MR CHAIRMAN,
DISTINGUISHED PARTICIPANTS,
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.
I count myself highly honoured and extremely fortunate to have been given the opportunity to address this historic gathering of Black and African intellectuals at this historic Festival of Arts and Culture. When I was approached two days ago about giving a Public Lecture to the Colloquium, I was flattered and I did not doubt that it was a great honour. I however hesitated to take the risk of facing an audience such as this without the chance to have had the time to prepare a lecture worthy of the audience and the occasion.
But my good friend the RapporteurGeneral, himself a distinguished scholar and a Reverend Father, knows the weaknesses of man, particularly the academic man, when confronted with the flattery of being invited to address a distinguished group of intellectuals. He knew I could not refuse the honour. While I was still trying to overcome my timidity, he had announced the lecture publicly and suggested as topic, "The problems of African Historiography".
I will of course be concerned with the problems of African historiography, not so much in terms of the methodology of African historical writing, as of the subject matter and the purpose of such writing, and particularly in terms of their relevance. I will be speaking largely as a historian, but I thought that I might attempt to see the problems of African history in the wider context of the problems of the Humanities in Africa.
I also believe that those problems can be subsumed under what we are now used to describing in a blanket fashion as Relevance. Having observed that the organisers of the colloquium have a fear of learned and abstruse lectures and that they prefer ex tempore addresses as being more likely to be relevant to the issues of the day, and seeing also that in my present pre-occupations as Vice-Chancellor, I have become more used to writing and giving addresses rather than lectures, I have called my ensuing remarks an address to the Colloquium.
The Humanities
I am thinking of the Humanities in the sense in which they are to be distinguished from the natural sciences and even from most of the social sciences such as economics whose high utility value to "progress and development" seems too obvious to require debate. I am thinking not only of history, but also of those disciplines such as literature, religious studies, art, music, and culture which someone once described as the "useless disciplines" with no obvious utilitarian application beyond personal satisfaction. Such disciplines focus on man as man, a being with both universal and unique characteristics.
Many historians conceive of history largely as social science, a study of societies rather than of man. Other historians, including myself, are sufficiently old-fashioned to continue to view history as a discipline largely in the Humanities, concerned more with man than with social formations, man in both his universal and unique characteristics. Implicit in the study of history is the belief that man shares a common humanity with all other human beings to the extent that a historian in the twentieth century presumes that he can deduce from his own studies and experience some explanations for the behaviour of other human beings several
thousand years ago in different climates and environments and at the same time that man is nevertheless so unique that in the final analysis no two men are the same: there are really no completely identical twins, and each people, each culture, has an integrity of its own to which standards derived from other cultures and the history of other peoples are really irrelevant.
It is important to understand this concept of the Humanities. We cannot deny the common humanity of man, nor can we deny his uniqueness. If we overstress the common humanity, we drift into the trap of those who are anxious to impose on us their own values and standards evolved from their own experience and for their convenience as universal values and standards. Yet, if we overstress the uniqueness of man, we have no basis at all for study other than of our own individual self alone, and even for that we have no basis of comparison to initiate such a study.
Continued on page 2
|
