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Africa: A Biography of the Continent
From the primeval cataclysms that formed the continent to the civil wars and genocide that ravage it today--a work of startling grandeur and scope that provides a remarkable panoramic history of Africa, by a deeply intelligent writer who has spent most of his adult life there.
We all originated in Africa, and no matter what our race, our most ancient relationship is with that continent. Reader tells the story of our earliest ancestors' adaptation to Africa's ferocious obstacles of jungle, river, and desert, and of how its unique array of animals, plants, viruses, and parasites has over millions of years helped and hindered human progress to a degree unknown anywhere else on Earth.
Illustrated with many of the author's own beautiful photographs, which capture the staggering diversity of human experience in every part of the continent--from the inland estuaries of the Niger and the rain forests of the Equator, to the deserts of the north and the high veld of the south--this book weaves together into a richly fluent narrative the rise and fall of ancient civilizations, the changing patterns of indigenous life over the millennia, the complex history of slavery, the devastating impact of European settlers, and the fragile reemergence of independent nations. John Reader has given us an extraordinary biography of an infinitely fascinating continent.
We all originated in Africa, and no matter what our race, our most ancient relationship is with that continent. Reader tells the story of our earliest ancestors' adaptation to Africa's ferocious obstacles of jungle, river, and desert, and of how its unique array of animals, plants, viruses, and parasites has over millions of years helped and hindered human progress to a degree unknown anywhere else on Earth.
Illustrated with many of the author's own beautiful photographs, which capture the staggering diversity of human experience in every part of the continent--from the inland estuaries of the Niger and the rain forests of the Equator, to the deserts of the north and the high veld of the south--this book weaves together into a richly fluent narrative the rise and fall of ancient civilizations, the changing patterns of indigenous life over the millennia, the complex history of slavery, the devastating impact of European settlers, and the fragile reemergence of independent nations. John Reader has given us an extraordinary biography of an infinitely fascinating continent.
816 pages, Hardcover
First published October 30, 1997
About the author
John Reader
27 books35 followersAn author and photojournalist with more than forty years' professional experience. He holds an Honorary Research Fellowship in the Department of Anthropology at U.C.L.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 167 reviews
October 1, 2022
“Were it not for the importunities of Europe, Africa might have enlarged upon its indigenous talents and found an independent route to the present – one that was inspired by resolutions from within rather than examples from without. The moment passed, however, during the fifteenth century and cannot be retrieved. Since then the history of Africa has been the story of an ancient continent and its inhabitants trying to accommodate the conceits of modern humans whose ancestors left the cradle-land 100,000 years ago, and who came back 500 years ago, behaving as though they owned the place…”
- John Reader, Africa: A Biography of a Continent
John Reader’s Africa is about as ambitious a volume as you can imagine. In 682 pages of text, he attempts to encompass the entire existence of a vast continent, from its literal formation at the dawn of time, right up till the book’s 1997 publication date. Instead of diving deeply into one or two big themes, Reader attempts a massive multidisciplinary effort that interweaves geology, ecology, climatology, agriculture, anthropology, and history.
There is simply no way to perfectly accomplish what Reader is trying to do. It cannot be done in a single book, or in a hundred books. There is just too much to cover, and every time you start examining one subject, you find yourself facing three others, in an investigatory game of whack-a-mole. Still, Africa is a marvelous synthesis, one that is consistently engrossing even as the coverage becomes increasingly scattershot as we progress down the timeline.
***
In telling Africa’s story, Reader starts at the very beginning, with entire chapters devoted to the continent’s physical creation. He ponders numerous rock formations, and engages in a great deal of talk about cratons, fissures, and the Bushveld Igneous Complex. As a person who connects to the past through people, an entire section meditating on inanimate processes – most derived from competing hypotheses that must be collated – is generally uninteresting to me. Thus, it is a testament to Reader’s writerly abilities that I pushed onward, through the lava and tectonic forces, until we reached that strangest of species: homo sapiens.
Once humankind shows up, Africa picks up its pace. For the most part, I’ve expended very little effort pondering our super-ancient ancestors, so it was enlightening to think about something as simple as a bowl being a huge technological leap with far-ranging consequences. Human development proceeded as it did due to innumerable factors, and Reader fascinatingly leads you through them, from the big stuff like plant arrays and viruses, to smaller things like bipedalism, lactose intolerance, and the virtues of bananas.
All the big stuff and the small stuff adds up, which is why we get two info-dense paragraphs on camels having sex.
***
Africa is at its strongest when it focuses on a particular storyline and follows it for a while. Obviously, this is easier said than done, since there are near-infinite storylines to follow in Africa, with its panoply of civilizations, and with the ups-and-downs that comes from existing forever.
Unfortunately, a substantial part of Africa’s tale revolves around slavery and the slave trade, and Reader handles this material quite well. As he notes, slavery existed in Africa long before the slave trade, a function of generally low population densities and a difficulty in creating surplus wealth out of agriculture. Nevertheless, Reader points to the trade itself as the disrupting element. It not only subjected millions of men and women to the horrors of the Middle Passage, but it allowed Europe to latch onto Africa like a parasite. The slave trade became the foot in the door that led to colonization, and to the exploitation of natural – as well as human – resources.
***
According to Reader, Sub-Saharan Africa was mostly stateless before the arrival of Europeans, who then proceeded to draw a bunch of lines on a map that were convenient for them, but ignorant of the cultures they either divided or pressed together.
In distilling the experience of colonization, Reader opts to highlight a few case studies, rather than make a survey. He spends a goodly amount of space on South Africa and the Congo, and on the Zulu and the Xhosa, at the expense of other regions and people. Indeed, Reader’s narrative remains almost completely tethered to Sub-Saharan Africa, with surprisingly little devotion to North Africa – including Egypt – or the influences of Islam.
Having gathered all his sources, it seems that Reader decided to approach things by feel, rather than systematically accounting for all of Africa’s different regions and modern nation-states. This is not a criticism. After all, if he had tried to go country-by-country, Africa might have become an exercise in pedantry, inviting repetition and overlap. Furthermore, it is unlikely that such comprehensiveness could have been contained between two covers. By following his own interests, Reader demonstrates an unflagging enthusiasm, and provides illustrative examples. The downside, though, is that there are a lot of gaps, and so Uganda barely gets mentioned, while places like Libya and Somalia are not mentioned at all.
***
There is a lot – arguably too much – to absorb in Africa, and it can verge on the overwhelming. The project is ultimately saved by Reader’s talents: his ability to describe a place, to explain a process, and to support a conclusion. Africa is also lifted by Reader’s transparent passion for what he is writing about.
Too often Africa is defined by its very-real tragedies, whether it is the slave trade, colonial exploitation, or post-colonial dictatorships. But this is just one part of the story. Here, Reader writes profoundly about those other aspects that are just as important. Having sprung from Africa, it is perhaps not surprising that this continental biography has so much to say about humanity as a whole, for the good as well as the bad.
- John Reader, Africa: A Biography of a Continent
John Reader’s Africa is about as ambitious a volume as you can imagine. In 682 pages of text, he attempts to encompass the entire existence of a vast continent, from its literal formation at the dawn of time, right up till the book’s 1997 publication date. Instead of diving deeply into one or two big themes, Reader attempts a massive multidisciplinary effort that interweaves geology, ecology, climatology, agriculture, anthropology, and history.
There is simply no way to perfectly accomplish what Reader is trying to do. It cannot be done in a single book, or in a hundred books. There is just too much to cover, and every time you start examining one subject, you find yourself facing three others, in an investigatory game of whack-a-mole. Still, Africa is a marvelous synthesis, one that is consistently engrossing even as the coverage becomes increasingly scattershot as we progress down the timeline.
***
In telling Africa’s story, Reader starts at the very beginning, with entire chapters devoted to the continent’s physical creation. He ponders numerous rock formations, and engages in a great deal of talk about cratons, fissures, and the Bushveld Igneous Complex. As a person who connects to the past through people, an entire section meditating on inanimate processes – most derived from competing hypotheses that must be collated – is generally uninteresting to me. Thus, it is a testament to Reader’s writerly abilities that I pushed onward, through the lava and tectonic forces, until we reached that strangest of species: homo sapiens.
Once humankind shows up, Africa picks up its pace. For the most part, I’ve expended very little effort pondering our super-ancient ancestors, so it was enlightening to think about something as simple as a bowl being a huge technological leap with far-ranging consequences. Human development proceeded as it did due to innumerable factors, and Reader fascinatingly leads you through them, from the big stuff like plant arrays and viruses, to smaller things like bipedalism, lactose intolerance, and the virtues of bananas.
All the big stuff and the small stuff adds up, which is why we get two info-dense paragraphs on camels having sex.
***
Africa is at its strongest when it focuses on a particular storyline and follows it for a while. Obviously, this is easier said than done, since there are near-infinite storylines to follow in Africa, with its panoply of civilizations, and with the ups-and-downs that comes from existing forever.
Unfortunately, a substantial part of Africa’s tale revolves around slavery and the slave trade, and Reader handles this material quite well. As he notes, slavery existed in Africa long before the slave trade, a function of generally low population densities and a difficulty in creating surplus wealth out of agriculture. Nevertheless, Reader points to the trade itself as the disrupting element. It not only subjected millions of men and women to the horrors of the Middle Passage, but it allowed Europe to latch onto Africa like a parasite. The slave trade became the foot in the door that led to colonization, and to the exploitation of natural – as well as human – resources.
***
According to Reader, Sub-Saharan Africa was mostly stateless before the arrival of Europeans, who then proceeded to draw a bunch of lines on a map that were convenient for them, but ignorant of the cultures they either divided or pressed together.
In distilling the experience of colonization, Reader opts to highlight a few case studies, rather than make a survey. He spends a goodly amount of space on South Africa and the Congo, and on the Zulu and the Xhosa, at the expense of other regions and people. Indeed, Reader’s narrative remains almost completely tethered to Sub-Saharan Africa, with surprisingly little devotion to North Africa – including Egypt – or the influences of Islam.
