Amy Niang (2006-05-25)
Graduate student Amy Niang meets well known history professor Joseph 
Ki-Zerbo at his home in Burkina Faso.


There is an incommensurable gap between the old and younger generation of 
Africans. We - African youth - have grown up, been made to believe that 
anything ‘traditional’ or ‘old’ is necessarily retrograde, often 
‘unreliable.’

Young Africans, especially children of the Diaspora, do not have the 
advantage of communicating with their past, a handicap that inhibits a 
corrective study of African history and deepens their incapacity to take 
their destiny in hand. According to an African proverb, “he who is lost 
doesn’t know where he comes from.”

I had the immense honor to meet the first African to qualify as professor of 
history, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, at his house in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (West 
Africa). At 84 today, weakened by age and sickness, Ki-Zerbo still draws 
amazing strength and vitality from his deeply-rooted convictions. He may 
have been preaching in the desert for decades but men like him live by their 
principles and his writings find resonance. African and world scholars have 
understood his message.

Ki-Zerbo deplores the increasing extinction of African identity. According 
to him, the curse of Africa is not the chronic poverty of its countries but 
the ignorance of its children of the true history and the true values of the 
continent. Unless Africans start learning about their own continent, their 
own thought system and the essence of its traditions, they will remain 
locked into the stranglehold of cultural identity.

It’s high time Africans liberate themselves from cultural asphyxiation, high 
time they went in search of what it is to be African, to draw the necessary 
lessons from their own traditional history in order to apprehend the future 
with confidence. The approach will consist, for Africa, in re-conquering its 
confiscated identity for, according to Ki-Zerbo, “without identity, we are 
just a mere object of history, a prop in the play of globalization, an 
instrument used by the others. A utensil.”

Ki-Zerbo narrates African past not in the way of a nostalgic chronicler who 
wallows in past glory or dwells into an imaginary fantasyland of 
pre-colonial Africa. He uncovers the history he was not taught at La 
Sorbonne University in France.

According to Ki-Zerbo, throughout history strong beliefs in simple 
principles such as the importance of family over the individual, the respect 
of elders, the spirit of sharing and good neighborliness, human communion in 
joy and sadness, etc, have been the bedrock of existence for Africans. 
Unfortunately, the degradation of these principles has blighted prospects 
for Pan-Africanism and development. But Ki-Zerbo warns us that “liberation 
for Africa will be Pan-African or will not be.”

Today, the debate over Africa is enmeshed in endless and ineffectual 
squabbling over the legitimacy of pseudo-democracies and misleading 
conflicts. But Ki-Zerbo argues that “the conception of power as well as its 
management in today’s Africa has nothing African to it.” In fact, political 
formations in pre-colonial Africa are rich with institutions based on a 
division of power with the greater possible number of people.

Africans, he says, “believe that power should be divided among its 
incumbents. They also believe that stability could be preserved in the 
multiplication of power.” He debunks misconceptions about African history 
and dominant theories that deliberately confine the history of the continent 
to the slave trade and the colonial experience. He adds that historical 
knowledge is a condition to collective liberation as the linkage between 
historical knowledge and self-worth is undeniable. In Africa, the lack of 
this knowledge has greatly contributed to underachievement and ‘mental 
underdevelopment.’

Ki-Zerbo is a man of vision and a soothsayer but he does not read Africa’s 
future in the sand of its drying soil; he uses the dialectical process of 
history as an investigative method to uncover the true past of the continent 
in order to understand the underpinnings of Africa’s value systems. He then 
tells us what a de-structured society can expect to see: the import and 
application of values that do not fit its peoples, which eventually will 
lead to the destruction of cultural identity.

His unsparing analysis and sharp, perceptive, riveting, pertinent, careful 
and thorough study of Africa’s history as well as its relations with the 
West has yielded a great number of articles and monographs, among which have 
been the comprehensive “History of Black Africa” (1972) that laid the 
foundation of a lifetime of scholarship and commitment to restoring the 
history of Africa by Africans. He also supervised the publication of two of 
the monumental eight-volume “General History of Africa” (Méthodologie et 
Préhistoire Africaine, 1981) as a member of the Scientific Committee for 
UNESCO.

He explores Africa’s past, drawing from oral tradition that is, in essence, 
the source of history and traditions for many African writers such as Mali’s 
late Amadou Hampaté-Bâ, who once said: “When an old man dies in Africa, it 
is like a whole library burning down.”

Ki-Zerbo’s life struggle and relentless social and political activism are 
not just a message of hope for Africa. It is the deep conviction of a man 
who knows that African development cannot be elusive forever and that it 
will be ‘African’ in conception and application or will not be. This 
knowledge is what he wishes young Africans to oppose against heavy odds and 
unacceptable immobilization, against institutionalized ignorance and empty 
rhetoric.

* Amy Niang is a Senegalese graduate student at the University of Tsukuba in 
Japan. E-mail her at [log in to unmask]

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