PERSPECTIVES ON AND OF AFRICA – THABO MBEKI 1/2

TO have a perspective about something, signifying a “mental view” about the past, the present and the future, necessarily assumes that there must have been information, events and processes that shaped that mental view.

Accordingly, perspectives on Africa must also be based on information, whether correct or otherwise, events and processes about Africa and in Africa.

On the 19 to 25 May 2025 the 15th Thabo Mbeki Africa Day Lecture is scheduled to take place in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. 

This year’s theme, “The State of the Continent: Reigniting the African Renaissance,” will guide a series of meaningful engagements aimed at catalysing action toward a united and prosperous Africa. The event will be hosted at the Julius Nyerere International Convention Centre, in collaboration with the Julius Nyerere Foundation. We are honoured to announce that the keynote address will be delivered by Judge Joseph Sinde Warioba, former Prime Minister of the United Republic of Tanzania.

To mark this venerable and august occasion and bestow upon it the honour and dignity it so richly deserves RADIO FREEDOM has chosen to republish a Lecture delivered by President THABO MBEKI on the 08/04/2006 under the heading PERSPECTIVES ON AND ABOUT AFRICA.

TO have a perspective about something, signifying a “mental view” about the past, the present and the future, necessarily assumes that there must have been information, events and processes that shaped that mental view.

Accordingly, perspectives on Africa must also be based on information, whether correct or otherwise, events and processes about Africa and in Africa.

Dealing with this matter a number of questions arise, like:

• What past and present information is available on Africa?
• Who gathers and disseminates such information?
• Who interprets events and processes in Africa?
• From what point of view are these interpretations made?
• Whose views dominate the daily discourse in our country and in the rest of the continent?
• In other words, what is the world outlook of those who present news to us, those who analyse events and those who interpret processes taking place on the continent?
• Whose ideas drive our societies?

A certain continuum in the global perspective on or of Africa makes it inevitable that we look back into the history of this continent.

Let us begin with the most systematic distortions of the African history and the place of Africans in the historical scheme of things, especially in 19th century Europe. The European historians of the 19th century were consumed by the cancer of racism and the firm belief that there were no human beings on earth who were divinely endowed with intelligence, fortitude and wisdom than those who populated the European countries.

About blacks they were absolutely sure that these were not only incapable of making any significant contribution to human civilisation but were in fact sub-humans who needed the tutelage, on everything, of the matured European peoples.

Thus began a distortion of who was responsible for one of the greatest civilisations in human history, the Egyptian civilisation, which left a permanent mark on all subsequent civilisations.

Accordingly, the 19th century Europeans, could not contemplate the possibility that blacks could have been responsible for such an outstanding civilisation, and began ascribing that civilisation to everyone except black Africans.

In this regard, the historian Basil Davidson has observed that: “None of this rather fruitless argument, as to the skin colour of the ancient Egyptians before the arrival of the Arabs in the seventh century AD, would have arisen without the eruption of modern European racism during the 1830s.

“It became important to the racists, then and since, to deny to Africans any capacity to build a great civilisation.

“We should dismiss all that. What one needs to hold in mind is the enormous value and direct relevance of the Pharaonic records to Africa’s remote history.”

The outstanding scholar, Martin Bernal, also addressed this issue in his seminal work, Black Athena. He wrote about how European scholarship in the 19th century sought to deny the fact reflected in ancient Greek texts that the ancient Greeks had learnt much of what constituted Greek civilisation directly from the Egyptians. He wrote: “In the long run we can see that (the eminent place of) Egypt was also harmed by the rise of racism and the need to disparage every African culture; during the 18th century, however, the ambiguity of Egypt’s ‘racial’ position allowed its supporters (among European scholars) to claim that it was essentially and originally ‘white’. Greece, by contrast, benefited from racism, immediately and in every way, and it was rapidly seen as the ‘childhood’ of the ‘dynamic’ ‘European race’.”

It was this European racism and attempts to deny Africans any capacity to build great civilisations that made even late 20th century European historians, such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, boldly to declare that Africans had no history.

For instance Trevor-Roper said: “Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa.

“The rest is darkness and darkness is not a subject of history. We cannot therefore afford to amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.”

I take it for granted that all of us know the irrefutable fact that the Egyptians who build that great civilisation were “black with kinky hair” as the great Greek historian, Herodotus, said.

To disabuse Trevor-Roper and others like him of the false notion that from its infancy, the universe of human evolution was made in the image of Europe we shall state some few facts.

Blacks invented the art of writing in the form of Egyptian hieroglyphics. In later years they modified it into a phonetic sign language consisting of 24-word word-signs, each of which had one consonant. These were the foundation of the emergence of the modern alphabets.

Among others, the ancient Egyptian tombs are famous for the mummies that date back thousands of years. To be able to do mummification these Africans had to master a number of different disciplines, including physics, chemistry, medicine and surgery.

The Egyptians mastered these disciplines over many years of experience and later taught, especially the Greeks, who in turn spread this knowledge to Western Europe.

Egyptians were able to do mummification because of their high expertise in surgical techniques.

Between 5 600 and 5 400 years ago Egyptians produced what is today known as the Smith Papyrus, which is a treatise on bone surgery and external pathology.

The Greek Hippocrates, regarded as the father of medicine, studied in the temple of Memphis in Egypt where he learned from the library of a great Egyptian physician, Imhotep, whom the Greeks called Askelepios.

Ancient Egyptians invented mathematics and divided it into arithmetic, algebra and geometry. This knowledge was later passed on to the Greeks. The development of the ancient calendar began in Egypt, initially by observing the behaviour of the Nile River which had three cycles of four months each.

Egyptians also engaged in engineering, construction, ship-building and architecture. They then imparted their vast knowledge to the Greeks most of whom became very famous such as Plato, Pythagoras, Eudoxes, the mathematician and astronomer, Hippocrates and many others whose work reflected the great and pervasive influence of the black Africans.

END OF PART 1/2 PART 2 TO FOLLOW.