This article traces five hundred years of European and American academic and public music discourse through two disparate examples: Vicente Lusitano, a sixteenth-century Portuguese composer of African descent, and anti-Black comments directed at musicians Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones in the 1984 documentary I Love Quincy. These threads converge in the present day, as discourse involving Lusitano increasingly contains a form of anti-Blackness that parallels what is presented by the film’s white director, Eric Lipmann, and more recent popular music discourse that echoes his perspective. Moreover, the longitude of Lusitano’s experience as a historical figure offers a unique vantage from which we can observe recursive rhetorical devices – denial, fantasy, and erasure – over time and in varied cultural contexts. Because these tropes support contemporary American anti-Black viewpoints as well as similarly flawed and destructive argumentation from historically distant European societies, we can see the continuity of denial, fantasy, and erasure in five hundred years of discourse as a sign that these musical cultures favor domination.

This article is the second part of a detailed historical assessment of historical scholarship and training at the Department of History of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. It assesses the contemporary situations of historical scholarship and training in the Department vis-à-vis the personalities, programs/courses, and prospects and challenges of the Department over the years. It provides brief profiles of the current academic staff of the Department, the undergraduate and graduate programs and courses, as well as legacies of the founding fathers of the Department. It is shown in the article that the Department of History at Ife has excelled in all areas of historical scholarship and training in the last sixty years of its existence in spite of its challenges. The article concludes that the Department of History at OAU, Ile-Ife, has good potential for greater achievements in historical scholarship and training in the future.