The title is taken from Sir Mortimer Wheeler's Rome Beyond the Imperial Frontiers, in which he described how ‘the long, acquisitive arm of imperial Rome’ reached out over thousands of kilometres, not only to affect the history of the lands it touched, but also to leave a record, archaeologically and in writing. As far as Africa is concerned, it is with the written record that the importance of its outreach begins, and indeed ends. While Christopher Ehret's An African Classical Age. Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000B.C. toA.D.400 is a reminder of how much of the continent was totally or effectively unknown to the Greeks and Romans, over the expanse of which they had some knowledge, their writings report on the passage from herding and farming to cities and states over a much wider area than those of the Ancient Egyptians. After Herodotus in the fifth century BCE, the core of the relevant literature is formed by the work of three geographers over a period of about a hundred years at the height of the Roman empire. The Greek writer Strabo, who settled in Alexandria and wrote at the beginning of the first century CE, is followed by the Latin author Pliny the Elder, a Roman who perished in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, and finally by the Greek Ptolemy, writing once again at Alexandria in the first half of the second century CE. Classified by M. Cary and E.H. Warmington in their conclusion to The Ancient Explorers, they represent two schools of geography, the human and the mathematical.

Historians have not looked kindly upon the Ottoman empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, comparing the growing weakness of its central government and the traditional nature of its economy with the growing power and wealth of western Europe. Admiration for that growth, however, has been matched by growing criticism of European imperialism, and in the case of Africa by denunciation of the slave trade that fed the sugar industry that contributed so much to the prosperity of England in particular. When we come to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in other words, the study of African history moves beyond the search for evidence of the past and the problem of its interpretation, out into the realm of evaluation and controversy, in which the whole of the subject from Antiquity onwards has since been caught up.

That realm is not simply the preserve of the modern historian looking back upon the past; it came into existence at the time. The morality of enslavement was of concern to both Islam and Christianity, the ruling religions of the period, for whom all human beings were, in principle, equal in the sight of God. Islam solved the problem by restricting enslavement to non-Muslims outside the lands of Islam; Christianity was in two minds. As a justification for the enslavement of Black Africans, the Biblical curse upon the descendants of Noah's son Ham was offset by the egalitarian and humanitarian concerns that culminated in the course of the nineteenth century in prohibition and abolition, and passed in the twentieth century into the principle of human rights.

Below the Fourth Cataract, in the middle of the great S-bend of the Nile between Khartoum and Aswan, where the river flows south-westwards before turning back towards the north, the isolated crag of Jebel Barkal stands by the west bank. Flat-topped and sheer-sided, it is distinguished by a pillar of rock standing clear of the cliff face, which seemed to the Ancient Egyptians and the Nubians they conquered to be the cobra on the brow of the Pharaoh. The mountain was thus sacred, the home of the god Amon and the focal point of Napata, the region that has given its name to the kingdom of the Nubian Pharaohs who ruled Egypt itself for almost a hundred years. Today it poses the question of the role of Ancient Egypt in the history of Africa, the subject of a controversy at the heart of African historiography.

For Martin Bernal in Black Athena, the problem was with the white Europeans who refused to admit that the Ancient Egyptians were Black Africans whose civilisation had given rise to that of Ancient Greece: the Greek Herodotus in the fifth century BCE had said as much about the origin of Greek religion. But whatever its merits, insofar as the argument is racial, Bernal's thesis has been criticised as an inversion of the infamous Hamitic hypothesis of a superior white race in Africa to which the Egyptians themselves belonged.

