Marxist Historiography: A Threshold To The Study Of African Historiography And Decolonization In The 20th Century

Abstract

Marxist view occupies a central place in the construction and reconstruction of history. In a specific sense, and within the context of Africa’s past, series of progress were made in the resistance to colonial domination as well as indigenous governance in the post-colonial situation. To a large extent, the developments have been attributed to a resultant influence of Marxist conception of historical processes and phenomenon of class struggle. While certain writers such as Kapteijns (1977), Ernst (2007) as well as Ogot (2009) have chronicled the trends and trajectory of Marxist historiography in Africa, other works have made efforts to elucidate Marxist thoughts in academic and social stance. Basically, this paper seeks to examine the place of Marxist historiography in the African context. However, arising from a thorough interrogation of relevant literature, this paper challenges the aspersion that ‘Africans have no history’ and renders it as a baseless summation of developments informed by chauvinistic, egoistic, ethnocentric, jingoistic and xenophobic 
Eurocentric distortion of Africa’s historical worth. The study employed both primary and secondary sources of data collection to analyse the discourse. The paper concludes that Marxist approach to historiography enabled African historians and writers to decolonise their history from European bias, reclaim the lost glory of Africa in many respects and also 
embark on omnibus documentation of African perspectives to development as from the 1960s onward.