Category: Book Reviews

Reviews of books featuring a summary of the book and links to related material

Mar 19 2025

Book review: Africa is not a country by Dipo Faloyin

My next review is of Africa is not a Country: Breaking stereotypes of modern Africa by Dipo Faloyin. It follows a thread of books I have read on Africa and Black people in the UK and elsewhere, this was prompted by the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.

Africa is not a country is about viewing Africa from an African perspective. It is comprised of 8 parts, the first of which is a thumbnail sketch of the author, and his family, and where he grew up in Lagos. Faloyin is Nigerian with part Yoruba and part Igbo background although he was born in Chicago and now lives in London. He paints a vivid picture of his upbringing very unlike my own, mainly because his family is clearly very sociable and loves cities (or at least Lagos).

The second part goes on to talk about how the 54 countries of Africa came into being, starting with the Berlin Conference in 1884, in which the Western powers agreed to divide up Africa; no Africans participated, despite requests. One thing that struck me was that outside the conference politicians as senior as Gladstone in the UK knew that what they were doing was wrong. The US refused to sign the General Act of the conference, despite being participants. It isn’t clear whether this was a decision made on moral grounds. The 54 countries is something I think I will return to as a number, for comparison Europe has 44 countries, half the number of people and a third of the land area so we might expect Africa to be rather more diverse than Europe.

As a British European I don’t like to dwell too long on the colonial period. This part of the book highlights the preference of the British to out-source the colonisation problem to private companies, in particular the Royal Niger Company, which was taken over by Unilever (a former employer of mine) in the 1920s and only ended its existence in 1987. King Leopold II of Belgium’s subjugation of the Congo (essentially for his own personal gain) is spine-chilling – over the 20 years after the Berlin conference half the population, 10 million people were killed.

The division of Africa into arbitrary countries that did not follow ethnic or any other native pattern had consequences in the post-colonial period; the countries created at independence were naturally unstable so conflict was inevitable. However, the African consensus is that it is best to stick with these countries rather than attempt a wholesale reorganisation. This is not a peculiarly African problem, we can think about the fighting as Yugoslavia fell apart, and the Soviet Union, and the secessionist movements in Spain or Irish reunification.

Many of my early memories of Africa represented in the UK were of Band Aid, and the Ethiopian famine (1983-5). Faloyin sees this as the birth of modern white saviour imagery (I don’t disagree with him). Band Aid projected an image for all of Africa of famine and misery whose inhabitants could only be saved by the intervention of white Westerners – this theme has been repeated endlessly since then. It feels like things are changing though, for the 30th anniversary of Band Aid in 2014 there was a pretty large backlash with musicians with African backgrounds refusing take part. Of the leaders of the Aid/Relief movement Bob Geldof, for his part, essentially said the means justified the ends whilst Lenny Henry was more reflective on the appropriateness of the “white saviour” narrative.

The theme of representation gets a reprise in a later part of the book where Faloyin talks about representations of Africa in the movies which are usually highly stereotypical. This chapter is genuinely laugh out loud funny, as the author says it is a pastiche of Binyavanga Wainaina’s “How to write about Africa“. I hadn’t appreciated quite how revolutionary the film, Black Panther, was in terms of it’s representation of Africans. Actors in Black Panther did not act as generic Africans, they took on national or region speech and habits. Somewhat to my surprise Faloyin cites Coming to America as an earlier film in the same vein – sadly from Hollywood this appears to represent the full list of African films.

Faloyin talks about the story of post-independence democracy in seven types of dictatorship: cold war dealmakers, god-playing colonial masters, revolutionary heroes, opportunistic families, civil-war peacemakers, founding fathers and (rarely) unhinged madman with taste for human flesh. He does this through brief sketches of 7 post-independence leaders Siad Barre, Sani Abacha, Robert Mugabe, Paul Kagame, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Obiang Nguena Mbasogo, and Muammar Gaddafi. Some of these dictators have fallen, but others and others like them remain in place. All of them have been supported to some degree by the West or the Soviet Union – sometimes both!