In the approach to African history, the lasting achievement of Baker and his fellow explorers was to put the interior of Africa literally on the map, while in the eyes of their fellow countrymen they were shedding the light of Europe upon the Dark Continent, with all that this implied of superiority and inferiority. As Rotberg points out in Africa and its Explorers, in the eyes of the Africans they encountered, they were judged by what they were good for. Unsuccessful as it was, Baker's attempt to annex Bunyoro for Egypt in 1872 was nevertheless a token of something quite different, the empirebuilding that began with the conquest of Egypt by Napoleon in 1798 and continued across northern Africa under the influence of France rather than Britain, its broad sweep described by Magali Morsy in her North Africa 1800– 1900. Intended as a step in the direction of British India, Napoleon's expedition was a dramatic demonstration of the centrality of Africa to the strategic calculations of the two rival powers. Its actual achievement was to puncture the northern frontier of the continent, which had been held against Europe by the Ottomans and Moroccans since the sixteenth century, and open up its line of Ottoman states to political, social and economic development along European lines. Napoleon's overthrow of the regime of the Mamluk Beys was followed in 1802 by the expulsion of the French by a British and Ottoman force, and in 1805 by the seizure of power by the Ottoman commander Muhammad 'Ali.

The concerns of this chapter are threefold. First, it highlights the fact that Dambudzo Marechera's play ‘The Servants' Ball’ is the only known artistic work in Marechera's oeuvre written in his mother tongue, Shona. Second, it shows how Marechera's play is situated in the context of the newly independent Zimbabwe of the early 1980s. And, finally, this chapter explores how the ‘discovery’ of Marechera's only Shona work resurrects the ‘ghost’ of the debate over the ‘appropriate’ language of African literature.

For many Zimbabweans, it is not necessary to have read The House of Hunger or Mindblast to know Dambudzo Marechera. He is public property. For the teenage reader, the name Dambudzo Marechera is synonymous with rebelliousness. For the many writers across Zimbabwe, the name evokes razor sharp brilliance. There is the mental image of the stubborn, dreadlocked man furiously writing, and writing, and writing. The youngsters often wish that they are him – that they have his vision, language and charisma. However, when one has worshipped Marechera like this, one begins to wonder if he ever wrote in his mother tongue. Such absence in his literary production is made glaring by the fact that some of Marechera's contemporaries and friends, like Charles Mungoshi, Musaemura Zimunya and Chenjerai Hove, have actually written convincingly in both English and Shona and, moreover, won prizes in both languages.

Everybody agrees that Dambudzo Marechera is a unique, and uniquely difficult, figure in African literature. There is possibly no writer whose fiction is more enmeshed with his life, no writer whose life seems more like a picaresque novel. Commentary on his work has been sometimes almost obsessed with the ways in which his life intervenes in his writing, no doubt helped by the dominance of the narrating ‘I.’ In passages on language, nation, literary identity, sexuality and many others, the writer seems to be speaking from his own life. In many places the narrator's commentary is directly autobiographical. Yet, as Flora Veit-Wild says, ‘Marechera was constantly re-inventing his biography,’ re-inventions that formed an apparently indispensable pre-text but no less fictional than his writing. Marechera's life was as rebellious as his work and this has inevitably acted as a magnet to commentary on the writing, ‘a unique expression of self and postcolonial identity in contemporary African literature.’ A true ex-centric individual, he eschewed nation, language, education, career. He turned his back on the life of an educated African writer, and while offering blistering attacks on the Rhodesian regime he offered equally scathing critique of the newly independent national administration of Zimbabwe.

If Africa be the elephant, then the different students of the African past, each with his or her own specialism, are the blind men who each have hold of a different part of the beast – trunk, tusk, ear, belly, leg and tail – and have in consequence quite different tales to tell. Proverbially, in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king; but who might this be in the case of Africa? Which of these various students has the eye to see the whole, however imperfectly? Imperfection begins with historical knowledge itself, which is derived from surviving records, never directly from the past. It is, moreover, built into the process of derivation. In principle, this should lead to a steady accumulation of knowledge, which has certainly been the case in Africa. That knowledge, however, is governed by the ways in which we make sense of the information. These ways, as we can clearly see from the example of Africa, are continually changing. For the moment, and no doubt for the future, they include not only the idea of prehistory, but the idea of African history itself. Beyond that, however, they are as various as the blind men with their different approaches to the subject. Only the rules of evidence, the master idea which provides the common ground of modern scholarship, can decide between them, or bring them together in a vision of the whole. In applying those rules to African history, the would-be kings, those who have claimed the eye, have started from different positions, proceeded by trial and error, and reached only provisional conclusions.

