Editor’s Note: The following is a foreword on a book written by Honourable Karamoh Kabba, Sierra Leone’s resident Minister for the Eastern Region (pictured). It was written by Gbanabom Hallowell, the Managing Director of the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation.
Fire from Timbuktu, A Dialogue with History
Foreword
By Gbanabom Hallowell, PhD, Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Since the treasure of human knowledge, especially in written form, there have been occasional thinkers who seek to dismantle accepted narratives, especially about regions or concepts where an alternative doesn’t seem to ‘exist. Usually, among conformists, such explosive narratives are ganged up against and quickly thrown out as soon as they make entry into mainstream discourse. Whether, in the end, these works are incorporated into the ‘cannons’ or not, depends on the weight of their arguments. But it is assuring to note that the philosopher, John Searle argued that "In my experience there never was, in fact, a fixed ’canon’; there was rather a certain set of tentative judgments about what had importance and quality. Such judgments are always subject to revision, and in fact they were constantly being revised."
Walter Rodney was among the first set of Africanist scholars who advanced the fiercest argument for the endemic underdevelopment of Africa in his book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Since the production of that book, the study of critical race theory, with regards to race, power and culture, has never been the same again in African universities. Rodney laid a strong foundation for many African scholars to be suspicious of writings by outsiders about Africa. Mr. Karamoh Kabba seemed to have had his ears to the ground next to the notes of Walter Rodney.
Fire From Timbuktu: A Dialogue With History is a short account of Africa—pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial, with much of its contents drawn from the famous ancient city of Timbuktu, and then used to appropriate contemporary issues on the continent. In other words, Africa is what it is because of Timbuktu and her history, obliterated by European Barbarians. It is one of those books that come into existence for the simple purpose of correcting a misnomer along the line of history. I say misnomer because, the author, Karamoh Kabba, committed himself to restoring the definitional character of Timbuktu, seeking to redefine black civilization; that is, in addition to that city’s reputation of great wealth and sound education. A good name, it is said, is better than riches.
While Eurocentric history acknowledged the fact that Timbuktu had immense wealth and sound education by the year 1213-1214, much of that history had the tendency to ignore the external forces that depleted the wealth and education of Timbuktu, thus casting the blame for Timbuktu and Africa’s demise on inter tribal wars across the continent. Recorded account evidence that by 1500 Timbuktu had come into fame, and remained so until the arrival of the Barbarians from Europe who plundered Africa’s fame and fortune by subjecting its people in bondage for over three hundred years.
In Fire From Timbuktu, Karamoh Kabba argues that the savagery brought upon the African people by European Barbarians was meant to destroy any evidence of integrity and civilization the latter had made in order to subject them to slavery. These European Barbarians and colonizers, Kabba noted, “were the savages who obliterated a civilization in its cradle before it made an impact on the rest of the continent dissimilar to Athens’s influence on the rest of Western nations and later on the rest of the world.” With this kind of thinking, Kabba treads on the footsteps of Africanists like Cheikh Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Rodney.
These were scholars, whose ideas were initially, fiercely challenged by the Eurocentric academic establishment, for their controversial revisionist thinking, but later, after the dust of ignorance, sentiments, and biases had settled down, they were embraced for their new and compelling scholarship. The question is in place, with Fire From Timbuktu, has Karamoh Kabba fashioned a place for himself among these Africanist scholars?
What is indisputable is that, Fire From Timbuktu attempts to achieve an ambition similar to Rodney’s book, at least, that one of derailing from the ‘accepted narrative’ of the growth of African civilization. Kabba makes the case that Africa should “put its fine scholars to work on investigative studies on how its ancestors administered themselves hitherto the advent of colonial influence.” Kabba has followed his own advice, and has taken a bold step to research and investigate Eurocentric and Afrocentric scholarship to make a case for Timbucktu historically as well as metaphorically, as a place where black people were engaged in complex political arrangements and organized educational systems long before the advent of colonialism. In fact, Kabba even postulates that Quranic and Judaic education predated European Barbarians in Africa because the pre-colonial citadels of learning had established links with their counterparts in the Arabic and Asiatic worlds.
It is important to emphasize that while Kabba’s work is historical in nature, yet his desire is to point out to issues of social and economic justice. In a truly Diopian sense, Africa was coerced to abandon its own route to civilization, and to embrace the European civilization; in fact, it could be said that, Africa was rather forced to contribute to the alien civilization for the benefit of Europe. At that material time, Europe itself had not quite dug its feet into its own civilization. In Europe, the process of civilizing had only just begun. Little wonder why that first mad rush to plunder the African continent was made by bearded savages long before the first European missionaries came to plead on their behalf. In reading Fire From Timbuktu, one can understand why Europeans held Africans in mental and physical captivity for over three hundred years, sucking from their bodies the blood of hope of tens of generations who could have built the continent of Africa with steel, science and arts!
I hope you enjoy reading Kabba’s argument.
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