Istwa Nou

Before the 1960s the study of early African history in the United States had a small number of addresses, and nearly all of them were Historically Black Colleges and Universities. William Leo Hansberry taught it at Howard, and his colleagues at comparable institutions carried the rest. Evidence was not the difficulty. Excavation reports, Arabic chronicles, linguistic work and classical accounts of African states had been accumulating for a century, available to any scholar who thought the subject worth an afternoon. The white academy did not, and the reason was racial rather than evidentiary. Politics broke it open. African independence movements from the late 1950s and the civil rights movement in the United States made the absence impossible to maintain, and departments began appointing Africanists. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because Haiti has been handled by the same method. The record was always there. The willingness to treat it as history arrived only once the people it concerned had forced the question in the street.