Born in Blackness: Africa’s Role in Modernity 🌍

Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity, Professor Howard French’s most recent book Born in Blackness reframes our understanding of world history. Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity? In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that.

Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa.

Born in Blackness retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history. While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories—siloed and piecemeal—were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic “rise of the West” theories that have endured to this day.

This seminar took place on 2 February 2022.

Chapters:

0:00 - Introduction of Professor Howard French and Professor Toby Green
3:18 - Born in Blackness and the terminology of modernity
12:45 - Mali and the emergence of Portuguese interest in the new world
28:01 - Initial exploratory missions down the coast of Africa and beyond
36:50 - Portuguese discovery of Brazil and the introduction of sugar and slavery
47:22 - Professor Toby Green on history as hagiography and questions of historical impact
1:00:18 - Portuguese wealth and the interests of Ghana
1:11:00 - What should happen with education on Africa, now or in the future?
1:18:01 - The Canary current and possible successes of earlier expeditions
1:24:02 - Professor Howard French on future projects