The Last Border Is the Mind

The Memory of Empires “Every empire that has ever existed has, in the end, been remembered for what it built — not for what it destroyed. Africa will be remembered for what it builds next.” There is a habit, in the contemporary discussion of African history, of beginning the conversation with the slave trade. I want to gently insist that this is the wrong place to begin. To begin the conversation with the trade in African bodies is to organize African memory around its greatest injury. It is to assume, implicitly, that Africa is best understood as the recipient of historical violence rather than as the originator of historical achievement. This habit, which is well-intentioned in many of its practitioners — pedagogical, even reparative in spirit — has had, on the African self-image, a corrosive long-term effect. It has produced generations of African students who know the dates of the Berlin Conference and the volumes of the Atlantic trade, but who do not know the dates of the Mali Empire at its peak, the architecture of the Great Zimbabwe, the libraries of Timbuktu, the gold-mediated diplomacy of the Ashanti court, the navigation systems of the Swahili coast, the medical traditions of the Yoruba, the astronomical observations of the Dogon, the constitutional sophistication of the Tswana kgotla. The injury, however real, has come to overshadow the inheritance. This is a profound mistake. This chapter is an attempt to restore the inheritance to its proper position in the African memory, because I have come to believe that no continent can build a Renaissance from a self-image organized around its wounds. A Renaissance is built from a self-image organized around its capabilities. The wounds must be remembered — they must be honoured, they must be reckoned with — but they cannot be the foundation. The foundation must be what came before the wounds, and what has survived the wounds, and what can be built after the wounds. So let us remember, briefly, the empires. Before the European powers arrived on the African coasts in any significant numbers, before the slave trade reached its catastrophic industrial scale, before the colonial enterprise carved the continent’s borders along lines that ignored every cultural and ecological reality, Africa was a continent of empires, kingdoms, republics, confederations, and civic traditions whose sophistication compares favourably with any contemporaneous civilization on earth. The Mali Empire in West Africa, at its peak in the fourteenth century, was one of the wealthiest political entities in the world. Its emperor, Mansa Musa, made a pilgrimage to Mecca whose distribution of gold along the route was so extensive that the price of gold in Egypt is said to have remained depressed for years afterward. This is a fact preserved in Arab chronicles, not African ones. The empire’s capital, Timbuktu, contained libraries whose manuscripts on astronomy, jurisprudence, medicine, and philosophy ran into the hundreds of thousands of volumes. A meaningful fraction of those manuscripts, against extraordinary odds, has survived the centuries and is currently being painstakingly catalogued by modern scholars. They contain knowledge that the European Renaissance, in many cases, did not yet possess. The Great Zimbabwe, in southern Africa, was a stone city whose architectural sophistication, built without mortar, baffled the European explorers who first encountered it. So baffled were they that several of them refused to believe it had been built by Africans at all, and invented theories of Phoenician or other non-African origin to account for the evidence in front of their own eyes. Those theories were, of course, nonsense. The city was built by the ancestors of the Shona people. The technical capability the city represents — long-distance trade with the Indian Ocean network, gold metallurgy, hydrological engineering, urban planning — places its builders in the small global elite of pre-modern civilizational achievement. The Ashanti Confederation, in what is now Ghana, developed a federal political system, a sophisticated diplomatic corps, a system of public account-keeping using gold weights of standardized denominations, an army with professional command structures, and a court whose legal proceedings were recorded by skilled clerks. The British, when they finally invaded, did so against a polity that was, in many functional respects, the institutional peer of their own. The Swahili city-states along the East African coast — Mombasa, Zanzibar, Kilwa, and many others — were nodes in an Indian Ocean trade network that connected Africa to Arabia, Persia, India, Indonesia, and China for over a thousand years before the first European ship arrived. Their architecture, their literature, their cuisine, their merchant law, their multilingual urbanity remain visible today, despite centuries of erosion, in the coral-stone houses of Lamu and Stone Town. The Kingdom of Aksum, in present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea, was contemporary with the Roman Empire and was, by some accounts, the fourth great power of its age — alongside Rome, Persia, and China. Aksum minted its own coinage in gold, silver, and bronze, traded with the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, and adopted Christianity as a state religion in the fourth century, before most of Europe had done the same. Its monolithic obelisks remain among the most impressive feats of stone