Joseph Ki-Zerbo

Joseph Ki-Zerbo was born on the twenty-first of June 1922 at the village of Toma, in the northwestern Samo country of Nayala Province, in the French colony of Upper Volta. He was the son of Alfred Diban Ki-Zerbo — a Samo man remembered as the first Christian of Upper Volta, a Catholic catechist who had survived captivity in Timbuktu before returning to preach the faith — and of Thérèse Folo. From this devout household the young Joseph carried both a rootedness in his people and a hunger to understand the wider world.

He trained across disciplines, becoming a historian and philosopher of rare breadth. In 1972 he published his landmark Histoire de l'Afrique noire, a sweeping counter-history that refused the colonial lie of a continent without a past. He taught African history at the University of Ouagadougou, shaping a generation of scholars, and lent his authority to the great collaborative project of his age.

For UNESCO's monumental General History of Africa, Ki-Zerbo served as editor and director of Volume I, Methodology and African Prehistory, published in 1981. In 1980 he founded in Ouagadougou the Centre d'Études pour le Développement Africain, guided by his conviction that "on ne développe pas, on se développe" — a people are not developed from without, but develop themselves.

His scholarship was inseparable from courage: exiled for his opposition to Thomas Sankara's regime, he returned to serve in Burkina Faso's parliament and received the Right Livelihood Award in 1997. He died on the fourth of December 2006 in Ouagadougou. May the historian who gave Africa back its history be honored, and his memory kept.