To turn from the problem of African history to what can now be said about events over the past ten thousand years, is to turn in the first place to Phillipson's archaeology for information and to Iliffe's geography for the beginning of understanding. Throughout the length of human history, which goes back much further into the past, the position, shape and relief of the continent have not significantly changed. The same, however, cannot be said of its climate, which has fluctuated over what, geologically speaking, are astonishingly short periods of time: as little as five thousand years, or from one millennium to another. The date of around 10,000 BP – Before the Present – is the date of just such a climatic event: the ending of the last Ice Age in the northern hemisphere. It marked the end of the Pleistocene – the Most Recent period in the history of the earth, and the beginning of the Holocene – the Wholly Recent period, the period in which we now live. During the last Ice Age, at the end of the Pleistocene, the climate of Africa north of the Equator, and especially in the Saharan region, was even harsher and drier than it is today: we can call it the Pleistocene Dry. But with the rapid melting of the glaciers, the climate of the Mediterranean spread southwards and that of the Equatorial regions northwards, to begin a period of some five thousand years in which the desert turned into savannah and the old savannah into swamp.

As summarised so far in this book, the account of the African past down to the achievement of independence in the 1950s and 1960s has been written in the historical present, that is, in the period since the Second World War, when the history of the continent was established as a subject of historical research in accordance with the criteria of modern historiography. Inevitably, as a period of historical writing, this present itself is a part of the past, just as the anthropological present stretches from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day. In much the same way, it has a history of its own, as three or even four generations of historians have succeeded each other in the attempt to find out what can be known and what may be said about the millennia since the emergence of man on the continent. In the process they have been on the march, myself included as a member of the second generation, in tandem with the events themselves as these have continued to unfold in the contemporary world. In finding and utilising all the various ways of turning the idea of prehistory into history, they have made a major contribution to the idea of history itself as the study of the human past. By doing so in Africa, they have transformed the idea of the continent as well as effecting its integration into the history of the world.

In her widely-cited review of The House of Hunger, Juliet Okonkwo criticizes the debut writer Dambudzo Marechera for self-purposefully subjecting his readers to a grotesque imagery:

Okonkwo goes on to object to Marechera's abundant and apparently haphazard use of ‘obscene and four-letter words,’ which, as she maintains, ‘are used purely for their own sake.’ Okonkwo's critique is emblematic in the sense that it articulates the discrepancy between the African nation-building ethos and Marechera's disillusioned postcolonial poetics. While several critics maintained that The House of Hunger witnessed Marechera's writerly talent, if not ingenuity – this is something that even Okonkwo suggests in her review – the novella obviously did not meet the demands of contemporary political agendas that had their bearing on the conception of literature. Okonkwo's words convey the great expectations and hopes set in independence, suggesting simultaneously that, in the face of such a great collective liberatory effort, there is something truly inappropriate in Marechera's violently grotesque approach.

McCaskie's reading of Asante history comes as near as the historian may hope to get to the rather dangerous dictum of Collingwood in The Idea of History, that the historian who studies a civilisation other than his own can apprehend the mental life of that civilisation only by re-enacting its experience for himself. It is certainly far away from the approach of Eva Meyerowitz in The Akan of Ghana, who used the same ethnographic evidence to trace the Akan, and thus the Asante, to an origin ultimately in Ancient Egypt. But the kind of experience he describes was variously repeated, not only in the forest kingdoms of West Africa: off to the east and away to the south, in the Bantu world across the Equator, the period from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century was likewise one of state formation, or at least, was characterised by the proliferation of rulers and overlords of various descriptions. Empire is rejected by David Beach in The Shona and their Neighbours as a general term for these political systems, on the grounds that it conjures up a vision of imperial Rome; but if as he says, ‘empire’ is taken to mean some form of government of different peoples by some common power and authority, it may describe a wide variety of dominions, from Asante down to the nominal recognition of Ife as the source of royal authority. The common factor upon which MacGaffey, like McCaskie, insists in his Kongo Political Culture and again in his article ‘Changing representations in Central African history’, is the identity of belief and government in the person of the ruler.

