Africa has a rich history of external conceptualisations. What has been “known” by much of the world about the continent has long been a product of external scholarship. It was however in Africa’s encounter with Europe’s colonial powers that the most enduring (and arguably the most damaging) image of the continent was formed. Africa was studied as a primitive, uncivilised, and otherworldly place — a continent of savages and cannibals so vividly portrayed to a Western audience in writing like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness — a “prehistoric Earth … an unknown planet” inhabited by “prehistoric man”. Africa was set up as the antithesis of Western civilisation: an unknown into which Europeans could peer for assurance about their superior positions in the hierarchy of nature. As Comaroff says, Africa and the African “marked the point at which humanity gave way to animality”. Thus Africa was painted as an “other”: a continent without history in which indigenous bodies of knowledge and ways of thought were not considered. In the “natural progression” of the world towards European civilisation, Africa and the African were centuries behind the colonising powers.

The legacy of this thinking is still with us, despite the efforts of initiatives from Negritude and Black Consciousness to the African Renaissance, as eminent figures like Hugh Trevor-Roper and Nikolas Sarkozy portray. Trevor-Roper, Oxford’s late regius professor of modern history said in 1963 that “Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is