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Having lived in Canada for many years now, I have come to know the month of February as Black History Month. In fact, since 1926, February has been designated as Black History month in North America.

During one of the Black History Month celebrations here in Edmonton, I engaged in a chat with a gentleman who had come to find out what it was all about. During our conversation he kept asking me why do Black people need a month to celebrate their history? He wanted to know what is Black history? And if there is any history of African people at all to talk or read about.

I must say I was not surprised at his queries. I cannot remember the number of times I have heard or read somewhere that, as Africans we have not contributed anything substantial to history. In fact, to many Westerners we have no history at all. This statement by a Columbia University professor is very typical: "Over the past 5,000 years," he noted, "the history of black Africa is blank. The black African had no written language; no numerals; no calendar, or system of measurement. He did not devise a plough or wheel, nor did he domesticate an animal; he built nothing more complex than a mud hut or thatched stockade. The African had no external trade except in slaves of his own race, in ivory, and (on the West Coast) in palm oil and mahogany."

And of course, there is the much quoted pronouncement by the eminent Oxford University historian, Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper who said that: "Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at the present there is none; there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness ... and darkness is not the subject of history".

Or what about the view expressed by the British scholar of Africa, Margery Perham, who wrote that: "Until the very recent penetration of Europe the greater part of the [African] continent was without the wheel, the plough or the transport animal; without stone houses or clothes except skins; without writing and so without history."

In his book, Progress and Evolution of Man in Africa, Dr. L. S. B. Leakey wrote that: "In every country that one visits and where one is drawn into a conversation about Africa, the question is regularly asked by people who should know better: "But what has Africa contributed to world progress?"

What I have found troubling though is how many of us in the Black or African communities still believe some of these statements. I have encountered Blacks who are completely ignorant or have less knowledge about African history - despite the many fine books on African history and the rise of the Afrocentric movement in North America.

African-American historian John Hope Franklin was right when he told an interviewer that: "[Blacks] can never expect the public schools to teach us as much about our history as we want to know. We can urge them, we can press them to teach more, but I think that much of this lies with us."

As someone interested in Black education, I find it a tragedy that many Black and African children grow up today convinced of their own inferiority. The educational process largely ignores the contributions of Blacks to world civilization and is full of negative perceptions of Blacks and their culture. The school system in North America has continually perpetuated the historical myths and stereotypes about the African past.

I was almost moved to tears to read in a recent Canadian newspaper report about a Black student who until enrolling in a Black-oriented remedial school never knew or read a book by a Black author. There have been reports about how studies in Black history have been an "eye-opener for [Black] students" in Canadian high schools.

One account noted that students are not taught any African or Black history in regular classes. As one student put it: "They have always taken Canadian history, prime ministers, kings, queens. Maybe some US history. But they've never taken anything African". Or as another student said at a high school in Toronto: "History, Canadian history, English or anything else, was always about white people."

In a Windsor high school where a history course in African history has just began, teachers observed how Black students are "amazed and are absolutely intrigued about what they learn about the African past." Similarly, the introduction of Black history in a Toronto high school in 1993 +is part of an initiative to engage more black students in academics, to hook in kids who come from educational jurisdictions outside Canada.

Their vital interest in the course would be the means to develop their learning skills+researching, communicating, reading. " Already, teachers in Canadian schools have noticed what one called +signs of a newly informed dissent." One teacher observed that: "A few weeks ago, one of my students, stood up in his Grade 11 English class and asked why there weren+t any black writers on the reading list." And "through the influence of the black history course, a number of "high-risk" students are taking on more academically demanding courses and faring well."

I have always believed what African American historian John Henrik Clarke said a long time ago that, to control a people you must first control what they think about themselves and how they regard their history and culture. And when your conqueror makes you ashamed of your culture and your history, he needs no prison walls and no chains to hold you.

The chains on your mind are more than enough. Over time, many of us Africans have been injected with inferiority complexes, humiliation and cultural degradation as a result of the lack of knowledge of ourselves and our past. We have become caricatures and an inferior subset of the human race in the body of Western thought. Teacher, historian and educational psychologist, Asa Hilliard has said many times that no groups other than Native Americans and African Americans, in the history of the United States have undergone more defamation of character through distortion, omission, suppression of information, and genocide.

African American historian Carter Woodson has written about how "the thought of the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies .... To handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst form of lynching. It kills one's aspirations and dooms him to vagabondage and crime".

This degradation of African peoples goes on till this day. Just witness the recent publication of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American life", a book that assigns genetically inferior intelligence to African peoples everywhere.

It is enough of a tragedy for colonialists and white racists to degrade Africans in this manner, but this tragedy is compounded when as Africans we join in the mockery. Therefore, to me, there can be no freedom until there is freedom of the mind. I always remember the lyric by the late Bob Marley which says: "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds."

