White intellectuals declared Africans historyless to rationalize racial slavery

Evidence

The most minute and the most careful researches have, as yet, failed to discover a history or any knowledge of ancient times among the negro races. They have invented no writing; not even the rude picture-writing of the lowest tribes. They have no gods and no heroes; no epic poem and no legend, not even simple traditions. There never existed among them an organized government; there never ruled a hierarchy or an established church. Might alone is right. They have never known the arts; they are ignorant even of agriculture. The cities of Africa are vast accumulations of huts and hovels; clay walls or thorny hedges surround them, and pools of blood and rows of skulls adorn their best houses. The few evidences of splendour or civilization are all borrowed from Europe; where there is a religion or creed, it is that of the foreigners; all knowledge, all custom, all progress has come to them from abroad. The negro has no history—he makes no history. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 403

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: This is the denial-of-history claim Robinson’s whole project rebuts — connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and Eric Williams’s argument that slavery rationalization shaped Western historiography.

Related

• Racist historiography, not ignorance alone, sealed off the African past (similarity 0.85)
• The invented Negro erased Africa’s civilizational contributions from Western memory (similarity 0.83)
• Even pioneering Black historians accepted white racialist views of African degradation. (similarity 0.82)
• Trevor-Roper denied that Africa had any history at all. (similarity 0.81)
• The black soul is a construct created by white civilization (similarity 0.80)
• African heritage, not slavery, defined the Black condition (similarity 0.80)
• The Negro construct erased African history, space, and humanity itself (similarity 0.80)
• Authentic understanding of the Negro requires breaking cultural crystallization (similarity 0.80)
• The Negro identity was manufactured in the West, not brought from Africa. (similarity 0.79)
• Enslaved Africans carried intact cultural systems, not deculturated minds, into slavery (similarity 0.79)
• Western scholarship’s denial of Black radicalism served an ideology that obliterated the African (similarity 0.79)
• African heritage, not slavery, shaped the Black condition fundamentally. (similarity 0.79)
• Black scholars accused white radical historians of reproducing Eurocentric stereotypes of Africans (similarity 0.78)