As something of an outsider and amateur re: African history (I teach
US history, with a particular interest in slavery and race
relations), I have to say I have found the effort to create, and then
argue over the contents of, a list of "100 Great Africans" to be
rather odd. What's the point of such a list? It seems like an
exercise in what we used to call "contributionist" history (a
pejorative label, obviously): considering individuals and groups to
be of importance only if they can be shown (somehow) to have
"contributed" (something) to the main currents of national or
regional history.
Aren't our real interests as historians broader than that? Aren't
they, to push the point further, defined differently? Certainly,
three or four decades of scholarship in the new social history have
been grounded in the assumption that "ordinary" people count too,
whether or not they have written a constitution, invented something,
or led an army.
In writing my dissertation about 15 years ago, I was so struck by a
passage I happened to come across in a volume of African history that I
incorporated in into an introduction to my own effort to reconstruct
biographies of a number of slaves, free blacks, and their families in
colonial Virginia. It STILL makes a lot of sense to me:
"Some of the lives recorded here have heroic qualities, but
many are stories of at least partial failure, of disappointment,
of compromise, sometimes of weakness and error and
self-seeking.... Ordinary people like these may sometimes be
less admirable than heroes, but they are much more complicated
than heroes. They need understanding rather than adulation, and
understanding is more difficult than adulation."
John Illife, ed.
MODERN TANZANIANS: A VOLUME OF BIOGRAPHIES
(1973) pp.4-5 of an unpaginated introduction