And I’ve been thinking largely about historic truth.

If you ask most people to give as detailed a history of humanity as they can, most would go: monkey, caveman, cradle o’ civilization, ancient Egypt, China over there, blurblelug, GreeceRomeMiddleAgesBritishEmpireAmerica. And that’s fair enough, because it’s our history; the history of the “civilised west”. The Eurocentric version of history won, or at least has ascendancy at the moment, because Eurocentric version of society won, because Eurocentricism won its wars and now gets to teach  the students who go on to write the history books. The victor’s justice of history: an obvious point but one that occasionally deserves to be revisited.

But when we talk about historic victor’s justice, we tend to think about in in limited terms. We think about Neuremberg, and whether we’d like the Nazis more if they’d won; we think about Charles Taylor and the ICC; we think about America and whether it truly understands the cultures of the countries it invades, and whether history will accord Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay the weight they deserve. But history’s bias towards victory is much more far-reaching than that; it affects our entire world view. Michael Hastings at True/Slant gives a demonstration of this in his review of District 9, in which he expounds on the nature of English language political and social discourse on Iraq and Afghanistan:

Our government’s language is teeming with condescension when discussing Iraqis and Afghans, as if they’re not quite complete humans, child-like, and certainly not really civilized. Their lives are not valued as much as Western life–in economic terms (the families of Iraqis or Afghan who get accidentally killed during get a payout of around $3000; the family of a Westerner, military or civilian, who gets killed will get around $500,000) and in how we process the daily death totals. (Politicians always mention the 4,500 Americans who’ve died in Iraq, but rarely give more than perfunctory acknowledgment to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.)

The very metaphor for our strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan is so casually offensive that it’s somewhat astounding that it passes through our lips without comment. Usually it’s summed up by American officials like so: “The Iraqis are on a bicycle and we’re holding the bicycle seat until they’re ready, so we can let go.” Or: “It’s like we have training wheels on their bicycles, and we can leave once we take the training wheels off.”

This echoes the way that we often refer to people from “hot places” – and by minimising them in this manner we pave the way for an oversight of the historical worth of their culture. It is somewhat true that all history is, to some extent, ‘-centric’;  it has to be, as a history can never really be comprehensive, the scale of the task is too big. So we narrow it down, by region and era, and take it from there. You can ask, “What would a Native American-centric explanation look like? What would an Afro-centric explanation look like?” but the answer would be too obvious: they would tell the story of the development of the civilisations of Africa or Latin America, and only deal with Europe when it impacts those stories; after all, we don’t have to simply focus on history’s winners. And it’s legitimate to ask whether, given that all history is at least slightly -centric, and that the story of European history has to be told, why Eurocentricism has to be classified as a criticism. After all, a large part of the justification for the idea of the nation-state is that it preserves the culture, identity, language and history of the nation it serves. Insofar as an obligation to record Latin American and African history exists, it lies with Latin America and Africa; the duty of European scholars to record that history extends only so far as it takes to explain its impact on our own history. So long as we can do that respectfully and without jingoism then we have done all that is required of us.

But there is an untruth to that, and in that untruth lurks an imperative. In our military and political worlds, we have a concept called the “Responsibility to Protect”. This (admittedly contested) doctorine states that a nation has the right to intervene on behalf of a people whose government either will not protect them from grevious need, or which is directly oppressing them. Why is there no comparable ideal in history? During the Early Middle Ages, learning in Europe was a complete bust. The intellectual and social rout was complete, and all of Europe’s history was profoundly lost. The only reason why we know anything of Europe pre-1200 or so is because there was an external superpower who was minding our business better than we were. The scholars of the Byzantium and the Islamic Caliphate painstakingly transcribed and preserved the words of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates; they kept and treasured the history of Europe, even though it had had almost no direct influence on the development of the Caliphate itself. Our entire knowledge of the world exited Europe via Byzantium and spent centuries making its way around the Mediterranean, through Damascus, Beirut, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Tunis, Carthage and finally back into Europe through Cordoba.

By enshrining European knowledge, the Caliphate did the entire world a courtesy, one which Europe and, later, America have been tepid in returning.

Take Africa. A cat may look at a king; but the poorest, bloodiest, most corrupt and least densely populated continent by a long margin cannot fairly be compared to Europe. They seem to be worlds apart. Why is that? In the short term, we talk about colonialism, but that’s a code, because we still think of the European invaders rounding up chieftains in grass huts full of yams. There is a reason for this: it is because sub-Saharan African history is virtually unknown to us except as an extension of European history. The history of an entire continent is basically lost to us – not just because modern historians have been more interested in Louis XIV (aka the most awesome king in history) but because history throughout the ages has been homocentric, and Africa has never had a chance to record Africa’s history. The earliest we can go with confidence is the Kingdom of Mutapa, which was founded in 1450 in the area that is now Zimbabwe and which was attacked by the Portuguese – pre-guns – who were trying to establish a trade route to India. The history that has been preserved for us is the Eurocentric ideal: it has no context beyond what our historians have given it.

Which gets to my second point: Eurocentricity is one thing, but our obsession with our victor’s history has caused us to reflexively overlook another cause. The Caliphate was not restricted to the Mediterranean coast. The main reason why Portugal and Mupata clashed, rather than coming to a peaceful trading agreement, is because the Mupatanese government was Muslim. We have no idea what the southern extent of the Caliphate was, and even if we did, we would have no idea how its influence had spread within Africa, because those historical records don’t exist. When we talk about the Caliphate, we fixate on the geography of the empire itself, and this grossly overlooks the human and cultural dimensions of what it achieved.

Thirdly, these two misunderstandings – Eurocentricism and geography-fixation – have led to you a conclusion that is false. Because we do have a little bit of pre-European knowledge of Africa, mostly thanks to Caliphate historians and architectural digs. In the aftermath of the Bantu expansion, the Monomatapa kings (the precursors to the Mutapa Kingdom) built a city called Great Zimbabwe. It stood for 300 years, covered seven square kilometres and has a population of around 20,000 at its peak, making it significantly larger than London was at the time. It was the centre of a trade network that stretched from China to Arabia and possibly even to South America. With Great Zimbabwe, we can prove that as of 1400 AD, sub-Saharan Africa was as technologically advanced as Europe – not ‘noble savages’, not victims of geography, but genuine contenders for the mantle of future leaders of the free world. Portugal could not beat Mupata. Portugal’s generals are recorded as having described it as “invulnerable”. Mupata collapsed through infighting and domestic politiking, and so thrust sub-Saharan Africa into its present dark age.

Europe is not alone in having suffered dark ages; Latin America is only decades removed from its own, and Africa is still deep in its clutches. The reason why Eurocentricism is a criticism is because European history doesn’t need protecting. It is as complete as it possibly can be, but for lucky finds and interpretation; but more African, Middle Eastern and Latin American history is being lost by the day. History is written by the victor, but only because the losers have a few other things on their hands, so under the circumstances, it surely doesn’t hurt us to be a bit more magnanimous with our resources.