Having gathered all his sources, it seems that Reader decided to approach things by feel, rather than systematically accounting for all of Africa’s different regions and modern nation-states. This is not a criticism. After all, if he had tried to go country-by-country, Africa might have become an exercise in pedantry, inviting repetition and overlap. Furthermore, it is unlikely that such comprehensiveness could have been contained between two covers. By following his own interests, Reader demonstrates an unflagging enthusiasm, and provides illustrative examples. The downside, though, is that there are a lot of gaps, and so Uganda barely gets mentioned, while places like Libya and Somalia are not mentioned at all.
***
There is a lot – arguably too much – to absorb in Africa, and it can verge on the overwhelming. The project is ultimately saved by Reader’s talents: his ability to describe a place, to explain a process, and to support a conclusion. Africa is also lifted by Reader’s transparent passion for what he is writing about.
Too often Africa is defined by its very-real tragedies, whether it is the slave trade, colonial exploitation, or post-colonial dictatorships. But this is just one part of the story. Here, Reader writes profoundly about those other aspects that are just as important. Having sprung from Africa, it is perhaps not surprising that this continental biography has so much to say about humanity as a whole, for the good as well as the bad.
February 23, 2007
John Reader has an agenda. He loves Africa, a continent that has been misunderstood and misused by Westerners for centuries, and he wants you to love it, too. Reader approaches his “biography of a continent” with unbounded ambition and intelligence, gracefully synthesizing academic arguments from disparate fields to construct a portrait of humanity’s first homeland that is insightful and reverent. The scope is staggering, with detours into geology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, archeology, linguistics, economics, and, of course, history. It is a beautiful journey through the story of how we came to be us, and how African countries came to suffer the tragedies they experience today.
Reader does an excellent job of avoiding the romanticization of African traditional ways of life that many sympathetic westerners fall into. Nature is heartless, and life could be brutal. Starvation was—is���a constant threat, and none of our modern notions of human rights applied. But he tries to show that far from being backwards, African cultures achieved something the West never has: homeostasis in cooperation with the environment. Technology evolved locally inasmuch as was needed to adapt to changing conditions, and cultures developed to allow groups of people to live symbiotically without a coercive state. Westerners mistook balance for backwardness, and thus, Reader shows, their (our) influence has been malevolent from the first.
From time to time, it is clear that Reader is writing beyond his expertise. In a book of this scope, that’s inevitable. His economic analysis sometimes leaves something to be desired, and occasionally he pursues his sympathetic agenda at the cost of intellectual honesty—but only in small ways. You can’t just accept everything Reader writes, but I don’t think he’d want you to. The story he is telling is too complex to have only one truth, and even this tome doesn’t have space to present every perspective. But Reader does give you a story that is fresh and compelling, an analysis of humanity’s relationship to Africa which takes you pretty damn close to the heart of what it means to be human.
Reader does an excellent job of avoiding the romanticization of African traditional ways of life that many sympathetic westerners fall into. Nature is heartless, and life could be brutal. Starvation was—is���a constant threat, and none of our modern notions of human rights applied. But he tries to show that far from being backwards, African cultures achieved something the West never has: homeostasis in cooperation with the environment. Technology evolved locally inasmuch as was needed to adapt to changing conditions, and cultures developed to allow groups of people to live symbiotically without a coercive state. Westerners mistook balance for backwardness, and thus, Reader shows, their (our) influence has been malevolent from the first.
From time to time, it is clear that Reader is writing beyond his expertise. In a book of this scope, that’s inevitable. His economic analysis sometimes leaves something to be desired, and occasionally he pursues his sympathetic agenda at the cost of intellectual honesty—but only in small ways. You can’t just accept everything Reader writes, but I don’t think he’d want you to. The story he is telling is too complex to have only one truth, and even this tome doesn’t have space to present every perspective. But Reader does give you a story that is fresh and compelling, an analysis of humanity’s relationship to Africa which takes you pretty damn close to the heart of what it means to be human.
June 25, 2022
From this book, I learned more about pre-Independence Africa than I did before, but I found this book a real plod at times.
Much of it reads like a college textbook, particularly in the portions about Africa before the arrival of the first Portuguese explorers -- informative, but didactic and dull. When I was a kid, I'd get up early for Saturday morning cartoons, turn on the TV, only to find, due to getting up too early, a show called "Sunrise Semester" which usually featured some old anthropology professor talking insipidly like Ferris Bueller's teacher about old hominid/ monkey bones --- boring as hell. Too much of this book reminded me of that.
I was hoping that, as the book's history progressed to the point of Africa's indigenous civilizations, it would pick up a bit, but these seemed as colorless and dull as before. Which is really amazing given the role and inspiration they have played with modern Africans.
Prior to the Europeans' arrival, aside from those African civilizations, most of the rest of Africa is portrayed as one of subsistence farmers barely holding on --- with much arable land unavailable due to the ravages of the tsetse fly, and with elephants ravaging farmers' crops that were not exactly flourishing to begin with. And even in the civilizations like Mali and Ghana this seems also to have held true --- the only difference being powerful leaders who could marshal the resources for the good of their domain. While much of the exchange of ideas in the Eastern Hemisphere was going East-West, Africa seems to have missed out south of the Sahara --- sailing and navigation technology were primitive and the gains to be found from trade with India, China, and Europe easily were far more profitable than journeys to Africa. The result being an Africa surprisingly isolated from the rest of the world --- to its north by the vastness of the Sahara, to the south by being surrounded by seas that most explorers and merchants of the time considered not worth the risk, difficulty, or trouble of getting there.
Yet, Africa's isolation did end --- with Arab traders on its east, and the first Europeans in the early 15th Century. I did find this part more interesting --- slightly so -- as it got to the part about the first European explorers, the Portuguese, arriving.
The Portuguese managed to perfect sailing and navigation beyond anyone else, and, as a result, were able to find ways of making African trade and exploration profitable --- with a profound impact on Africa's course.
Many have heard of the "Big Man" phenomenon (detailed in Martin Meredith's "The Fate of Africa") in modern Africa ---- where a powerful African leader and his cronies use their position to enrich themselves greatly at the expense of the common good of the people they're meant to serve. Reader doesn't explicitly mention this in pre-modern Africa, but he implies it. With Portuguese trade, increasingly to find commodities, African chiefs and kings offered slaves --- at first, usually criminals or prisoners of war, but as demand increased these resorted to selling their own people in return for European goods. At first, the Portuguese were little more than middle men --- profiting from the slave trade by buying southern Africans and transporting them to the West African kingdoms there in return for gold and ivory. But as Portuguese settled Africa and its islands, and then with the opening of the New World, the demand for African slaves exploded. And, unfortunately, too many African kings and tribal chiefs were all too willing to fill that demand.
A couple thoughts at this point. No doubt, the Europeans were villains to conduct such an evil trade, but one thing is inescapably clear --- the slavery issue is much more nuanced than what I was taught in grade school. Because, clearly, the African slave trade could never have grown as large as it did except for the willing efforts of African powerful men and warlords to capture and sell their fellow Africans into slavery --- there's no way at that time that the Europeans could have done it on their own. And this is a profound difference that would greatly impact the future of Africa in comparison with other places such as Europe, Arab civilization, or China's for example. For, while these were far from perfect, you find few circumstances of them selling their own people to other cultures like you do with Africa.
The result of this is that a continent that was already sparsely populated with its own long term labor shortages, dependent on subsistence farmers, was being largely stripped of people it needed for its development. This, in turn, would create an Africa that, from European perspectives, seemed empty and underpopulated and free for the taking --- creating the ensuing rush of European colonialism. Truly, the 15th through 17th Centuries were a crucial time for Africa --- that, while other parts of the world were becoming well relatively advanced, Africa's would lag, held back by the damage being done by its harsh climate, rife diseases, and, now, by slavery and domination by outside powers.
Reader then goes on to chronicle the Africa's Age of Colonialism. I think he does a good job describing how it effected Africa and how it explains much of the reasons that so much of Africa is in the condition it is in today.
However, he tends to portray Africans as victims with little agency in changing their condition or responsibility for doing so. I don't think this is helpful --- as it does get in the way from viewing Africa's past and its present objectively --- and, if these are off, then there's little chance of viewing its future objectively.
Overall, I think one can learn from this book, but it is a plod to get through. I do think that this could have been much more interestingly written than it was.
Much of it reads like a college textbook, particularly in the portions about Africa before the arrival of the first Portuguese explorers -- informative, but didactic and dull. When I was a kid, I'd get up early for Saturday morning cartoons, turn on the TV, only to find, due to getting up too early, a show called "Sunrise Semester" which usually featured some old anthropology professor talking insipidly like Ferris Bueller's teacher about old hominid/ monkey bones --- boring as hell. Too much of this book reminded me of that.
I was hoping that, as the book's history progressed to the point of Africa's indigenous civilizations, it would pick up a bit, but these seemed as colorless and dull as before. Which is really amazing given the role and inspiration they have played with modern Africans.
Prior to the Europeans' arrival, aside from those African civilizations, most of the rest of Africa is portrayed as one of subsistence farmers barely holding on --- with much arable land unavailable due to the ravages of the tsetse fly, and with elephants ravaging farmers' crops that were not exactly flourishing to begin with. And even in the civilizations like Mali and Ghana this seems also to have held true --- the only difference being powerful leaders who could marshal the resources for the good of their domain. While much of the exchange of ideas in the Eastern Hemisphere was going East-West, Africa seems to have missed out south of the Sahara --- sailing and navigation technology were primitive and the gains to be found from trade with India, China, and Europe easily were far more profitable than journeys to Africa. The result being an Africa surprisingly isolated from the rest of the world --- to its north by the vastness of the Sahara, to the south by being surrounded by seas that most explorers and merchants of the time considered not worth the risk, difficulty, or trouble of getting there.
Yet, Africa's isolation did end --- with Arab traders on its east, and the first Europeans in the early 15th Century. I did find this part more interesting --- slightly so -- as it got to the part about the first European explorers, the Portuguese, arriving.
The Portuguese managed to perfect sailing and navigation beyond anyone else, and, as a result, were able to find ways of making African trade and exploration profitable --- with a profound impact on Africa's course.
