By Godson S. Maanga
History, my mother, I salute you! I stand on the top of Kilimanjaro, the highest hill in Africa, to announce your majesty, peculiarity, and awesomeness. Unshakably and immovably, you stand transcendentally, imparting symbolism of historical attainment and confidence – towering above all knights and emperors. You deserve love, honor, and gratitude. Here and abroad, you shine with super motherhood; as well as unique and marvelous cubits of knowledge. From you come myriad streams of guidance, pouring golden instructions and mighty inspiration for stunned humanity. Your age-old stores overflow with experience and perseverance. From the history of history viewpoint, all rivals stay aloof, trembling with fear and cowardice. In your numerous annals, evolution and revolution are flimsy chapters, subject to debate and frequent amendments; and Charles Darwin and Karl Marx are tiny dots overtaken and discredited by time, in the immeasurable and limitless ocean of history.
Thinking critically about you, I fearlessly declare that yours is a job highly commendable! You have carried me along on a long journey, tormented by turbulence and persecution – caused by old and new colonialism. As a gracious mother, you have been feeding me with knowledge and wisdom, through the historical umbilical cord. In your perfect womb, I was mold into what I am, a great admirer of history. You have infused into my person unequaled passion and respect for history. Through history, I am nurtured and guided, and suckling at your golden breasts is indeed a rare opportunity. Your breasts are a pair of precious stones, found nowhere else except in historical paradise. On your grandeur chest are galaxies of pearl-like teats that produce milk creams, with a far-reaching fragrance of the best smelling flowers in the realm of history. Your face shines like the morning star, and each hair on your head is a model of multi-faceted wisdom. Your sparkling eyes resemble splendid lamps with a searching beam of historical radiance.
Interpreting you retrospectively, even geographical mothers sing your praises because you have mothered them all – Mother Africa, Mother Europe, Mother America, Mother Asia, Mother Australia, and Mother Antarctica. In the time immemorial, when no human being was yet born, you mothered all these mothers. That is why there is History of Africa, History of Europe, History of America, History of Asia – History, History, History – the list is endless!
My mother, history, they despise you. They smear your fame. They say that you are inferior to science – that the scientific theories and principles postulated by great scientists are better than the basic tenets in your fabric. They claim that theories like Gravitation, Relativity and Fermentation are at the top of the ladder of progress but grand topics like History of Africa and World History are indeed at the foot of the ladder. They say that you are so inferior and insignificant that you cannot stand the challenges of Engineering and Nuclear Physics. They forget that Chemistry and Physics and Biology are all your offspring. You are the one who has given birth to Geometry and Algebra. Without your labor travails, all these branches of science would not have come into existence, and their importance would not have been understood because without history science cannot be understood. Without you, great scientists like Archimedes of Syracuse, Marie Curie, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, and Albert Einstein would not have been known because they would have remained in the total darkness of unwritten history. It is you, Mother History, who takes great inventors from under the carpet and brings them into visibility and global prominence. Your historical milk has enabled various disciplines of science to grow into what they are. It is you, my mother, who has given birth to the history of all activities witnessed in science, inside and outside science laboratories. Without you, all types of past, present and future mechanization and industrialization are nothing but unknown giants that have not seen the light of day. Without you even astronomical postulations like geocentric and heliocentric theories would have remained closed huts for those who ignore your significance.
Perched on shaky ground are myopic judges, who underrate your fans and people who teach your greatness and authority. Out there are short-sighted judges who belittle your role and relevance, insisting that those who teach History deserve little salaries or no salaries at all. It is indeed a folly to say that History is an inferior subject. These academic scarecrows argue that priority should be directed to science teachers and not to those who teach things like Paleontology, The history of Scholasticism, Renaissance and the French Revolution, the Mwenemutapa Kingdom, African Liberation Movements and other historical stuff. Dear mother, the chaps who deny your value are indeed shortsighted and unrealistic! No people can know where they are or where they are going if they do not know where they come from. If one does not know one’s mother, one is the most pitiful person under the sky. And a person who says that there are children without mothers is a great liar.
