Joseph Ki-Zerbo
'Without identity, we are an object of history.'
Full detail, evidence and debate
Historian, teacher and opposition politician from Burkina Faso, Ki-Zerbo helped conceive and direct UNESCO's eight-volume General History of Africa, wrote the first widely used African-authored general history of the continent, and argued through five decades that development imposed from outside is not development at all.
- Lived
- 1922 – 2006
- First
- First Burkinabè to qualify as a history teacher (agrégation, Paris)
- Major work
- Histoire de l'Afrique noire, 1972
- UNESCO
- Edited Volume I of the General History of Africa
- Politics
- Founded the PDP; long exile under Sankara and Compaoré
- Motto
- 'Nan lara, an sara' — if we lie down, we are dead
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Formation
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
Ki-Zerbo was born in 1922 in Toma, in what was then Upper Volta, into a Catholic family; his father was among the first converts in the region. He studied in Bamako, Dakar and then Paris, where he became the first Burkinabè to pass the agrégation in history — the qualification that certifies a teacher of the discipline at the highest level in the French system. In Paris he was active in the African student movement alongside a generation that would supply much of the continent's post-independence leadership and intellectual class. He taught in Guinea and Senegal before returning home.
The problem he set out to solve
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
The history taught in African schools at independence had been written elsewhere, largely by Europeans, and treated Africa as a place things happened to. Ki-Zerbo's response was not to invert the propaganda but to change who was doing the work and what counted as evidence. That meant taking oral tradition seriously as a historical source with its own critical methods, integrating archaeology and linguistics, writing in a way usable in African classrooms, and training African historians in African institutions. His Histoire de l'Afrique noire, published in 1972, was the first general history of the continent by an African historian to reach a wide readership, and it stayed in print and in use for decades.
The General History of Africa
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
UNESCO's General History of Africa, launched in 1964 and published in eight volumes between 1981 and 1993, was designed to be produced by an international scientific committee two-thirds of whose members were African. Ki-Zerbo edited Volume I, Methodology and African Prehistory, which set out how the whole project would treat evidence — the standing of oral tradition, the use of linguistics and archaeology, the problem of written sources produced by outsiders. That volume is where the project's philosophy lives, and it is Ki-Zerbo's most consequential piece of institutional work: it defined the terms on which African history would be written by African scholars for the following generation.
Endogenous development
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
Ki-Zerbo's second great argument concerned development. He held that models imported wholesale — structural adjustment, donor-designed programmes, education systems that taught children in languages their parents did not speak — could not produce development because they severed societies from their own capacities. 'On ne développe pas, on se développe': one does not develop others, one develops oneself. He argued for African languages in education, for building on existing agricultural and social knowledge rather than replacing it, for regional integration, and for the slow institutional work that donors' funding cycles never accommodate. Much of what he said in the 1970s and 1980s reads as prescient about the failures of the adjustment era.
Politics and exile
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
He founded the Mouvement de Libération Nationale and later the Parti pour la Démocratie et le Progrès, sat in parliament, and spent long periods in exile — under Sankara's revolutionary government, whose methods he criticised while sharing many of its goals, and under Compaoré, whose government he opposed until his death. He survived an assassination attempt in the 1990s. His political life mattered to his historical work: he argued consistently that a people without a grasp of its own past could not exercise agency in the present, and he treated teaching, writing and organising as the same project.
How we know, and what is argued
The broad outline is accepted but dates, numbers or details are actively argued by specialists.
Ki-Zerbo is unusually well documented: his books, the UNESCO project archives, extensive interviews — the book-length conversation À quand l'Afrique? being the best entry point — and the work of the foundation his family established in Ouagadougou. Debate about him concerns emphasis rather than fact. Critics argue that his general history compressed regions unevenly and that later specialist scholarship has superseded much of its detail, which he would not have disputed; the book was designed as a starting point. Others question whether 'endogenous development' offers workable policy or mainly a critique. His own answer was that the critique had to come first, because programmes designed on false premises fail regardless of their funding.
Legacy
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The General History of Africa has been translated into many languages and, since 2009, adapted into teaching materials for schools across the continent — the pedagogical use he always intended. Burkina Faso's national institutions and a university carry his name, and the Fondation Joseph Ki-Zerbo in Ouagadougou continues the work. Within African historiography he is the institutional counterpart to Diop's provocation: where Diop forced an argument, Ki-Zerbo built the structures that let African historians conduct arguments of their own.
Where to go next
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
Cheikh Anta Diop covers the contemporary who shared his aims and differed on method; Thomas Sankara the revolutionary government he both supported and criticised. Agenda 2063 in the Modern book carries his development argument into current continental policy, and the Sources library lists the General History of Africa itself.
Sources
- Histoire de l'Afrique noireAfrican source
Joseph Ki-Zerbo · 1978
- General History of Africa (8 volumes)African source
UNESCO International Scientific Committee · 1981–1993
https://www.unesco.org/en/general-history-africa
Follow the thread
Cheikh Anta Diop
The physicist-historian who forced a discipline to argue.
Trained in physics and chemistry in Paris and working in radiocarbon dating in Dakar, Cheikh Anta Diop argued that Ancient Egypt was a Black African civilisation culturally continuous with the rest of the continent, and that African history had to be written from African linguistic, cultural and archaeological evidence rather than from European assumptions. The Egypt thesis remains contested; the methodological demand reshaped African intellectual life.
SenegalThomas Sankara
Four years that are still being argued about.
In four years as head of state, Sankara renamed Upper Volta as Burkina Faso — land of upright people — vaccinated millions of children in weeks, planted millions of trees against the advancing desert, outlawed forced marriage and female genital cutting, cut his own government's privileges to the bone, and told a continental summit to refuse its debts. He was killed in the coup that installed Blaise Compaoré in 1987, and his reputation has grown steadily ever since.
Burkina FasoAgenda 2063
The Africa We Want, written by Africans.
The African Union's fifty-year framework, adopted in 2015 on the fiftieth anniversary of the OAU: seven aspirations, twenty goals, and a set of flagship projects delivered through successive ten-year implementation plans. It is the continent's own long-term plan for 2063 — prosperity, integration, good governance, peace, cultural identity, people-driven development, and Africa as a global player.
Continental