The UNESCO project for a General History of Africa has been around for some time now. It was launched in 1964 by a resolution of the General Conference of UNESCO, and was essentially a consequence of the accession to the United Nations and to UNESCO of the large number of new African states which secured their independence in the early 1960s. These felt, rightly, that Africa had too long been ‘the dark continent’ of world history, and that it was high time that, the history of its peoples and cultures was placed on the same level of public record as that of the other continents.

The first positive step taken by UNESCO was to call a ‘meeting of experts’ at Abidjan in 1966. This seems to have taken the line that the first thing to be done if the history of Africa were to be written on a major scale was to provide support for research into it.