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Idiot, idiot, stupidity

It has taken nearly a decade to research and write, and runs to more than 750 pages. But The History Makers, described as “an epic exploration of those who write about the past”, has itself been rewritten after its author failed to take into account enough black historians, academics and writers.

The complaints are that he’s ignored black history. Which isn’t what he was writing about, rather, about writers of history. And the impact of writers of history is going to be reliant upon how many people read them, not the history itself that happened.

Sigh.

3 thoughts on “Idiot, idiot, stupidity”

  1. I wonder who the whingers concerned critics are?

    “Black history has not been welcome in history,” says British historian David Olusoga. “Black people have been invisible in history.”

    I suppose when your only form of knowledge transmission is oral, it’s hard to get those pesky facts about what happened hundreds of years ago straight. Thus, the ‘History’ of black people has been written largely by Arabs and by White people.

    To counter criticism about the lack of African historians and writers, Cohen has added Leo Africanus, a Berber…

    Lol. So he still couldn’t he find a Sub- Saharan African Historian? Surely there must be at least one he could use, say, someone with a few books and TV appearances behind him and a favourite on the BBC? Maybe one born in Nigeria and called David? Anyone?

    ( A nice takedown of Mr Olusoga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuCi5dG6vhw )

  2. ‘… has itself been rewritten after its author failed to take into account enough black historians, academics and writer.’

    An extra half-page shouldn’t take long.

  3. Writing history is not all that common in history. The old Hebrew stuff is just rubbishy fiction and folklore until it suddenly met reality with the conquest of Israel by the Assyrians. Early Roman history is also just folklore. The Greeks certainly had historians. So had the Chinese but not the Indians. Not the Phoenicians, not the peoples of Mesopotamia, not …

    The Egyptians were pretty impressive but did they write history? ‘The problematic search for ancient Egyptian historiography is tied to the debated extent and form of historical consciousness. The ancient Egyptians did have a sense of “historical” events or achievements that could be described to a future audience. Though they did not produce a historiography comparable to other ancient, or later Western, models, which attempt to analyze and critically reconstruct the distant past, they left texts that display historiographic features, such as an awareness of the singularity of events, or references to “reality.” The annals and the “king’s novel” are the most discussed examples of this kind of text. The non-mythical distant past is a featured subject of king-lists, and it became the object of historiography in Manetho’s Aegyptiaca.’
    https://escholarship.org/uc/item/73v96940

    Manetho was an Egyptian who wrote in Greek in the Hellenistic period i.e. he was writing in the Greek tradition. Still, he can be passed off as “African” though he does have the disadvantage that little of his work survived.

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