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Monday, February 6, 2017

The History the Slaveholders Wanted Us to Forget | By Henry Louis Gates, J. FEB. 4, 2017

Black History Month

Writing in 1965, the distinguished British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper argued against the idea that black people in Africa had their own history: “There is only the history of the Europeans in Africa,” he declared. “The rest is largely darkness.” History, he continued, “is essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement too,” which in his view Africans lacked.

Trevor-Roper was echoing an idea that goes back at least to the early 19th century. But it wasn’t always this way. When the young Prince Cosimo de Medici (1590-1621) was being tutored to become the Duke of Tuscany — about the time that Shakespeare was writing “Hamlet” — he was asked to memorize a “summary of world leaders” that included Álvaro II, the King of Kongo, along with the Mutapa Empire and the mythical “Prester John” of Ethiopia. Soon, however, even that level of knowledge about African history would be rare.

Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that ideas about Africans and their supposed lack of history and culture were used to justify the enslavement of millions of Africans throughout the New World, especially during the 19th century when sugar production was reaching a zenith in Cuba and cotton was making growers and manufacturers rich. What is surprising is that these ideas persisted well into the 20th century, among white and black Americans alike.

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A generation of African leaders who inspired an American schoolboy: from left, Patrice Lumumba and Moïse Tshombe of the Congo; Léopold Senghor of Senegal; and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. Credit From left, photographs by Terence Spencer/The Life Images Collection, via Getty Images (both), Agency France-Presse/Getty Images, and Bettmann Archive

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