Development Of African Historiography Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 2

Development Of African Historiography - Essay Example The historians, mostly hailing from European nations, who relied on material and tangible discoveries as the only sources of information about the early life of any culture, classified the world into â€Å"civilizations† based on an inappropriate definition of the term referring only to societies that left evidences of complex social and cultural systems with a centralized authority that controlled labor, wealth, military forces and commissioned the construction of cities and towns and other public buildings, as well as works of ‘monumental’ art. (Ehret)This approach led to a distinction between different cultures around the world on the basis of intelligence that was measured mostly from written texts that could be translated and could provide a vision into the life of the early people, dismissing the rest of the world as ‘uncivilized’ and ‘unintelligent’ (Ehret) Such attitudes assisted the slave traders in undermining the humanity of the African people, looking down upon their traditional values as ‘primitive’, their ethnic communities as ‘tribes’, their nation as a ‘race’. (Ehret 4-9)These terms though originally meaning nothing degrading have come to be associated with ideas denoting a distinction from what is considered to be ordinary and accepted in a ‘civilized’ society and consequently such dismissals prevented the historians of that time to investigate events that accounted for African history. Thus the rich cultural life of a huge percentage of the population of the world has been left undiscovered due to the limiting beliefs and predetermined superiority of smaller class. Historians today, however, have understood the implications of such an error and have made efforts to develop unique research methodologies for investigating past events through mainly Oral Tradition and Archeology as well as other interesting sources such as genetics, linguistics, and botany.