According to the late Ali Mazrui, modern Africa is the product of a triple civilizational legacy: African, Arabo-Islamic, and Western (Mazrui Reference Mazrui1986). Each civilization left Africa with bodies of knowledge rooted in particular epistemologies and transmitted in written and/or oral form. In the first half of the twentieth century, what became known as the colonial library (Mudimbe Reference Mudimbe1988: x) had provided the sources and conceptual apparatus for studying African history, but from the mid-twentieth century onwards, nationalist intellectuals sought to deconstruct European colonial intellectual hegemony through the search for alternative sources and interpretations of African history. Notable among these intellectuals is Cheikh Anta Diop, whose work highlighted the close connections between Egypt and the rest of the continent to claim Ancient Egypt's historical legacy for the continent. Nigeria's first university – University College Ibadan, which later became the University of Ibadan – provided a forum for talented Africans and Europeans to pursue the project of decolonizing African history. Jeremiah Arowosegbe's survey provides insights into the rise and decline of academic commitment in the African continent, with particular reference to South Africa and Nigeria.

As a student of the Islamic intellectual history of Muslim West Africa, I will focus my comments on where Arowosegbe did his doctoral work (the University of Ibadan) and on what his piece does not mention (the Islamic library of West Africa). Most of what we know on West Africa from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries comes from Arabic sources. Despite their many biases and limitations, these sources remain essential in any effort to produce a new decolonized historiography. In November 1964, historian Murray Last received from University College Ibadan the first PhD awarded by a Nigerian university. His supervisor, H. F. C. Smith, who later converted to Islam and became known as Abdullahi Smith, was among the scholars who challenged the Eurocentric nineteenth-century historiography of West Africa, and he got his start at University College Ibadan, where he served from the mid-1950s to 1963. Smith argued forcefully that the assumption of a growing European influence in nineteenth-century West Africa was problematic and had strongly informed the writing of nineteenth-century West African historiography. According to Smith, ‘the real conflict between African and European institutions was hardly felt anywhere in West Africa more than 200 miles from the Atlantic Coast before the 1880s’ (Smith Reference Smith and Smith1987: 132). In Ibadan, and later at Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, Abdullahi Smith created a new school that used Arabic sources to reinterpret West African history. Murray Last collected over 10,000 Arabic manuscripts to establish the Northern History Research Scheme, which supplied Arabic resources for a rising generation of Nigerian historians. After Last, whose book The Sokoto Caliphate draws extensively on Arabic sources, a few Northern Nigerian historians contributed to this effort of decolonizing African history, including Yusufu Bala Usman on Katsina and Abdullahi Mahadi on Kano.

Another interesting endeavour to bring new sources to the study of African history, religion and philosophy was one that historian John Hunwick started in 1964 at the University of Ibadan in the form of the Centre for Arabic Documentation. He began by publishing a journal called Research Bulletin through the Institute of African Studies there, and in 1965 announced a project that would collect together Arabic writings from all over Africa. Hunwick started the bulletin with the goal of publishing a bio-bibliographic volume of Arabic writings in West Africa (Hunwick Reference Hunwick, Jeppie and Diagne2008: 303), but his research turned up such a wealth of writings that he and Sean O'Fahey, with the assistance of other scholars in the field, were able to publish a seven-volume encyclopaedia of Arabic writings in Africa, most of which have still not been studied by historians and philosophers.

The neglect of these sources is likely to be due to the post-slavery definition of Africa – the perception that Africa is the continent that supplied the rest of the world with black slaves, a continent therefore deemed to be without history and without civilization. In this connection, Arowosegbe mentions Hegel as a must in the study of philosophy. Hegel left us with a conception of Africa as unhistorical. For Hegel, Africa proper is south of the Sahara; North Africa is not part of Africa. The division of academic labour on Africa, which Arowosegbe implicitly embraces, split the continent into two parts very much along Hegelian lines. Africa proper typically was studied as part of African studies and North Africa typically as part of Middle Eastern studies. Such a division rests on the problematic assumption that the Sahara was a barrier when we know that it has always been a bridge. The spread of Arabo-Islamic culture and civilization in Africa stops at the equator. The northern half of the continent, which includes most of West Africa, has been exposed to Arabo-Islamic civilization for over a millennium. Modern African culture is therefore the product of centuries of cultural, economic and political interactions between Arabs, Europeans and Black Africans.

The greatest postcolonial challenge is to reconstruct African intellectual history. Such a project requires that we reject nativistic and anti-colonial rhetoric, take stock of Africa's hybridity, and figure out ways to bring different bodies of knowledge into conversation. The majority of Arabs live in Africa. After English, Arabic is the most spoken language on the continent. Arabic was not just the language of writings before colonialism; just like French, English, Kiswahili and Hausa, it is the language in which a huge postcolonial philosophical and literary tradition is expressed. How can intellectuals from different traditions be brought into effective conversation? This is one of the greatest challenges going forward.