Using African history as a tool for Change | Zeinab Badawi | TEDxEuston

[Music] hello don't you all look terrific from this vantage point that I have so I'm saying Abu Dhabi it's my great pleasure to be with you and although I studied politics and economics at Oxford I actually did my postgraduate studies in history so I am here today to make a plea for history to say that history is not something about the past no history from the African point of view is something which allows you to have self-respect it helps you to have a reclaimed identity it helps you to assert yourself on the social political and cultural agenda today so it's a very very important thing and in my view it's been overlooked wrongly it's very fashionable to talk about education education is important it's the you know most empowering thing you can give a young child in Africa and it's true but what kind of education quality education is the thing that's very important in history is an integral part of that and not just for people living in Africa but also the established African Diaspora Beauty in the Caribbean be it in Brazil beauty in the United States whether it's also the more recently arrived diaspora Africans living in the West all part and parcel of the same history is the shared history so I've been very struck by the paradox that you can be educated but not know very much about your history and I'll take you on a journey as to why I believe this is the case first of all education you could say is the family business in the Sudan because my great-grandfather was the pioneer of female education in the Sudan at the turn of the last century there were no schools for girls but my great-grandfather chef barbequed Beverly said you know what why should my girls go uneducated so he established a school in his own family compound against much much not only from the local community but from the British colonial authorities at the time they said don't do this you know it's going to upset people's you know traditional customs and so on and he said there's nothing in Islam that says women should not be educated and that's why actually whenever I hear about you know so-called Muslim societies denying girls education I think there's nothing inimical to educate educating girls in Islamic societies so my great-grandfather persisted in the teeth of opposition and he succeeded in fact in the family we say he was so Pro women he married four of them we'll just skate over that particular thing thankfully one tradition that's not continued and finally he just you know started schools and the British in the end said you know what you've done so well and they awarded him an OBE in the late 1940s and he went and accepted it from the Governor General of the Sudan and Winston Churchill was prime minister in the UK and he said well tell mr. Churchill I fought against him in the Battle of Omdurman but I won't hold that against him and he took his OBE so good on you great-grandfather's so you know I grew up with women who if they were alive today would be well over a hundred highly educated women with degrees from Western universities you know my mother was a teacher and so on and so forth so I grew up with very very powerful female figures where it was just you know we imbibed it with our mothers milk really but having said that I was sitting down a few years ago with my late father who died last year very sadly and my mother and I said you know these are two people who were highly educated you know in the Sudan and I said what do you know about Sudan's ancient history and I think I said well we were taken to the pyramids once on a school trip in the 1930s or the 1940s you know and these were people could tell you about British history you know Kings you know King Henry the eighth his wives and so on and yet when it came to their own country's history these two educated people you know drew a bit of a blank and it wasn't just my parents I realise this you know over time that I was filming in lake or in Nigeria and I was going around the university there and I talked that you know the finest the brightest and the best of Nigeria and I said what do you know about your history and they said well we got our Nigeria was formed in 1911 slavery obviously was quite you know think I said what before that before that and they all drew a blank and and I realized that actually this was a pattern not only in Africa across generations but also diaspora African communities who you know perhaps living in the Caribbean or whatever we're feeling quite deracinated didn't know so much about their history and I thought you know what this isn't right and I and I began to think about myself what do I know about my own history and you know when I and I realized that although I've always liked to say oh you know I'm a well-educated person what did I know and it reminded me of a time when I was an undergraduate at Oxford who was one of the history professors when I was actually there professor Hugh trevor-roper late Hugh trevor-roper and this is what he said about African history perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach but at present there is none or very little there is only the history of Europeans in Africa he talked about the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe so if you think that that kind of infantilization of a continent and I actually think that Africans have been infantilized to a degree which we have not seen with people anywhere else in the world if you think that's just you know the ruminations of a man long since dead know you know the leader of a major Western country only a few years ago less than a decade ago was visiting an African country a key African country made a speech to his African audience they all listened very politely as he said the African people have not entered the history books they've not entered history and when I visited this particular country not so long ago to this day so many people from you know presidents politicians down to waiters and restaurants remembered this speech made by this Western leader that the African man had not entered history so don't think this is something that you can consign to the past so it was with these thoughts that I began to develop an interest in ancient Sudan and you know I discovered wonderful things there are thousand pyramids in the Sudan 300 of them preserve their superstructure in around in the eighth century BC the