Africa Did Not Blink into Existence: An African History Quiz

I have, for a long time, lamented the absence of African history from most centres of education around the world—including, quite ironically, schools in Africa. In fact, I started this website blog specifically to address that lack of knowledge—hence, African Skies. In previous posts, I have also used the medium of the quiz to encourage reflection on current states of knowledge. There is a flags one, a capitals one, and a geography one. This blog post aims to bring those two threads together in the first of a series of African history quizzes. There is also a bibliography below; one of my deep weaknesses as an academic, as frequent readers of this blog will attest, is to try and get people to read stuff! See various reading lists.

A Brief Note on African History as World History and the Necessity of History

It is often said that slavery and colonisation interrupted Black African history. However, especially during Black History Month, it is evident that BHM activities (particularly in universities) focus on these eras of African history. In addition to that, culture and experience are prioritised over history and intellectual engagement with said history. In this way, African history is reduced to a history of erasure, obliteration, minimisation, infantilisation, and exotification. And even during celebrations of Black/African history, that history is told through a particular gaze of whiteness. We are preoccupied with a critique of extractive colonisation and enslavement – but what was Africa before violent contact with Europe? The history books record thriving, vibrant, productive and, most importantly, human civilisations with all humanity’s characteristics and flaws. For that reason, the quiz below only has questions about that Africa. Because for many, understanding Africa without a European lens is inconceivable. When people complain about Africans/Black people in period drama on stage, screen and page, it is as if they assume Black Africans blinked into human existence at the moment Europe entered into the picture. Main character energy much?

This idea or invention of ‘darkest’ Africa must be repudiated, as it cannot be divorced from the ideology that drove colonisation—the false distinction between the civilised and the uncivilised. Despite the presumption that civility is the natural preserve of people racialised as white, it was revealed in 2025 that Oxford University academics drank from the skull of an enslaved woman at formal dinners – so what does it even mean to be civilised? Yet, the monolithic, uncivilised and primitive ideology of Africa pervades her current relations with the rest of the world – power structures, politics, language and knowledge. Chinua Achebe, commenting on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), states that the book’s thesis is based on a presumption of African savagery, barbarism and intellectual inferiority. Edward Said’s critique of Conrad notes that, despite Conrad’s disgust for colonial horrors, a world where Europe did not exercise mastery over Africa was beyond Conrad’s imagination.

What then do we do with African history in such a world? What is its purpose? When I was in secondary school, three of my friends and I decided to study History instead of Government which was the norm for our section of the cohort. My experience studying history opened my eyes, and historical analysis has remained part of my scholarly toolkit since that time as a key way to understand the world. History helps us put together the puzzle of how the local, national and global society we live in came to be. The denial of history is also a powerfully destructive tool. According to George Orwell, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

So, yes, definitely, Africans and African-descended people should study African history in the broadest sense. But what about everyone else? Of what use is the study of African history to a high schooler in Iowa or a primary school pupil in Nanjing? African history is world history, and an African studying African history is as vital as the study of any other history. As Zoe Marks tells us, “Africa is the key to understanding today’s global political and economic system and its inequalities.” Africa’s polities have always engaged with the rest of the world. This quiz touches on just a few of those engagements. If we do not pretend that Africa blinked into existence at the start of the infernal trade of kidnapped Africans for the sole purpose of the infernal trade of kidnapped Africans, that should be an obvious and uncontroversial point. And even the enslavement enterprise and the subsequent invasion and colonisation of Africa had and continue to have a profound effect on the contemporary shape of the world and knowledge today. Think about the origins of international law, the environmental crisis, extreme inequality, and our understanding of labour and development, to name a few. In his book, The Divide, using a historical narrative, Hickel notes how European colonial powers (often through trading companies) were able to legitimately lay claim to resource-rich territories, the best agricultural land across the world, as well as unfree labour, all for the maximisation of profits. He argues that European nations, by creating and manufacturing strict control over the financial terms of global relations, have legally kept impoverished nations both poor and trapped in colonial structures while leaving rich nations free to hold on to their colonial loot, restricting the movement of the colonised, at the same time as endangering the planet. The extractive, dehumanising and destructive epistemologies that were developed for that process are often still holding up disciplines today. Who gets to be human? What gets to live on which bit of the earth? How do we move through the devastation of time? Yet we have only one planet, one humanity, one world—headed to perdition.

In essence, to ignore African history is to ignore world history and to engage in meaning-making and, consequently, policies, recommendations, analyses and legislation for the whole world and our future that will never work – while we are still headed to perdition.

Your African History Quiz

Ideal in full-screen mode.

Tell us your score in the comments

Also, which books helped you understand African history? Suggestions welcome in the comments.

Bibliography

Adi, Hakim, and Marika Sherwood. Pan-African History. London: Routledge, 2003.

Ajayi, JF Ade, ed. UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. VI, Abridged Edition: Africa in the Nineteenth Century Until the 1880s. Vol. 6. Univ. of California Press, 1998.

Boahen, A. Adu, JF Ade Ajayi, and Michael Tidy. Topics in West African history. London: Longman, 1966.

Buah, Francis Kwamina. A History of West Africa from AD 1000. Macmillan, 1986.

Conrad, Joseph, and Joseph Conrad. Heart of darkness. Palgrave Macmillan US, 1996.

Davidson, Basil. Africa in history. Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Davidson, Basil. West Africa before the colonial era: A history to 1850. Routledge, 2014.

Hickel, Jason. The divide: A brief guide to global inequality and its solutions. Random House, 2017.

Isichei, Elizabeth. A history of African societies to 1870. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Mokhtar, Gamal, ed. Ancient Civilisations of Africa. Vol. 2. University of California Press, 1981.

Ogot, Bethwell A., ed. Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Vol. 5. Univ of California Press, 1999.

Onwubiko, K. B. C. History of West Africa: School Certificate. AD 1000-1800. Africana Publ. Limited, 1982.

Page, Willie F. Encyclopedia of African History and Culture: Ancient Africa (Prehistory to 500 CE). Vol. 1. Facts on File, 2001.

Parker, John, and Richard Rathbone. African history: A very short introduction. Vol. 160. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Said, Edward W. “Two visions in Heart of Darkness.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Joseph Conrad’s (2008): 5-18.

Shillington, Kevin. Encyclopedia of African History 3-volume set. Routledge, 2013.