It's a Continent

Our latest episode of PastMaster (out Monday 4 December) features special guests Chinny Ukata and Astrid Madimba from It’s a Continent podcast.

Their show covers the history and unique identity of individual African nations with topics ranging from ‘A food hug from Sierra Leone’ to Cobalt mining in the DRC, to an unflinching eye on European nations’ colonial exploitation of the continent over the past 200 years.

In the opening of their book, also called It’s a Continent, there is the line: ‘Africa’s history is everyone’s history’. Africa’s natural resources were plundered by European nations including Britain, Belgium, Germany and France in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, creating wealth that fuelled western countries’ development up to the present day. Africa’s history is integral to how the world is today.

In their PastMaster adventure, Chinny and Astrid head back to the Berlin Conference of 1884 where Europe’s elite met to formalise the carving up of Africa. No African leaders were invited or indeed allowed to attend the event, and today the conference is broadly seen as the moment European nations formalised and legitimised the scramble for Africa.

Chinny and Astrid, who both grew up in England, said the history they were taught in school was Eurocentric, with hardly any information about colonialism in Africa. It made me think about what I was taught in my history lessons.

I’m probably not the best history student: I dropped history halfway through my first term in sixth form in Buckingham in 1997, trading it in for English literature and the works of Samuel Beckett, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alan Bennett. This might have been a disappointment to my parents, who had shelled out an eye-watering amount on interminably dry books about the Tudors for me. But in any case I had at least had a taste of what was on offer in the history curriculum, and before sixth form I enjoyed my history GCSE, taught by the lovely, guitar-playing Mr Green.

It’s hazy, but I can remember learning about the Bolsheviks, Trotsky, Lenin and the Russian Revolution. There was a big focus on Henry VII and his son Henry VIII, who of course is the cover star for PastMaster, and also dipping our toes into Nazi Germany. But I don’t remember much else. There was definitely no colonial history of Africa. 

I was vaguely aware, that is to say I had a suspicion but never really investigated, that European nations including Britain had perpetrated awful acts in African countries in the past. But this was a long time ago. How relevant could it be today? Listening to It’s a Continent has been eye opening. I didn’t realise Mozambique only achieved independence as late as 1975. I knew nothing of the massacre of Senegalese soldiers by French authorities after they were conscripted to fight for France, or the Aba Women’s War in Nigeria in protest at restrictive British colonial rule.

All these stories are an open hole in my historical knowledge. To my shame I hadn’t heard of the Berlin Conference until Chinny and Astrid mentioned it, saying they wanted to go back and either prevent the conference from happening or stop the outcomes agreed at it.

We had a lot of fun playing the game in this setting, testing whether ChatGPT possessed the creativity required to change the outcomes of the Berlin Conference and imagine alternative an history for the world.

I won’t give too much away here, but it’s worth a listen if you have time. In the meantime, I’ll be digging back into some more episodes of It’s a Continent.