20 most influential Black H istory in its broadest sense contains all knowledge not acquired in the present. Therefore, all the subjects studied at school have history as their base, be they in the social sciences, the natural sciences, or the arts. All of them (mathematics, chemistry, English literature, religious education, even physical education) contain accumulated knowledge collated over many years, i.e. not in the present. History is thus the foundation of all of them. This raises the question: What is Black history? Many scholars regard Africa and its heritage as the CENTREPIECE of Black history. Africa and its civilisations show what Black people were capable of building in all African settings. This raises another question: Who researched African history and heritage and what did they discover? African American historians in the nineteenth century began mapping the history of Africa. Great strides were made in the 1920s with the work of Mrs Drusilla Houston. Her pioneering Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire told the story of civilizations such as Ancient Kush and Egypt, but also of Negro civilizations that used to exist in Western and Southern Asia. Unfortunately, her work was too far ahead of its time to gain the mass acceptance that it deserved. Professor DuBois penned the landmark The World and Africa. Published in 1946, he told the story of Negro civilisations in North, South and West Africa. Like Houston, before him, he also told of ancient Negro civilizations
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that used to exist in Asia. Professor DeGraft-Johnson, a Ghanaian historian, wrote African Glory. Published in 1954, it advanced the state of knowledge by including a strong account of the civilisation of the Moors in Spain and the Kongo Kingdom in Central Africa. It also had a very detailed account of the vast West African desert super states of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. Like DuBois before him, however, DeGraft-Johnson was weak on the civilisations of East Africa. Englishman Basil Davidson plugged this gap with his classic Old Africa Rediscovered, issued in 1959. Davidson, and later English scholars, alerted historians to the growing wealth of archaeological material available on the African past. Introduction to African Civilizations, the classic by Professor John Jackson, was a 1970 synthesis and update of DuBois, DeGraftJohnson, and Davidson, together with research Jackson conducted with Willis Huggins, a colleague from the 1930s and 40s. In particular, Professor Jackson shows that humanity was of African origin. Moreover, the early civilisation of Sudan, Egypt, Sumer, Elam, and India were Negro. He further demonstrated that Africans voyaged to America well before the time of Christopher Columbus. This was the most complete synthesis before my When We Ruled appeared in 2006. It was also the biggest influence on my work. The methodology of researching and writing about the African heritage was much advanced by the examples set by Cheikh
Anta Diop and Yosef ben-Jochannan. With the publication of Precolonial Black Africa in 1960, Professor Diop, a Senegalese scholar, demonstrated the importance of reconstructing the social, political, economic, intellectual, technical, and aesthetic elements of the old African civilisations. This brings colour and vividness to those remote times totally lacking when history is presented as dry dates and dusty kings lists. His 1974 classic African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality? was concerned with a single question: Who were the Ancient Egyptians? In addressing this controversy, Diop presented an invaluable masterclass of how to interpret primary and secondary source material. Moreover, he demonstrated the key importance of confronting problem areas in Black history rather than retreating from them. Professor ben-Jochannan, author of the 1971 tome Africa! Mother of Western Civilization, also teaches how to interpret source material. Moreover, Dr Ben introduces his readers to long forgotten works on African history written since the late eighteenth century. He empowers his readers to examine these works for themselves and to follow the leads that they give. Professor Chancellor Williams’ The Destruction of Black Civilization also of 1971 is another classic. Influenced by DuBois but augmented using oral tradition and a team of researchers working with him, this remains one of the finest and most influential pieces of research out there.