Many have heard of the "Big Man" phenomenon (detailed in Martin Meredith's "The Fate of Africa") in modern Africa ---- where a powerful African leader and his cronies use their position to enrich themselves greatly at the expense of the common good of the people they're meant to serve. Reader doesn't explicitly mention this in pre-modern Africa, but he implies it. With Portuguese trade, increasingly to find commodities, African chiefs and kings offered slaves --- at first, usually criminals or prisoners of war, but as demand increased these resorted to selling their own people in return for European goods. At first, the Portuguese were little more than middle men --- profiting from the slave trade by buying southern Africans and transporting them to the West African kingdoms there in return for gold and ivory. But as Portuguese settled Africa and its islands, and then with the opening of the New World, the demand for African slaves exploded. And, unfortunately, too many African kings and tribal chiefs were all too willing to fill that demand.
A couple thoughts at this point. No doubt, the Europeans were villains to conduct such an evil trade, but one thing is inescapably clear --- the slavery issue is much more nuanced than what I was taught in grade school. Because, clearly, the African slave trade could never have grown as large as it did except for the willing efforts of African powerful men and warlords to capture and sell their fellow Africans into slavery --- there's no way at that time that the Europeans could have done it on their own. And this is a profound difference that would greatly impact the future of Africa in comparison with other places such as Europe, Arab civilization, or China's for example. For, while these were far from perfect, you find few circumstances of them selling their own people to other cultures like you do with Africa.
The result of this is that a continent that was already sparsely populated with its own long term labor shortages, dependent on subsistence farmers, was being largely stripped of people it needed for its development. This, in turn, would create an Africa that, from European perspectives, seemed empty and underpopulated and free for the taking --- creating the ensuing rush of European colonialism. Truly, the 15th through 17th Centuries were a crucial time for Africa --- that, while other parts of the world were becoming well relatively advanced, Africa's would lag, held back by the damage being done by its harsh climate, rife diseases, and, now, by slavery and domination by outside powers.
Reader then goes on to chronicle the Africa's Age of Colonialism. I think he does a good job describing how it effected Africa and how it explains much of the reasons that so much of Africa is in the condition it is in today.
However, he tends to portray Africans as victims with little agency in changing their condition or responsibility for doing so. I don't think this is helpful --- as it does get in the way from viewing Africa's past and its present objectively --- and, if these are off, then there's little chance of viewing its future objectively.
Overall, I think one can learn from this book, but it is a plod to get through. I do think that this could have been much more interestingly written than it was.
January 22, 2015
Vast, kaleidoscopic--an ambitious tour through millions of years of African history and prehistory. There is so much to like and be impressed with here that I feel somewhat churlish rating it three rather than four stars, but the book suffers from its own ambition and, especially towards the end, from too scattered a focus. Still, for those looking for a thoughtful and intriguing introduction to a very big and complex land, Africa: A Biography of the Continent deserves to be well up on the TBR list.
John Reader is at his finest when he centers his narrative firmly on how the land was formed and how the people and the land continued to shape each other down through the millennia. He does a brilliant job setting the geological background: "Africa is the Earth's oldest and most enduring land mass. Ninety-seven percent of the continent has been in place and stable for more than 300 million years...and some for as much a 3,600 million years" and we meet these ancient land masses again when diamonds and gold are discovered in South Africa igniting the fires of human greed.
Continents drift and rain forests shift splendidly and majestically: "Africa has had more of its land surface covered with tropical forest, for a longer period, than any other part of the globe. But the forests have not been static. They have migrated across the continent as the continent drifted about on the face of the Earth....The Equator lay across what is now the Sahara to begin with, and then moved south as Africa drifted northwards."
Reader does a superb job illustrating how and why the continent has been, and still is, among the most challenging environments that humans face on earth: millions of years of co-evolution have created a horrific set of diseases that still defy us. Trypanosomes, hookworms, schistosomiasis, malaria. A UNESCO survey revealed an 80% hookworm infestation rate in the West African rainforest. "The larvae burrow through the skin and begin an incredible two-day journey to their final destination in the small intestine."
Nor is the larger wildlife any friendlier. As humans shifted from pure hunting and gathering, they found they had serious competition. "Farmers, by contrast [with hunters], were in direct competition with elephants." I had never thought of elephants as THE ENEMY! Now I can see them: looming nearer and nearer to my hard-won crops, with their terrible great feet and knowing old eyes and long, long prehensile trunks just waiting to grab the meal I need to get me through the dry season.
Yet humans did tame the land and large swathes of Africa became rich grazing land for the continent's pastoralists, who in turn shaped the plant and animal life and even the mix of parasites. Cattle, for example, have a long and ancient history in Africa dating back over 7,000 years ago. But the human edge was always fragile. Starting in 1890, after 25 years of above average rainfall, the next decades saw continent-wide drought followed by epidemics of cholera, typhus, smallpox and horrible jiggers--a kind of burrowing sand flea introduced from Brazil. And then came rinderpest, a plague that killed 90-95% of African cattle, along with sheep and goats and other grazing animals. Then, as he tells it, on the once-rich pasture lands depopulated by rinderpest, the land reverted to tsetse-infested bush and woodland inhabited only by wild animals. Influential environmentalists who thought these plains were pristine wilderness fought for their 'conservation' and now most (including the famed Serengeti) are tsetse-infested game parks devoid of their ancient human populations. That's Reader at his most incisive and unexpected.
His discussion of archeological evidence of sub-Saharan cultures is masterly and very engaging, but he largely ignores centuries of North African civilization, allotting a mere six pages to Pharonic Egypt and giving Rome, Byzantium and the Islamic Empires barely a glance. That would be fine except that the influences of those cultures shaped the fortunes of Africa's sub-Saharan native populations just as surely as did Western European colonialists. And it is in the coverage of Africa's modern history, from the arrival of the Portuguese on, that the narrative becomes scatter-shot and less compelling. Too many pages are given over to oft-told tales, like the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade, but without the perspective that a look at the North African trade might have granted us. Similarly, the long history of colonial rule under North African and Arab powers is not discussed, but that of Europe is.
Truthfully, I wish that some editor had taken a sharp red pencil to much of the last hundred pages of political narrative and pushed Reader to refocus his view on the story he knows best: the interaction of the land and its people. Every time he returns to that theme, the book takes off again and the ah-ha moments kept me searching hopefully. Alas, he ends with the Rwandan genocide, with only a very brief look at the end of apartheid in South Africa--a finish that left me exhausted and confused.
But don't let the downside stop you from trying this--it's a great place to start on any serious tour of a land filled with marvels. Group read with Great African Reads
Content rating: PG warning for dark thematic elements such as slavery and genocide.
For a thoughtful and readable perspective on trade and interactions between the Arab and Mediterranean worlds and sub-Saharan Africa I recommend Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora. For a brief and interesting history of North Africa, see: A Traveller's History of North Africa.
John Reader is at his finest when he centers his narrative firmly on how the land was formed and how the people and the land continued to shape each other down through the millennia. He does a brilliant job setting the geological background: "Africa is the Earth's oldest and most enduring land mass. Ninety-seven percent of the continent has been in place and stable for more than 300 million years...and some for as much a 3,600 million years" and we meet these ancient land masses again when diamonds and gold are discovered in South Africa igniting the fires of human greed.
Continents drift and rain forests shift splendidly and majestically: "Africa has had more of its land surface covered with tropical forest, for a longer period, than any other part of the globe. But the forests have not been static. They have migrated across the continent as the continent drifted about on the face of the Earth....The Equator lay across what is now the Sahara to begin with, and then moved south as Africa drifted northwards."
Reader does a superb job illustrating how and why the continent has been, and still is, among the most challenging environments that humans face on earth: millions of years of co-evolution have created a horrific set of diseases that still defy us. Trypanosomes, hookworms, schistosomiasis, malaria. A UNESCO survey revealed an 80% hookworm infestation rate in the West African rainforest. "The larvae burrow through the skin and begin an incredible two-day journey to their final destination in the small intestine."
Nor is the larger wildlife any friendlier. As humans shifted from pure hunting and gathering, they found they had serious competition. "Farmers, by contrast [with hunters], were in direct competition with elephants." I had never thought of elephants as THE ENEMY! Now I can see them: looming nearer and nearer to my hard-won crops, with their terrible great feet and knowing old eyes and long, long prehensile trunks just waiting to grab the meal I need to get me through the dry season.
Yet humans did tame the land and large swathes of Africa became rich grazing land for the continent's pastoralists, who in turn shaped the plant and animal life and even the mix of parasites. Cattle, for example, have a long and ancient history in Africa dating back over 7,000 years ago. But the human edge was always fragile. Starting in 1890, after 25 years of above average rainfall, the next decades saw continent-wide drought followed by epidemics of cholera, typhus, smallpox and horrible jiggers--a kind of burrowing sand flea introduced from Brazil. And then came rinderpest, a plague that killed 90-95% of African cattle, along with sheep and goats and other grazing animals. Then, as he tells it, on the once-rich pasture lands depopulated by rinderpest, the land reverted to tsetse-infested bush and woodland inhabited only by wild animals. Influential environmentalists who thought these plains were pristine wilderness fought for their 'conservation' and now most (including the famed Serengeti) are tsetse-infested game parks devoid of their ancient human populations. That's Reader at his most incisive and unexpected.
His discussion of archeological evidence of sub-Saharan cultures is masterly and very engaging, but he largely ignores centuries of North African civilization, allotting a mere six pages to Pharonic Egypt and giving Rome, Byzantium and the Islamic Empires barely a glance. That would be fine except that the influences of those cultures shaped the fortunes of Africa's sub-Saharan native populations just as surely as did Western European colonialists. And it is in the coverage of Africa's modern history, from the arrival of the Portuguese on, that the narrative becomes scatter-shot and less compelling. Too many pages are given over to oft-told tales, like the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade, but without the perspective that a look at the North African trade might have granted us. Similarly, the long history of colonial rule under North African and Arab powers is not discussed, but that of Europe is.
Truthfully, I wish that some editor had taken a sharp red pencil to much of the last hundred pages of political narrative and pushed Reader to refocus his view on the story he knows best: the interaction of the land and its people. Every time he returns to that theme, the book takes off again and the ah-ha moments kept me searching hopefully. Alas, he ends with the Rwandan genocide, with only a very brief look at the end of apartheid in South Africa--a finish that left me exhausted and confused.
