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Africanism And Culture
Written by Kwame Nkrumah   
AFRICANISM AND CULTURE
(EXCERPT OF SPEECH GIVEN AT THE CONGRESS OF AFRICANISTS)
By KWAME NKRUMAH
(ACCRA, GHANA--DECEMBER 1962)

"We have made our contribution to the fund of human knowledge by
extending the frontiers of art, culture and spiritual values."
-- Dr. Kwame Nkrumah

If we have lost touch with what our forefathers discovered and knew,
this has been due to the system of education to which we were introduced.
This system of education prepared us for a subservient role to Europe and things
European. It was directed at estranging us from our own cultures in order the
more effectively to serve a new and alien interest.

The central myth in the mythology surrounding Africa is that of the
denial that we are a historical people. It is said that whereas other continents
have shaped history and determined its course, Africa has stood still, held down
by inertia. Africa, it is said, entered history only as a result of European
contact. Its history, therefore, is widely felt to be an extension of European
history. Hegel's authority was lent to this a-historical hypothesis
concerning Africa. And apologists of colonialism and imperialism lost little time in
seizing upon it and writing wildly about it to their heart's content.

To those who say that there is no documentary source for that period
of African history which pre-dates the European contact, modern research has a
crushing answer. We know that we were not without a tradition of
historiography, and, that this is so, is now the verdict of true Africanists. African
historians, by the end of the 15th century, had a tradition of recorded history,
and certainly by the time when Mohamud al-Kati wrote Tarikh al-Fattash. This
tradition was incidentally much, much wider than that of the Timbuktu school of
historians, and our own Institute of African Studies here at this University, is
bringing to light several chronicles relating to the history of Northern Ghana.

The Chinese, too, during the T'ang dynasty (AD. 618-907), published
their earliest major records of Africa. In the 18th century, scholarship
connected Egypt with China; but Chinese acquaintance with Africa was not only
confined to knowledge of Egypt. They had detailed knowledge of Somaliland,
Madagascar and Zanzibar and made extensive visits to other parts of Africa.

The European exploration of Africa reached its height in the 19th
century. What is unfortunate, however, is the fact that much of the discovery was
given a subjective instead of an objective interpretation. In the
regeneration of learning which is taking place in our universities and in other
institutions of higher learning, we are treated as subjects and not objects. They
forget that we are a historic people responsible for our unique forms of
language, culture and society. It is therefore proper and fitting that a Congress of
Africanists should take place in Africa and that the concept of Africanism
should devolve from and be animated by that Congress.

Between ancient times and the 16th century, some European scholars
forgot what their predecessors in African Studies had known. This amnesia, this
regrettable loss of interest in the power of the African mind, deepened with
growth of interest in the economic exploitation of Africa. It is no wonder
that the Portuguese were erroneously credited with having erected the stone
fortress of Mashonaland which, even when Barbossa, cousin of Magellan, first
visited them, were ruins of long standing.