From Lost Cities to Living Voices
What happens when we stop asking only, “What did outsiders discover about Africa?” and start asking, “What have Africans been saying about themselves all along?”
That question sits at the heart of where we are going next on King Cam’s Ujumbe Podcast. This Fall we are beginning a new book study: Zeinab Badawi’s An African History of Africa.
And I chose this book very intentionally. This isn’t just the next book on the reading list or to fill a slot. To me it represents a transition.
A transition from lost cities to living voices. And if you have been following King Cam’s Ujumbe Podcast for any length of time, you already know that books matter to me. This the backbone and foundation of our work.
I don’t want Ujumbe to be a place where we simply make claims about African history and move on to the next topic. I want us to have something we can actually study.
Something we can pick up.
Something we can underline.
Something we can argue with.
Something we can return to.
Because if we’re serious about reclaiming African history, then we have to become serious about how we know what we know.
From Lost Cities to Living Voices
One of the books that helped shape my thinking about African history was Basil Davidson’s The Lost Cities of Africa. I think, altough dated, Davidson’s work mattered because it challenged a narrative that many of us encountered growing up: the idea that Africa somehow existed outside of history.
Africa had no great cities.
No sophisticated kingdoms.
No intellectual traditions.
No complex political systems.
No monumental architecture.
No civilizations worth studying.
You know the story.
And it was wrong.
Davidson helped bring attention to places and civilizations that deserved far greater recognition.
Great Zimbabwe.
Kush.
Meroë.
Ethiopia.
Mali.
Timbuktu.
The legacy of Mansa Musa.
These were civilizations with their own histories, institutions, cultures, economies, religious traditions, political systems, and intellectual lives.
I remember learning about Kush, Meroe, and the pyramids of Sudan when I was at Paul Quinn College in Mrs. Ann Matthews class. I’ve heard about Egypt but not about Kush. And I’ll tell you something: once you realize how much of African history never made it into the history books you were handed as a child, you start looking at the entire historical record differently.
You start asking questions.
What else didn’t I know?
And perhaps even more importantly:
Why didn’t I know it?
But We Also Have to Be Honest About Davidson. Now, here’s where I think we have to be careful. Recognizing someone’s contribution doesn’t mean we have to treat their work as the final word. Davidson was working within the scholarship and research environment of his time. His work helped illuminate African civilizations through archaeology, historical research, material remains, and documentary evidence. Those things matter. But they’re not the only ways human beings preserve history. Africa has never depended entirely upon written books to remember itself.
I think History can live in a manuscript. It can live in an inscription.
It can live in a building.
It can live in pottery.
It can live in a royal cemetery.
But it can also live in a story.
It can live in a song.
It can live in a genealogy. (Which is another discussion for another day.)
It can live in the memory of a community.
It can live in the traditions passed from one generation to another.
It can live in the people who know the history because their families have carried it.
That doesn’t mean every oral tradition should automatically be accepted as historically accurate.
We still have to ask questions.
We still have to compare sources.
We still have to look at chronology, archaeology, linguistics, manuscripts, material culture, and historical context. However, we also shouldn’t make the opposite mistake and believe that something isn’t history simply because it wasn’t written down by a European historian.
That’s the conversation I want us to have.
Enter Zeinab Badawi
This is one of the reasons I’m excited about An African History of Africa. Zeinab Badawi approaches African history from a different position.
She is Sudanese.
She is a journalist.
She has traveled extensively throughout Africa.
And her work has involved visiting historical sites and engaging with people connected to those histories. That matters. Not because being African automatically makes someone correct. Let’s be clear about that. Being African doesn’t give anyone a free pass from evidence. However it’s the perspective that matters to me.
The questions we ask are influenced by where we stand. The things we notice can be influenced by our experiences. And the people we talk to can open doors that aren’t visible from a distance. That’s what interests me.
When you travel through Ethiopia, Sudan, Mali, Timbuktu, and other parts of the continent, you’re not simply looking at ruins.
You’re encountering landscapes.
Manuscripts.
Libraries.
Families.
Communities.
People who live among the remains of histories that outsiders may have once described as “lost.”
And suddenly the word lost starts to feel a little different.
Maybe the city was lost to us.
Maybe the knowledge wasn’t lost to everybody.
Africa’s History Is Bigger Than the Ruins
This is something I want Ujumbe to continue emphasizing.
Africa’s history is not simply sitting in museums waiting for somebody to discover it.
It isn’t buried underneath every pyramid.
It isn’t locked inside every archaeological site.
And it certainly isn’t contained inside one historian’s book.
The physical evidence is important.
But so are the intellectual traditions.
So are the manuscripts.
