Who Is Afraid of Historical Reckoning?, By Moses E. Ochonu

#BlackLivesMatter has opened the floodgates. It should not end in America. It should travel to Europe, Australia, Asia, and Africa. This wave of uncomfortable historical conversations should especially travel to Nigeria, which is a minefield of many unresolved historical questions. These questions have for far too long been denied or swept aside…

As the #BlackLivesMatter protests force governments and other entities across the world to reckon with racist and oppressive histories and culpabilities, those intent on shutting down corrective, constructive, and revisionist conversations about past injustices and their injurious and traumatising resonance in the present have invoked three specious, diversionary registers to try to engineer a backlash or blunt the momentum towards reckoning and corrective healing. I will outline the three points the reactionaries are raising and debunk them.

Talking about past racism, slavery, conquest, colonialism, exploitation, slave-raiding, injustices, and myriad oppressions will fray the social fabric, exacerbate societal tensions, and activate the impulse of revenge.

Rebuttal: This is nothing but emotional blackmail meant to silence and truncate the movement by historically marginalised and oppressed groups and their allies in dominant groups to correct past wrongs and heal social relations in the present. Intergroup tensions and suspicions of the present are not going away. If anything, they will deepen as the stakes in political and socioeconomic struggles increase, so you might as well confront them frontally rather than trying in vain to conceal or live in denial of them in the hope that you can make them go away or preserve an artificial peace built on injustice, unresolved historical questions, and denialism.

At any rate, the world is already in turmoil, so where is the peace or harmony to be preserved by suppressing historical truth-telling and the sincere, good-faith airing of historical grievances? The most compelling reason why this emotional blackmail should be ignored by all people of conscience is that it is precisely because of the centrifugal, racial, sectarian, ethnic, and religious strife that plagues our world that we need to expose, analyse, and morally evaluate the dark sides of history and historical injustices that continue to victimise, marginalise, and embitter people in the present.

We should consider historical injustices and crimes such as slavery and racial terror and those who perpetrated them in their temporal context, in the spirit of the times in which those crimes occurred. We should not apply today’s moral standards on the past.

Rebuttal: That is a notion of history that no historian today subscribes to, unless they’re driven by ideological and political agendas or invested in the existing historical and archival orthodoxies that distort history and exclude the perspectives and voices of marginal, oppressed, and vanquished groups. It is a notion of history that is rooted in the discredited 19th century positivist canard that history is about “retelling the past as it actually happened,” that historical objectivity and fidelity to the archive are the point of professional history, and that one should not attempt to judge the archive or bring voices into it that had been excluded.

To the extent that all history is about standing in the present and looking backwards into the actions of past actors, the historian, whether they acknowledge it or not, is applying the moral and ethical and professional standards of their time to whatever past era they are studying.

Those who propounded this notion of history were unsurprisingly located in dominant identities, nationalist projects, and imperial traditions and were interested in shutting down alternative, insurgent, and revisionist histories that privileged the stories of marginalised and oppressed groups and critiqued the oppression, exploitation, and atrocities of the dominant groups. Those who recycle this discredited view of history in the present, such as apologists of racism and colonialism like Boris Johnson, Niall Ferguson, and others, are also located in dominant identities, with all their inherited privileges, and want to police a view of the past and a dominant archive of the past written and constituted by their forebears.

Speaking of archives, they are not neutral repositories of historical truth. Instead, archives are produced and shaped by powerful, dominant, and oppressive people, classes, and political formations. The archive is a place of power, silencing, and erasure, where dominant, oppressive power formations decide what is said and known about the past; whose story to include and whose to exclude. So when defenders of metanarratives and dominant, severely distorted perspectives on history fetishise the existing archive and the self-serving, conveniently one-sided narratives they authenticate, they are unwittingly or wittingly reifying and protecting the silencing, erasures, and exclusions of history.

