African Historiography

by John Henrik Clarke

Joel A. Rogers, a Jamaican scholar, whose work in the field of African world biography is still not appreciated as well as it should be by blacks, is comparatively unknown by whites. The following quote is from my Introduction to the re-publication of his book, World's Great Men of Color Vols. I & II:

  'J. A. Rogers devoted at least fifty years of his life to researching great black personalities and the roles they played in the development of nations, civilizations, and cultures. This book is his greatest achievement. In his lifetime his books did not reach a large popular reading audience. All of them were privately printed and circulated mainly in the black communities; he died, unfortunately, on the eve of the "Black Studies Revolution." Mr. Rogers had already delivered what some of the radical black students were demanding. He had looked at the history of people of African origin, and had showed how their history is an inseparable part of the history of mankind.'

J. A. Rogers started his research at a time when a large number of black people had some doubts about their contribution to human history. In books like, Blacks in Antiquity by Frank M. Snowden, Jr. (1970), The African Genius by Basil Davidson (1969), The Prehistory of Africa by Desmond Clarke (1970), Topics in West African History, by A. Adu Boahen (l967), Introduction to African Civilizations, by John G. Jackson (1970), and Great Civilizations of Ancient Africa, by Lester Brooks (1971) these doubts are put to rest.