The chapter on looting is perhaps the most shameful for a British European since it is ongoing; the “Scramble for African” in the 19th century is beyond our reach – it happened in at least our great-great grandparents time. But in terms of looted artefacts it is my generation, people like me, in museums in my country who hold a tight grip on the artefacts taken (violently) by British forces during the Scramble with little obvious will to return them. Much of this discussion is based on the Benin Bronzes, these were not just taken, the sophisticated cities that held them were destroyed. Faloyin states that 90% of Africa’s cultural artefacts are now outside of Africa but of the 900 or so Benin Bronzes held by the British Museum, 800 or so are in storage. When Benin Bronzes went on (loaned) display in Cotonou, capital of Benin 275,000 people went to see them.

France, Germany, and Belgium were also heavily involved in looting artefacts – the Germans seem to have a particular enthusiasm for human remains which fed into their race science research.

It is fair to say there has been some progress on the return of artefacts to Africa but mainly in writing reports, with minor organisations returning a few artefacts with great fanfare, and foot dragging. Faloyin estimates that the number of artefacts under discussion for return is around 10% of the total.

Jollof, a rice dish from West Africa is a bit of a recurring theme through the book, clearly of critical importance to West Africans, and the author, but perhaps included for relief from some of the more serious chapters.

The book finishes with some vignettes with modern Africa, through protests in several countries, culture and the story of Botswana who fortunately discovered their diamond deposits after independence from the British and has thrived as a country since. Faloyin is optimistic about the future, he sees a young continent with a lot of positive things going on and perhaps signs of the end of the post-independence conflicts.

Feb 26 2025

Book review: 1666 – Plague, War and Hellfire by Rebecca Rideal

My next review is of 1666 : Plague, War and Hellfire by Rebecca Rideal. The book is centred on London, in the year 1666 with a substantial chunk on 1665 which provides background to the events of the following year. It was certainly a very eventful time, the plague of the title is the Black Death which made a return to London in the summer of 1665. The war is the second Anglo-Dutch War and the hellfire is the Great Fire of London.

It is only a few years after the Restoration. As an interesting aside I learnt of the Indemnity and Oblivion Act 1660 which appears to have forgiven all crimes committed during the Civil War, except for regicide. This is relevant since some senior figures in the navy had been involved in Cromwell’s government. John Milton benefited from it too, as someone imprisoned for his anti-Royalist views.

1666 is substantially about the “great men”, such as the king, his brother and the court but it contains quite a lot of rather smaller characters. I was intrigued by the reports from William Taswell, a schoolboy, whose autobiography was published posthumously in 1852.

Also mentioned, amongst many others are Margaret Cavendish, whose biography I read previously, and Aphra Behn – who sounds like a really interesting woman. In this book Behn travels to the Netherlands as a spy, she would later go on to become a prolific playwright. Rather inevitably Samuel Pepys appears frequently, as does another diarist, John Evelyn. Robert Hooke, John Milton and Isaac Newton also gain a couple of pages but it feels a little like they were bolted on for additional colour.

I must admit I read the section on the plague assuming that it was written after the COVID pandemic, and only realised after I’d finished that it was written in 2016. This highlights some of the similarities in pandemics across the years. In contrast to the present day, the 1666 plague led to a mass exodus from London. Those suffering plague were quarantined in their own homes, typically with their families, with fatal consequences for most concerned. At the time there was some discussion as to the wisdom of this type of quarantine. The government took steps to limit public gatherings which seem to have been largely obeyed. The plague was petering out in London by early 1666 but was starting to rage outside the capital. It killed around 100,000 from a population of 460,000 in London.

I have read books on plague, and as a child the Great Fire of London was a regular feature in history lessons. The Anglo-Dutch Wars are something I have not read about before. This thread of the story starts with the accidental destruction of the London in the Thames. Followed by a number of naval engagements where it seemed, to a large degree, that the weather was a determining factor – the navies of the English and Dutch were fairly evenly matched at this point. The English were possibly gaining the upper hand during later Summer 1666 but the Great Fire strained resources considerably. The Dutch successfully attacked the Chatham Docks in the summer of 1667, shortly after a peace was agreed which only lasted until 1672.