But don't let the downside stop you from trying this--it's a great place to start on any serious tour of a land filled with marvels. Group read with Great African Reads
Content rating: PG warning for dark thematic elements such as slavery and genocide.
For a thoughtful and readable perspective on trade and interactions between the Arab and Mediterranean worlds and sub-Saharan Africa I recommend Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora. For a brief and interesting history of North Africa, see: A Traveller's History of North Africa.
October 18, 2015
In my attempt to read more from and about Africa, this was a year-long group read with the Great African Reads group. True to form, I kept with the schedule up until July, and found myself needing to read the second half this week.
Can one book tell the story of an entire continent? Consider that the story of one empire's rise and fall takes six volumes (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire)!
And then. Then I found that Reader, who is not himself African, starts at the very beginning. As in, the formation of the world and the joining of the tectonic plates that would form Africa. Phew! It took a while to get to the people of Africa, as I'm sure you can imagine. But these pieces of information about the formation of the land ended up being crucial to understanding why some parts were sought for ownership, why some were set up to support rapid population growth, and why the very best diamonds would be formed in some of the depths of the earth of these nations.
Once Reader gets to the 19th century, it was as if he flipped a switch and talked about the nations staking claims that they had no right to, and I thought ugh, is it all colonies and empire? He says in passing that Ethiopia was the only African nation not to be claimed by a European country in their own empire building. Wow. I admit, I don't know that much about African history, and that is why I read this book, but that did surprise me.
The author takes the story of Africa pretty solidly up to 1960, although Egypt's role is largely neglected in the 20th century, and while Rwanda gets a mention in the 90s, AIDs is left out (although I learned a lot about rinderpest, and how when 90-95% of the cattle died that allowed the tsetse fly to return, etc.) The author does do a good job at making connections between the ramifications of seemingly small decisions and events, from the importance of rain to the fallout from requiring the people living in Rwanda to declare an ethnic group.
I have a slightly different perspective on Africa since we had missionaries in our home on furlough throughout my childhood. Some worked with the Maasai, some with the Turkana, some traveled furtively and unofficially through countries unrecognized by the USA like Eritrea. I can sing in Swahili and have consumed ugali. But even that perspective is filtered by the imperialism that changed Africa forever. My later training in folklore, fieldwork, and anthropology comes from a field that really came into its own in the 1960s. That field places great importance on the insider perspective, and I want to read the story of Africa from that perspective. I want to understand the people without our framing of tribes and warring people groups. I want to understand their history and everchanging culture from their perspective. That isn't what this book is, but the author knows it. He tries to give an overview of how everything fit together. It is well-researched and documented, but the only African voices we tend to get are those in positions of power. I want the people!
And for a final, sarcastic send-off, I declare that I! Am Africa!
Can one book tell the story of an entire continent? Consider that the story of one empire's rise and fall takes six volumes (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire)!
And then. Then I found that Reader, who is not himself African, starts at the very beginning. As in, the formation of the world and the joining of the tectonic plates that would form Africa. Phew! It took a while to get to the people of Africa, as I'm sure you can imagine. But these pieces of information about the formation of the land ended up being crucial to understanding why some parts were sought for ownership, why some were set up to support rapid population growth, and why the very best diamonds would be formed in some of the depths of the earth of these nations.
Once Reader gets to the 19th century, it was as if he flipped a switch and talked about the nations staking claims that they had no right to, and I thought ugh, is it all colonies and empire? He says in passing that Ethiopia was the only African nation not to be claimed by a European country in their own empire building. Wow. I admit, I don't know that much about African history, and that is why I read this book, but that did surprise me.
The author takes the story of Africa pretty solidly up to 1960, although Egypt's role is largely neglected in the 20th century, and while Rwanda gets a mention in the 90s, AIDs is left out (although I learned a lot about rinderpest, and how when 90-95% of the cattle died that allowed the tsetse fly to return, etc.) The author does do a good job at making connections between the ramifications of seemingly small decisions and events, from the importance of rain to the fallout from requiring the people living in Rwanda to declare an ethnic group.
I have a slightly different perspective on Africa since we had missionaries in our home on furlough throughout my childhood. Some worked with the Maasai, some with the Turkana, some traveled furtively and unofficially through countries unrecognized by the USA like Eritrea. I can sing in Swahili and have consumed ugali. But even that perspective is filtered by the imperialism that changed Africa forever. My later training in folklore, fieldwork, and anthropology comes from a field that really came into its own in the 1960s. That field places great importance on the insider perspective, and I want to read the story of Africa from that perspective. I want to understand the people without our framing of tribes and warring people groups. I want to understand their history and everchanging culture from their perspective. That isn't what this book is, but the author knows it. He tries to give an overview of how everything fit together. It is well-researched and documented, but the only African voices we tend to get are those in positions of power. I want the people!
And for a final, sarcastic send-off, I declare that I! Am Africa!
May 11, 2014
Review to follow... Excellent book, though. A thoroughly digested and thoughtful account of a million years of history... Literally, a biography of the continent.
August 10, 2016
_Africa: A Biography of the Continent_ by John Reader is a very well-named book, a through and engaging look at the epic story of this land, from its geological origins to its most recent political struggles. Though a thick book at 682 pages (plus appendices, endnotes, and bibliography), it is a wonderful read.
The introductory section laments that Africa has been "woefully misunderstood and misused by the rest of the world," and that humanity does not properly "recognize its debts and obligations to Africa." A question the author asks, and returns to again and again in the book, is why did the population of humans that left Africa 100,000 years ago grew at much faster rate, or conversely, what prevented the Africans from growing at a similar rate?
Part one was four chapters detailing the geological and paleontological history of Africa, the author noting that the search for missing links is a tradition in African paleontology ("an icon...hunted with fervor bordering on the zealous"), whether the links between reptiles and mammals, lower and higher primates, or hominids and modern humans.
Part two was fantastic, devoted to the origins of the hominids. Hominids he noted arose in an ecological diverse setting (there was no abrupt replacement of forest by savanna when they arose 7 million years ago) and that apes were preadapted for bipedalism (apes carry 60% of their weight on their hind legs, contrasting with 40% for most quadrupeds). Hominids may have evolved to become nomadic, to take advantage of an unexploited food resource, the natural deaths that occurred in the great east African game herds (research has shown that as much as 70% of all carcasses found in the region died from other than predation and are largely unexploited by the highly territorial carnivores). He also cited such researchers as Peter Wheeler, who concluded that "thermoregulation is at the root of all things human," that being bipedal gave hominids additional advantages (walking upright exposed less body surface to direct rays of the sun and allowed for more heat to be removed from the skin by convection by taking advantage of the cooling effects of being higher above ground) that allowed them to remain active in temperatures that would drive a quadruped to heat stroke.
Part three looked at the origins of modern humans civilization, spending a good deal of time on the importance of language and the increasing evidence that sophisticated modern behavior did not arise first 30,000-40,000 years ago among humans that had left Africa for Eurasia, but instead had occurred in Africa some 35,000 years earlier than that, the author providing accounts of the manufacture of sophisticated tools and early attempts at agricultural practices. A fascinating chapter was devoted to the spread of the iron-using Bantu-speaking peoples, who in less than 3,000 years expanded from their homes in modern Nigeria and Cameroon to colonize virtually all of sub-Saharan Africa, "an event unmatched in world history."
Part four was an immensely interesting section, detailing many interesting African civilizations, including the Aksum of Ethiopia (whose influences at its height extended into Arabia and developed Africa's only indigenous written script, Ge'ez) and Jenne-jeno (an urban civilization of the inland Niger delta in Mali that was not hierarchical and lacked centralized control yet was quite prosperous). The history of African agriculture is well-covered, noting the importance of bananas and plantains to the diet, the differing practices of raising cattle for milk versus beef (surprisingly interesting), and the fact that elephants were a real impediment to African agricultural development until comparatively recent times. Slavery is also covered, as the author stated that between 30-60% of all Africans were slaves during historic times, far exceeding the number taken from the continent by the slave trade, these being slaves used within Africa.
Part five examined early European exploration of Africa and the origins of the Atlantic slave trade and also delved into many aspects of African political and economic development, noting how various factors, such as unpredictable climate, disease, problems of food production, the need to maintain voluntary and cooperative trade links, and the age-set system of rule mitigated against the development of powerful, densely-settled African states (and the disadvantage this would put the Africans at when facing Europeans). Reader also spent a good deal of time noting just how profoundly four centuries of slave-trading "seized the entire social and cultural ethos" of Africa, leading to destruction of some peoples, the creation of others, and the commercialization of African economies (sadly, even after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade indigenous slavery not only continued to exist but actually expanded).
Part six largely dealt with the history of South Africa. Surprisingly, the Zulu state owes is existence less to the rise of Shaka than popularly thought, as it was "squeezed into being" between spreading white settlers in the west and the disruptive activities of slave traders to the east. Early established labor practices for African workers in the Kimberly diamond fields and Witwaterstrand gold mines would have profound implications and influence on Africa, firmly establishing Africans not as true employees but something to be exploited.
Part seven looked at the European scramble for Africa, the horror of King Leopold's Congo and its "carnival of massacre," some of the political legacies of European colonies (177 different ethnic groups according to one study are divided by European-established national boundaries), why Africans accepted the "the thin white line" that was colonial administration, and the profound impacts of the rinderpest plague, which killed a staggering 90-95% of all cattle in Africa between 1889 and the early 1900s, leading to a disruption in agricultural practices and the return of the tsetse fly to large swaths of land (many famous game parks such as the Serengeti exist today largely thanks to this plague).
Part eight examined the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi, the causes of Africa's frequent coups, and why prosperous, stable democracies are virtually unheard of in sub-Saharan Africa (the author examined the "Botswana exception").
The introductory section laments that Africa has been "woefully misunderstood and misused by the rest of the world," and that humanity does not properly "recognize its debts and obligations to Africa." A question the author asks, and returns to again and again in the book, is why did the population of humans that left Africa 100,000 years ago grew at much faster rate, or conversely, what prevented the Africans from growing at a similar rate?
Part one was four chapters detailing the geological and paleontological history of Africa, the author noting that the search for missing links is a tradition in African paleontology ("an icon...hunted with fervor bordering on the zealous"), whether the links between reptiles and mammals, lower and higher primates, or hominids and modern humans.
