If Africa was never behind, how did it become “behind”?

The answer lies not first in Africa, but in Europe.

Europe did not merely rise in power between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It increasingly recast its rise as the direction of history itself.

As European states consolidated authority, expanded maritime capacity, and extended commercial networks beyond the Mediterranean, a growing strand of European political and intellectual thought began interpreting that trajectory as normative rather than particular.¹ The Renaissance was framed not simply as a regional revival but as the rebirth of civilization. The scientific revolution was narrated as the dawn of rationality. Political consolidation became evidence of maturity. Europe’s historical experience was elevated into a model.

This shift did not invent chronology. It transformed chronology into hierarchy.

European historiography increasingly described history as linear, progressive, and directional — moving from darkness to light, from superstition to reason, from fragmentation to unity.² Progress implied sequence. Sequence implied advancement. Advancement implied superiority.

Once history is imagined as a single forward-moving line, someone must stand ahead and someone must fall behind.

Europe placed itself at the front.

This move did not require hostility toward Africa. It required something subtler: the assumption that Europe represented the present — and even the future — of humanity.

Christian theology had long contained a fulfillment structure: promise and completion, old and new, shadow and substance.³ In sacred history, what comes........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)