The “Pudding” of Pudding Lane, where the Great Fire started, is black pudding, not dessert. Providing a segue from the Angle-Dutch War: Thomas Farriner, the owner of the bakery where the fire started had a contract with the navy to make ship’s biscuit. Farriner was a jury member in the trial of Frenchman Robert Hubert who confessed to starting the Fire, he was found guilty and executed despite being clearly innocent (even at the time). This was an aspect of the Fire I had not appreciated as a child – there was a lot of suspicion, and even violence, against foreigners even as the fire raged on the assumption that the fire could not have spread so fast without help. The total damage was 70,000 made homeless, 13,000 houses destroyed, 87 churches, and 52 livery halls with a total financial loss estimated at £10,000,000 (about £2billion in current figures). Over the four year Blitz campaign during the Second World War around 70,000 buildings were destroyed but the population of London was nearly 9 million rather than several hundred thousand. The fire ran its course in 4 days and obliterated most of the city of London within the Walls.

The official death toll was 6 people, however Rideal highlights this was probably a large under-estimate; many of the elderly and infirm would not have been able to evacuate quickly enough and their bodies would have been completely consumed by the fire. Rideal also talks about the psychological impact of the fire, Pepys writes of his nightmares after the Fire and there are a number of accounts of people clearly permanently changed by the Fire. I can’t help thinking the Plague would have had a similar impact.

The book finishes with an epilogue containing paragraphs on key characters and what they did next.

I found this a very enjoyable read, it is relatively short with quite a narrow scope but it gives a gripping picture of London at the time. The themes of plague, fire and war “work well together”.

Feb 07 2025

Book review: Roads in Roman Britain by Hugh Davies

My next review is of Roads in Roman Britain by Hugh Davies. Davies was a road engineer, and the study of Roman roads is a retirement project for him, which amused me since I am currently contemplating retirement. I don’t mean this pejoratively – I think in Roads he did a great job bringing together his expertise and the existing academic work in the area, as well as his own original research. He gained a PhD in 2001 from Reading University. In addition he has compiled a database of Roman road characteristics which is exactly my sort of thing.

The book starts with some basic definitions of what a road is and how it is structured. Davies focusses on the function of the road as a transport mechanism rather than as a boundary indicator, a navigation system or an expression of Roman power – uses I hadn’t really considered. As a structure a road has a route and a cross-section. I liked the quote from John London McAdam which basically said the function of the road cross-section was to stop the running surface becoming unusable as a result of water coming from above or below!

There is very limited primary documentary evidence for the Roman roads of Britain, there is the Antonine Iternary, tables of routes across the Roman empire which includes some routes in Britain and the Peutiger Tables, a sort of pseudo-map of roads across the Roman Empire of which Britain is only covered in a small fragment showing the far south east of the country.

This leaves us with archaeology, fortunately Roman roads in Britain have been excavated for many years. Less fortunately dating evidence is sparse in roads. Some roads identified as Roman may well date to medieval or even the 17th century when the turnpike roads were the first to match the quality of construction of Roman roads. It’s worth noting that none of the names used for Roman roads (Watling Street, Ermine Street, the Foss Way etc) are original – they are labels dating to the medieval period at earliest. It is not clear if Romans used any sort of naming for roads.

Archaeological practices have improved over the years, it is only really in the last quarter of the 20th century that it was appreciated that Roman roads are structures that were repaired and reconstructed over centuries.

I think the most interesting idea in this book Davis’s proposal for a reason for the straightness of Roman roads. He argues, unlike others, that the Roman’s must have made some sort of map before laying out roads and that the likelihood was that this was some large scale object possibly inscribed onto a floor. Under these circumstances straight road segments are the easiest to transmit to “the field”. It is easy to say “go to this point, build a straight road in this direction until you have gone this distance”, imagine trying to describe a more complex route accurately.

