It is still rare to read the introduction to a textbook on African history without encountering a customary denunciation of the late Oxford don Hugh Trevor-Roper. For example, Richard Reid’s A history of modern Africa published in 2020 still repeats this trope while many other popular textbooks on African history still continue to selectively weaponise the quote. This has been termed the “Trevor-Roper syndrome”. Roper, a former Regius Professor of Modern History at Oriel College, has often been accused by African historians of stating that Black Africa had no “history.” Roper’s oft-quoted comments were made in the 1960s—first in The Rise of Christian Europe, published in 1965, and then in a further insightful lecture on the philosophy of history at the LSE in 1968, where he remarked about an “unhistoric Africa.”
The keen student of African history, who encounters Roper for the first time, often reads a selective quote that has been removed from its broader context and made to serve new meanings that extend beyond its original intentions. While Africanists often restrict their use of Roper’s quote to a few lines, a fuller understanding of what Roper meant can only be gained by examining his explanation for the use of history, which extends across about two more pages.
For the purpose of this essay, I will state a longer form of these quotes verbatim in order to analyse what they actually meant. In the first chapter of The Rise of Christian Europe—a book derived from a series of lectures delivered at the University of Sussex in 1963—Roper stated:
“It is fashionable to speak today as if European history were devalued: as if historians, in the past, have paid too much attention to it; and as if, nowadays, we should pay less. Undergraduates, seduced, as always, by the changing breath of journalistic fashion, demand that they should be taught the history of black Africa. Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history.
Please do not misunderstand me. I do not deny that men existed even in dark countries and dark centuries, nor that they had political life and culture, interesting to sociologists and anthropologists; but history, I believe, is essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement too. It is not a mere phantasmagoria of changing shapes and costumes, of battles and conquests, dynasties and usurpations, social forms and social disintegration. If all history is equal, as some now believe, there is no reason why we should study one section of it rather than another; for certainly we cannot study it all. Then indeed we may neglect our own history and amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe: tribes whose chief function in history, in my opinion, is to show to the present an image of the past from which it has escaped; or shall I seek to avoid the indignation of the medievalists, from which it has changed.”
The first point that jumps out is that Roper’s comments were a reaction to the intellectual developments of his time. The 1960s were a momentous period both in modern African history and in the study of Africa’s past. The study of African history in its academic, professional form had just taken off, typified by the launch of the Journal of African History in 1960. In addition, centres devoted to the study of the African past were established during the decade, sparking interest among a new generation of postgraduate historians. In the backdrop of all this were the heady currents of decolonisation—both in Western history departments and in the chancelleries of Europe—which supported the emergence of newly minted African nation-states.
A prominent historical fashion at the time, as now, was the denunciation of Eurocentrism and the championing of what has been termed “merry Africa” by the eminent economic historian A. G. Hopkins. This was the misguided idea that Africa enjoyed a golden age of peace and harmony before the advent of colonial rule. This was the context in which Roper made his reactionary comments about the “unhistoricity” of Black Africa. Yet Roper’s comments—while often denounced in African history textbooks—were not really about Black Africa per se. Rather, they were about the essence of the study of history and an attempt to answer the perennial question of how the human past should be studied in its various guises.
The first thing to mention is that Roper did not deny that there was an African history. As he stated, he did not “deny that men existed even in dark countries and dark centuries, nor that they had political life and culture, interesting to sociologists and anthropologists,” but he questioned why this should be a subject for history, since history, he believed, was “essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement too. It is not a mere phantasmagoria of changing shapes and costumes, of battles and conquests, dynasties and usurpations, social forms and social disintegration.”
In addition, I don’t accept that Roper’s position amounts to a complete denunciation of oral sources, which form a key part of the reconstruction of pre-colonial African history, as his magnum opus, The Last Days of Hitler, was mostly constructed from oral interviews. Essentially, Roper was setting out an argument also made by some of his favoured historians, such as Edward Gibbon: that the study of history is not merely the listing of chronological events or recounting every minute of the human past—which is impossible—but the study of certain periods or “histories” that have been purposive or decisive in their influence on human affairs.
As he explained vividly while channelling David Hume, “the positive content of history consisted not in the meaningless fermentation of passive or barbarous societies but in the movement of society, the process—conscious or unconscious—by which certain societies, at certain times, had risen out of the barbarism once common to all, and, by their efforts and example, by the interchange and diffusion of arts and sciences, gradually drawn or driven other societies along with them to the full light and freedom.”