kings of ancient Sudan the kings of Koosh were superpowers in Africa they that you know their influence extended as far as the modern-day Middle East they governed Egypt for the best part of a century and so on and so forth and then after that so all you know with all this sort of coalescing in my mind my metamorphosis was sort of quite gradual you know the conversation with the parents that the finding out about ancient Sudan I then was at UNESCO and I saw there that there were some volumes called the general history of Africa and I asked what these were the GHA and I was told that in the early 1960s during that period of rapid decolonization in Africa the newly independent African President said look we have decolonized our countries we want to decolonize our history so they got together there was a very enlightened Frenchman line a mile was director-general of UNESCO at the time and he said okay you know in Kruger Kenyatta near re and so on and so forth you guys pay for this and our facilitators process so UNESCO scoured the continent of Africa for the best historians archaeologists anthropologists paleontologists you name it and they compiled volume after volume after volume of Africa's history written by Africans themselves there's a difference between being an African estándar African historian these were African historians and these are proper scholarly works you know they use the kind of sausage which Western historians had often overlooked and they also use you know use culture like music dance and so on to inform what they had done and they said just because Western historians have said in the past that Africa's history is not always recorded written it doesn't mean that Africans don't have a history indeed they had the longest history in the world because it's where human beings originated if you're not from Africa you're an African export aren't you so you know yeah well we're talking about trade you know Africa was the major exporter par excellence so you know so the irony that this continent with this long history should be told that you know wow you don't really have a history because you know it just means we've got to get at it in a different way and that's what the African historians did so I thought this is a wonderful inspiring project but very few people know about it so I either then worked out with UNESCO how I could make a TV history series based on these volumes Africa's history told by Africans themselves the experts but I also wanted to make sure that ordinary African citizens were also part of this conversation and I embarked on this journey of filming around Africa the the first history series of what was called the history of Africa was a nap but are we which went out on BBC World TV and it was a real eye-opener for me you know going around seeing the wonderful things that just at the back of my mind proved huge revenue per solar so wrong we all know about ancient Egypt but you know what about the kingdom of Aksum in modern-day Ethiopian Eritrea and bits of the Horn of Africa in the fourth century this was described by a Greek historian as one of the four greatest civilizations of the world what about Great Zimbabwe the wonderful you know monuments if you go there what about King Musa in the 12th 13th century when who you know was was one of the kings of the Mali Empire the Ghana Empire the Nok civilization you know that was BC BCE before a Common Era in in in Nigeria today in northern Nigeria you know really honestly I could go on and on the berber kingdoms of north africa with their had you know their capital in in morocco it was just you know i there was so much history that actually my first series stops at around the 13th century and i've got to start the second series so really you know there is so much there that you can get at and why i think history's so important is I'll give you a quote from the late wonderful Kenyan environmental and social activist Wangari Maathai who sadly died in 2011 where she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 and she said you cannot enslave a mind that knows itself that values itself that understands itself and I'm very heartened that you know just as the the African leaders in the 1960s you know with this project which is still ongoing by the way the general history of Africa at UNESCO just as as they said look we've got to reclaim our history now you see for example students in South Africa wanting to decolonize their curriculum because even 20 years after the end of apartheid more than 20 years you still find that you know higher education in South Africa is still deeply rooted in colonial and apart at the apartheid thinking you see students now at Oxford University saying we want African history to be taught because it's part of world history African history is part of the global narrative it's not just something that's just relevant to you if you are or of African origin you know it is absolutely for for everybody so this is what I really I'm very keen to be part of his reconstructing African history from an African perspective putting the African intelligentsia center stage so I'm not saying do away I'm not saying and and you know honestly there were so many of them I mean in this series every person I interviewed was you know an African and the minds you know they would be comfortable in any major academic institution anywhere in the world is just they've not been given the chance to go center stage put them center stage you know great thinkers like shake hand et up from Senegal the late Senegalese professor yes yes you know he should be known you know his he was a polymath one of the greatest minds of the 20th century you know accomplished in so many disciplines people should know about him so you know I I really want to be part of this movement but sadly sadly as Professor Anthony assuage you a wonderful night year in historian told me when I was talking to him a few years ago like Lagos University African universities right across the continent not just in Nigeria history the history faculty is really really neglected of course Africa's future lies in you know leapfrogging technology and science and technology and medicine and all these things are important to make sure that you know Africa is part of the 21st century but it doesn't mean that we should completely you know forget our history so it is a plea to say that our history is about identity it's about self-respect