Part two was fantastic, devoted to the origins of the hominids. Hominids he noted arose in an ecological diverse setting (there was no abrupt replacement of forest by savanna when they arose 7 million years ago) and that apes were preadapted for bipedalism (apes carry 60% of their weight on their hind legs, contrasting with 40% for most quadrupeds). Hominids may have evolved to become nomadic, to take advantage of an unexploited food resource, the natural deaths that occurred in the great east African game herds (research has shown that as much as 70% of all carcasses found in the region died from other than predation and are largely unexploited by the highly territorial carnivores). He also cited such researchers as Peter Wheeler, who concluded that "thermoregulation is at the root of all things human," that being bipedal gave hominids additional advantages (walking upright exposed less body surface to direct rays of the sun and allowed for more heat to be removed from the skin by convection by taking advantage of the cooling effects of being higher above ground) that allowed them to remain active in temperatures that would drive a quadruped to heat stroke.
Part three looked at the origins of modern humans civilization, spending a good deal of time on the importance of language and the increasing evidence that sophisticated modern behavior did not arise first 30,000-40,000 years ago among humans that had left Africa for Eurasia, but instead had occurred in Africa some 35,000 years earlier than that, the author providing accounts of the manufacture of sophisticated tools and early attempts at agricultural practices. A fascinating chapter was devoted to the spread of the iron-using Bantu-speaking peoples, who in less than 3,000 years expanded from their homes in modern Nigeria and Cameroon to colonize virtually all of sub-Saharan Africa, "an event unmatched in world history."
Part four was an immensely interesting section, detailing many interesting African civilizations, including the Aksum of Ethiopia (whose influences at its height extended into Arabia and developed Africa's only indigenous written script, Ge'ez) and Jenne-jeno (an urban civilization of the inland Niger delta in Mali that was not hierarchical and lacked centralized control yet was quite prosperous). The history of African agriculture is well-covered, noting the importance of bananas and plantains to the diet, the differing practices of raising cattle for milk versus beef (surprisingly interesting), and the fact that elephants were a real impediment to African agricultural development until comparatively recent times. Slavery is also covered, as the author stated that between 30-60% of all Africans were slaves during historic times, far exceeding the number taken from the continent by the slave trade, these being slaves used within Africa.
Part five examined early European exploration of Africa and the origins of the Atlantic slave trade and also delved into many aspects of African political and economic development, noting how various factors, such as unpredictable climate, disease, problems of food production, the need to maintain voluntary and cooperative trade links, and the age-set system of rule mitigated against the development of powerful, densely-settled African states (and the disadvantage this would put the Africans at when facing Europeans). Reader also spent a good deal of time noting just how profoundly four centuries of slave-trading "seized the entire social and cultural ethos" of Africa, leading to destruction of some peoples, the creation of others, and the commercialization of African economies (sadly, even after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade indigenous slavery not only continued to exist but actually expanded).
Part six largely dealt with the history of South Africa. Surprisingly, the Zulu state owes is existence less to the rise of Shaka than popularly thought, as it was "squeezed into being" between spreading white settlers in the west and the disruptive activities of slave traders to the east. Early established labor practices for African workers in the Kimberly diamond fields and Witwaterstrand gold mines would have profound implications and influence on Africa, firmly establishing Africans not as true employees but something to be exploited.
Part seven looked at the European scramble for Africa, the horror of King Leopold's Congo and its "carnival of massacre," some of the political legacies of European colonies (177 different ethnic groups according to one study are divided by European-established national boundaries), why Africans accepted the "the thin white line" that was colonial administration, and the profound impacts of the rinderpest plague, which killed a staggering 90-95% of all cattle in Africa between 1889 and the early 1900s, leading to a disruption in agricultural practices and the return of the tsetse fly to large swaths of land (many famous game parks such as the Serengeti exist today largely thanks to this plague).
Part eight examined the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi, the causes of Africa's frequent coups, and why prosperous, stable democracies are virtually unheard of in sub-Saharan Africa (the author examined the "Botswana exception").
January 16, 2013
Before I picked up this book, I had a relatively rich smattering of knowledge of Africa - particularly my trips to Sierra Leone and Tanzania and the reading I'd done associated with them. However, all these readings served to emphasize my lack of a broad, strong foundation of knowledge about African history. I was desperate for books by the end of my study abroad in Tanzania, which led me to browse the airport bookstore while waiting for a flight to Kilimanjaro, where I came across this enticingly ambitious and well-recommended brick of a survey. I took a gamble: the book was $35, well more than I'd ever pay for a book, ever, but I was confronting a situation in which the only thing I'd have to read for the next week was Pynchon's Mason and Dixon - which is absurdly highly regarded, but I never made it far enough in to gain the momentum necessary to finish.
The gamble paid off, more or less. John Reader's Africa is a history in the broadest sense, a synoptic overview of the geology, ecological evolution, human evolution, climatic trends, archaeology, human ecology, and recorded history of the whole thing. Reader's skill as a writer is evinced by the relative infrequency at which the book felt like it was groaning under the weight of its vast subject matter.
Aside from clear, accessible writing, Reader accomplishes this by focusing the book on revelatory ideas about causation and trend rather than aspiring to be comprehensive. He chooses new perspectives on old debates, avoiding an obligatory-feeling rehash of well-trodden pop-sci territory. Having just taken classes in human evolution and savannah ecology, I felt like I still had a lot to learn from Reader's points of view (though this is essentially a reflection of the overall shittiness of those classes). Among his interesting points, I remember especially the idea that those investigating ancient social regimes shouldn't only look at the earlier autocratic states, since there are several interesting examples of more egalitarian complex economies, like the Niger delta's cooperative interaction between fishers, farmers, and herders.
The biggest point he made regarded labor: while we tend to think of things in the Malthusian way, a competition for scarce resources, Reader asserts that in Africa the issue has more often been that there aren't enough people to produce and process the resources available. This issue was compounded by boom and bust cycles of climate that inhibited the stability of large populations; the high disease load of the continent where humans evolved (particularly tsetse and their trypanosomes, and malaria); and eventually slavery, rinderpest and its consequent famine, and the world wars. The struggle of colonizers was to marshal sufficient labor to extract the abundant resources they wanted to plunder.
As a Brit, Reader's perspective was generally liberal in bent, placing a lot of blame for modern African problems at the foot of European colonial powers (my estimation of Belgium suffered greatly, for instance - they seem to have been the most blithely selfish and inconsiderate of them). The policies of apartheid, ethnic division and internal conflict (particularly the Rwandan genocide), the generally execrable state of government, lack of human capital, population growth in excess of capacity to accommodate it, and even the existence of uninhabitable areas of wilderness like the Serengeti and Selous are all ascribed to European influence, usually due to policies that were self-consciously greedy and short-sighted, if not deliberately malicious. I guess it could be because he's playing to my biases, but I buy all these arguments.
On the other hand, beyond his interest in unorthodox explanations and interpretations generally sympathetic to Africans, Reader has no agenda or ideology in the strict sense. He never hesitates to criticize Africans for their bad decisions and behavior, and he even goes so far as to suggest that, in the light of colonial depredations, it's not inaccurate to say that many African states were "not ready" for independence. He has no patience for ideas about the pleasantness and harmony of pre-colonization lifestyles. He makes a point to emphasize the existence of a native slave trade prior to that of the Europeans, and to illustrate the active and eager complicity of many states and chiefs in that vile trade.
The logistic nature of the timescale is weird in this book, as it is in all books like it, because there's something discontinuous about passing from geologic time to the often daily scale at which modern historical events unfolded. It feels like you are reading a different book by the end, which is fine, because all the parts are well done. The transition between the early colonial period and independence is particularly striking, which I think is genuine and not an artifact of the book's organization. People thought about the world in a completely different way after years of exposure to European culture.
If you want to learn about Africa, in general, this book is the best place I can imagine starting, a solid foundation that is thorough but digestible. It is also a fascinating exploration of issues that have broader relevance - human ecologies; the interaction between geology/climate and human ecology; the legacy of colonialism and independence from it.
The gamble paid off, more or less. John Reader's Africa is a history in the broadest sense, a synoptic overview of the geology, ecological evolution, human evolution, climatic trends, archaeology, human ecology, and recorded history of the whole thing. Reader's skill as a writer is evinced by the relative infrequency at which the book felt like it was groaning under the weight of its vast subject matter.
Aside from clear, accessible writing, Reader accomplishes this by focusing the book on revelatory ideas about causation and trend rather than aspiring to be comprehensive. He chooses new perspectives on old debates, avoiding an obligatory-feeling rehash of well-trodden pop-sci territory. Having just taken classes in human evolution and savannah ecology, I felt like I still had a lot to learn from Reader's points of view (though this is essentially a reflection of the overall shittiness of those classes). Among his interesting points, I remember especially the idea that those investigating ancient social regimes shouldn't only look at the earlier autocratic states, since there are several interesting examples of more egalitarian complex economies, like the Niger delta's cooperative interaction between fishers, farmers, and herders.
The biggest point he made regarded labor: while we tend to think of things in the Malthusian way, a competition for scarce resources, Reader asserts that in Africa the issue has more often been that there aren't enough people to produce and process the resources available. This issue was compounded by boom and bust cycles of climate that inhibited the stability of large populations; the high disease load of the continent where humans evolved (particularly tsetse and their trypanosomes, and malaria); and eventually slavery, rinderpest and its consequent famine, and the world wars. The struggle of colonizers was to marshal sufficient labor to extract the abundant resources they wanted to plunder.
As a Brit, Reader's perspective was generally liberal in bent, placing a lot of blame for modern African problems at the foot of European colonial powers (my estimation of Belgium suffered greatly, for instance - they seem to have been the most blithely selfish and inconsiderate of them). The policies of apartheid, ethnic division and internal conflict (particularly the Rwandan genocide), the generally execrable state of government, lack of human capital, population growth in excess of capacity to accommodate it, and even the existence of uninhabitable areas of wilderness like the Serengeti and Selous are all ascribed to European influence, usually due to policies that were self-consciously greedy and short-sighted, if not deliberately malicious. I guess it could be because he's playing to my biases, but I buy all these arguments.