It is crucial to note that in this context, Hume was commenting on the unremarkable nature of medieval Anglo-Saxon society, asking: “What instruction or entertainment can it give the reader to hear a long bead-roll of barbarous names—Egric, Annas, Ethelbert, Ethelwald, Aldulf, Elfwold, Beorne, Ethelred, Ethelbert—who successively murdered, expelled, or inherited from each other, and obscurely filled the throne of East Anglia?”
Essentially, Roper, in my opinion, was providing a fitting response to the question of why the histories of some societies are often studied far more than others. He implicitly admitted that the realities of the present often determine the attention historians devote to certain periods and cultures, simply because of the impact they have had. And while it may be interesting to study the histories of cultures that have had less impact on global affairs purely for their own sake, it is less clear why they should deserve disproportionate attention.
As Finn Fuglestad, a Norwegian historian who has also written about this subject, puts it: “It is to be sure no longer deemed respectable to put the label ‘unhistoric’ on the African continent. But the contention that Black Africa has indeed a history worthy of interest and consideration is still not self-evident to everyone.” This analysis is not unique to precolonial Black Africa but applies to different periods of European history and other cultures as well. It is impossible to study the entirety of the past simply for its own sake, and historians would do well to avoid this trap lest they descend into antiquarianism.
The reality is that the last 500 years of human history have been decisively shaped—for better in some instances and for worse in others—by the European continent. This is undeniable. It is not simply Eurocentrism; it is historical reality. The political structures of modern African nations mirror those of Europe. The vast behemoth that is China is governed according to Marxist-inspired philosophy. India’s government—regardless of the decolonising actions of Narendra Modi—still runs on a European model, and the ancestors of the most powerful country in the world, the United States, were essentially European. Europe made the modern world. This, however, does not mean that there were no substantial contributions to the rise of Europe from other cultures—there certainly were—but the decisive influence, in my opinion, was still distinctly European.
One of the main conclusions of Roper’s book, which is actually among the least Eurocentric of its time, is that it was far from clear in the fifteenth century that Europe was destined to take this lead. As he further explained in The Rise of Christian Europe, “In the fifteenth century there were many civilized societies in the world, and there was no particular reason that any one of them was destined to overshadow, or conquer, or absorb the others.”
Indeed, this dynamic view of history is characteristic of Roper and distinguishes him from the biological racists of the nineteenth century who believed European domination stemmed from innate superiority. Roper, however, did not believe Europe’s rise was ordained or secure for all time. As he remarked in the same book, “it may be well that the future will be the future of non-European peoples: that the ‘colonial’ peoples of Africa and Asia will inherit that primacy in the world which the ‘imperialist West’ can no longer sustain.” If this were to happen, in which there is every possibility, it would not be surprising, as the “rise” of these states would draw historical attention to the forces that precipitated their ascent. We have already seen historical and economic scholarship flourish in response to the meteoric rise of China and Southeast Asia, especially with the advent of the “Asian miracle.”
Essentially, Trevor-Roper’s comments were not about whether African history was worth studying, but rather about the amount of historical attention it deserved. The reality of this historical attention is that it is most likely to be devoted by indigenous Africans who are keen to demonstrate that their continent does have a ‘history,’ as well as by Western historians with special interests in cultures that lie outside the dominance of conventional historical scholarship. However, African history will best be understood if it is studied for its own sake. In trying to understand the continent’s history, it is important that Africanists do not always study African history as a counter to Eurocentrism or as a way to prove that there was indeed an African history. African history can simply be studied because it enriches our understanding of the human past and because it is crucial for indigenous Africans to understand their own past.
The reality of the study of history, just as Roper contended, is that societies often receive the attention they do because their contemporary forms have had decisive impacts on the trajectory of human affairs. This may be a Whiggish interpretation of history—which Roper certainly admitted he sometimes adopted—but it remains the reality of historical study and will continue to be.
HISTORIES. 
One response to “African history and the Trevor-Roper syndrome”
interesting take. As someone living in the UK, I’ve always found learning about precolonial Africa fascinating – I think it’s mostly because UK schools still act like it doesn’t really exist, and not in the nuanced way you are talking about here. I think looking past the slave trade and the British Empire has helped me to understand how the period beforehand across both Europe and Africa had far more similarities than differences.
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