Colonial record-keeping systematically erased African revolts from the written archive.
Evidence
In Africa itself, the same historical tradition was no less apparent in the nineteenth century. But we must also keep in mind the warning issued by C. L. R. James and George Padmore that it was the colonial habit not to maintain a very close record of these events: … The difficulty… is to get accounts written in any detail. The British send out their punitive expeditions against revolting tribes and do not necessarily mention them in the annual colonial reports. But if the revolt awakens public interest, a commission will investigate and make a report. This report will frequently clash violently with the accounts of participants, eye-witnesses, correspondents of newspapers, native and European, and persons living in the colony at the time. The French and Belgians, however, publish little of this kind. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 820
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: This archival erasure claim directly meets Robinson’s own archaeology metaphor—the chapter title’s ‘historical archaeology’ is required precisely because the colonial record buried the tradition.
- SEED: The claim that revolts were omitted from annual colonial reports unless they awakened public interest is a strong angle for an essay on the institutional production of historical silence.