On the other hand, beyond his interest in unorthodox explanations and interpretations generally sympathetic to Africans, Reader has no agenda or ideology in the strict sense. He never hesitates to criticize Africans for their bad decisions and behavior, and he even goes so far as to suggest that, in the light of colonial depredations, it's not inaccurate to say that many African states were "not ready" for independence. He has no patience for ideas about the pleasantness and harmony of pre-colonization lifestyles. He makes a point to emphasize the existence of a native slave trade prior to that of the Europeans, and to illustrate the active and eager complicity of many states and chiefs in that vile trade.
The logistic nature of the timescale is weird in this book, as it is in all books like it, because there's something discontinuous about passing from geologic time to the often daily scale at which modern historical events unfolded. It feels like you are reading a different book by the end, which is fine, because all the parts are well done. The transition between the early colonial period and independence is particularly striking, which I think is genuine and not an artifact of the book's organization. People thought about the world in a completely different way after years of exposure to European culture.
If you want to learn about Africa, in general, this book is the best place I can imagine starting, a solid foundation that is thorough but digestible. It is also a fascinating exploration of issues that have broader relevance - human ecologies; the interaction between geology/climate and human ecology; the legacy of colonialism and independence from it.
February 1, 2016
One of the more interesting nonfiction books I've ever read — the subtitle of this book is accurate: "A Biography of the Continent." While anthropologists criticize it for leaving out some of the important archaeological finds, and political scientists/historians criticize it for failing to detail every coup and skirmish, I have no similar complaints. As a general reader, poorly educated in all aspects of Africa's past, I found fascinating new information in every chapter in this book.
The reason it took me two years to read this was the sadness I felt starting late in part 4 (of 8 parts) when the European trade in slaves and the products of the African continent began to figure largely in the story. The book proceeds chronologically from the geological formation of the continent (part 1) and the emergence of early humans (part 2) through what we today know about the early civilizations and social structures in Africa (parts 3 and 4) — we don't know much, but what is known was all new to me, and here I found some of the most wonderful and compelling chapters.
John Reader has researched all his material deeply, and he includes a number of contemporary quotations once the Europeans arrive and start making written accounts that still survive for us to ponder. He also includes quotes from writings by Africans when they are available, even early on. His writing style is compact and straightforward and sympathetic. I worried when I first encountered this book that his Eurocentric view might be unfair — he's not from Africa, although he's spent loads of time there and clearly loves it — but if he's biased at all it is against the excesses and exploitation wrought by the Europeans. This is not the account of a colonizer, an owner, an acquisitive capitalist.
As the book came to the infiltration of the continent by European settlers, I really had to be in the right mood to pick it up. Whenever I did read another chapter, I still enjoyed learning new things, and I still enjoyed the author's style and attitude — but it was hard to read more than one or two chapters because there's just so much death and land stealing and waste and the mines and the wealth and the labor and the rinderpest killing the cattle and f--king Belgium! and then the empires and the trading of territories and World Wars I and II. It's sad, and it's hard, and it made me want to cry.
After World War II ends and the empires fall, the book speeds quickly to a rather sudden end. Maybe Reader was feeling as bummed out as I was by that point. He covers the story of Rwanda and its genocide well, with the precursors in chapter 51 and then the genocide in chapter 55, the last chapter. He tries to ring a peal of hope with South Africa's historic elections in 1994 (the same year an the Rwandan genocide), but since I know too well how challenged South Africa still is today, that failed to lift my spirits. The influence of the Soviet Union and communism are faintly mentioned, and Africa's new invaders from China are not in this book at all.
Don't let that dissuade you! If like me you have a yearning to learn more about Africa and its history — not by present-day countries but rather from its origins, both land and people, the way they grew and changed and prospered and fell victim to so many factors, including climate and terrain — then go ahead and take on this book as a reading project that will surprise you and finally illuminate what for so many of us has long been kept from the light.
BACKGROUND
From a review of the book in The Economist: "... his account combines the best of academic research with a sense of Africa which is vivid and understandable—an Africa to which all mankind is related." http://www.economist.com/node/113256
I also found two other reviews, accessible through a university library's database:
"The author is at his best in the first 200 pages. He has previously written on the origins of man and his laying out of the physical history of Africa, the domain of all of our ancestors, is exciting, most engagingly and accessibly written." —History Today, Mar98, Vol. 48 Issue 3, p53. 2p.
"His emphasis is on processes of change through time: he employs specifics selectively, using case histories that best illustrate his point. He is a vivid and evocative writer and the review is highly interesting and readable. The volume is a powerful introduction to Africa for the layman." —African Archaeological Review, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1999, pp. 137-142
The reason it took me two years to read this was the sadness I felt starting late in part 4 (of 8 parts) when the European trade in slaves and the products of the African continent began to figure largely in the story. The book proceeds chronologically from the geological formation of the continent (part 1) and the emergence of early humans (part 2) through what we today know about the early civilizations and social structures in Africa (parts 3 and 4) — we don't know much, but what is known was all new to me, and here I found some of the most wonderful and compelling chapters.
John Reader has researched all his material deeply, and he includes a number of contemporary quotations once the Europeans arrive and start making written accounts that still survive for us to ponder. He also includes quotes from writings by Africans when they are available, even early on. His writing style is compact and straightforward and sympathetic. I worried when I first encountered this book that his Eurocentric view might be unfair — he's not from Africa, although he's spent loads of time there and clearly loves it — but if he's biased at all it is against the excesses and exploitation wrought by the Europeans. This is not the account of a colonizer, an owner, an acquisitive capitalist.
As the book came to the infiltration of the continent by European settlers, I really had to be in the right mood to pick it up. Whenever I did read another chapter, I still enjoyed learning new things, and I still enjoyed the author's style and attitude — but it was hard to read more than one or two chapters because there's just so much death and land stealing and waste and the mines and the wealth and the labor and the rinderpest killing the cattle and f--king Belgium! and then the empires and the trading of territories and World Wars I and II. It's sad, and it's hard, and it made me want to cry.
After World War II ends and the empires fall, the book speeds quickly to a rather sudden end. Maybe Reader was feeling as bummed out as I was by that point. He covers the story of Rwanda and its genocide well, with the precursors in chapter 51 and then the genocide in chapter 55, the last chapter. He tries to ring a peal of hope with South Africa's historic elections in 1994 (the same year an the Rwandan genocide), but since I know too well how challenged South Africa still is today, that failed to lift my spirits. The influence of the Soviet Union and communism are faintly mentioned, and Africa's new invaders from China are not in this book at all.
Don't let that dissuade you! If like me you have a yearning to learn more about Africa and its history — not by present-day countries but rather from its origins, both land and people, the way they grew and changed and prospered and fell victim to so many factors, including climate and terrain — then go ahead and take on this book as a reading project that will surprise you and finally illuminate what for so many of us has long been kept from the light.
BACKGROUND
From a review of the book in The Economist: "... his account combines the best of academic research with a sense of Africa which is vivid and understandable—an Africa to which all mankind is related." http://www.economist.com/node/113256
I also found two other reviews, accessible through a university library's database:
"The author is at his best in the first 200 pages. He has previously written on the origins of man and his laying out of the physical history of Africa, the domain of all of our ancestors, is exciting, most engagingly and accessibly written." —History Today, Mar98, Vol. 48 Issue 3, p53. 2p.
"His emphasis is on processes of change through time: he employs specifics selectively, using case histories that best illustrate his point. He is a vivid and evocative writer and the review is highly interesting and readable. The volume is a powerful introduction to Africa for the layman." —African Archaeological Review, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1999, pp. 137-142
November 28, 2021
This book has held my interest for many weeks, dipping into it a chapter at a time to digest a narrative that covers the span of the African continent - its geography and history - from before the dawn of humanity up to the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa.
I was fascinated by the early part of the book which covers the creation of the continent and the emergence of our earliest ancestors. I found huge gaps in the history I'd learned long ago about the 'Scramble for Africa'. No doubt, much of the appalling behaviour of the colonial powers was deliberately left off the syllabus. So many seeds of later social, political and economic inequality and unrest were sown then, and the continent continues to suffer the legacy of both the arbitrary and the deliberate division of the map of Africa.
First published in 1997, the book ends on a hopeful note, declaring that Nelson Mandela and South Africa offer 'hope for all humanity'. I'm not so sure that that is the case any more. Nevertheless, this remains an excellent reference as a biography of the continent of Africa.
I was fascinated by the early part of the book which covers the creation of the continent and the emergence of our earliest ancestors. I found huge gaps in the history I'd learned long ago about the 'Scramble for Africa'. No doubt, much of the appalling behaviour of the colonial powers was deliberately left off the syllabus. So many seeds of later social, political and economic inequality and unrest were sown then, and the continent continues to suffer the legacy of both the arbitrary and the deliberate division of the map of Africa.
First published in 1997, the book ends on a hopeful note, declaring that Nelson Mandela and South Africa offer 'hope for all humanity'. I'm not so sure that that is the case any more. Nevertheless, this remains an excellent reference as a biography of the continent of Africa.
Read
April 8, 2009http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1172339.html[return][return]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.[return][return]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).[return][return]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.[return][return]Anyway, all very interesting.
October 18, 2016
Reader gives a very good overview of an enormous topic. The book is literally a biography of the continent, not just the people. So he gives an overview of the development of the earth and of Africa in particular. I do not agree with the extent of his "nature" winning over "nurture" argument but it is an interesting one.
May 23, 2014
Pretty much the best most definitive continental overview you will ever get. From early geology becoming geography to the present and everything in between without any of that obnoxious humanitarian racism so prevalent in talking about this subject.
April 17, 2021
Africa. My youth largely knew of it only through the distorted lens of racist cartoons peopled with bone-in-their-nose cannibals, B-grade movies showcasing explorers in pith helmets who somehow always managed to stumble into quicksand, and of course Tarzan. It was still even then sometimes referred to as the “Dark Continent,” something that was supposed to mean dangerous and mysterious but also translated, for most of us, into the kind of blackness that was synonymous with race and skin color.
