GUY MARTIN’S AFRICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT

Abstract

The contention that the bulk of what Africa parades today in terms of scholarship was completely a heritage from their colonial encounter has lingered. In fact, some scholars of European origin, such as Seligman (1930), Hegel (1956), Trevor-Roper (1963), Sabine and Thomson (1973) etc. maintain that Africa’s history and civilization begins and ends with the history of the Europeans. Trevor-Roper in Ihediwa (2018) bluntly asserts that “Africa had no history prior to European exploration and colonization; there is only the history of Europeans in Africa, the rest being darkness”. Trevor-Roper’s ultimate goal was to convince his readers that hundreds of thousands of years prior to her encounter with the colonialists, Africa was a land of inactivity, occupied by a people with no form of organization and leadership, without any form of cultural, political, agricultural, and commercial activities. To Hegel (1956: 99), while the rest of the world was making history and recreating themselves, “Africa was no historical part of the world; it had no movement or development to exhibit”. Europeans’ conception of Africans as a ‘race’ incapable of identifying and resolving any of their societal challenges without their assistance strongly suggests that African natives had no autochthonous political thought prior to their colonial encounter. However, the above skewed conception of the rich African heritage by the Europeans has generated series of reactions among notable African scholars such as Fanon (1967), Rodney (1972), Ake (1983), Afigbo (1984), Biereenu-Nnabugwu (2011), Martin (2012), etc. While Fanon (1967) avers that the Europeans, through cultural imperialism, destroyed African heritage by portraying it as the most undeserving evil and forcefully integrating the natives into the Western sociocultural systems, which resulted in the psychic alienation of the natives, Afigbo (1984) contends that the Europeans tactfully took the paucity of written documents to mean that Africa had no history and exploited same to distort obvious facts.