Why disregard for history is our greatest undoing

Celebrated musician Kanye West has been hitting the news waves lately for his latest provocative statement that slavery was a choice. His statement has fanned the flames of racial debate in the US with many black Americans calling him out for his little understanding of black history. The controversial hip-hop artist has come out to clarify what he really meant but the damage appears to have been done.

All the interpretations aside, Kanye appears quite bold going against the grain, but he only man-ages to spark such great outrage because his remarks are made in a country with a very well preserved history. Accounts of slavery and racial discrimination are well documented through various forms of literature.

Great efforts have also been made to ensure this history is not forgotten, with whole months dedicated to celebrate black history in countries such as the US, the UK and Canada, and museums containing rich historical knowledge as opposed to mere artefacts.Preserving history is not some-thing we do particularly well. We are probably better at preserving historical artefacts than we are at preserving knowledge.

This not only addresses the political – we struggle at preserving our culture as well. Case in point, to the average Dar dweller, the village museum has been reduced to a venue for wedding committee meetings, and the national museum a venue for conferences.

Demand and supply

The problem, I reckon, has its roots in both the demand and sup-ply sides.

It’s easy to say people are not interested, but hard to convince anyone that whoever is in charge of such important institutions has made any laudable effort to get peo-ple interested.

So we remain a peo-ple without a history.Arguably, Mwalimu Nyerere is the most “documented” Tanzanian, yet you get the sense that the wealth of his wisdom is more appreciated and utilised outside the country. His works are a frequent subject of debate in Ivy League schools and many other academic institu-tions across the world. Yet here, it is amusing how snippets of his speeches appear sporadically and conveniently when there’s a situa-tion that demands it.

A great example is how an audio clip of Mwalimu telling workers off for demanding a wage increase on Labour Day somewhat magi-cally surfaced and was circulated at the time of the latest Labour Day celebrations.

It is easy to sus-pect that someone is holding on to archives upon archives of Mwal-imu’s speeches, and, for reasons best known to themselves, they do not want the general public to have full access to them.Mwalimu Nyerere, himself a great thinker, challenged Tanza-nians to be self-reliant, thrive in the arts and sciences, yet the manner in which his thoughts are superfi-cially utilised locally suggests that the present-day Tanzanian is a pale shadow of the person our founding father envisioned.

Nationalism

Nationalism, a subject taught in our schools is one we view only in that way – as something restrict-ed to our history books. But in an increasingly globalised world, those who fail to preserve their history risk losing their national identities. This is what gives us our “Kanyes”, whose denial or igno-rance of our history only serves to hurt us because any discontinuity in the way we view present events weakens our ability to understand and resolve our problems.I am currently watching Bobby for President, a Netflix docuseries looking at the life of Senator Rob-ert Kennedy, the late President Kennedy’s brother who was in the running for the top office before his assassination in 1968.

It’s clear from the docuseries that the pursuit of truth about this assassination has not ended. Truth not only helps people and nations reconcile, but also offers important lessons that helps people avoid repeating past mistakes, and I believe it is histori-cal accounts such as the Kennedys’ that have helped make American democracy what it is today.On a personal note, this article marks a year’s worth of weekly writings published on this paper. I hope these writings will give my two-and-a-half-year-old son access to my thoughts, even in my absence, for his entire life.

I have had the benefit of accessing my own father’s account of history through his novel Mzizi wa Chuki which recounts how structures in the socialist Tanzania paved the way for rampant corruption in the post-Nyerere era. If we’re to find our footing in this world and have something about us that the young and old can both ral-ly around and become part of our national psyche; we must embark on that journey of not only recount-ing our history to the young, but archiving it in literature and digital formats.