Before They Disappear, Learn Languages Before They Die, Listen To Elders Before They Leave, And Write Stories People Want To Read. Not Because The Past Is More Important Than The Present, But Because The Present Itself Will Remain Poor And Distorted If It Loses Its Deep Memory.

After Richard Reid Finished His Dissection Of The Crisis Of Foreshortening And Proposed His Program For Re-Extension, He Leaves The Reader In Front Of A Last Question That He Does Not Answer Directly But It Looms In Every Page: Why Does This Deep Past Matter To Us Now, In A World Drowning In Crises Of Climate And Wars And Artificial Intelligence? And His Implicit Answer Is That The Deep Past Is What Gives Us The Ability To Imagine Different Futures. When We Reduce The History Of Africa To The Tragedy Of Slavery And Colonialism, Then We Establish In Consciousness That Africa Is An Eternal Victim, And That The Only Solution Is External Rescue. But When We Recover The History Of Kingdoms That Lasted Six Hundred Years, And The History Of Trading Cities That Linked Timbuktu With Fez And Cairo, And The History Of Agricultural Systems That Fed Millions Without Chemical Fertilizers, Then We Recover The Idea That Africa Was Once An Owner Of Solutions, And Can Be Again. Long History Is Not An Academic Luxury, But Is A Reservoir Of Alternatives.