What does it take to bury an outdated argument? The thought occurred while reading Motherland, one of a series of recent books seemingly haunted by the ghost of Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Back in 1964, Trevor-Roper, an expert on the English Civil War and the Third Reich, made the mistake of opining on African history. There was nothing much to teach, he said, other than the history of Europeans in Africa. ‘The rest is largely darkness… And darkness is not a subject for history.’ He then added insult to injury with a snitty reference to the ‘unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes’. These were silly remarks; but Trevor-Roper was the man who later authenticated the Hitler diaries, so not above the odd clanger. They were also comments voiced more than 60 years ago, when far less was known in the West about the continent’s rich and diverse past.
But that lofty dismissal seems to enjoy extraordinary staying power, for hard on the heels of the Sudanese-British television presenter Zeinab Badawi’s An African History of Africa comes Motherland, by Luke Pepera, a young British historian and broadcaster with Ghanaian roots. Both seem preoccupied with demolishing the Trevor-Roper canard.
Like Badawi’s book, which kicked off with ‘Lucy’, the skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis on display in an Addis Ababa museum, Motherland reaches back into the mists of time. To drive home the depth and breadth of African history, Pepera focuses on the Mandingo emperor Kanku Musa Keita’s 60,000-man, 100-camel pilgrimage to Mecca in 1323, which first brought Mali to international attention. We also hear the Moroccan diplomat Al-Wazzan’s dazzled account of life in Timbuktu, the jewel of the Songhay empire, captured back in 1512.
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