A “Quest for Relevance”: The Memory Politics of UNESCO’s General History of Africa

In 1963, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched the General History of Africa (GHA) project which ran for over three decades. The stated aim of the project was to produce “a scientific history of African unity and culture from the inside” – a history written by Africans for Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. Those involved in the GHA as contributors, editors and UNESCO officials were motivated by what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has labelled a “quest for relevance” which was felt strongly among African cultural elites during the decades after 1940. This quest for relevance involved contributing to the decolonisation of the mind based on the idea that the ending of formal colonial rule would be incomplete and meaningless without a cultural decolonisation in education, science, and the arts, including history. In this chapter I revisit the chequered history of the GHA and place the project in its historical context of Pan-Africanism and nation building. I unravel the institutional context and argue that the project was shaped by an agenda centred on the politics of historical memory shared by this generation of Africans and by UNESCO. Africa scholars put more emphasis on showing that Africans had a history than on asking how Africans’ history-making was implicated in establishing or contesting power. (Frederick Cooper, 1994)1 In November 2015, UNESCO – the UN special agency for education, science and culture – celebrated its 70 anniversary with proceedings that included a conference on the organisation’s history.2 During the celebrations, former Director-General and Senegalese geographer and diplomat Amadou Mahtar M′Bow explained what UNESCO had achieved during his Director-Generalship from 1974 to 1983.  Frederick Cooper, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking African History,” American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (1994): 1528.  Mads K. Mogensen and Ivan. L Christensen, “Report on: Making a Difference: Seventy Years of UNESCO Actions UNESCO Anniversary Conference, UNESCO, Paris, 28–29 October 2015,” UNESDOC Digital Library, 2015, accessed 28 November 2019, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/