My interest in Africa came via the somewhat circuitous route of my study of the Civil War. The central cause of that conflict was, of course, human chattel slavery, and nearly all the enslaved were descendants of lives stolen from Africa. So, for me, a closer scrutiny of the continent was the logical next step. One of the benefits of a fine personal library is that there are hundreds of volumes sitting on shelves waiting for me to find the moment to find them. Such was the case for Africa: A Biography of the Continent, by John Reader, which sat unattended but beckoning for some two decades until a random evening found a finger on the spine and then the cover was open and the book was in my lap. I did not turn back.
With a literary flourish rarely present in nonfiction combined with the ambitious sweep of something like a novel of James Michener, Reader attempts nothing less than the epic as he boldly surveys the history of Africa from the tectonic activities that billions of years ago shaped the continent, to the evolution of the single human species that now populates the globe, to the rise and fall of empires, to colonialism and independence, and finally to the twin witness of the glorious and the horrific in the peaceful dismantling of South African apartheid and the Rwandan genocide. In nearly seven hundred pages of dense but highly readable text, the author succeeds magnificently, identifying the myriad differences in peoples and lifeways and environments while not neglecting the shared themes that then and now much of the continent holds in common.
Africa is the world’s second largest continent, and it hosts by far the largest number of sovereign nations: with the addition of South Sudan in 2011—twelve years after Reader’s book was published—there are now fifty-four, as well as a couple of disputed territories. But nearly all of these states are artificial constructs that are relics of European colonialism, lines on maps once penciled in by elite overlords in distant drawing rooms in places like London, Paris, Berlin, and Brussels, and those maps were heavily influenced by earlier incursions by the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. Much of the poverty, instability, and often dreadful standards of living in Africa are the vestiges of these artificial borders that mostly ignored prior states, tribes, clans, languages, religions, identities, lifeways. When their colonial masters, who had long raped the land for its resources and the people for their self-esteem, withdrew in the whirlwind decolonization era of 1956-1976—some at the strike of the pen, others at the point of the sword—the exploiters left little of value for nation-building to the exploited beyond the mockery of those boundaries. That of the ancestral that had been lost in the process, had been irrevocably lost. That is one of Reader’s themes. But there is so much more.
The focus is, as it should be, on sub-Saharan Africa; the continent’s northern portion is an extension of the Mediterranean world, marked by the storied legacies of ancient Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, and the later Arab conquest. And Egypt, then and now, belongs more properly to the Middle East. But most of Africa’s vast geography stretches south of that, along the coasts and deep into the interior. Reader delivers “Big History” at its best, and the sub-Saharan offers up an immense arena for the drama that entails—from the fossil beds that begat Homo habilis in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, to the South African diamond mines that spawned enormous wealth for a few on the backs of the suffering of a multitude, to today’s Maasai Mara game reserve in Kenya that we learn is not as we would suppose a remnant of some ancient pristine habitat, but rather a breeding ground for the deadly sleeping sickness carried by the tsetse fly that turned once productive land into a place unsuitable for human habitation.
Perhaps the most remarkable theme in Reader’s book is population sustainability and migration. While Africa is the second largest of earth’s continents, it remains vastly underpopulated relative to its size. Given the harsh environment, limited resources, and prevalence of devastating disease, there is strong evidence that it has likely always been this way. Slave-trading was, of course, an example of a kind forced migration, but more typically Africa’s history has long been characterized by a voluntary movement of peoples away from the continent, to the Middle East, to Europe, to all the rest of the world. Migration has always been—and remains today—subject to the dual factors of “push” and “pull,” but the push factor has dominated. That is perhaps the best explanation for what drove the migrations of archaic and anatomically modern humans out of Africa to populate the rest of the globe. The recently identified 210,000-year-old Homo sapiens skull in a cave in Greece reminds us that this has been going on a very long time. Homo erectus skulls found in Dmansi, Georgia that date to 1.8 million years old underscore just how long!
Slavery is, not unexpectedly, also a major theme for Reader, largely because of the impact of the Atlantic slave trade on Africa and how it forever transformed the lifeways of the people directly and indirectly affected by its pernicious hold—culturally, politically and economically. The slavery that was a fact of life on the continent before the arrival of European traders closely resembled its ancient roots; certainly race and skin color had nothing to do with it. As noted, I came to study Africa via the Civil War and antebellum slavery. To this day, a favored logical fallacy advanced by “Lost Cause” apologists for the Confederate slave republic asks rhetorically “But their own people sold them as slaves, didn’t they?” As if this contention—if it was indeed true—would somehow expiate or at least attenuate the sin of enslaving human beings. But is it true? Hardly. Captors of slaves taken in raids or in war by one tribe or one ethnicity would hardly consider them “their own people,” any more than the Vikings that for centuries took Slavs to feed the hungry slave markets of the Arab world have considered them “their own people.” This is a painful reminder that such notions endure in the mindset of the deeply entrenched racism that still defines modern America—a racism derived from African chattel slavery to begin with. It reflects how outsiders might view Africa, but not how Africans view themselves.
The Atlantic slave trade left a mark on every African who was touched by it as buyer, seller or unfortunate victim. The insatiable thirst for cheap labor to work sugar (and later cotton) plantations in the Americas overnight turned human beings into Africa’s most valuable export. Traditions were trampled. An ever-increasing demand put pressure on delivering supply at any cost. Since Europeans tended to perish in Africa’s hostile environment of climate and disease, a whole new class of “middle-men” came to prominence. Slavery, which dominated trade relations, corrupted all it encountered and left scars from its legacy upon the continent that have yet to fully heal.
This review barely scratches the surface of the range of material Reader covers in this impressive work. It’s a big book, but there is not a wasted page or paragraph, and it neither neglects the diversity nor what is held in common by the land and its peoples. Are there flaws? The included maps are terrible, but for that the publisher should be faulted rather than the author. To compensate, I hung a map of modern Africa on the door of my study and kept a historical atlas as companion to the narrative. Other than that quibble, the author’s achievement is superlative. Rarely have I read something of this size and scope and walked away so impressed, both with how much I learned as well as the learning process itself. If you have any interest in Africa, this book is an essential read. Don’t miss it.
My interest in Africa came via the somewhat circuitous route of my study of the Civil War. The central cause of that conflict was, of course, human chattel slavery, and nearly all the enslaved were descendants of lives stolen from Africa. So, for me, a closer scrutiny of the continent was the logical next step. One of the benefits of a fine personal library is that there are hundreds of volumes sitting on shelves waiting for me to find the moment to find them. Such was the case for Africa: A Biography of the Continent, by John Reader, which sat unattended but beckoning for some two decades until a random evening found a finger on the spine and then the cover was open and the book was in my lap. I did not turn back.
With a literary flourish rarely present in nonfiction combined with the ambitious sweep of something like a novel of James Michener, Reader attempts nothing less than the epic as he boldly surveys the history of Africa from the tectonic activities that billions of years ago shaped the continent, to the evolution of the single human species that now populates the globe, to the rise and fall of empires, to colonialism and independence, and finally to the twin witness of the glorious and the horrific in the peaceful dismantling of South African apartheid and the Rwandan genocide. In nearly seven hundred pages of dense but highly readable text, the author succeeds magnificently, identifying the myriad differences in peoples and lifeways and environments while not neglecting the shared themes that then and now much of the continent holds in common.
Africa is the world’s second largest continent, and it hosts by far the largest number of sovereign nations: with the addition of South Sudan in 2011—twelve years after Reader’s book was published—there are now fifty-four, as well as a couple of disputed territories. But nearly all of these states are artificial constructs that are relics of European colonialism, lines on maps once penciled in by elite overlords in distant drawing rooms in places like London, Paris, Berlin, and Brussels, and those maps were heavily influenced by earlier incursions by the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. Much of the poverty, instability, and often dreadful standards of living in Africa are the vestiges of these artificial borders that mostly ignored prior states, tribes, clans, languages, religions, identities, lifeways. When their colonial masters, who had long raped the land for its resources and the people for their self-esteem, withdrew in the whirlwind decolonization era of 1956-1976—some at the strike of the pen, others at the point of the sword—the exploiters left little of value for nation-building to the exploited beyond the mockery of those boundaries. That of the ancestral that had been lost in the process, had been irrevocably lost. That is one of Reader’s themes. But there is so much more.
The focus is, as it should be, on sub-Saharan Africa; the continent’s northern portion is an extension of the Mediterranean world, marked by the storied legacies of ancient Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, and the later Arab conquest. And Egypt, then and now, belongs more properly to the Middle East. But most of Africa’s vast geography stretches south of that, along the coasts and deep into the interior. Reader delivers “Big History” at its best, and the sub-Saharan offers up an immense arena for the drama that entails—from the fossil beds that begat Homo habilis in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, to the South African diamond mines that spawned enormous wealth for a few on the backs of the suffering of a multitude, to today’s Maasai Mara game reserve in Kenya that we learn is not as we would suppose a remnant of some ancient pristine habitat, but rather a breeding ground for the deadly sleeping sickness carried by the tsetse fly that turned once productive land into a place unsuitable for human habitation.
Perhaps the most remarkable theme in Reader’s book is population sustainability and migration. While Africa is the second largest of earth’s continents, it remains vastly underpopulated relative to its size. Given the harsh environment, limited resources, and prevalence of devastating disease, there is strong evidence that it has likely always been this way. Slave-trading was, of course, an example of a kind forced migration, but more typically Africa’s history has long been characterized by a voluntary movement of peoples away from the continent, to the Middle East, to Europe, to all the rest of the world. Migration has always been—and remains today—subject to the dual factors of “push” and “pull,” but the push factor has dominated. That is perhaps the best explanation for what drove the migrations of archaic and anatomically modern humans out of Africa to populate the rest of the globe. The recently identified 210,000-year-old Homo sapiens skull in a cave in Greece reminds us that this has been going on a very long time. Homo erectus skulls found in Dmansi, Georgia that date to 1.8 million years old underscore just how long!
