Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

States of Anxiety: History and Nation in Modern Africa

2015; Oxford University Press; Volume: 229; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/pastj/gtv033

1477-464X

Richard Reid,

African history and culture studies

‘Happy is the Nation without a History’: an intriguing and enduring dictum, whether we attribute it to Cesare Beccaria, or Montesquieu, or Thomas Carlyle. It is certainly one of the more memorable non-sequiturs — there is, of course, no such thing, as Eric Hobsbawm averred: ‘Nations without a past are contradictions in terms’.1 But what about nations which are ‘new’, created through the complex and often contradictory processes of decolonization, apparently without the historical ballast that is such a fundamental element in the composition of the national community? These have rather more anxious and difficult relationships with history, and they are the focus of this article, which offers some reflections on the ways in which in recent decades the past has been utilized and conceptualized by modern African nations. All nations are synthetic products in one way or another, and often owe something to interfering foreigners, or at least to foreign influence.2 Yet in the African context these issues are seen as particularly problematic, even insurmountably so. My objective in this article is to reflect on some visions of the past at the national level in an era in which the nation itself has been simultaneously fragile, marginalized as a unit of study, and aggressively developmental; and one in which the professional historical academy in Africa has been, notwithstanding some local variations, in steady decline in terms of its material security and perceived relevance in public life. The article is particularly concerned with the presence (or absence) of the deeper past — the echoes, visions, and mobilizations of the so-called ‘precolonial’ — in public and political imaginaries.