engineering in pre-modern history. The Kingdom of Benin, in present-day Nigeria, produced bronze and ivory artistry whose technical sophistication, when finally brought to European attention in the late nineteenth century — through the catastrophe of the Benin Punitive Expedition of 1897 and the looting of the Benin Bronzes — astonished European art historians and forced a revaluation of African artistic capability that European institutions are, only now, beginning to honestly grapple with. I could continue. The list is long. The point is not antiquarian. The point is this: Africa is not a continent whose history begins with its injury. Africa is a continent of civilizations — many civilizations, many languages, many political forms — that produced, over millennia, an inheritance of achievement comparable in scope and depth to any other continent of human civilization. The injury, when it came, came to an Africa that was already busy being itself. It did not encounter a blank continent and produce the African condition. It encountered a continent of empires and disrupted them. This is not merely a historical claim. It is a psychological resource. The African child of the twenty-first century is not the descendant of victims. The African child is the descendant of empires. The empires were interrupted. The descendants are alive. The capability that built the empires has not been deleted from the genetic, cultural, or institutional substrate of African societies. It has been suppressed. It can be reactivated. How would such a reactivation look? I want to suggest, in the rest of this chapter, that the African Renaissance — the project this book argues for, on every page — is not, properly understood, a creation of something new. It is the resumption of something old. The empires of Africa did certain things very well. They organized long-distance trade. They produced scholarship at scale. They administered diverse populations with sophistication. They negotiated diplomatically with peer powers. They produced art whose beauty has outlasted the polities that produced it. They built cities, fortifications, and infrastructure on the strength of African engineering, African labour, and African capital, in service of African vision. A contemporary African civilization that, in the next thirty years, does these same things again — organizes long-distance trade through the African Continental Free Trade Area, produces scholarship at scale through the rebuilding of African universities, administers diverse populations with sophistication through the strengthening of African federal and continental institutions, negotiates diplomatically with peer powers through the consolidation of African positions in multilateral fora, produces art whose beauty travels through the continued rise of African cultural industries, and builds cities, fortifications, and infrastructure on the strength of African engineering, African labour, and African capital, in service of African vision — would be, in functional terms, the heir of the African empires. It would not be the same empires. The age of empires is, properly, over. The age of competitive, mutually-respecting, federated African polities is, properly, beginning. But the capabilities are the same. The disciplines are the same. The patient, long-horizon civilizational work is the same. This is what the memory of empires offers the African future: not nostalgia, not romanticism, not return — but evidence. Evidence that African societies have, before, organized themselves at scale around their own vision. Evidence that the African substrate is not a thin substrate. Evidence that the question of whether African societies can build great things has, in fact, already been answered in the affirmative, many times, in many places, in many centuries. The question of our century is not whether Africa can build great things. The question of our century is whether the present generation is willing to resume the building. I want to close this part of the book — Part II, Africa, The Interrupted Giant — with a sentence I have used many times in conversation with African leaders, African entrepreneurs, African young people, and which I will repeat here, because I believe it is, in the deepest sense, the operating principle of the African Renaissance: We are not waiting for permission. We have been told, for too long, that the African future is something we will be granted by external powers when we have proven ourselves worthy. We have been told that it depends on aid flows, on foreign direct investment, on the goodwill of multilateral institutions, on the patience of credit-rating agencies, on the approval of trade partners, on the absence of conflict, on the alignment of stars. It depends on none of these. The African future depends on what Africans do, in African villages, in African cities, in African parliaments, in African universities, in African boardrooms, in African studios, in African farms, in African startups, in African families. The external conditions can help. The external conditions can hurt. The external conditions cannot, however, author the future. The author is, and will be, Africa. We do not need permission to begin. We never did. The empires our ancestors built did not ask permission either. This is the continuity. This is the inheritance. This is the resumption. The interrupted giant is, at this very moment, beginning to stand. The world will, in time, learn to recognize what is rising.