it's about claiming our own narrative working in the media people often say to me oh you know you always get some Western you know well meaning often person to sum up the situation be it you know the Ebola crisis or some political situation that's happened what about our own experts this infantilization over people whereby you've got to get other people to come and talk on their behalf people still see development as something which has got to be done by outside agents actually no country in history has ever been developed by outsiders you know perhaps Germany a bit with the Marshall Plan after the Second World War but you know it's it's putting age it's putting Africans in the driving seat of a train it means starting that journey are not just jumping Midway insane to claim our narrative today let us erm you know start now no no no you've got to go all the way back to the past to bring yourself down to the present and it's also about unity you know my late father was a great agitation for independence in the Sudan in you know in the 1940s and 50s and he was a great pan-africanist very inspired by you know Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore and so on and and that's really what I bring as well to this topic of history because African history it is about unity it doesn't matter where you live in the world you are of African descent be you you know in Brazil where by the way a lot of people don't realize that around a hundred million Brazilians that's about more than 50% of the population either have african heritage or mixed African heritage you know that they are the second largest African population after Nigeria or the African American diaspora the most powerful and influential diaspora of Africans in the world you know about 18% of the American population again a vast number seventy-five million you know come together it pains me when I see when I go to the United States and chat to people about my relations today between the recently arrived Africans more recently arrived Africans from the continent and the established african-american community that there isn't as much interaction and cross fertilization of you know ideas and and so on between them there seem to be more differences than I would really really like and I don't think that's right I mean even now there are people amongst the African American community who are beginning to say let's go back to calling ourselves black Americans to distinguish ourselves from the more recently arrived you know Africans in our Diaspora in in the country I think that would be a retrograde step because stick to the term african-american I talked to Jesse Jackson I had the pleasure of talking to him a little bit about his history and you remember Jesse Jackson the 1980s was part of that kind of scholarly movement in the United States to claim the term african-american and he said just as we were called colored but we were not that and then Negro but we were not that I mean African simcha answering i'ma need I'll call myself a Negro I call myself colored they didn't to be called black he said it's just as baseless black tells you about skin color what side of town you live on african-american evokes discussion of the world so it's that oneness of the disparate community it's bringing everybody together under you know one banner so you know I would appeal to African Americans to maintain that that name african-american because it's only by drawing on this common shared history that we have that one can really realize the ambitions of the you know early independence fighters like my late father the Pan Africanist who see the whole African community you know when you're talking about the black lives matter campaign or you know racist attacks or races and feelings or whatever you know do you think somebody's going to stop and say oh are you from Khartoum or are you from you know Kingston Jamaica or are you from you know from Boston or whatever no it's all part and parcel of the absolute same community and I know that this is an important topic because you know here we live in the United Kingdom we know how important history is for you know informing your present and if you watch any major events like the Olympics or you know whatever football matches they're always you know a bit of history coming in whereby a nation asserts itself so history is important for national identity for an individual sense of identity for a community as well and so Africans must not be robbed of this you know advantage because it's something that hasn't been put center stage and I want to say actually but when I I know this is right because when I was filming the film crew who I was with I used African film crews everywhere I went filming for this TV series at the end of each shoot they say say not thank you we are exhausted you've worked so hard but we are so grateful to you saying that because now for the first time we really know about our own history it's been an I open a forest and these are by and large you know young men and women who were very struck by the wonderful minds that they were listening to telling them about their own history and so there is a thirst there is a hunger there for this kind of knowledge and I think that my plea would be that be it politicians be its academics be it you know ordinary members of the public in whatever guys you are you should say please let us put African history center stage I will end with a quote earlier this year I was sitting having tea in in a central London hotel with a former president of South Africa our president mocked lanty and we were talking about history and he said to me you know what say 'no I think you're absolutely right to focus on history because only when Lions have historians will the hunters cease to be heroes and that is absolutely right and I am so glad that my four children two sons and two daughters Joseph Sophia Hannah and Zachary have all said mummy thank you so much for telling us about the history of the continent where you were born because my four children I'm sure like all people of African descent anywhere in the world are the real lions thank you for your attention [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 124,749

Rating: 4.8867927 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Life, Change, History, Identity, Impact

Id: IsdwybV07e8

Length: 21min 2sec (1262 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2017