One of the recurring themes of the book is as to whether the Romans built roads to a strict pattern in terms of construction details and width. Justinian codified road classifications in the 6th century AD; an iter is pedestrian only, actus will allow a beast of burden, via will allow a cart however no numerical widths were defined. The Twelve Tables from fifth century BC says a straight section of road must be 8 pedes (Roman feet) wide on the straight an 16 on corners. However, on the ground road widths follow quite a broad distribution with a peak around 20 pedes (which is about six metres). This is wide enough for two-way cart traffic.

Based on the road surface (crushed stone/gravel) and the maximum gradients Davies suggests that Roman roads were designed for heavy carts moving at walking pace rather than fast passenger carriages. I was interested to learn the optimum gradients for carts are based on the rolling resistance of the surface balancing gravity (which becomes larger for steeper slopes). This is to avoid runaway carts since braking technology at the time was poor.

In the past historians have tended to the view that the Romans worked in a very regimented fashion. Davies comes down on the side of a more flexible approach determined by local factors. This is complicated in the archaeological record by repair and reconstruction activities, in some places there is evidence for 9 or 10 cycles of repair/reconstruction – sometimes this is as an addition on top of an older road but sometimes it is a widening of the route.

Davies observes that there is a difference in construction methods between the north and west of the country and the south and east with the north and west making greater use of stone. He attributes this to much more significant military use in the north and west, and better availability of suitable stone.

There is a chapter on Roman town plans which looked like it could be a whole separate book. Roman towns are typically built on a grid sometimes this grid is based around a Roman road alignment – suggesting road predates town and sometimes the road deviates to adapt to the town grid, suggesting town predates road.

Davies covers fairly briefly the development of the network over time, in terms of the military function of roads. The Royal Engineers estimated that the initial road from a Kent invasion landing point to London would have taken 1000 men about 15 weeks, a full version would take 3400 men about 3 years. The Roman road system was not fully developed until into the 2nd century AD – some 60 or so years after the invasion. London was not the transport centre of Britain at the beginning of the Roman occupation but became so over time.

This book is somewhat specialist, I enjoyed it because I’m interested in civil engineering and Roman history. It is short and readable, and I think provides a unique perspective.

Jan 26 2025

Book review: The Teenager’s Guide to Burnout by Dr Naomi Fisher and Eliza Fricker

I recently reviewed Understanding Pathological Demand Avoidance Syndrome in Children, this book follows that theme – I’m reviewing The Teenager’s Guide to Burnout by Dr Naomi Fisher and Eliza Fricker. The Teenager’s Guide is a far easier read, directed at teenagers rather than adults although it includes a section at the end for adults.

Dr Naomi Fisher is a clinical psychologist well-known for her work on the mental health of children, parenting and schooling. She experienced many different schools in different countries as a result of her parents’ life-style. Eliza Fricker is an illustrator and author and has experience of the issues covered in the book and drew the illustrations.

The book starts with some generally comments about stress and burnout which could apply to anyone, it’s useful in setting the scene although I did worry whether I’d got the right book. Perhaps surprisingly the book doesn’t mention “autistic burnout” except in the final section for adults where Fisher says that burnout is burnout, some children are neurodivergent but that’s not the key feature.

The action quickly moves on to school which in general is what will cause burnout in teenagers. The process of burnout is divided into four sections:

  1. Breakdown – burnout often seems to come out of the blue, a child is “fine at school” and then suddenly can no longer go in. It is traumatic for parents as well as children. Fisher (rightly) attributes this largely to the school environment and emphasises that a return to school should not be the short term gaol. This stage is about re-connecting with the child, it turns out our family sessions of Fortnite were actually a pretty good thing to do!;
  2. Repair – this is when we start to find the new normal with a child at home not at school, and a family rearranged to accommodate. There is often sadness here at the life apparently lost. This stage is about the teenager trying to find some enjoyment in life;
  3. Learning from the journey – this is about learning about what went wrong; why was it that school became unbearable? Sometimes as parents we will discover that our well meaning efforts were just pressuring our child and worsening the problem. I think of our efforts to get our son to see a counsellor here;
  4. The Road Ahead – this is about finding another path to education, outside of mainstream school. Part of the current process is, typically, to pressure children by telling them that mainstream school is the only option and they will be a failure if they don’t attend. Fisher describes it as a myth, really it is an outright lie;

