As some readers may be aware, October is the month designated in the United Kingdom as Black History Month. So, few weeks ago, I asked my twelve-year-old daughter what she had been learning at school for Black History Month.
Her answer was depressingly familiar.
The transatlantic slave trade. Slavery. The Civil Rights movement.
There is nothing wrong with teaching any of these. Quite the opposite. The transatlantic slave trade was one of the great crimes in human history. Chattel slavery subjected millions of Africans and their descendants to organised brutality over generations. The Civil Rights movement is equally indispensable: a remarkable story of courage, resistance and the long struggle to force societies to live up to principles of liberty and equality they so often proclaimed but denied to Black people.
My concern was not what she had been taught.
It was what she had not been taught.
There was little sense of Africa before enslavement. Little about its long history of states, cities, scholarship, commerce, technological ingenuity, art and political organisation. Black people appeared, once again, at the point of subjugation.
I had seen this before.
About 19 years ago, when I worked in a school in East London, Black History Month often followed much the same pattern. I remember pupils recreating posters depicting Black people being sold in slave markets. Then came abolition, segregation, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr and the Civil Rights movement.
All important.
But I often found myself wondering what picture was quietly being assembled in the minds of those children.
A Caribbean colleague once made a simple observation that stayed with me. She asked us not to call those captured and transported across the Atlantic ‘slaves’ but ‘enslaved people’.
The distinction is not cosmetic.
A slave sounds like an identity. Enslaved describes something that was done to a human being.
Those men, women and children were farmers, traders, craftspeople, rulers, priests, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters before somebody captured and sold them. Their humanity did not begin on a plantation. Their history did not begin on an auction block.
And neither did Black history.
That is the problem I increasingly have with the way Black History Month is sometimes approached. It is not that we remember slavery too much. We remember too little of what came before it.
Only last week, Lewis Hamilton made almost exactly this point from another direction. Speaking about Formula One’s planned return to Africa, he reflected on his own upbringing in Britain: ‘Growing up in England, they never taught us anything about Africa. It needs to be on the curriculum.’
That sentence stopped me.
Here was one of Britain’s most prominent sportsmen, looking back on his own schooling and identifying the same absence I had noticed as a teacher years ago and that my daughter is now encountering as a pupil.
Three generations of experience, and the question remains remarkably similar.
What exactly are we teaching our children about Africa?
If the first time a child encounters Africans in history they are standing on an auction block, then we have already offered that child a profoundly distorted account of the past.
Africa possesses one of humanity’s longest historical records. The Nok culture, in what is now central Nigeria, produced sophisticated terracotta sculpture and worked iron more than two thousand years ago. Aksum, in the Horn of Africa, developed into a major political and commercial power linking Africa with Arabia and the Mediterranean world. Great Zimbabwe became a significant urban and trading centre whose monumental stone architecture still testifies to the organisational capacity of the civilisation that built it.
In West Africa, Mali and Songhai commanded extensive territories and trading networks. Timbuktu became associated with scholarship, manuscripts and intellectual exchange. Across the continent were societies connected by trade, migration, diplomacy, religion and warfare.
And then there is the Yoruba historical experience.
At its height, the Oyo Empire was one of the major powers of West Africa, combining commerce, military organisation, extensive urban networks and a sophisticated political system. The Alaafin did not exercise unrestrained power. Institutions such as the Oyo Mesi, led by the Bashorun, constituted important checks within the political order. Oyo also developed mechanisms for incorporating and governing communities across a wide territorial sphere.
Ile-Ife occupies another extraordinary place in Yoruba civilisation. Its artistic achievements, especially the naturalistic terracotta and metal works associated with medieval Ife, remain among the great artistic accomplishments of the African past. It was also a major spiritual and urban centre whose influence travelled far beyond its immediate geography.
Together, Oyo and Ife illuminate different dimensions of a much larger Yoruba civilisational inheritance, just as Benin, Kanem-Bornu, Igbo-Ukwu and many others illuminate the histories of the peoples who now inhabit Nigeria.
Nor does recovering this history require romanticising Africa.
Precolonial African societies had wars, slavery, inequality, political intrigue and failures of leadership. History ceases to be useful when it becomes public relations. The answer to one distortion is not another distortion.
The answer is a fuller history.
And this responsibility does not belong only to British schools.
Africans cannot endlessly complain about what Europeans or Americans teach about Africa while neglecting African history in African classrooms.
How many Nigerian children can explain the significance of Nok? How many know something substantive about Oyo’s political institutions, Ife’s artistic achievements, Benin’s urban history, Kanem-Bornu’s longevity or Timbuktu’s intellectual traditions?
How many encounter African history as a serious body of knowledge rather than as a short prelude before colonial rule, nationalist struggle and independence?
Epistemic confidence begins at home.
A people who do not teach their children their own history should not be surprised when somebody else teaches it badly.
This is also why heritage initiatives deserve more serious attention. The maiden Oyo Empire Day, which the organisers have scheduled for this December, is one example. Properly conceived, such an event should be more than colourful clothing, drums, pageantry and royal procession. It can become an educational platform through which younger generations encounter political institutions, commerce, military organisation, migration, language, art and the wider legacy of an African civilisation.
And there should be many such initiatives.
No single kingdom, ethnic group or country can carry the burden of African history. The continent’s past is too vast, too varied and too important. Schools, universities, museums, filmmakers, writers, parents, cultural institutions and diaspora organisations all have a part to play.
Black History Month should be part of that larger effort.
But it must resist becoming an annual pity party in which Black people are remembered principally through what was done to them.
We should teach the slave ships.
But we should also teach the cities that existed before the ships arrived.
We should teach the auction block.
But we should also teach the kingdoms, markets, universities, artworks, political systems and trading networks created by the people whose descendants were later placed upon it.
We should teach Martin Luther King Jr and Rosa Parks.
But we should also teach children that Black history did not wait for segregation before becoming worthy of study.
This is not a demand for special treatment.
It is a demand for better history.
A curriculum that introduces Africans mainly as enslaved people does not merely underserve Black children. It miseducates every child who encounters it.
White children need the fuller history too. So do Asian children. So do African children growing up on the continent who may themselves know remarkably little about the civilisations that preceded them.
The point is not to manufacture pride.
It is to restore proportion.
Children should know about suffering because suffering happened.
They should know about resistance because resistance happened.
But they should also encounter civilisation, creativity, statecraft, scholarship, commerce, faith, invention, beauty, failure, recovery and achievement.
The Black child deserves more than a history of chains.
Every child deserves the fuller story.
And every child deserves a history sturdy enough to stand on.