African historiography

African historiography is a branch of historiography concerning the African continent, its peoples, nations and variety of written and non-written histories. It has differentiated itself from other continental areas of historiography due to its multidisciplinary nature, as Africa's unique and varied methods of recording history have resulted in a lack of an established set of historical works documenting events before European colonialism. As such, African historiography has lent itself to contemporary methods of historiographical study and the incorporation of anthropological and sociological analysis.
The chronology of African recorded history encompasses many movements of art, African nations and dialects, and its history has permeated through many mediums. History concerning much of the pre-colonialist African continent is passed down through oral tradition. As European colonization emerged, the cultural identity and socio-political structure of the continent drastically shifted, and the written documentation of Africa and its people was dominated by European academia, which was later acknowledged and criticized in post-colonialist movements of the 20th century.
African historiography became organised in the mid 20th century, and saw a movement towards utilising oral sources in a multidisciplinary approach alongside archaeology and historical linguistics, culminating in UNESCO publishing the General History of Africa from 1981, edited by specialists from across the continent. Contemporary historians are still tasked with building the institutional frameworks, incorporating African epistemologies, establishing a continental periodisation, and representing an African perspective.
There are vast amounts of ecological, cultural, linguistical, and religious diversity in Africa. Valentin Mudimbe notes that the idea of Africa was first made and used by non-Africans, particularly Europeans. The concept was appropriated by diasporic Africans during abolitionist movements in the 19th century as intellectuals sought an "African homeland", with their removal from the continent enabling them to view it as a whole. This planted the roots of pan-Africanist thought, however for most it was the shared experience of colonial rule and resistance to it that fostered a unified African identity.
In Africa, historiography has traditionally been undertaken by oral historians, either specialists such as the griots of West Africa, "men of memory", or elders. In accordance with African cosmology, African historical consciousness viewed historical change and continuity, order and purpose within the framework of human and their environment, the gods, and their ancestors. In African societies, the historical process is largely a communal one, with eyewitness accounts, hearsay, reminiscences, and occasionally visions, dreams, and hallucinations crafted into narrative oral traditions which are performed, sometimes accompanied by music, and transmitted through generations. In oral tradition, time is sometimes mythical and social, and ancestors were considered historical actors. Origin myths serve multiple purposes, helping to define a group's identity and forge sociocultural alliances, and provide the fulcrum on which a group's religious ideology rests. Traditions offer a socially consolidated version of the past, and often include the origins of institutions, embedding political authority. In stateless societies, clan histories predominated.
Some African writing systems have been developed or adapted in ancient and recent history. One of the most notable ancient languages were the hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt, which are attested to have been used for historical records from c. 1580 BCE. Following the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, historians were able to decipher hieroglyphs and access a new field of Ancient Egyptian history, however this field was undertaken predominantly by European historians. Some ancient external sources include Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (c. 230 CE) and Ptolemy's Geography (c. 140 CE). In Abyssinia, during the Aksumite period (c. 100 – c. 960 CE) histories were inscribed in Ge'ez on stelae, thrones, and obelisks, and recounted a ruler's reign, recording various historical events such as military campaigns, diplomatic missions, and acts of philanthropy. From the 13th century, written imperial chronicles predominated. Following the spread of Islam, there are also plenty of written records in Arabic from Islamic scholars such as al-Masudi, al-Idrisi, Leo Africanus, al-Bakri, Ibn Battuta, and Ibn Furtu. They included observations of local societies, and sometimes utilised oral sources, embodying bias towards Muslim rulers while denigrating non-believers. In West Africa and the Swahili coast Africans used Arabic or adapted the Arabic script into Ajami for their languages, and works were written in Akan, Fula, Yoruba, Hausa, and Swahili. Some were chronicles which literarily recorded oral tradition, such as the Kilwa Chronicle (16th c.), Timbuktu Chronicles (17th c.), Kitab Gonja (18th c.), Funj Chronicle (early 19th c.), and Kano Chronicle (c. 1880s).
European written records about the coastal regions proliferated during their exploration of Africa from the 15th century.