This brings me back to why there is a Black History Month in North America. Why is it important to know our history? Carter Woodson, who is credited with founding Black History Month was the premier Black historian to put forward the idea of African history as a form of Black cultural empowerment and emancipation.

In his view, the knowledge and dissemination of African history would, "besides building self-esteem among blacks, help eliminate prejudice among whites." He aimed both "to inculcate in the mind of the youth of African blood an appreciation of what their race has thought and felt and done" and to publicize the facts of the Black among whites, so that "the Negro may enjoy a larger share of the privileges of democracy as a result of the recognition of his worth."

In a speech at Hampton Institute in 1921 Woodson addressed the issue head on: "We have a wonderful history behind us. ... If you are unable to demonstrate to the world that you have this record, the world will say to you, 'You are not worthy to enjoy the blessings of democracy or anything else'. They will say to you, +Who are you, anyway? Your ancestors have never controlled empires or kingdoms and most of your race have contributed little or nothing to science and philosophy and mathematics."

So far as you know, they have not; but if you will read the history of Africa, the history of your ancestors' people of whom you should feel proud+you will realize that they have a history that is worth while. They have traditions...of which you can boast and upon which you can base a claim for a right to a share in the blessings of democracy.

Let us, then, study...this history...with the understanding that we are not, after all, an inferior people. ... We are going back to that beautiful history and it is going to inspire us to greater achievements. It is not going to be long before we can sing the story to the outside world as to convince it of the value of our history...and we are going to be recognized as men.

In his 1933 classic work, The Miseducation of the Negro, Woodson showed the fundamental problems concerning the education of the African person. He noted how Blacks have been educated away from their own culture and traditions and how as African peoples we have attached ourselves to European culture often to the detriment of our own heritage.

Who would believe for example that, the music department of Fisk University, a traditionally Black university, concentrated on classical European music to the exclusion of the music that expressed the Black experience in America, and Black history and sociology courses were rare and exceptional until after World War 1? Or that French textbooks on African history taught to African children on the African continent, even to this day, would treat French colonialism in Africa as an unqualified blessing and joy for the African?

If education is ever to be substantive and meaningful within the context of North American and world history, Woodson argued, it must first address the African+s historical experiences, both in Africa and the Diaspora. "No nation, no race," observed Dr. Charles Finch of the Morehouse School of Medicine "can face the future unless it knows what it is capable of. This is the function of history."

Thus, as James Walker notes in his book, A History of Blacks in Canada: "...the study of black history can give blacks a sense of the positive achievements of their people, and provide self-confidence and self-pride which are essential to any program of assertiveness." Cornell University Professor Martin Bernal, author of Black Athena, has acknowledged that: "Eurocentric history as taught in schools and universities has had a very large ego-boosting, if not therapeutic, purpose for whites. ... It's in a way normal for the idea that Blacks should have some confidence building in their pedagogy."

There is a Swahili adage which says: "You are what you make of yourself, and not what others make you." In fact, a positive identity or enhanced self-concept is critical for the academic, social, and personal success of Black students everywhere. And this is where Black history becomes important.

Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah has written about the need for "a re-awakening [of] consciousness among Africans and peoples of African descent of the bonds that unite us - our historical past, our culture, our common experience and our aspirations."

And the late Afro-Guyanese historian, Walter Rodney made the same point when he wrote that: "What we need is confidence in ourselves, so that as Africans we can be conscious, united, independent and creative. A knowledge of African achievements in art, education, religion, politics, agriculture, medicine, science and the mining of metals can help us gain the necessary confidence which has been removed by slavery and colonialism."

So if they say as Africans we don't have a history, we should be able to point out the fallacy in such ignorant statements by referring to works by distinguished African historians such as Cheikh Anta Diop, Chancellor Williams, Walter Rodney, Adu Boahen, John Jackson, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, John Hope Franklin, Leronne Bennett Jr., John Henrik Clarke, J. F. Ade Ajayi and many more. Thanks to their works, we've come to know that when we talk about African history, we are also talking about African astronomy, African mathematics, African metallurgy, African medicine, African engineering and so on.

And thanks to the great contribution by the late African historian, Cheikh Anta Diop, we now know that the history that we need to recover includes that Egyptian science and technology which laid the foundation for the development of Europe. The use of historical knowledge must be a weapon in our struggle for complete liberation.

An overall view of ancient African civilizations and ancient African cultures is required to get rid of all myths about the African past, which continues to linger in the minds of Black and African peoples everywhere. And that is what Black History Month is all about. Remember the African saying: "Know your history and you will always be wise."

Henry Martey Codjoe
A Policy Consultant
with the Alberta Department of Education, Canada.

January 1995

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