This Monday we explored Africa’s ‘contentious’ role in world history. Before the transatlantic African slave trade, Africa was viewed as contiguous with the rest of the world. For instance, the Trans-Saharan Trade connected sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean and west Asia. Additionally, Arabic script would be used to transcribe and record many African languages. The European Age of Discovery would come to redefine Africa from being large, complex, and diverse to being ‘uncivilized’ and immature.

Despite Africa’s active role in the premodern world, enlightenment scholars wrote off Africa’s historical significance as being both minor and isolated. These scholars wrote about Africa in a vacuum, historicizing its place in the world as being subordinate. Professor Ibra Sene explained that the Eurocentric frameworks we use to study civilizations are biased by the European model of civilization. For example, early Enlightenment historians like Hegel viewed history as a study of written documents. Africa has a rich history of civilizations that do not use written script which automatically excluded them from being viewed and studied as ‘civilized.’ In addition, influential historians narrowly analyzed world history as simply a continuation of certain races and civilizations. The fault in this thinking is its teleological and exclusionary basis as it presumes that Europe is the height of civilization and that ‘development’ is not a trans-regional phenomenon, being exclusive to Europe and those it deems civilized.