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

In 1963, Professor Hugh Trevor Roper said:  '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 the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness...indeed we may neglect our own history and amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe: tribes whose chief function in history, in my opinion, is to show to the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped..'



In this video Zeinab Badawi counters the ideology of the above statement, while also examining why this ideology is destructive as part of a historical and persistent infantilisation of Africa and Africans. Listen.