Why HISTORY feels impossible to believe.

If you read only one thing today, let it be this. I ask for just a few minutes of your attention. What you're about to read is not just a story, it's a journey from doubt to understanding. It began with a question I had quietly carried for years and ended with one of the greatest lessons history has ever taught me. Read it to the very end... because by the last paragraph, you may never look at history or even your own life, the same way again. For many years I put up with difficulties concerning history in silence. I never hated it nor did I want to reject it; rather, I was attempting to work out how humans could speak so confidently about events that took place thousands of years before any of us had been born. How is it possible for anyone to be certain that an empire came into being in a particular century, that a king conquered another kingdom, that a prophet lived at a specific time, or that a wealthy African ruler travelled across the Sahara with such a great amount of gold as to affect the economies of the cities he passed through? <blockquote>What evidence do we have for all this?</blockquote> I never voiced those questions since I knew they seemed controversial, but they were real questions. At times it seemed to me that history was too distant for my imagination to understand. The moment anyone said, "This took place in 500 BC," my mind would stop. Five hundred years before the Common Era?Two thousand years ago?Ten thousand years ago?About hundreds of thousands of years ago? I would stop and consider whether the human mind can truly comprehend such time.There were also stories which sounded almost impossible.It was the case that enslaved Africans had heavy iron chains round their necks. That it was necessary to fit iron devices over the mouths of some people in order to prevent them from speaking or eating. That families were forever separated.That so many people were made to cross oceans.That entire civilizations disappeared.Two world wars resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people. Ancient kingdoms attained great power and then disappeared, leaving behind only ruins, records, and memories. I believed these events truly happened.Yet a small part of me still longed to witness them for myself—not because I doubted historians, but because distance has a strange way of making reality feel like fiction. Then, life taught me something no history book ever could. One experience in my department made that realization even more profound.One day, one of our lecturers shared something that left me speechless. He told us that many years ago, he sat in these very classrooms as a student, learning under a lecturer who is now a professor and still teaches in this department today. Now, that former student stands alongside his former teacher, and together, they are teaching my generation. In that moment, three generations met in a single classroom: the professor, his former student, and us. Then I wondered: perhaps one day, one of us will return to this same university as a lecturer, stand beside one or two of our own lecturers, tell this same story, and together teach another generation. At that moment, I realised that history is not only written in books. Sometimes, history is standing right in front of us. That realization made me reflect on my own life. I remembered when most everyday transactions in Nigeria were carried out with paper ₦5, ₦10, ₦20, and ₦50 notes.I remembered how different phones were back then. I remembered life before artificial intelligence became part of everyday conversations.I can still remember the events of my childhood as if they had happened yesterday.At that moment a question came into my mind. Imagining that a child who is born seventy or one hundred years from now listens to these stories? Picture having to tell that child that people used to carry around paper money.Picture having to say that students used physical notebooks for almost everything.Picture the situation in which people discussed at one time whether artificial intelligence would alter education, journalism, medicine, law, or even take over human jobs.Picture having to say to them that there had been a global pandemic which brought the world to a standstill. They might smile politely.They could even disbelieve us. One might wonder, "Did that actually happen?"One might argue, "That sounds an overstatement."Not due to their lack of respect.Yet since they had never been there. All of a sudden, history made sense.I came to the realisation that the people who lived centuries before us were not mythical figures. They woke up each morning just as we do.They laughed.They worried about tomorrow.They raised children.They argued.They prayed.They celebrated victories.They mourned losses.They reached their decisions without realizing that historians in the future would analyse them in classrooms and books. For them, their life was merely focused on the present moment.Just as we are. One day, what is now our present will be the past for someone else. <ul><li>The examination questions of decades in the future might well be based on the news headlines that we pass over today.</li><li>The inventions which we talk about casually could one day end up in museums.</li><li>The political debates that are filling today's newspapers may one day be included in history books.</li></ul> Our ordinary photographs could also serve as historical evidence.The idea completely changed my life.History is not unbelievable simply because it is false. It is impossible to believe since time produces distance.Distance removes emotion.Distance removes voices.Distance removes faces. What is left in the end are dates, documents, photographs, ruins, and memories.Which is why history often seems cold.But each date had its own heartbeat. For every battle there was a soldier who was frightened.Hope was always at the heart of any migration. For every empire there was always a group of ordinary people who were just trying to get through another day. History is not simply a set of dates.It is the memory of humanity that has been preserved. It serves as a reminder that the people who came before us had dreams, struggled, failed, made discoveries, built things, loved and sacrificed in order that the world might become what it is today. Since I have studied history, I don't any longer ask whether this actually took place.Then I ask, "What evidence has come down to us which allows us to tell this story?" Once I adopted that new way of looking at things, my view of the past changed completely.Perhaps the greatest lesson history has taught me is this: We nowadays spend so much time in questioning the reality of the people who lived before us, without realizing that one day people who have never met us will do the same regarding our own reality. One who has not yet been born might some day read about us just as we read about ancient civilizations.It might be difficult for them to believe our stories. Perhaps they regret that they are not able to see our world with their own eyes.Maybe they will at last grasp what I have come to understand.History isn't in some remote place inhabited by strangers.History is nothing more than yesterday... waiting patiently to become unbelievable.

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