The one exception to this rule for Americans I can think of was Apartheid in South Africa. For a long time there was an involved political debate in America about what U.S. policy towards South Africa should be. Americans took sides and argued with each other, because they saw the ethnic conflict in South Africa as both more specific (people knew the particulars–Soweto, Mandela, Botha–instead of just generic categories like “Africa”, “blacks” and “whites”) and more general (the conflict was a struggle about human freedom that had relevance for us). So I would bet that the racial angle is what made it real for Americans, but specifically how? The most simple answer I can come up with is that South Africa looked very familiar. We’d had a version of Apartheid in the U.S., and have ethnic categories that break down along the same “white” and “black” lines as in South Africa. People were passionate because it was easy to draw analogies to our own society.

That’s the laziness explanation. The guilt explanation would say that in many westerners’ moral calculus, a black person harming another black person isn’t as bad as a white person hurting a black person, and therefore Apartheid deserved more passion than Liberia (or Bosnia) because it was a greater tragedy. I guess personally, I hope that laziness explanation is more true. Laziness is unfortunate human foible, but the guilty moral calculus is pretty repugnant to me.

What motivates the gatekeepers, though? You allude to people being involved in a “restorative” project–e.g. erring on the side of saying nothing at all critical about Africa. How much of it is this kind of prescriptive moralism, and how much is simple laziness? By laziness I mean that educated westerners already have a story to tell about Africa–the story of European imperialism–and inertia works against saying anything else. So if I want to lay all the ills of a particular contemporary African society at the feet of nefarious meddling “neocolonial” western corporations, maybe I’m motivated by guilt, or maybe I just already know how to talk about meddling westerners from my study of the Belgian Congo. Maybe contemporary African historians, like generals, always want to be fighting the last war.

Anyway, that’s a possible alternative motivation that occurs to someone outside the field like me. I’m wondering if you or other posters inside the field also see this distinction, and if you do have a gut sense for what the mixture of guilt vs. laziness might be.

I also agree that a Rome-like series about Oyo or any number of other precolonial societies would likely founder, for the reasons you cite and more besides.

You’re also right that precolonial African histories don’t excite non-specialists, and this has a lot to do with how most of them have been written. But I still would say that the narrowness of the style is marked by a reluctance to make judgemental claims save for vaguely redemptive ones. That’s what rich, large, generalized narratives need to do, to translate knowledge of a place into relevance for wider audiences: feel comfortable having an evaluative opinion, including a negative one, about the whole or the components of the society being written about.

For many Westerners, I think that Rome is culturally distant, i.e. its impacts are believed insignificant to explain collective identities today. As such, it matters little to many of us, how Romans are portrayed. We don’t believe that it says much significant about ourselves nor that others think it has such significance. Furthermore, even among laypersons, there already exists a sense that Rome was a “great” civilization for a variety of achievements. No matter how callous, brutal or incestuous it might have been, it meets the standards of civilization that Westerners and I believe much of the world have come to accept. Nor is the view of Rome that we are seeing in HBO’s series fundamentally different than the conventional wisdoms about its society. We can easily watch and judge Rome, because it is a settled matter for most of us.

A caveat is in order. I’m more familiar with the literature of African politics than African history as such. However, the contemporary literature I see is replete with moral claims about political and social practices. From what the precolonial African history I’ve read, there are implicit and explicit moral claims even if we think they are incorrect. The problem is not so much that they don’t exist or cannot be had, but rather that there are prevailing senses of what the correct moral claims ought to be. I’ve read and talked to several traditionalist conservatives, who hold unpopular if not “wrong” views of the antebellum South. Often, they feel they do not get a fair hearing and that holding those views cost them dearly in professional opportunities and collegial respect. For them (and for historians of other eras), there are gatekeepers constraining and burdening the marrow of history for their own projects. My point here is that precolonial African history is not really unique in this.

Returning to your implied comparison between Rome and Oyo as fodder for tv series, I doubt that a Rome-like Oyo series would be nearly as successful in North America and Europe where Rome is distributed. Oyo enjoys less cultural resonance necessitating much more backstory to support anything more than a crude caricature for the series. [Heck, the Brits have argued that they needed even less backstory for Rome than their ignorant American cousins when they explained why they stripped out much of the history in favor of the sex and violence. :)] I also doubt that the audience it attracted would be worried about making moral judgments of it or would most historians if it were done well. (Of course, I’m not a historian.)

Caveat: Actually, using history for redemptive and prescriptive purposes doesn’t bother me too much. It bothers me when it is poorly done, but not that it is done. Too me

One note. I think many precolonial African histories do not excite the passions of lay readers. However, I don’t think that is because of any particular orthodoxy or attempt to shy away from moral claims. Rather, I think it is because many people write books of history with the same narrative style as they write monographs. They have learned to write for a small, specialized audience so well that they do not write well for a larger, general audience.