As for the idea of not applying the moral judgments of the present to the past, it is an outmoded notion of history that no respectable historian holds. History is a snapshot, a perspective on the past, and it is informed by the positionality of the historian, his biases, socialisation, and more importantly, the moral, ethical, philosophical, and professional standards of his time. By its very nature, history is provisional and tentative and never final. Every perspective on history, whether paradigmatic or revisionist, thus invites scrutiny and further examination because it is not and cannot be a complete reconstruction of the past. That is why historical texts and their explanations are often revised and challenged by contemporaneous or future historians, in light of new evidence and new ways of seeing.

To the extent that all history is about standing in the present and looking backwards into the actions of past actors, the historian, whether they acknowledge it or not, is applying the moral and ethical and professional standards of their time to whatever past era they are studying. This is the gist of historians’ critique of positivist history, the pretentious 19th century notion of history that has since been discredited.

Historian Gabrielle Speigel has argued correctly in defence of the histories of minorities and historically marginalised groups, histories that were excluded from the dominant archives and canons of the profession, and that demand the moral judgments that privileged and conceited advocates of silencing disapprove of.

To actually do an “objective” history and reconstruct history without the biases and moral conventions of the present, which is what the reactionaries are advancing, the historian would have to time-travel to the past and inhabit the temporal and spatial universe of the particular time and place that they are studying, which is impossible. Alternatively, they would have to write a “history” of their time, of the present. But that would not be history but journalism, and even at that, no journalism manual or theory will tell you that journalism is free of biases or that journalists do not bring their perspectives, moral commitments, predilections, socialisation, and their employers’ editorial bents to bear on their stories.

Alternative, competing historical narratives are already proliferating, aided by new informational mediums and online modes of sociability, so the attempt to propagate official histories and historical fictions, to silence the ugly past in the name of keeping the peace, or to let historical sleeping dogs lie, is already in ruins.

The invocation of historical context and objectivism is thus both illusory and diversionary, a mere red herring designed to shut down important, ongoing conversations on the many bloody histories that need to be thoroughly excavated so that their lessons can be learnt, their culpabilities understood, and the grievances of their victims discerned and addressed. Moreover, moral relativism is historically a favourite tactic of powerful oppressors who want to escape scrutiny. It is often weaponised by dominant groups and their supporters to blunt efforts to investigate and expose historical crimes in which they’re implicated.

#BlackLivesMatter has opened the floodgates. It should not end in America. It should travel to Europe, Australia, Asia, and Africa. This wave of uncomfortable historical conversations should especially travel to Nigeria, which is a minefield of many unresolved historical questions. These questions have for far too long been denied or swept aside in a misguided and failed effort to foster and maintain a façade of national unity and peace — a misguided effort because peace and unity cannot take hold on a foundation of historical injustices, bitter memories, and unaddressed historical grievances and hurt.

Alternative, competing historical narratives are already proliferating, aided by new informational mediums and online modes of sociability, so the attempt to propagate official histories and historical fictions, to silence the ugly past in the name of keeping the peace, or to let historical sleeping dogs lie, is already in ruins. What is needed is a new approach of holistic and sincere historical reckoning and accountability.

If you start revising the past and tearing down past monuments to racists, violent colonisers, slavers, and other historical criminals, where do you draw the line?

Rebuttal: You do not draw a line. It is not for you to draw a line. Let society draw the line as it evolves morally, ethically, culturally, and politically. All societies evolve and notions of what is acceptable and unacceptable, what is right and wrong, and what constitutes oppressive and exploitative behaviour change over time. These evolutions are then projected backwards to retroactively evaluate the actions and practices of societal ancestors. The resulting introspection, self-reflexivity, historical re-examination, and revision enrich society, help heal lingering wounds of the past, and promote inclusion and cohesion.

Therefore, the metaphorical line keeps changing and keeps getting drawn and redrawn according to the evolution of society. All that historians, people of conscience, and people with empathy for the historically disenfranchised, excluded, and erased need to do is to try to keep up by adjusting their own moral and professional lenses. Societal evolution is the arbiter, not personal whim, discretion, or arbitrariness. Therefore, the question of where to draw the line is posed on a faulty premise that assumes that drawing a line is an arbitrary, whimsical process, which it is not.

Moses E. Ochonu can be reached through meochonu@gmail.com

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