REFLECTIONS

Universal History and the Challenge of

Globalization to African Historiography
Abolade Adeniji

Universal or world history has been dened as that brand of history that aspires to
comprehend the totality of past human experiences and derive from it some message and future utility. The eld seeks a history unbounded by geographies, continents, and national frontiers and strives to become unfettered by established
chronologies. The current interest in the eld is derived from many factors including
the perceived failure of hemispheric, national, and local histories to offer historical
truth and reality. But the writing of universal history predates the twentieth century
and actually has a long historiographical tradition.
The acknowledged pioneer of the eld is Herodotus (495 425 BC), who
ignored the narrow Eurocentric approach of his age and included Egypt, India,
Babylon, Arabia and Persia in his histories.1 His stated purpose was to preserve the
memory of the past by placing on record the astonishing achievements of both our
own and of the Asiatic peoples.2 Herodotus can be adjudged to be right to the
extent that hemispheric history can only form part of a whole. As European knowledge of other peoples increased through trickles of information obtained through
contacts and commerce, so did European historians resituate their history by widening their gaze to China, India, Japan, and America. They dealt with the natural histories, religions, and ethnographies of most parts of the connected world.
With the advent of the French Revolution, European triumphalism ensured
the truncating of this trend. Henceforth European historiography departed from its
cosmopolitan enlightenment to become introspective. The mass of European history
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Issue 91 (Winter 2005): 98103
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writing of the period focused on national frameworks to further the rise, rationality,
and hegemony of Europe and its states. Universal history was rediscovered after
World War II as a result of the wars awesome destruction and deep cultural shock.
The universal histories of Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Pitirim Sorokin, H. G.
Wells, and Basil Davison hoped to comprehend the barbarity of Europe by contemplating the whole of humanity.3 They sought spiritual meaning and lessons from civilizations beyond Europe, concluding with pessimism about the prospect of the survival of European civilizations.
African Historiography: Evolution and Development
As a modern intellectual activity, history dates back to the beginning of human society. It reached a stage of sophistication during the era of classical antiquity, but
lapsed during the Roman period. However, it witnessed a new resurgence during the
Renaissance, at which time its methodology and rational perception were fairly
advanced. By the nineteenth century, history had emerged as a scholarly discipline
through the efforts of Leopold von Ranke and other German scholars who brought
history into its modern form. It is instructive to stress that in the process of its evolution, the tendency has been for Western scholars to pretend that African historiography does not exist, even though it is well known that the writing of African history is as old as history itself.4 For instance, as far back as the sixteenth century, there
already existed the writings of such men as Al-Masudi (c. 950), Al-Bakri (102994),
Ibn Batuta (1304 69), and others. It was, however, Ibn Khaldun (1332 1406) who
could be said to have engaged in looking at history in its modern and current sense.
Indeed, as has been suggested elsewhere, if he were better known to western scholars, [he] might well usurp Herodotuss title of the father of history.5 Whatever the
case, the fact remains that his view of history as a cyclical process, his use of analysis and comparisons in his work, and his insistence that all evidence should not be
weighted equally make him stand out as one of the greatest historical thinkers and
writers of the early period.
Beside the works of Ibn Khaldun and the other mentioned writers, there
were also tarikhs and chronicles such as Tarikh al-Sudan (The Chronicle of the Land
of the Blacks) and Tarikh al Fattash (The Researching Scholars Chronicle), as well
as the Kano and Kilwa chronicles. These writings were to be followed by those of
European travelers such as Alvise Cadamosto, John Barbot, and Reizen Bosman. By
the eighteenth century, European historians had begun to give some attention to
tropical Africa. There were, for instance, Archibald Dalzels History of Dahomey,
published in 1793, and Silvia Correias History of Angola, published in about 1742.
Different authors continued to produce other publications, writings, and comments
pertaining to tropical Africa. To be sure, not all of these were positive. Typical were
the words of Hugh Trevor-Roper, who alleged that what people call history in Africa