Most African societies used oral tradition to record their history, meaning there was little written history. Colonial histories focussed on the exploits of soldiers, colonial administrators, and "colonial figures", using limited sources and written from an entirely European perspective, ignoring the viewpoint of the colonised under the pretence of white supremacism. Colonial historians considered Africans racially inferior, uncivilised, exotic, and historically static. The most widespread genre of colonial narrative involved the Hamitic hypothesis, which claimed the inherent superiority of light-skinned people over dark-skinned people. Only Hamitic Africans were considered "civilisation", and by extension all major advances and innovations in Africa were thought to derive from them. Oral sources were deprecated and dismissed by most historians, who claimed that Africa had no history other than that of Europeans in Africa. Some colonisers took interest in the other viewpoint and attempted to produce a more detailed history of Africa using oral sources and archaeology, however they received little recognition at the time. The liberal tradition, championed by figures such as William Miller Macmillan, sought to criticise colonialism and racial segregation. The 1940s and 50s saw the study of African history split from colonial history, as institutions were set up such as the School of African and Oriental Studies by the University of London, producing a new generation of Africanists.
Some indigenous works of this period include Carl Christian Reindorf's The History of the Gold Coast and Asante (1895), Samuel Johnson's History of the Yorubas (1897), Apollo Kaggwa's The Kings of Buganda (1901), Jacob Egharevba's A Short History of Benin (1934), Akiga Sai's History of the Tiv (1935), Paul Mbuya's Luo kitgi gi timbegi (1938), Samuel Josia Ntara's Mbiri ya Achewa (1944/5), and John Nyakatura's Kings of Bunyoro-Kitara (1947). The Uganda Society founded The Uganda Journal in 1934 which aimed to increase knowledge about Uganda and preserve oral traditions.
The struggles for independence in the 1950s and 1960s were mirrored by a movement towards decolonising African history, involving the refutation of colonial narratives. The new African elite now had the daunting task of achieving in the historical field what they had done in the political one. Historians' post-colonial works were characterised by their nationalism and Afrocentrism, aiming to reverse colonial thought which degraded their culture. At the time, it wasn't thought African history was possible and it was common for enthusiasm to be dismissed. The period saw a methodological revolution regarding the use of oral sources, archaeology, anthropology, and historical linguistics.
In the mid-20th century members of the Ibadan School of History in Nigeria, led by Kenneth Dike and Jacob Ade Ajayi, pioneered a new methodology of reconstructing African history using archives supplemented with oral traditions, destabilising the notion that Africa's history was essentially its interactions with Europeans. Other influential schools on the continent included the Legon School in Ghana which published on Akan history, and the Senegambian Dakar School, while the Dar es Salaam School in Tanzania succeeded in showing modern nation states as continuations of the African past. Africanists such as Basil Davidson, Terence Ranger, and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch also made important contributions. National Historical Associations were founded along with journals such as Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria and Kenya Historical Review, accompanying the European journals Journal of African History and Cahiers d'Études Africaines. Works through the 1960s and '70s relied upon a wealth of data to conclusively prove that Africans possessed historical consciousnesses and conceptualised, preserved, and transmitted their history through oral tradition. Jan Vansina also pioneered the study of oral tradition in Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology (1965) and Oral tradition as history (1985).
Despite a vigorous assault on the validity of oral sources by structuralists, oral tradition continued to be heavily utilised in the reconstruction of African history. This movement towards utilising oral sources in a multi-disciplinary approach culminated in UNESCO commissioning the General History of Africa, edited by specialists drawn from across the African continent, publishing from 1981 to the present. North African scholars and intellectuals found themselves in an identity crisis, and gravitated towards the Arab/Islamic world. The General History of Africa and The Cambridge History of Africa's coverage of Ancient Egypt ensured it was viewed in an African context, drawing upon the Afrocentric works of Cheikh Anta Diop which sought to wrestle the ancient civilisation from European Egyptologists. Despite all this, in the process of refuting European myths about African history, nationalist historiography embraced Western views of what constitutes history, largely focussed on narrow political themes from above, and sometimes underplayed the impacts of colonialism.
The mid-1960s saw growing pessimism as various socio-political problems such as corruption, economic mismanagement, political instability, social malaise, and neo-colonialism endured, and the failure of African elites to deliver on their promises became apparent. Celebration of African achievement was replaced by fierce critique of the ruling elites and their neo-colonialist collaborators, and the term Africanist gained negative connotations. The dual problem of poverty and dependency bore a new Marxist historiographic ideology focussed on development. In 1972 Walter Rodney, building on previous works, introduced dependency theory to African historiography by publishing How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. It stated that Africa's natural development had been taken off course by the slave trade and colonialism into one of permanent dependency on outside forces. He also attacked modernisation theory, arguing that Africa must reject the international capitalist system in order to develop. This new school which combined Marxist historiography with dependency theory broadened the discipline's domain from nationalist historiography's narrow focus.
