Terence Ranger

So-called World History originated in an attempt to escape from the tyrannical perspective of dead white Euro-American males, yet that ‘world’ perspective has had the effect of making those same males more dominant than ever. Thus Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (1982), however heroic in intention, ends up asserting that extra-European peoples did have a history, but it was a history of their relations with Euro-American economies. In his Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm expresses his contempt for the historians who deny a past to Africa or Asia, but himself provides an account which gives all the agency to Europe.‘

The publishers of each of these books claim a revelation of common experience and suffering through the true recounting of an individual life. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself was first published anonymously in 1861. The dust-jacket of this new edition hails it both as a true life-story and as a classic expression of ‘the Afro-American experience’. Edith Turner’s The Spirit and the Drum, which recounts her visits to western Zambia with her husband Victor a century later than Jacobs’s misadventures in America, is described as ‘a highly personal memoir’ which ‘re-creates the ritual and ceremonial life of the Ndembu people’. Mark Mathabane’s autobiographical Kaffir Boy, which describes growing up in Alexandra township near Johannesburg between 1960 and 1978, is offered both as ‘a unique and remarkable memoir’ and as a revelation of ‘how a black and his family suffer the daily reality’ of the system of Apartheid. Yet each raises questions concerning their representativeness, their literalness and their significance.