So many “Africas” that you don’t expect

One of the great battles that Africans faced in the process of emancipation from European domination was to affirm the existence of a totally African history of Africa, free from any relationship with Europe.

It was therefore necessary, first of all, to deal with the idea of nineteenth-century European origin that Africa was a continent without history, without civilization, on the margins of world events with the exception of Egypt and the other lands overlooking the Mediterranean. This image of a continent without history clearly derived from the racist imagination of nineteenth-century colonialism and the dynamics of imperialism that conceived European domination as the fruit of a presumed superiority of "white" civilization, thus justifying the occupation of territories, discrimination, exploitation of people and resources. From this perspective, Hegel could write in his Philosophy of History of 1831: "Africa is a part of the world that has no history, it does not present any movement or development, any development of its own. That is to say, the northern part belongs to the Asian and European world. What we properly mean by Africa is the spirit without history, the undeveloped spirit, still wrapped up in natural conditions..."

A totally distorted and Eurocentric perspective of the African historical events has permeated studies on Africa until very recent years and partly continues even today, preventing us from building a different, original vision of the African continent.

A different and indiscreet vision that is fortunately offered to us by Gianfranco Giovannone and Luca Bussotti in their Sguardi sull'Africa (Ibis, 2024, pp. 150), a short but intense journey through the African continent proposed to Italian readers, increasingly curious to delve into a land that, even today, in the era of global communication, emanates mystery, charm and desperation.

With a style accessible to all readers, the authors introduce us to some of the thousand possible “Africas”, from Conrad to the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, from the representations that Italian music (De Gregori, Battiato, among others) has provided of the African over time, up to Antonio da Noli, the Ligurian navigator “discoverer” of Cape Verde, in the pay of the Portuguese crown, and much more. Literature, music, history and politics characterize this book with multiple perspectives, apparently parallel, but in truth always crossed, intertwined and in the perennial search for the encounter between different worlds. A book with multiple perspectives, as multiple is Africa, or rather the “Africas” that we can encounter.

It is no coincidence that one of the greatest African historians, the Ghanaian Albert Adu Boahen, wrote: «Despite the many similar characteristics, the events of the individual units that make up the black continent can be fully understood only if studied in themselves, with their own sources and their own reasons».

For the Ghanaian historian, in fact, the history of Africa «is the sum of differentiated local histories. The only common factor is the same methodology. The history of the continent must be gradually replaced by histories of Africa or of the Africas».