(History in an Age of Equity: How in an Age of Growing Aspiration for Equity and Equal Justice for All People Everywhere Can We Still Pay More Time in Our Hi…

(History in an Age of Equity: How in an Age of Growing Aspiration for Equity and Equal Justice for All People Everywhere Can We Still Pay More Time in Our Histories to Kings Nobles Dictators and Wars Than to Understanding and Celebrating the Full Range of Human Accomplishment, the Call to Reorient the Discipline of History Toward the Contributions of All Peoples in All Eras and Away from the Self-Aggrandizing Monuments of Oppressive Rulers): How, in any case, in an age of growing aspiration for equity and equal justice for all people everywhere, can we still pay more time in our histories to kings, nobles, dictators, and wars than to understanding and celebrating the full range of human accomplishment? The question is Ehret’s parting challenge, addressed to the entire enterprise of historical writing, the discipline of African history and even world history included. For millennia, history has been written by and about the powerful: the kings who commissioned the chronicles, the nobles who funded the universities, the empires that built the archives. The history of humanity has been told as the history of its rulers, and the vast majority of human beings (the farmers and herders, the potters and weavers, the mothers and healers, the inventors and thinkers who actually built the material and intellectual foundations on which all human life depends) have been invisible. Ehret’s book is, at its deepest level, an argument for their visibility. The women who invented agriculture in West Africa. The fishermen who created sacral kingship in the green Sahara. The villagers who smelted iron in central Africa. The Amazigh theologians who built the intellectual architecture of Christianity. The Nilo-Saharan thinkers who conceived of Divinity nine thousand years before the Council of Nicaea. These are the people whose accomplishments matter most. It is not because they built monuments. It is because they built the world. And it is past time that history told their story.