Centuries of enslavement, followed by destructive conquest and colonial domination have generated peculiar conceptions of Africans, their past and their position in the world, as well as their future. Despite important contributions of a small number of scholars - Leo Frobenius, Maurice Delafosse and Arturo Labriola - mentioned in his text, M'Bow points to a common theme that emerged during the nineteenth century and spread during the colonial period. According to that theme, derived from the Hegelian conception of world history, African communities were societies unlikely to have a history. The core of the issue was that of the nature of the sources needed to write history. The lack of written sources in most ancient African societies was erroneously equated with the absence of history. Oral sources were paradoxically disparaged. Most of African history was still written from an outsider's perspective, based on external sources and relying on a European template as a model. African history was filtered through a series of preconceptions. It thus appears crucial for the historians to reshuffle their methodological tools and abandon the misleading preconceptions.  
The dominant perception of Africa was that of a continent with juxtaposed subsets. North Africa, known as 'white' and sub-Saharan Africa, known as 'black' were thought to have lived separately on account of an insurmountable obstacle, namely the Saharan desert. Ancient Egypt and Nubia were also thought to have evolved independently from the rest of the continent. Consequently, Africa was not considered to be a historical entity. While each of the regions of Africa possesses its own originality, those regions have maintained uninterrupted exchanges between each other. North Africa, for example, was a bridgehead between the Mediterranean world and sub-Saharan Africa, and as for the margins of the Sahara, they have always been fluctuating. Egypt and Nubia have an interwoven history and share many cultural characteristics with the rest of Africa.