The onset of the "era of disillusionment" in the 1980s saw African universities struggle amid economic and political crises, resulting in the migration of many great scholars. Some nationalist historians accepted responsibility for the model of the nation that they had projected, which idealised leaders and power rather than production and commoners. Works such as Lucette Valensi's Tunisian Peasants in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century (1985), Judith Tucker's Women in Nineteenth Century Egypt (1985), and Elizabeth Isichei's A History of African Societies to 1870 (1997) embodied a new impetus to write history from below.
The widespread mood of introspection saw the formulation of postmodernist approaches to African historiography. The most notable work of this school was Valentin Mudimbe's The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (1988), which argued that African scholars derived their ideas and interpretations from Western academic discourse, and that they ought to reject the Western view of what constitutes scientific knowledge. The 1990s saw the abolishment of apartheid in South Africa, allowing Black students to attend formerly all-White universities and creating a crisis in South African historiography as Afrikaners struggled to come to terms with their history. The collapse of communism and failed socialist experiments in Africa produced revisionist responses from neo-Marxist historians. Emphasis on the cultural embedding of knowledge has seen the domain of historical inquiry extend. Conversely, the turn away from material concerns caused the field of economic history to be neglected from the 1980s to early 2000s in spite of its enduring relevance (and is still neglected in African universities between the Sahara and Zambezi). There were major challenges which persisted, such as "academic labour migration", particularly to the United States, and overreliance on Western publishers inhibiting the growth of institutions in Africa.
In the present day, the discipline includes the various schools of thought in a pluralist tradition. The study of history in Africa is critically underfunded, with governments searching for economic development favouring hard sciences and technology-based disciplines, consolidating brain drain. The new generation of historians are less ideological than their predecessors and emphasise Africans' agency amid economic imperialism, and in a bid to stay relevant focus more on contemporary rather than early history. There has been an increased focus on ethnicity at the expense of social class. Histories are most often written in English or French, limiting accessibility for local audiences. Funso Afolayan writes that African historians ought to write history for Africans rather than just for their Western colleagues. An important question to answer is what to do about the Western-derived nation states and institutions. Despite efforts by multiple successive generations, scholars are yet to formulate an African philosophy of history, distinct and autonomous from the Western tradition. Contemporary historians are still tasked with building the institutional frameworks, incorporating African epistemologies, and representing an African perspective.
Periodisation of African history was rooted in Eurocentrism, and initially centred around Africa's interactions with outsiders rather than on its internal developments. There is no agreed upon periodisation for Africa history, with the difference in temporal stages of state formation between parts of the continent providing disagreement. The concept of prehistory has received strong criticism, with some scholars favouring a "total history". Basil Davidson considered Africa's ancient period to be until 1000 AD, however Corisande Fenwick has posited the time of the Arab conquests (the 7th century) as an endpoint. Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore proposed "Medieval Africa" as from 1250 to 1800, having revised the start date back from 1400. Despite this, the European terms "ancient", "medieval", and "modern" have long been criticised as failing to represent African realities and capture its complexity.
Most African societies used oral tradition to record their history. They generally have a reverence for the oral word, and have been termed oral civilisations, contrasted with literate civilisations which pride the written word. Historians generally view oral traditions as neither entirely symbolic or wholly true, but a synthesis of the two, requiring great skill and subtlety to separate them. In African epistemology, the epistemic subject "experiences the epistemic object in a sensuous, emotive, intuitive, abstractive understanding, rather than through abstraction alone, as is the case in Western epistemology" to arrive at a "complete knowledge", and as such oral traditions, music, proverbs, and the like were used in the preservation and transmission of knowledge. As oral tradition rarely incorporates chronological devices, lists of rulers have been crucial to establishing chronologies.
Radiocarbon dating has given historians dates going back four millennia.
Historical linguistics, particularly glottochronology has enabled historians to go back two millennia.
