Tag: africa

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.

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.

Sep 11 2021

Book review: Precolonial Black Africa by Cheikh Anta Diop

diopMy next book follows on from reading Black and British by David Olusoga. It is Precolonial Black Africa by Cheikh Anta Diop. I was looking for an overview of African history from an African perspective. Diop’s relatively short book focuses on West Africa. It turns out he is a very interesting figure in himself, building several political parties, doing research in history as well as physics and chemistry and having a university named after him. Some of his ideas on African history are controversial (you can see the wikipedia page relating to him here).

The core of the controversy is two fold, one is his claim that ancient Egyptians were black, and the second is that there is a historical unity in West Africa civilisation with migration from the east of Africa populating the continent. The basis for this thesis relies quite heavily on similarities in totemic names across the region as well as cultural similarities. These days there is some support for the migration of populations out of the Nile basin to West Africa from DNA evidence.

Most of the discussion in this book is oriented around the area of West Africa where Diop grew up, in Senegal, with some mentions of Eygypt and Sudan. Diop draws parallels in the internal organisations across the empires of Ghana, Mossi, Mali and Songhai. The Empire of Ghana stretched beyond the boundaries of the modern country, and stood for 1250 years. Mossi was to the east and south, in the area of modern Burkino Faso, Mali and Songhai were a little to the north encompassing the modern Timbucktu. Looking at wikipedia these empires appear to have overlapped to a degree both in time and space. Precolonial Black Africa covers the period from about 300AD to the 17th century although it does not make much reference to dates.

There is almost no mention even of the area of Nigeria, a little to the east, or Southern Africa. I was nearly half way through the book before I realised that Sudan referred to two different places: Sudan the modern state in North East Africa, and the Sudan Empire which stretches across the southern margin of the Sahara in the West of Africa.

The books starts with a description of the caste system, emphasising the two-way nature of the system and contrasting it to a degree with the caste system in India.

Precolonial Black Africa contrasts Africa with Europe, in the period covered by the book Europe was based on city-states which evolved into feudal structures, with Roman geographical divisions, where defence from marauders by the lord in the castle was important. Land ownership was core of this political system whereas Africa evolved more along Egyptian lines which saw countries divided into regions with regional governance and no tradition of land ownership.

These empires were led by kings with a small cabinet of advisors who had both a regional responsibility and a specialism (like a minister for finance, or the army). Although not republics, nor democratic in the modern Western sense, Diop claims that these governments were more representative than their Western European equivalents of the time.

The technological expertise of the ancient Romans and Greeks was carried through the Middle Ages by the Arab world. It is no coincidence that Spain was once a technology leader, given the Muslim rule of Spain. Islamization of West Africa is a recurring theme of the book, and Arab writers feature regularly in the lists of sources for the early history of Africa. Islam was important in education through to the present day, this is in part responsible for slowed technological progress in the region. Islamic schools did not place a great emphasis on what they consider pagan history, nor so much on modern science.

Precolonial Black Africa covers technology relatively briefly, mentioning architecture and the Great Zimbabwe – a significant stone-built city in present day Zimbabwe whose early excavation was plagued by the then Rhodesian governments view that it could not be constructed by Black Africans. Coins, and metalworking are also mentioned – West Africa made relatively little use of the familiar coinage of European. Gold dust was used as currency, as were Cowrie shells. The Benin Bronzes dating from the 13th century demonstrate there was significant metalworking skill in West Africa (the Bronzes are currently in the news as the UK refuses to return them to Benin). Little of technology and writing seems to have survived from precolonial times, I suspect this is a combination of the environment which is not conducive to the preservation of paper (or even metal), successive colonisations by Islam and then Europeans and relatively little archaeological activity.Trade seemed quite significant across West Africa, even in the absence of conventional coinage.

The interesting thing reading this book is the contrast with flaws that Western history has had in the past, being focussed on great men, the idea of the natural superiority of the white man, and leaning heavily on Classical heritage for legitimacy. I suspect these points of view are generally not prevalent in modern academic history but they certainly hold sway with the current UK government and a coterie of right-wing historians. To a degree Diop suffers the same types of prejudices but from a different perspective – the superiority of the Black African. My view of African history is still heavily influenced by those old Western European foundations.  

After a rocky start I came to enjoy this book, I found the book alien in a couple of respects firstly in its discussion of history from an African perspective, and also simply that it is African history. What I know of Africa is largely through a colonial lens.