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was nothing but the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but
irrelevant corners of the globe.6
The emergence of nationalist movements in the various African colonies during the second quarter of the twentieth century, however, altered the intellectual climate within which historical scholarship was pursued. The nationalist movements
sought to revive within the colonies African culture characterized by values at variance with those of the colonialists.7 As the nationalists began to triumph, African history rejected the perspective and restraint imposed on the colonial situation and
created a new history and a rich one at that. The task was to establish that the
African past had glorious achievements to its credit, ones by no means inferior to
those of Europe. Thus, if Europeans had established organized polities, monarchs,
and cities, nationalist historiography felt challenged to prove that Africans, too, had
produced the same. As Terence Ranger noted, There was a demand for some
almost anypast as a source of pride in Africa.8
The works of pioneer African historians like Kenneth Onwuka Dike, S. O.
Biobaku, B. A. Ogot, and others demonstrated notions such as the one identied
above. All these scholars had similar visions and were engaged, as Ranger recalls, in
the task of demonstration of the possibility and viability of the eld and the evocation of a glorious past in the face of its denial by the colonial mythology of racism.9
Indeed, it must be stressed at this point that nationalist historiography should not
just be seen as an intellectual component of the movement toward independence of
African states; rather, we must also view it as an ideological response to racialism and
the inherent idea of European cultural supremacy.
In spite of these courageous efforts, the concurrent Eurocentric view of
African historiography persisted. One could hear Professor Trevor-Roper from his
base at Oxford contemptuously declaring that history cannot be created out of the
darkness discernible in the African past.10 Imperial historiography, unimpressed
with the enthusiastic efforts of African historians, continued to treat Africa as an
extra in an essentially European epic. Perhaps this persistent contempt was responsible for the innovation in the methodological tools of African historiography. Thus
nonwritten sources such as oral traditions and oral history were acknowledged and
utilized as legitimate tools for producing historical knowledge. At a personal level,
this writer recalls that as an undergraduate, he was made to take courses that emphasized the utilitarian value of oral tradition and oral history in the reconstruction of
the African past. In addition, the university syllabus was designed in such a manner
that the study of African history received pride of place. For example, distinct compulsory courses existed on the history of West Africa, East Africa, southern Africa,
and North Africa, in addition to the numerous courses in Nigerian history and ones
designed to project the role of freedom ghters during the precolonial era. As a
result, little room remained for the study of other parts of the world. Of course, the

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rationale was straightforward: a thorough understanding of the various ramications

of African history, it was felt, could help cure the students of the feeling of helplessness, if not inferiority, that prevailed among them.
Globalization as a Challenge to African Historiography
Despite the lack of consensus about methodology, universal history writing has continued to gather steam, even more so in the last decades of the twentieth century.
This resurgence comes in response to an intensied demand on history as a discipline to supply a perspective required for understanding modern trends. Although
forms of globalization have existed for centuries, the scale and penetration of nonstate forces into local environments have proven extremely profound in more recent
decades. The changes that these forces have effected present themselves to the
social sciences as discontinuities, requiring new models of investigation and analysis.
History as a progressive study of societal changes is best suited to offer the analysis
required for grouping a complex global reality. Only universal history, in my estimation, has the capacity to handle the scope of these complexities.
In the meantime, exogenous forces are fast eroding the claims and sovereign
capacity of governments to control economies, populations, and assets within their borders. National frameworks in any eld are now recognized as nonsatisfactory for political action and academic inquiry. Globalization has brought in its wake subjects whose
comprehension requires global frameworks. These subjectsincluding environmental issues, the health of populations, crime, migration, transportation, popular arts
can no longer be understood and regulated within the boundaries of nation-states.
But can a universal approach adequately represent the African historical
experience? Perhaps one reason why African historians are skeptical about the usefulness of universal history can be located in the fear that the age-old prejudices
against African history will be reected in universal history, especially in the light of
the incapacity of the African school to write a universal history from an African perspective. The question of prejudice and objectivity cannot be divorced from the
appraisal of historical work. This skepticism is an ancient concern that applies to
every section of the eld. Happily, through the course of historiography, standards of
measurement have evolved for works of history. The challenge to African historians
therefore is not to shy away from universal history or to deny its existence as a branch
of the discipline. Rather, they must participate in the international discourse to shape
the curriculum, methodologies, and scope of the subject.
Given the fact of the incapacity of national histories to represent the actual
commonalities that people and societies have shared from ancient times, and their
inability to properly represent such transnational forces that are historically real and
to which nations actually react and adapt, African historians have no choice but to
escape from the cocoon of the precolonial and colonial historiography that many

