Instead of 'Africanizing' Western stories, I'm interested in reclaiming African history rendering them into what is happening in the present day.

We tend to view history not as it was, but as we think it should have been.

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Yes, but you have to put things in a positive way. It's true. We want to change the image of Africa, because we've been realizing that only we ourselves can change Africa. Nobody can do it for us. People try, because they love us, but only we can change things. We understand that we should stand up and try to write our own story.

We want to correct the paths of the revolution and history.

Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way; every new historian, not content with giving new answers to old questions, must revise the questions themselves.

History must not be written with bias, and both sides must be given, even if there is only one side.

Humans, being creative, can rewrite anything.
...which is a coy way of suggesting that each young generation invents history according to its own bigotries. The rewritten history gets quoted to show that one or another special group has perpetually saved civilization while suffering abuse known only to holy saints. The justification for historians is the same as the justification for janitors. Both sweep up the mess when the public gets done trashing.

Every time we think about the past, we rewrite history as part of bringing a moral order to the present. (2021)

We create history by our observation, rather than history creating us.

We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is simply a reflection of the present

Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn’t want us to imagine. By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape – and we can begin to think and dream differently. Studying history will not tell us what to choose, but at least it gives us more options.
Movements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history, thereby enabling people to reimagine the future. Whether you want workers to go on a general strike, women to take possession of their bodies, or oppressed minorities to demand political rights – the first step is to retell their history. The new history will explain that ‘our present situation is neither natural nor eternal. Things were different once. Only a string of chance events created the unjust world we know today. If we act wisely, we can change that world, and create a much better one.’ This is why Marxists recount the history of capitalism; why feminists study the formation of patriarchal societies; and why African Americans commemorate the horrors of the slave trade. They aim not to perpetuate the past, but rather to be liberated from it.

So as Africans, we must renegociate our relationships with the rest of the world. We must know our history, we must take responsability for our own future, we must dare to invent that future and we must mobilize the people and the strategies that are needed to build and win that future.

history wasn’t just written by the victors. First it had to be erased and rewritten. Replacing troublesome truth with self-serving myth.