When history became another subject

Indeed, out of curiosity, some of the 20 of us with an Arts combination (as compared to the smaller 15 in Science) opted to take on Current Affairs as a subsidiary subject; while most of us opted for History as a main subject. And at this level the history was a completely new colonial package. Having been subjected to British history at high school, we were now subjected to European history of self-praise and self-aggrandisement, and most regrettably no African history whatsoever.

As a consequence, we were made to conclude the formative years of our formal education absorbing and coalescing into our skulls the victors and villains and victims of European conflicts and wars of national aggression and imperial propagation. We closely traced The French Revolution, The Napoleonic Wars, ‘The Unification of Germany’ under Bismarck, and ‘The Unification of Italy’ under Garibaldi. (This is the same fabulous Garibaldi who, while sailing to within view of South America, through his binoculars sees and falls in love with an elegant ‘Red Indian’ damsel walking upon the beach and decides to court and marry her when he lands upon the shore, and indeed he goes on to do exactly that!)

Of great fascination were the Napoleonic expeditions into successive continental countries and Egypt, from the 1790s into the 19th Century, and country after country falling to Napoleon Bonaparte’s military might; and Napoleon declaring himself ‘Emperor of the French’ (1804); his commandeering the Pope to come along to crown him as the said Emperor, but grabbing the crown from the hands of the Pope and crowning himself, to signify to that Church potentate that he Napoleon was a higher power than ‘the Holy Father’.

Of similar fascination was Napoleon’s Russian Expedition of 1812, when he was strategically beaten at his own marshal game upon invading Moscow only to find the city 100 percent emptied of its inhabitants, the Russians having organised a ‘grand withdrawal’ from  the capital; as a consequence of which hordes of Napoleon’s troops perished in winter snow as they plodded back from the failed expedition; and Napoleon finally spending his twilight years (1815-1821) as Europe’s arch criminal prisoner on the barren, wind-swept rocky island of St Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean, far from Alpine grandeur or palatial pomp.   

To Europe’s permanent shame was its gluttonously chopping up Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884 into chunks of ‘possessions’ between themselves (the way greedy hunters chop up carcasses of the wild game they capture). This so-called ‘partition of Africa’ constitutes the 19th Century’s high point of imperial malady and craze. In monstrous ventures such as this, the most territorially ambitious European countries often act in unison. 

With regard to enmities and wars between themselves over the past two centuries (from Napoleon to Hitler), however, they contrive themselves into military alliances of convenience, in which each single national entity strategises to come out as the leading practical beneficiary.

The historical exception to this rule of self-aggrandising coalitions is, of course, the geographically diminutive Britain of superlative self-esteem, with its often-repeated recourse to its insular policy of ‘Splendid Isolationism’; for example in its recent hurriedly conceived and fumbling Brexit from the European Union – as bemused and un-amused Africa looked on.

Prof Timothy Wangusa is a poet and novelist.

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