The West deliberately obscured its prior knowledge of Africa’s historical significance

Evidence

The obscuring of the Black radical tradition is seated in the West’s suppression of Europe’s previous knowledge of the African (and its own) past. The denial of history to African peoples took time—several hundreds of years-beginning with the emergence of Western Europeans from the shadow of Muslim domination and paternalism. It was also a process that was to transport the image of Africa across separate planes of dehumanization latticed by the emerging modalities of Western culture. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 117

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to broader historiographies of erasure — e.g. the silencing of Indigenous and non-Western pasts discussed in postcolonial and settler-colonial studies.