A creative reset of modern African history, including a volume focused on the diaspora, has been released in three books to update and complement UNESCO’s original eight-volume series.
The three new volumes in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) General History of Africa series mark a deliberate shift toward an Afrocentric reading of the continent’s past. For much of history, African narratives were shaped by explorers and external observers, a distortion that, left unchallenged, risks impoverishing global understanding.
If this is not corrected, says Martial Ze Belinga, a contributor to the series, “humanity will lack the reality and the truth of [African] people and that part of humankind”.
He argues that the Eurocentrism long embedded in historical knowledge must be decentralised.
“That’s why it’s important to go beyond those visions, beyond those perceptions that are foreign perceptions,” Ze Belinga, a sociology and economic researcher, tells The Africa Report.
More than 350 African and international scholars contributed to the project, reconstructing African history through research spanning agronomy, archaeology, linguistics, oral traditions and political thought.