Fisher believes that a key mistake most people make is to see a return to mainstream school as the goal throughout this process. If an adult had a burnout as a result of a high stress job we probably wouldn’t see going back to that job as the goal. She sees the school environment as being the problem which reflects the WHO recognition of burnout as an “occupational phenomena”. She cites increasingly high pressure methods used in schools to control behaviour (see SLANT), enforce attendance (“your parents will be fined and may go to prison if you don’t go to school”) and recover the academic progress lost during the pandemic. I have to say I agree with all of this.

Fisher is scathing about schools, pointing out her experience of so many different school systems highlights which school rules are in fact unnecessary she mentions UK uniform rules and the UK tradition of calling teachers “Sir and Miss” as examples of this. The world doesn’t end if you don’t wear a school uniform and address your teachers by their first name.

Fisher says a little about why burnout is an increasing problem, some of it is changes in the world – particularly the pandemic. She mentions world events like climate change meaning there is little to hope for in the future, as a child of the seventies and eighties I can say there is no change there – we feared nuclear annihilation! She says that in the past those suffering from burnout might have been diagnosed as having glandular fever or simply truants. It strikes me that in the past twenty years or so we have been become (on the face of it) much more understanding of mental health issues in adults but we don’t extend that sympathy to children.

I found her comments on friends and social development interesting, one of the key worries of those educating at home is the lack of social interactions. However, Fisher points out that frequently younger children have a quite limited social circle covering only family and relatives. Friendship at secondary schools has the air of protection, being in with a group so you are not alone at lunch time or the school gate, not the target of bullying. That said she provides a long list of venues outside school where teenagers might find new friends.

I suspect this book will be mainly read by parents; teenagers in the process of burnout are likely only receptive to it at stage 4 (The Road Ahead). The best time for an adult to get this book would be prior to stage 1, perhaps when the first signs of issues at school appear but it is useful at any time in the process. I heartily wish no one needed this book.

The Teenager’s Guide is great: for affirming we are not alone, for providing reassurance and also for providing some strategies to try for a better future. Although it is purportedly written for teenagers it is fine for adults, making for an easy read with short recaps at the end of each chapter. There are some handy tables / exercises which also act as summaries.

Jan 24 2025

Book review: An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi

My next review is of An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi. On this topic I read Precolonial Black Africa by Cheikh Anta Diop a few years ago. Badawi’s book was a chance discovery at the library – published in 2024. I know Badawi as a newsreader in the UK, she was born in Khartoum in the Sudan but moved to Britain aged 2. She is one of the Africans of the title but more generally she interviewed many African scholars in writing this book.

An African History makes a tour of Africa in broadly chronological fashion, starting with the earliest humans but moving quickly to the area around the Nile in the time of the ancient Egyptians finishing with the liberation struggles of the second half of the 20th century. The 17 chapters are typically named for the areas they cover, some like “Slavery and Salvation” are thematic but typically tied to a region. There are too many chapters for me to comment on each one so I try to provide a thumbnail sketch of the whole here.

There are some recurring themes in the book, the first is reference to the UNESCO General History Africa project – a much longer version of this book in some senses.

In contrast to Britain it feels like groups of people in Africa were more mobile with groups moving around the continent and resettling, also land ownership seems not to have been a common practice.

Badawi writes a little about how the sources for African history are typically accounts written by outsiders such as Arabic scholars, or European traders/slavers. Many of these sources need to be read in light of justification for the actions of their authors either slavery or colonisation. That said the spread of Islam across West Africa and down the Eastern coast of Africa would mean that written language was available from a relatively early date. African sources are typically based on oral traditions which do not have high standing with Western historians. The First Astronomers by Duane Hamacher talked about the power of oral traditions in transmitting information over thousands of years.

South of the Sahara archaeology has been neglected, and in Zimbabwe (as Rhodesia) very actively supressed.

