Reviewer: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong in Ottawa, Canada

TITLE: TRADITION AND CHANGE IN AFRICA

The Essays of J. F. Ade. Ajayi

Edited By: Toyin Falola

Publisher: African World Press, Inc. P.O. Box 48, Asmara, Eritrea. 2000.

Pages: 463

Price: US$89.95 (Hardcover); US$29.95 (Paperback)

REVIEWER: KOFI AKOSAH-SARPONG

Increasingly, African history and values are coming in the forefront in the (re) search for solutions to the continent’s problems. Notably of recent times is the African media, for long seeing their own continent from Eurocentric lens, more because of the training they have received, are gradually shifting editorial stance towards African history and values in interpreting what occurs in Africa and how to solve the problems. The African media are backed, and informed, by the works of African academics such as Professor Toyin Falola’s edited Tradition and Change in Africa: The Essays of J.F. ADE. AJAYI in the new African journalism game. The book is a collection of essays written over the past 40 years by Nigeria’s top historian and Africanist, Dr. J.F. Ade. Ajayi, now 70 years old and for long vice-chancellor of the University of Lagos and currently a member of the Group of Eminent Persons established by the Organization of African Unity, O.A.U.

The essay dances around such themes like relevance of the past in understanding the present, the importance of 19^th century history to today’s African issues and the development and legacy of slavery in Africa. Among the three persons who wrote the comments for this very important book is Africa’s ace social scientist, Kenya’s Prof. Ali Mazrui, entitled "The Mirror of Africanity." Mazrui says "Global Africa" means the African continent plus its Diaspora worldwide, from Kampala to Kingston, from Harare to Harlem, from the remote village of Duasi in the Asante Region of Ghana to big city of Cleveland, U.S.A. and encompassing African-Brazilians to African-Europeans to African-Canadians. He says Global Africa is entrapped by the Western world in four great denials—the denial of history, the denial of science, the denial of poetry, and the denial of philosophy. And it is in this sense that scholars and visionaries like Prof. J.F. Ade. Ajayi have been important to Africa’s post-colonial defense against these four denials or Negrophobia. Mazrui says this Negrophobia is best captured in the notorious statement by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was then Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University: "Maybe in the future there will be African history, but at the moment there is none…There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness, and darkness is not a subject of history." Very painful phenomena and this calls for sustained battle by the African media, who are currently positioned to free Africa from the ethnocentrism of yesteryears, to correct such ignorance.

On denial of science Mazrui informs us that Westerners like David Hume asserted that among the African race are to be found "no ingenious manufactures…no arts, no sciences. And Thomas Jefferson, the American founding father denied Africans of capacity for great poetry. Stated Jefferson, "Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is the misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love [the love of blacks] is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion, indeed, has a Phyllis Wheatley, but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under name are below the dignity of criticism." And the same goes for the Westerners denial of Africans ability to philosophize and some Africans like Leopold Senghor, the former President of Senegal, had perpetuated this. Senghor had stated elsewhere that Africans are good at expressing emotions while the Europeans are good at thinking.

Mazrui says Africans themselves such as Prof. Ajayi are increasingly taking up the study of Africa and that the physical presence of Africans in the world is expanding demographically but how this will consolidate or contradict the ancient negative stereotypes is yet to be seen. He said people like Dr. Ajayi are worried about the future including leadership in African research. He says Ajayi does not suffer from Sub-Sahara syndrome, the seeing of Africa only from sub-Sahara excluding those from north. He describes Ajayi as Trans-Atlantic Pan-Africanist.

For Prof. Ajayi, the modern African State is in neck-to-neck competition with the traditional state. Today’s nation-state, a creation of non-Africans, is said to be "undermining, replacing and transforming the traditional societies and cultures." And in a heated dance, the so-called modern is under siege from the die-hard traditional, and in the ensuing difficulties the past is idealized and seen as providing most of the missing elements lacking in the modern state, or "to ignore it as too remote and not relevant to our current needs." And echoing many an African Renaissance talks today, Dr. Ajayi tasks the critical historian, including the emerging genre of Afric-centric journalism, to "explore and seek to understand the past better, so that its relevance to the concerns of the present can be more clearly defined and appreciated."