In perhaps his most widely read essay, ‘The African Writer's Experience of European Literature,’ Dambudzo Marechera introduces himself as a person who is ‘inclined to disagree with everybody and everything.’ It is at once a light-hearted and deeply provocative self-characterization. Undoubtedly, Marechera did not mind being regarded as the enfant terrible of African literature. Indeed, much of what he said and did painted him in this particular way. His exploits off the page married with the visceral ideas and images that he committed to it, created the myth of the man which would always precede him. So, as he returned to Zimbabwe from his exile in Europe:

The image of Marechera was of an anarchic young contrarian, a maverick, a rebel who stood against everything simply because he could. And, this is certainly the impression we are left with when we learn that Marechera spoke against Ian Smith's minority regime, declaring himself a supporter of Robert Mugabe, only to then declare his opposition to Mugabe when he later took the reins of government.

This chapter addresses a key issue in the hermeneutics of the Marechera prose corpus, namely the author's use of allusions to the Greco-Roman experience: literature, mythology, culture, and so on. While some critics have dedicated a lot of space to attacking Marechera's use of classical allusion in his literature, others have defended Marechera on that same score. Obert Mlambo says that classical literature cannot be separated from the writings of Marechera. ‘To separate the two,’ he writes, ‘is like throwing away the baby together with bath water.’ Marechera himself dedicates ample time in defense of his use of Greco- Roman scenery to adorn his works. This chapter attempts, within this narrow scope, to identify some of the most significant classical allusions in his prose, and thereby to understand better their contribution to the meaning of the texts. That is to say, I want to question the inheritance and explore the intertextual significance of classical allusion in Marechera's prose works. Of course, Marechera offers too many allusions to the ancient western world to consider offering an exhaustive account here. So, this present research introduces a bigger project to come, which will look at all classical allusions in Marechera's writing. In the meantime, I address the most recurrent classicisms in the prose corpus, and discuss those themes that strike me as the product of an African mind trained in the classics.

“Sir, good morning.” The quotation is from Kwame Anthony Appiah's discussion of ‘Old Gods and new’ in his In My Father's House, but the title is taken from W. E. Abraham's The Mind of Africa. Abraham's work, published in 1962, was written in the optimism of African independence to announce the contribution that African ways of thought could make to the future of the continent and the world. Thirty years later, in 1992,Appiah's work returned to the same subject in the light of the disappointment with the way in which the political kingdom coveted by Kwame Nkrumah has failed throughout the continent to live up to expectations. Like Nkrumah, the first president of the first state south of the Sahara to win its independence from colonial rule, the two authors are Ghanaian, but unlike Nkrumah they are both Akan, from the major language family of the country. Appiah is specifically Asante, a member of the dynasty of its major kingdom. Like Ibn Khaldun, therefore, they are inside observers of the society to which they belong, using their intimate knowledge of its beliefs and behaviour to establish what Abraham calls the paradigm of African society in general, and to explain its workings to the world. Both, therefore, are apologists in the sense of advocates of their subject in the face of the long-standing dismissal of the continent by Europeans as congenitally backward. Just as Hopkins mounted a vigorous defence of African rationality in economic matters, so Appiah confronts the argument that African thought is unscientific: that believing as it does in the supernatural, it is incapable of offering rational explanations of what happens in the world.