Once the preliminaries of the dawn of humanity are covered the action moves to ancient Egypt, the Kingdom of Kush, Aksum and Ethiopia – all in the North East of Africa covering the modern day states and Sudan. European historians have often written about Egypt as “not African”, as if somehow such an advanced civilisation could not possibly be African (specifically Black). Ancient Egypt persisted from around 3000BC until 330BC when it was invaded by Alexander the Great. The Kingdom of Kush in present day Sudan arose at approximately the same time, when the area was cooler and wetter, and did not fall until the 4th century AD.

Further west along the North African coast we find the Carthaginians fighting the Punic Wars against the Roman Empire a couple of hundred years BC. They were a much more sophisticated society at that time than the Britons that Rome would later invade. Africa gets its name from Ifrikiya, the Roman name for the region. In common with many places North African communities were not uniform in their opposition to Rome some sided with them against other local groups.

Arabs entered Egypt in 639AD, a year after the death of the Prophet Mohammad. They were “semi-welcomed” by the Egyptian populace, the Byzantine rulers had not been great and the native Coptic Church was dominated by the Orthodox Church. From there they spread across North Africa rapidly, crossing the Straits of Gibraltar to take Spain in 711AD.

Sub-Saharan West Africa gets a few outings, firstly with Mansa Musa, leader of the Mali Empire 1312 – c. 1337 and reputedly the richest man to every live, primarily derived from the gold mined in the region. The Mali Empire was followed by the Ghana empire – 600-1235AD and then by the Songhay Empire 1435-1592. Further East there was Benin. These empires do not follow the boundaries of the modern countries who take their names, those were the invention of 19th century colonialists. Also in this area were the Asante. These were large sophisticated societies with complex trading and impressive metalworking, not clusters of mud huts.

The traffic of Africans across the Atlantic in the “triangle trade” is well-known. Less well-known is the Indian Ocean slave trade which had been run by Arab traders from 7th to 19th century with approximately 14 million African slaves traded into Arabia. Interestingly an African view of the end of slavery was that it ultimately came about because the slaving nations started to see that African labour was more useful in Africa than across the Atlantic. This culminates in the “Scramble for Africa” in the late 19th century. Africans also viewed the transatlantic slavery (hard labour with a life expectancy of 7 or 8 years) as far worse than “local” slavery. The local impact of slavery was large, a significant fraction of the particularly young adult male population was trafficked and since slaves were often initially captured by neighbouring African groups levels of suspicion between communities rose – slavery casts a long shadow.

Southern Africa covering present day South Africa and Zimbabwe is covered last in the geographic tour. Originally a stopping point for the Dutch East India company ships heading out to the Far East, it was taken over by the British in 1806. It attracted many white settlers who took land for agriculture with wool a primary export in the first instance followed by diamonds in the late 19th century. Zimbabwe and South Africa were the last countries to gain independence – Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980 was one of my earliest political memories.

The book ends with the “Scramble for Africa” where European states divided up the continent in the 1884 Berlin Conference, control of Africa “passed” from African to European hands almost entirely between 1870 and 1890. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness captures this period – he says it represents “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration”.

At the time there was some armed resistance, generally overcome quite promptly by superior weaponry such as the Maxim gun. Independence happened after the Second World War, Badawi gives the impression that this process was generally peaceful – I’m not sure that is true. Large scale participation in the world wars by African soldiers drove a desire for independence, as it drove a desire for equality for Black British people at home. The US did not favour its European allies imperialist tendencies, and the colonies became too expensive to maintain after the destruction of the Second World War. The great powers were happy to interfere in the independence process though, the French destroyed much infrastructure as they left Guinea and the Americans with the Belgians backed a coup that deposed the independence leader Patrice Lumumba amongst many other examples.

Badawi ends with a positive note, talking about African as a continent whose population has an average age of 19, taking up new technologies rapidly. It is still blighted by poor government in places but things are improving.

I’m glad I picked this book up, I found it well-written and readable. It provides a great overview of African history with a different perspective to most of what I have read before.