Africa (edition 1998)

If you've traveled to Africa or plan to travel to Africa, this is an exceptional book on everything you'd ever want to know about Africa. It's long at 682 pages, but can can be read a few chatpers at a time. It's easy to skip chapters that don't interest you. ( )

I found this book rather heavy going, but that is partly because a lot of the more distant history stuff is of little interest to me. I did, however, also find the writing style a little dull.

To be fair, it is very ambitious in scope and provides a breadth of coverage, not just in terms of timescale, but also subjects e.g. linguistics, economics, anthropology etc that is not available in any other texts that I've seen. It is also extensively referenced. For these reasons, I've given 4 stars, despite having not particularly enjoyed reading it.

I am primarily interested in more recent history and, fortunately for me, this is delivered to near perfection in the fantastic 'State of Africa' by Martin Meredith. ( )

This is a big book with big aims: to tell, over the course of seven hundred pages, the story of sub-Saharan Africa from its geological formation through to the mid 1990s. Considering the magnitude of what he was attempting, Reader did well. It's obviously well-researched, cleanly written and accessible even for people like me, who know shamefully little about Africa. Yet I think the strain of compressing so much into such a small space began to tell on him after about the first two hundred and fifty pages or so—where they are strongly argued and well paced sections dealing with human evolution, and with the kinds of stresses and demands which led to the formation of Africa's distinct horizontally-organised socio-economic systems, the remaining four hundred or so pages become disjointed and choppy.

The earlier part of the book has the case studies serving to illustrate the thematic histories which he was constructing; in the latter half, however, the case studies become an end to themselves, and it's less easy for the reader to bring it together as a whole. A lot of the information which he presents about the awful impact which invasion and colonialism had on Africa was startling (if sadly not surprising), and what he had to say about the ways in which European intervention changed African culture very interesting, but I was left wishing that he'd had an editor ask him to step back a little and think about why he was saying what he was saying a little bit more, to recreate the structure of it. An interesting book, and probably a good starting point if you want to know more about Africa, but not without its flaws.

Lastly, there were one or two things which made me tilt my head. Reader has spent a lot of time in Africa, but as he acknowledges himself in the introduction, he is a white man and thus has to overcome a lot of internalised assumptions when talking about the continent. In many respects—at least to me—it seemed like he succeeded. But for instance, there were times when he referred to 'miscegenation' without problematising the term, showing how it's an ugly, ugly word, and that bothered me. ( )

Fabulously well written, with each small chapter like a precious jewel. Not too much a history about people, but truly the story of the continent. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1172339.html

This came up in recommendations after I read Fage's History of Africa last year. It starts awfully well, with sections on African geology in the context of continental drift, and on the evolution of humanity in the context of climate change.

From then on I found it a bit patchy. Fage's book was good on the general ebb and flow of states and cultures; Reader prefers to take particular vignettes, and then is a bit frustrating in how he fits them into the general picture: lots of (very interesting!) material about Ethiopia, very little about Islam (for Reader, most of Africa's history seems to start with the Portuguese in the fifteenth century); a general focus on the southern part of the continent which means the Horn (apart from Ethiopia) and West Africa (apart from the prehistory of the inland Niger delta, and a later section on Nigeria) get rather neglected, and anything north of the Sahara isn't covered at all (apart from one early section on the prehistory of the Nile Valley).

There are two overarching themes which Reader does address well and eloquently: slavery and colonialism. Particularly on slavery - he makes a convincing case that the Atlantic slave trade was hugely damaging to Africa's development, in terms of lost population growth and social harm. On colonialism, he is (I guess rightly) excoriating of the Belgians, and damning also of the British and Germans, but the Portuguese (in the modern era) get off rather lightly and the French are mentioned only really in passing, which I found a little odd.

Anyway, all very interesting. ( )