Nationalist historiography infuses historical writing with nationalism. Historical memory shapes nationalist sentiment on the basis of a shared past, creating a cultural identity, which in turn produces and legitimises nations. African nationalist historiography's primary mission is to generate patriotism and sustain the nation states. Crucially it aimed to reverse dehumanising colonial thought, especially the notion that Africans had to be divided into tribes and separated in order to be governed, instead promoting unity. Inter-group relations were prioritised, while ethnic rivalries were marginalised. It sought to uncover Africa's contributions to the world, emphasising leadership qualities and institutions in precolonial states, and their integrity and historicity prior to colonisation. It pioneered the use the oral sources, seeking their legitimisation, however largely used archives. In attempting to reverse the colonial notion that colonisation was the most important phase of African history, which implied a "barbaric past" and "modernising present", nationalist histories often downplayed its impacts.
The onset of the "era of disillusionment", as economic development struggled in combination with various internal conflicts, brought tough challenges to nationalist historiography and saw it decline amid growing pessimism and nihilism. Some historians accepted responsibility for the model of the nation that they projected, which idealised leaders and power rather than production and commoners. Globally, nationalist historiography became unpopular within academic circles during the 20th century, with transnational histories recently gaining in popularity. The new generation of African historians are less ideological, however the nationalist paradigm is still in use by some who confront neo-colonialist historians, and nationalist voices are included in the discipline's pluralist tradition.
Marxist historiography is the study and interpretation of history through the lens of Marxist theory, and involves analysing historical events in relation to social classes and materialistic phenomena. It maintains that history is shaped by the constant struggle of people against their material and social contexts. Marxist thought (or "radicalism") has been highly influential in African historiography. Scholars largely focussed on colonial history, and emphasised the agency of Africans in contrast to liberal historiography. Among African scholars, the ideas of Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci regarding the ideology of power, particularly the manipulation of cultural norms in the maintenance of power hegemony, were particularly influential. Marxist historiography greatly affected narrative writing and advanced a "cause and effect" interpretation of events, in contrast to them being viewed as a series of accidents or related to divine will. Differing from nationalist histories, radical histories shifted the weight of anti-colonial struggle from the elites to commoners.
While the school's generalisations led to the recognition of widespread patterns and the reinterpretation of events (such as the Fula jihads and Yoruba Revolutionary Wars), they sometimes inhibited the study of specific historical situations and often ignored cultural context. Despite this, Marxist approaches have been crucial in the development of a critical and holistic study of colonialism and Africa's relationship with the West. They solidified the point that European conquest and exploitation was the main cause of Africa's underdevelopment. The Marxist paradigm illuminated militant resistance to colonialism and mass nationalism, but also subscribed to a universal history of global capitalism. It has struggled to incorporate African thought, and narratives often found themselves at odds with the experiences and perspectives of the public.
Post-colonialist historiography studies the relationship between European colonial domination in Africa and the construction of African history, and has its roots in the concept of Orientalism. Western imperialism is viewed as the product of insatiable desire for power over the non-Western world, with this ambition to dominate extending to subjecting cultures to scientific scrutiny. As a result, knowledge produced from this endeavour is invalid as a projection of Western stereotypes and formulations. Another point made is the relativity of true knowledge and its cultural embeddings, discouraging external critique. While Orientalism's characterisation of Western imperialism has come under criticism, themes of relativism have continued in postmodernism.
Postmodernist historiography or deconstruction considers the past to be an ideological product of the present, thus reflecting present power relations and realities. The past is considered to be directly unknowable since traces of it are subject to people's perspectives and subjective interpretation, blurring the line between fact and fiction. This approach considers oral tradition to be contemporary ideas about the past. Deconstruction has faced staunch opposition in African studies, as it is perceived to dangerously depart from problems facing the continent and distract the intellectual agenda.
Critics argue that this particular movement towards an African alternative results in the disintegration of "African" into a vast multitude of cultural identities, having ramifications for pan-Africanism. Historians are challenged with focussing on cultural context while countering the criticism that subscribing to the European-derived idea of "Africa" might render the whole enterprise of African history worthless to the continent's future.
Social history, sometimes called "history from below", is a field which aims to look at the lived experiences of the past. Oral tradition gives valuable insights to African perspectives and mentalities, which is crucial to social history. One focus has been on peasant or agricultural history, which emerged in response to its neglect from colonial histories, and largely utilised testimonies. A renowned work is Charles van Onselen's The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894-1985 (1996).
