By Laura Angela Bagnetto
A creative reset of modern African history, including a volume focused on the diaspora, has been released in three books to update and complement Unesco’s original eight-volume series.
The three new volumes in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) General History of Africa series mark a deliberate shift toward an Afrocentric reading of the continent’s past. For much of history, African narratives were shaped by explorers and external observers, a distortion that, left unchallenged, risks impoverishing global understanding.
If this is not corrected, says Martial Ze Belinga, a contributor to the series, “humanity will lack the reality and the truth of [African] people and that part of humankind”.
He argues that the Eurocentrism long embedded in historical knowledge must be decentralised.
“That’s why it’s important to go beyond those visions, beyond those perceptions that are foreign perceptions,” Ze Belinga, a sociology and economic researcher, tells The Africa Report.
More than 350 African and international scholars contributed to the project, reconstructing African history through research spanning agronomy, archaeology, linguistics, oral traditions and political thought.
Embracing the history of African peoples
The contributors to the three volumes were selected by a dedicated committee, explains Augustin Holl, professor emeritus and head of the Unesco committee behind the series. Regardless of discipline – whether anthropology, musicology, oral history or related fields – the guiding principle was that this is the history of African peoples, and that it must therefore encompass the African diaspora.
“There is a very strong connection between African descendants,” Holl says. “It is the suffering of a continent that has built a kind of common past and that we can return it to strength, so Africans possess their own history and move forward confidently.”
That connection, he adds, was never completely severed. “We’re looking at movement back and forth because the links were never totally cut.”
Unesco’s General History of Africa has a history of its own. The original eight volumes were commissioned in 1964, following the independence of many African nations, to tell Africa’s story from an African perspective. That project has now been expanded with three new volumes – General History of Africa, IX: General History of Africa Revisited; X: Africa and Its Diasporas; and XI: Africa in the Contemporary World – designed to update the series and bring its insights into classrooms around the world.
“It was absolutely essential that if we wanted to keep Africa’s general history relevant, we would need to update the knowledge gained,” Holl tells The Africa Report.
For younger audiences, Unesco Dakar has partnered with Netinfo School of Art and Technologies in Tunisia to create African Heroes, a free, downloadable video game designed to make history a living source of creativity and learning.
The game allows players to follow the paths of 10 iconic figures from African and Afro-descendant history, including:
1. Soundiata Keïta, prince and founder of the Mali Empire
2. Queen Nzinga, ruler of Ndongo and Matamba kingdoms in present-day Angola
3. Zumbi, an anti-slavery fighter in Brazil
4. Shaka Zulu, king of the Zulus who revolutionised the military
5. Agojie, the all-female military regiment of the Kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin)
6. Ralambo, ruler of the Kingdom of Imerina in the central Highlands region of Madagascar
7. `Toussaint Louverture, leader of the revolt against French rule in Haiti
The selection underscores the game’s aim to connect Africa’s continental history with its global diaspora, using interactive storytelling to engage a new generation of learners.
Challenging old prejudices
While Unesco’s original eight volumes were conceived as a comprehensive series, Holl says both history and humanity have since evolved.
“We now have a growing number of African scholars,” Holl notes. “That was not the case when the General History of Africa began. There were virtually no African archaeologists involved in the 1960s.”
Shifts in scholarship and perspective, he adds, were a key motivation behind the three new volumes. As understandings of history have changed, the need to revisit and update Africa’s past from within became unavoidable.
The update also confronts persistent stereotypes. Despite Africa being widely described as the “cradle of civilisation” even in the 21st century, the idea that the continent has “no history” still surfaces. Holl points to a 2007 speech by then French president Nicolas Sarkozy at Dakar’s Cheikh Anta Diop University, where Sarkozy told a stunned audience that “the tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history … They have never really launched themselves into the future.” These remarks provoked widespread outrage in Senegal and across the continent.
Such views are rooted in a narrow definition of history that privileges written archives over oral traditions.
In one of the introductions to the books, Ze Belinga argues for decolonising history by interrogating authors’ intentions and the power structures behind knowledge production.
“European prejudice has dominated history … since at least the 15th-century conquests, bearing down with all its might until the relatively suspensive appearance of professional historians,” he writes.
Western narratives, he writes, have too often reduced Africa to evangelisation, slavery, colonisation and the Cold War. The new volumes aim to restore complexity, continuity and agency.
“A river metaphor can help us with this perspective, with an original source (Africa) and extended sources (diasporas). Oceans, gorges, nodes, comings and goings animate a historical hydrography made up of circulations, traumas and resilience,” writes Ze Belinga.
Local African languages count
In book nine, a special look at historical oral tradition includes papers on the linguistic map of African oral languages.
Other emphasis is given to African local languages, with papers that include Oral Traditions: Sources of an Updated African Historiography by Théodore Nicoué Gayibor and Tantara: Madagascar’s African Historical Tradition by Manassé Esoavelomandroso.
The importance of local language, to acknowledge the local words, is to understand the African experience at that time, says Ze Belinga, noting that in Mali, they did not call their leaders kings, they called them mansa.
“And when you look at mansa, you see that it’s a type of royalty … which is not exactly what you may understand when you just say kings,” he says.
Even migration routes can be traced by way of local names, says Ze Belinga, as some place names in Central Africa, such as Cameroon, Gabon, or Equatorial Guinea, are either named from a local language or a toponym, a place name that describes a geographical feature.
These place names can give clues to the past, perhaps showing a crossroads of those who have the same mindset or come from the same people, especially after you ask those who live there, he says.
“You see that you have the same mindset, and you may have the same people. And this will help you to write the history of how people settled in that place,” says Ze Belinga. And looking at the archaeology and the oral history, you can understand the “narrative from within”.
In fact, the three books are offered in English, French, and Portuguese, as well Hausa and Kiswahili.
Practical impact
Beyond academic circles, the three volumes are already being prepared for use in classrooms. According to Cecilia Barbieri, chief of Unesco’s education section, the organisation has developed a teaching guide to help schools integrate all three books into national curricula across Africa.
“We’ve already started to work with some countries that will use these volumes to plan out their curriculums,” says Barbieri. Teacher-training workshops have begun in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, The Gambia and Liberia, with plans to expand to additional countries.
How the books will be used in each country depends on the individual countries. Historians and education ministry experts from each country attend the Unesco sessions and are involved in the curriculum discussion, so they can tailor it to their needs, especially for subjects such as decolonisation.
“By looking at history from an African perspective, we can move from an Eurocentric idea and go beyond those perceptions that are foreign,” says Ze Belinga.
