The history curriculum taught in colonized Africa was inadequate in many aspects. Schoolchildren in French colonies were taught to sing 'Our Ancestors the Gauls'. The European self-assigned 'civilizing mission' was predicated on the erasure of African historical agency. A new approach to Africa's past was an absolute necessity. The process of writing the GHA was consequently launched by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1964. Its main goal was to write the history of Africa from an African perspective. The monumental task undertaken then took some 20 years, at the end of which, in the early 1980s, the first volumes were produced. Eight volumes, numbered I-VIII, initially in French, English and Arabic, and translated later into 10 other languages, were published between 1981 and 1999. Some 350 historians and scientists, two thirds of them Africans, were involved. Their work was coordinated by the International Scientific Committee for the drafting of a General History of Africa, comprising 39 experts. They had to challenge the colonial library and rebuild an African historiography free of colonialist imprints and stereotypes. The history of Africa was not confined to enslavement, poverty, famines and civil unrest. The rich and diverse tapestry of Africa's past had to be rendered as thoroughly and precisely as possible through sound and rigorous scholarship. The GHA project pioneered an alternative way of writing history (Schmidt and Patterson, 1993). It brought to the fore marginalized and silenced people's voices and promoted a 'de-nationalized' historical narrative, featuring hidden space and time connections between different countries and regions of the world.