Migrations are a common theme in African history. They are split into voluntary migrations and forced migrations. The study of African migrations requires a multidisciplinary approach, and there remains big gaps in our knowledge. There has been sparse research into much of Africa's migration history. Michael McCormick's Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD 300 - 900 (2002) researched cross-Mediterranean migrations, and included research on North Africa, but there has been no comparable study from an African perspective. The Bantu expansion has been debated over by historians, linguists, archaeologists, paleo-environmentalists, and evolutionary geneticists. Historiography of the Atlantic slave trade is by far the most developed sub-field on African migrations, however that of trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean migrations are growing.
Women's history studies the role women have played in history, with a focus on women of historical significance and on how historical events affected women. It posits that women have been marginalised in the historical record, and attempts to counter this. The three main paradigms in African historiography (nationalist, Marxist, and dependency theory) have neglected women's history, and works on general, economic, and even social history have had very little to say about women. Historians used to consider African women naturally inferior and helpless victims. African women's history has grown rapidly since the 1970s, widening its initial focus from economic production, social agency, and law, and has largely focussed on the colonial and postcolonial periods. An initial theory of modernity gradually liberating African women from tradition has since been rejected. It has studied urbanisation, informal and formal economic roles, motherhood, sexuality, reproduction, gender meanings, modernity, and public culture among others. It also considers the historical development of women's culture, including solidarity networks and autonomous social spaces. Political influence of women, whether as rulers or mothers and wives of rulers, is another focus. Works include Kathleen Sheldon's African Women: Early History to the 21st Century (2017), Iris Berger and E. Frances White's Women in Sub-Saharan Africa: Restoring Women to History (1999), Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch's African Women: A Modern History (1997), and Cheryl Johnson-Odim's Women and Gender in the History of Sub-Saharan Africa (2004).
Urban history studies the history of cities and towns, and examines the process of urbanisation. Scholars generally define African urban history as the study "of cities in Africa" rather than "of African cities", making them comparable to cities elsewhere with their Africanity considered secondary. Colonisers used to claim that Africa was mostly rural and historically absent of cities. Urban studies is typically very Eurocentric, and Africa has largely been neglected thus far, especially south of the Sahara. Scholars located in Africa are at a disadvantage, and often lack institutional access to the latest publications which tend to be expensive. Periodisation is demarcated into "precolonial", "colonial", and "postcolonial", due to colonisation gravely impacting the urbanisation process. Studies of colonial and postcolonial urban history tend to focus on dysfunctions, segregation, and marginalisation. Colonial cities mimicked those of industrial Europe by introducing capitalist systems of rent and administrative regimes, termed "modern", while pre-existing urban processes and structures, ranging from cosmology and family structure to construction materials, were termed "traditional", however postmodernist thought has largely dismantled this dichotomy. Local terms for settlements in general provide insight into how to approach the study of precolonial history. The widespread phenomenon of historical city-states in Africa requires a different approach to local politics, and favours comparability.
Economic history is the study of history using methodological tools from economics or with a special attention to economic phenomena. There are three main schools of thought in African economic history: neoclassical, Marxist, and one centred on dependency theory. Periodisation is split into four periods: the first is from the earliest hominids, through the Stone and Iron ages, and covers the development of agriculture; the second begins in the 16th century and revolves around the Atlantic slave trade; the third begins in the 19th century with the abolition of the slave trade and covers the colonial period; and the fourth covers postcolonial history from the mid 20th century to the present. One debate has been on whether cultural values affect profit-maximising behaviour. From the 1980s to early 2000s, Africa rarely appeared in major journals on economic history. Since then, there has been a revival in the study of African economic history, mostly focussed on contemporary history. Gareth Austin criticises the sub-discipline for applying concepts predominantly derived from the European experience to African history, and requests more intellectual ambition. He stresses the importance of comparative historical research in testing models proposed as universal, and notes that the immense diversity of the continent makes synthesising research into an "African model" challenging.
The neoclassical approach emphasises trade and exchange systems in African economies, with early pioneers being Kenneth Dike and A. G. Hopkins. Its initial efforts were to disprove Eurocentric ideas that economic dynamism, markets, and trade did not play important roles in precolonial Africa. Rational choice theory is central to this approach. The neoclassical school has received criticism for focussing too heavily on exchange, and ignoring production.