When malicious critics sneer at you I get nausea. I feel like vomiting all the nonsense I hear people talking about you. When insults are heaped on you wrath and vengeance take hold of me, like a bruised tiger – one’s anger becomes peak-high when one’s mother is insulted. Your despisers are as useless as bags of salt that has lost its saltiness. All people who mock your importance and role are hollow scholars – to give them the proper description. They are wayward like a vehicle without a steering wheel and eventually they will shudder with confusion and shame like reeds in a mighty whirlwind.
In your presence, edifices of ignorance and illusion crumble like morning dew. Thanks a hundredfold for disclosing to me great historians – excellent scholars who follow into your footsteps with notable loyalty and determination. In Africa I see Bethuel Ogot who put Kenya and Africa on the world historical map; and Cheikh Anta Diop, whose wide and deep historical investigations have elevated him to the heights of magisterial historians. In Europe, there are Herodotus, the father of history; Thucydides, the scientific historian; and Erik Hobsbawm, the giant historian with irresistible influence on modern historians. In South America, there is brother Walter Rodney who opened people’s eyes to see how Europe and the West at large retards Africa; there is Boris Fausto who gained world fame as an eminent historian; and Ricardo Augusto Caminos, an accomplished Egyptologist with his particular preoccupation on epigraphy and paleography. In North America, I see John Hope Franklin, a first class African American historian; Michael Kammen, the eminent cultural historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for History; and Joyce Oldham Appleby, with her superb knowledge of historiography and a sharp mind in championing Republicanism and Liberalism theories. In Central America there are Carlos Maria de Bustamante who merged history, statesmanship, and journalism into a perfect academic concoction; and Rafael Garcia Granados, who shared accomplished recipes on Mexican history. In Asia, I see Ram Sharan Sharma, a great scholar on Ancient and Medieval India; Aida Yuji, renowned Renaissance specialist; and James T.C. Liu, a leading scholar on the Song Dynasty in China. In Australia there is Geoffrey Bolton, who directed people’s attention to Western Australian History as well as popularizing Australia’s socio-political development from the historical viewpoint; and Sheila Fitzpatrick, a lady historian who excels as a specialist of Modern Russia History. History, my mother, credit and honor to your loyal sons and daughters, who from rooftops declare your glory and grandeur – sons and daughters who are not afraid of being called historians.
Day and night you stand in front of me like a huge mirror – reflecting human misdeeds, from ancestors of the distant past. With a down-to-earth language, you depict to me the factors underlying gigantic social-cultural and politico-economic evils: justification of enslavement and maltreatment of blacks; discrimination and exploitation of non-whites; the sexual and racial humiliation of black people; and nowadays systematic torture and wiping out people of African origin. Dear mother, you give me genuine pre-warning, that a new wave of the scramble for Africa is back full swing. Camouflaging their insatiable proboscises in business partnership as well as in bread-for-Africa donations, Western hounds (hungrier and shrewder than they were at the Berlin Conference in 1884/85) are on mass treks into Africa – to plunder, to exploit, to grab, to enslave, to pollute, to kill. Once in Africa, they prepare fertile ground for rape, divorce, coups, tax evasion, poaching, and moral decadence. My mother, history, from you I learn that egocentric foreign exploiters, operating with crooked arms entitled ‘multinationals’, come with hidden motives: splitting African families; supplying weapons that engineer ethnic clashes; transforming Africa into a filthy dustbin for industrial wastes from the West; trafficking hoodwinked Africans into clandestine destinations overseas; siphoning Africa’s natural resources, and causing havoc in African countries as it is evident in North Africa.
History, my mother, the nature of living forever is truly yours – you are neither ephemeral nor mortal. All humans will come and go, leaving you back as strong and healthy as ever. For the history assassins who announce your demise, you can only die as a result of their distorted thoughts. And if you die in their misguided minds you will never rot. If you rot in the eyes of these felons you will never stink. And if you stink it is because the nostrils of their minds are dead. And if they bury you insisting that you smell, they will indeed be crazy – it is only madmen who bury a nice-smelling flower like you, dear mother. History, my mother, long live! Long live! Long live! Glory, and power and dominion are yours, forever and ever!
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