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have embraced. If the challenge of writing universal history is to nd in the diversity of materials and languages common experiences and explanations of the human
past,11 surely this is not beyond the capacity of African historians. We need to
broaden the curricula in our institutions with a view to integrating into them the
study of diverse regions of the world. This writer is a product of the era during which
the immediate challenge was to prove that Africans had a glorious past. But in the
words of Julius Nyerere, the former president of Tanzania, the days have gone when
intelligent men and women [dared to] suggest that Africans had no history.12
Indeed, in recent times, younger historians in Nigeria have commenced
experimenting with the idea of giving history a broader outlook by expanding the
curriculum of the discipline to include international or even diplomatic studies. This
experiment was championed by my humble self at my university, and it has proven
a tremendous success. Our students have been saved from the daily drudgery of
studying the glorious African past, and in its stead, the study of other regions of the
world has received more primacy.
For the lecturers, too, this newfound enthusiasm has been reected in the
adoption of inter- and multidisciplinary approaches in their works. At the doctoral
level, for example, one student wrote on the inuence of ofcial development assistance on Nigerias economy from 1900 to 1993a topic that would have been considered esoteric a few years ago.13 The more interesting development is that the
external examiners for the work were drawn from the departments of political science and economics.
Unfortunately, transregional intellectual collaboration has remained very limited. This is because the use of the Internet still remains in its infancy in many of our
departments of history. That is not to say that some of the more ambitious and forward-looking lecturers have not been attending international conferences and
involving themselves in international collaborative efforts. It is just that the percentage is minimal. It is my fervent hope that as the use of the Internet becomes more
diffused, African historians will take up their rightful place in the community of
scholars of world history. Universal history does not preclude hemispheric, national,
or local histories. In fact, these sorts of history provide the insights then aggregated
into universal history. For this reason, African historians must continue the accumulation of historical data to increase the African data stock for universal history. The
question is not whether we approve of it or not; universal history is written and will
continue to be written. Global forces are at work, and they require a global perspective to deal with them.

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Notes
1.

2.
3.
4.

5.

6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

11.
12.
13.

Patrick Karl OBrien, Is Universal History Possible? (paper presented on the panel
Perspectives on Global History: Concepts and Methodology at the Nineteenth
International Congress of Historical Sciences in Oslo, Norway, August 14, 2000), 6,
www.osl02000.uio.no/program/mt1a.htm.
Quoted in ibid., 6.
Ibid., 7.
J. D. Fage, The Development of African Historiography, in Methodology and African
Prehistory, vol. 1 of UNESCO General History of Africa, ed. Joseph Ki-Zerbo (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1981), 38.
Gregory Blue, China and the Writing of Universal History in the West (paper presented
on the panel Perspectives on Global History: Concepts and Methodology at the
Nineteenth International Congress of Historical Sciences in Oslo, Norway, August 16,
2000), 26, www.osl02000.uio.no/program/mt1a.htm.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe, Listener, November 28, 1963, 5.
Henry Bernstein and Jacques Depelchin, The Object of African History: A Methodological
Perspective, History in Africa 6 (1979): 2425.
T. O. Ranger, Towards a Useable Past, in African Studies since 1945: A Tribute to Basil
Davidson, ed. Christopher Fyfe (London: Longman, 1976), 18.
Ibid.
Quoted in J. F. Ade Ajayi and E. J. Alagoa, Sub-Saharan Africa, in International Handbook
of Historical Studies: Contemporary Research and Theory, ed. Georg G. Iggers and Harold
J. Parker (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979), 403.
O. B. Oduntan, Universal History, in Issues in Historiography, ed. O. O. Olubomehin
(Ibadan, Nigeria: College Press, 2001), 119.
Quoted in T. O. Ranger, ed., Emerging Themes of African History (Nairobi: East Africa
Publishing House, 1968), 2.
Abolade Adeniji, A Study of Some Aspects of Ofcial Development Assistance to Nigeria,
19001993: A Socio-economic and Political Analysis (PhD diss., University of Lagos, 1998).