The Marxist approach applies Marxist economic theory, specifically the theory of "modes of production". Leading scholars included Jean Suret-Canale and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch. The approach considers multiple modes of production able to coexist within an economy, with the colonial period characterised by the domination of the colonial mode over the precolonial or pre-capitalist mode.
Dependency theorists emphasise unequal exchange as a causal factor of underdevelopment, and apply world-systems theory. This approach was introduced to African historiography by Walter Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). It posits that Europe created a peripheral form of capitalism geared towards exporting capital rather than cumulative reinvestment, resulting in a rich centre which accumulates wealth to the detriment of a periphery. Leading scholars include Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, and Charles E. Alpers. This approach has been criticised for denying Africans agency.
New economic history applies econometrics to economic history, and utilises technology able to process large amounts of quantitative data. Prominent scholars include Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. They advance a "reversal of fortunes" theory, positing that as a result of colonialism, richer regions in 1500 became poorer due to the implementation of extractivist and exploitative institutions, while poorer and less populated areas grew richer due to settler colonialism. This approach has been criticised for not taking into account historical changes over long periods, and for compressing history by considering century-old events causal to the present.
Military history is the study of armed conflict and its impact on the societies, cultures and economies thereof, as well as the resulting changes to local and international relationships. African military history was neglected throughout the 20th century, in part due to colonial thought and wariness about embracing militarism amid various contemporary conflicts. Early on, it focussed on military resistance at the time of colonial conquest. In the 1990s social historians began to focus on the lives of soldiers and veterans, improving understanding of the colonial experience. It is only in the last decade that Africanists have begun incorporating this into a separate sub-discipline of military history.
Most historians follow Richard Reid in studying "African dynamic[s] in the use of force and violence in the continent's deeper history", which provides insights into state formation, slavery, and conflict with foreign entities. The evolution of colonial armies into national armies can be studied to better understand civil-military relations. The incorporation of social history also involves the study of Africans' experiences of violence and conflicts. Rather than embracing militarism, historians aim to contribute to containing violence by furthering understanding of its origins, manifestations, and institutional dynamics.
Animal history aims to centre historical study on animals. It is very nascent, with regional societies only formed in the early 21st century. Historians of Africa have recognised animals as capable of producing change in human history, but specific focus on animals has been very rare. An early criticism of animal historians was regarding the ventriloquism of the animal, said to reveal more about the author than the animal, which historians now aim to avoid. The terms "animal-sensitive history" or "multi-species history" are preferred by some. The sub-discipline maintains similarities with various movements in African historiography aimed at recognising agency, and is sometimes incorporated into environmental histories.
Following the early ideological traditions of Pan-Africanism, popularised by Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois, and Négritude, advocated by Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, in the second half of the 20th century African-Americans became closely involved and took greater interest in the study of Africa. They posited that the project of African history ought to be tied to the notion of racial liberation from white domination. This led to the formulation of Afrocentrism, which sought to challenge Eurocentric assumptions and attitudes dominant in academia, such as the notion of universality in contradiction of differing ontologies and perspectives more relevant to a particular context. Essentially, it stressed the importance of centring analysis and explanation in African ideas, interests, and presuppositions. Relatedly, Afrocentricity, coined by Molefi Kete Asante, seeks to ground the study of the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora within their own historical, cultural, and sociological contexts. Afrocentrist histories are rooted in old pan-Africanist visions of racial unity and cultural diffusion, and consider Ancient Egypt as having played a central role in African history. Another idea espoused by Asante, building off of the work of Cheikh Anta Diop, is that Africa should use Ancient Egypt as its foundational source of scholarly inspiration, similar to the role Ancient Greece and Rome plays in European scholarship.
Afrocentrism is largely marginal to mainstream scholarship, and more closely resembles popular history. Its ideas and the discourse surrounding them have often attracted criticism and controversy. While most scholars recognise the need for African studies to be rooted in African thought, they have warned against usurping discredited notions of white supremacy with discourse of black supremacy. Afrocentrist histories remain popular in the African diaspora in the Americas amid an ongoing struggle for respect, equality, and empowerment in their respective societies, and are influential regarding the popular perception of Africa. They often ignore advances made in African historiography in the last half-century, and rely upon crude generalisations and clichés. Few African scholars have shown interest in the subject, indicating the irrelevance of racial discourse throughout much of the continent in the present day.