Ajayi emphasize the concept of change and transformation because the African traditional societies were never static "tribal" ones imagined by some wrong-headed colonial anthropologists. On the other hand, he is quick to point out that the movement of change and transformation, some attitudes, values and cultural traits tend to endure—such as the disturbing specter of juju and marabou and witchcraft. And added to this is the endurance of traditional African social justice, which is embedded in the African’s humanism, community and participation, and all at the heart of the life of the African society in the face of individualism and the acquisitive society via the emergence of class structures according to the control of state power, which dictates economic power and political power, both of which control education, the hierarchies of which restrict access to education and other factors that facilitate social mobility. And despite this heavy disturbances to Africa’s values, Ajayi informs us that the notion of community still persist in Africa, not only at the village level but at the urban level.

The wide-ranging essays in this book reveal the core causes of political and economic instability in Africa and "they constitute an appeal to reason for racial justice and purposeful amelioration of the painful legacies of slavery and colonial rule," as Prof. Richard Sklar of the University of California, Los Angeles writes in the introduction to this collection. Such views are seen in Ajayi’s education of Africans that there are cultural foundations of African unity. The skepticism that colonial boundaries have "balkanized" Africa is seen through colonial propaganda, including even radical critics of colonial rule, that pre-colonial Africa were collection of isolated tribes, engaged in internecine war and that it was the colonialism that "pacified" and unified the African tribes into the various states of modern Africa. But Ajayi informs us that current study of African history, more seen in the UNESCO General History of Africa, repudiates such misleading colonial picture. "In places of isolated tribes unified by colonial boundaries, historians now see a pre-colonial Africa in which cultural frontiers, being nowhere factors of human divide, tended to unite rather than divide neighbors all across the continent, and that these cultures, through change and adaptation, have proved resilient and even today, in spite of the colonial boundaries, still exercising a pull towards unity," argued Dr. Ajayi.

Herein lies the foundation of African cultural unity in the African geographical space within which African cultures have been formed and developed. And these differences have oiled the means and modes of production, and specializations in agricultural produce, craft, minerals and manufactured goods, turning to encourage exchange, barter and interaction. All these ecological zones have been changing with different African peoples adapting to the environment. However, these different zones merge one into the other, making the nature of African societies use cultural frontiers as more of "points of contact between neighbors than as lines of human divide." Over time, different channels of communication have emerged to facilitate linkages among different parts of Africa. "From archaeological and linguistic studies, and the oral traditions of various peoples preserved in group memory and handed down over the ages, we know enough about population movements on the continent to say that the geography of the continent has provided the base for the unity of African cultures," reveals Dr. Ajayi.

Repudiating the notion of disruption of African institutions, Ajayi offers that there is rather continuity of African institutions no matter the damaging intrusion of colonialism. "The view that African society in the pre-colonial period was static and unchanging is, of course, unhistorical," thundered Prof. Ajayi, in bring to open the European lies of yesteryears about Africa. To read this is to know how Europeans, through their anthropologists enforcers, who have used Africa as their main laboratory over time, got everything wrong in Africa, seeing Africa’s cultural institutions from their perspectives and misleading the larger world about who is Africa—a damaging development which has been running for far too long in the brains of non-Africans.

For Prof. Ajayi, any long-term historical observation of African history, "European rule becomes just another episode. In relation to wars and conflicts of people, the rise and the fall of empires, linguistic, cultural and religious change and the cultivation of new ideas and new ways of life, new economic orientations and so on, in relation to all these, colonialism must be seen as not as a complete departure from the African past, but as one episode in the continuous flow of African history," underlined Prof. Ajayi, who has preached the doctrine of continuity in history as almost an article of faith.