‘Africa is dying and no one gives a damn’: combating colonial historiography with revisionism, temporality in Tade Ipadeola’s The Sahara Testaments

Abstract

ABSTRACT The colonial historiography of Africa renders the continent historyless, oriental, and primitive. This cultural misrepresentation of Africa has dominated Western imagination and influenced the relationship of the West with Africa for a number of decades, while traces of this prejudice still subsist till now. Like other Africanist writings that repudiate jaundiced colonial African historiography, Tade Ipadeola’s The Sahara Testaments (2012) offers a literary theorisation for interrogating the historiography through revisionism and temporality. Ipadeola assumes the role of a historical revisionist, making efforts to rectify Western ahistorical perception of Africa through empirical historical events, sites, and panjandrums. He uses the power of poetry to reinvigorate Africa’s past, projecting it as a tool to rebuild the future of the continent. As a revisionist, he refuses to accept the traditionalist colonial perspective of African historiography that is pro-West, but calls for a revisit and celebration of Africa’s past as a defining moment in the history of a continent relegated to the margins of global economy and development. Drawing on Ipadeola’s position, this article contends that Africa’s history should reflect triadic temporal linearity, rather than limiting its historical development to then and now, because doing so is self-defeating.