Writing and teaching national history in Africa in an era of global history

Abstract

This session of the colloquium began where the preceding one had left off, with the lead-in speaker, Professor Toyin Falola of the University of Texas, arguing that if ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ were meaningful concepts for historical understanding, so too was ‘nation’. For him, national history was both meaningful and vital in the current era of globalisation, when global history was being touted as the only paradigm within which seriously to understand modern processes and events. Indeed, he believed that national history was an essential defence – even means of survival – against the dominant brand of global history in the contemporary world, which in his view amounted to ‘a narrative of western power and its expansion, …[which sought to turn] the national history of one great power [the USA] into the metanarrative of global history … by eras[ing] the experiences of so-called local identities, sweeping the dust of the ethnic under the carpet of the national, and the national itself under the table of the universal’.