So are the languages.
So are the oral traditions.
So are the communities.
So are the people who have continued to carry cultural memory.
This is one reason I keep coming back to books.
A book gives us something we can interrogate.
We can ask:
What sources did this author use?
What evidence supports the argument?
What perspective is shaping the interpretation?
What might be missing?
And then we can put that book alongside another book.
And another.
That’s how serious study begins.
Not with blind acceptance.
And not with automatic rejection.
With questions.
From the Nile Valley to the Kingdom of Congo
What makes Badawi’s book particularly interesting for our next study is the panoramic scope.
We’re talking about the Nile Valley and early humanity.
Kush and Axum.
North African dynasties and the expansion of Islam.
Mali and Mansa Musa.
Timbuktu.
Southern African kingdoms.
The Atlantic slave trade.
Colonialism.
Resistance.
The Kingdom of Congo.
This is not one isolated African civilization.
It’s an attempt to look across the continent and understand Africa as a historical world made up of many peoples, regions, kingdoms, cultures, languages, and experiences. And that’s important. It’s important because sometimes African history gets presented as if “Africa” is one civilization.
It isn’t.
Kemet isn’t Kush.
Kush isn’t Axum.
Axum isn’t Mali.
Mali isn’t the Kingdom of Congo.
The Kingdom of Congo isn’t Great Zimbabwe.
They are connected in various ways, but they are not interchangeable.
One of the things I want us to do at Ujumbe is learn how to hold both truths at the same time:
Africa has shared historical connections.
And:
Africa contains enormous historical diversity.
Both are true.
This Is What I Mean by the Ujumbe Method
When I talk about the Ujumbe Method, I’m talking about learning how to study.
Not simply what to believe.
That’s an important distinction.
I want us to look at primary sources.
I want us to read historians.
I want us to examine archaeological evidence.
I want us to pay attention to manuscripts.
I want us to understand oral traditions.
I want us to recognize African intellectual traditions.
And I want us to ask what happens when these sources speak to one another.
Sometimes they’ll agree.
Sometimes they’ll complicate one another.
Sometimes they’ll contradict one another.
Good.
That’s where the real learning begins.
Because studying history isn’t supposed to make us comfortable all the time. Sometimes a source is going to challenge what we thought we knew. Then there are times we’re going to discover that something we repeated for years doesn’t have the evidence behind it. And we’re going to discover that the historical record is far richer than we were ever taught.
That’s not a failure.
That’s scholarship.
That’s real learning
There will be times when we disagree and that’s fine. This is why studying and learning together is fun.
Why This Matters to Us
For me, this is bigger than another podcast series. It’s about changing our relationship with knowledge. I don’t want Ujumbe to simply tell you that African history is important.
I want to put books in your hands.
I want to give you sources.
I want you to study.
I want you to question.
I want you to become comfortable sitting with complexity.
Because eventually, I don’t want you to need King Cam to tell you what African history means.
I want you to be able to pick up the source yourself.
Read it.
Study it.
Compare it.
Ask your own questions.
That’s the goal.
The teacher isn’t supposed to become the destination.
The teacher should help you become a student who can keep going.
And Then There’s the Travel
One of the questions I asked during the livestream was simple:
If money wasn’t a limitation, where would you go?
My answer was pretty easy.
I’d follow the Nile.
I’d spend time in Ethiopia.
I’d go to Sudan.
I’d visit the ancient sites.
I’d sit with people.
I’d listen.
I’d look at the landscape.
I’d visit the places I’ve spent years reading about.
Because there is something different about seeing a place with your own eyes.
You can read about Meroë for years.
You can study Kush.
You can look at photographs of pyramids.
But standing there is different.
The landscape becomes part of the lesson.
And maybe that’s another reason I’m drawn to the idea of living voices.
History isn’t only something that happened.
It is something human beings continue to remember, interpret, preserve, debate, and experience.
The Next Chapter of Ujumbe
So this Fall, we’re opening An African History of Africa.
And we’re coming to it after The Lost Cities of Africa for a reason.
Davidson helped open the door to a world many people had been taught didn’t exist.
Now I want us to ask another question:
What happens when we listen to Africans telling the story of Africa?
Not because African voices are automatically beyond criticism.
But because they belong in the conversation.
Because African history should be studied from multiple directions.
Because the continent’s past is too vast for one perspective.
And because the history of Africa isn’t simply a collection of lost cities.
There are still people here.
Still languages.
Still traditions.
Still manuscripts.
Still memories.
Still questions.
Still stories.
And that’s where I want Ujumbe to go next.
From lost cities to living voices.
Peace and blessings, Ujumbe family.
Let’s study. Talk to you later.
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