Slavery is, not unexpectedly, also a major theme for Reader, largely because of the impact of the Atlantic slave trade on Africa and how it forever transformed the lifeways of the people directly and indirectly affected by its pernicious hold—culturally, politically and economically. The slavery that was a fact of life on the continent before the arrival of European traders closely resembled its ancient roots; certainly race and skin color had nothing to do with it. As noted, I came to study Africa via the Civil War and antebellum slavery. To this day, a favored logical fallacy advanced by “Lost Cause” apologists for the Confederate slave republic asks rhetorically “But their own people sold them as slaves, didn’t they?” As if this contention—if it was indeed true—would somehow expiate or at least attenuate the sin of enslaving human beings. But is it true? Hardly. Captors of slaves taken in raids or in war by one tribe or one ethnicity would hardly consider them “their own people,” any more than the Vikings that for centuries took Slavs to feed the hungry slave markets of the Arab world have considered them “their own people.” This is a painful reminder that such notions endure in the mindset of the deeply entrenched racism that still defines modern America—a racism derived from African chattel slavery to begin with. It reflects how outsiders might view Africa, but not how Africans view themselves.
The Atlantic slave trade left a mark on every African who was touched by it as buyer, seller or unfortunate victim. The insatiable thirst for cheap labor to work sugar (and later cotton) plantations in the Americas overnight turned human beings into Africa’s most valuable export. Traditions were trampled. An ever-increasing demand put pressure on delivering supply at any cost. Since Europeans tended to perish in Africa’s hostile environment of climate and disease, a whole new class of “middle-men” came to prominence. Slavery, which dominated trade relations, corrupted all it encountered and left scars from its legacy upon the continent that have yet to fully heal.
This review barely scratches the surface of the range of material Reader covers in this impressive work. It’s a big book, but there is not a wasted page or paragraph, and it neither neglects the diversity nor what is held in common by the land and its peoples. Are there flaws? The included maps are terrible, but for that the publisher should be faulted rather than the author. To compensate, I hung a map of modern Africa on the door of my study and kept a historical atlas as companion to the narrative. Other than that quibble, the author’s achievement is superlative. Rarely have I read something of this size and scope and walked away so impressed, both with how much I learned as well as the learning process itself. If you have any interest in Africa, this book is an essential read. Don’t miss it.
July 25, 2011
An incredibly well-researched book on a very complex continent. John Reader begins at the beginning. Africa IS the beginning. The beginning of humanity, the cradle of all that is in the world today. The fact that the Western world has historically considered itself superior to the African continent is the tragedy of the human spirit. The damage that we in the Western world have done to the African continent will take many lifetimes for those original humans to overcome. The story is told from the origins of evolutionary history. The reader is taken through the origins of the vast natural resources of the African continent, perhaps the richest the world has ever known…hence all the problems that have developed out of foreign intrusions into the African continent. The evolution of humanity is covered in it’s entirety, and extremely compelling. Reader takes us back to 100,000 years ago when it was believed that the first humans to leave the African continent made the trek into what is now the Middle East, China, India and Europe. From there we are taken through an archeological history of what is believed to be the earliest examples of tools for hunting and gathering and the locations of the first city states governed by kings and chiefs. I was deeply touched and saddened by Reader’s in depth account of the slave trade which has had a more powerful effect on world history than is often accounted for in literature. The pure insanity of this horrible crime against humanity is hard to comprehend. Reader spares no details in describing the voyage on the slave ship. Dysentery was rampant, and there was a line that has been seared into my brain about doctors going below deck to check on the living and the dead and feeling like they were stepping into a slaughter house with the blood, mucous and stench on the floor of the slave quarters. These human beings…the first human beings to walk this earth were treated worse than dogs…worse than rats. They were locked and chained for months on end in order to make the voyage across the Atlantic. A voyage that sometimes took nine months or more. It is a reminder of just how far back racism has gone, and the inability of the average human being to look at another as an equal. Even amongst their own ethnic groups or race. Many Africans sold off their relatives to obtain European goods that they did not really need in the first place. The message from Europe to the African continent was that the Africans had nothing to exchange but slaves. So the first signs of materialism were apparent in the African continent. I am not going to say that all Africans were innocent…far from it. They contributed as much or more to the slave trade as the Europeans, Indians and Arabs. In fact, the first Portuguese slave traders sold slaves from one part of the coast to Africans on another part of the cost. That was the true origin of the slave trade. From the slave trade, Reader takes us to the origins of apartheid in South Africa which is really the origin of the diamond trade. The British sanctioned, governed and exploited diamond trade enacted rules that basically made slave laborers out of the Africans who helped to find these diamonds…right down to the laws for stealing diamonds…40-50 lashes as if they were indeed slaves. These laborers oftentimes had no other source for work, so they were forced to engage in the brutal working conditions of the diamond mining industry, and were tied to it as there was often no way for them to get out of their “working contracts” which tied them to involuntary servitude…either fulfill the contract of face the threat of jail. It was only a few years before the book was published that this system was finally abolished in South Africa. The next section of the book takes us up through the colonial period when the Europeans decided it was their right after war victories to divide the continent into countries that made no sense ethnically, religiously or culturally. After the African independence movement in Arica, the European powers simply could not keep their hands off of the continent. From assassinations to exploitation of resources, the “independence” turned out to be not so independent after all, and at that point we could throw the United States into the mix as well. Our failure to intervene in true tragedies such as that of Rwanda and the present days situation in the Congo is inexcusable. These humans are not valued as highly as others, and never have been. Plus our geo-political position and thirst for oil is driving us towards other countries…Middle Eastern and the African country of Nigeria. We owe more to the people and continent of Africa than we can ever afford to pay back in hundreds of years, and the people with the dark skin that come from that continent still feel the very deep roots of racism everywhere in the Western world. Africa is a tragic story, but it is also a rich story. Rich with culture, rich with it’s people, and rich with it’s resources. It needs to be left alone and become the great center of civilization that it was always meant to be.
December 11, 2014
Africa; the cradle of the human civilization. It is the land where three million years ago Humans originated and two million years thereafter, started walking on their feet.
As someone curious about the history of this continent, discussed not very frequently in international affairs or even in our course books, I was expecting an introduction to its political history. That is what a history scholar would have been more attracted to.
However, John Reader surprised and subsequently mesmerized me by taking a giant leap back, to the origin, not only of Africa's people but its geography. Starting from its geological history to elaborating the archaeological evidence, he showed the significance of this geological phenomenon for the present. And indeed it was quite apt, when he described some of the phenomenon as ‘Geopoetry’. The history of how those natural resources, like Diamond, gold and other minerals, were created by natural processes helps put in perspective the mad race for them by Europeans, later in the sixteen century and beyond. Also highlighted is the the paradox that even after being one of the richest land in terms of resources, African is still world's most underdeveloped continent.
It also helps us understand the difference between two historical narratives. One is based on archaeological and paleontological evidence, following logical deduction, while other derives itself from the archives left behind by the humans themselves, wrapped in rocks and paper, studded with their outlook and prejudices. Which one is more reliable?
Finally the author elaborates with painstaking research and facts that horrible instance in humanity, still prevalent in some distant part of the world, called Slave trade. The present of Africa is heavily colored by its colonial past. The present territorial boundaries, the segregation of races, the nationalistic fervor and the embarrassment of still being an underdeveloped lot, all stem from the years of plunder and exploitation of the African people, by Europeans -enthusiastically complemented by some of the African leaders.
Beneath this opaque coating of contemporary history, John Reader has been able to scratch through to find the old remnants of African civilization that we rarely knew. It is a fabulous tale of humans consistently fighting with Nature for their survival. From battling with Tse Tse fly that killed their cattle to saving their agricultural fields from elephants, it demonstrates that our present surroundings were unthinkable few centuries ago. Africans tried to live in harmony with nature, knowing their boundaries until finally they over stepped them and humbled it by Europe's science and technology.
Slavetrade was not only a sociological but also an economic phenomenon that completely changed the living pattern of Africans. It lends some weight to the Marxist interpretation of history about the strong force of economic factors in deciding the course of history.
The author ends the book with a brief description of the chaos that Africa descended into after European retreated hastily post World War 2. A string of coups and racial genocides shattered the hopes of a united African century. Although Africans have done a lot to bring themselves to their present stage, there is no denying author's arguments, that Europe is majorly responsible for Africa’s woes. As the people of Africa try to come together and carve out a more prosperous future for themselves, this book shines a new light as to how history is much more than just humans. History is like our universe, the farther and deeper one goes and observes, the more clearly it explains our present and the impending future.
As someone curious about the history of this continent, discussed not very frequently in international affairs or even in our course books, I was expecting an introduction to its political history. That is what a history scholar would have been more attracted to.
However, John Reader surprised and subsequently mesmerized me by taking a giant leap back, to the origin, not only of Africa's people but its geography. Starting from its geological history to elaborating the archaeological evidence, he showed the significance of this geological phenomenon for the present. And indeed it was quite apt, when he described some of the phenomenon as ‘Geopoetry’. The history of how those natural resources, like Diamond, gold and other minerals, were created by natural processes helps put in perspective the mad race for them by Europeans, later in the sixteen century and beyond. Also highlighted is the the paradox that even after being one of the richest land in terms of resources, African is still world's most underdeveloped continent.
It also helps us understand the difference between two historical narratives. One is based on archaeological and paleontological evidence, following logical deduction, while other derives itself from the archives left behind by the humans themselves, wrapped in rocks and paper, studded with their outlook and prejudices. Which one is more reliable?
Finally the author elaborates with painstaking research and facts that horrible instance in humanity, still prevalent in some distant part of the world, called Slave trade. The present of Africa is heavily colored by its colonial past. The present territorial boundaries, the segregation of races, the nationalistic fervor and the embarrassment of still being an underdeveloped lot, all stem from the years of plunder and exploitation of the African people, by Europeans -enthusiastically complemented by some of the African leaders.
Beneath this opaque coating of contemporary history, John Reader has been able to scratch through to find the old remnants of African civilization that we rarely knew. It is a fabulous tale of humans consistently fighting with Nature for their survival. From battling with Tse Tse fly that killed their cattle to saving their agricultural fields from elephants, it demonstrates that our present surroundings were unthinkable few centuries ago. Africans tried to live in harmony with nature, knowing their boundaries until finally they over stepped them and humbled it by Europe's science and technology.
Slavetrade was not only a sociological but also an economic phenomenon that completely changed the living pattern of Africans. It lends some weight to the Marxist interpretation of history about the strong force of economic factors in deciding the course of history.
The author ends the book with a brief description of the chaos that Africa descended into after European retreated hastily post World War 2. A string of coups and racial genocides shattered the hopes of a united African century. Although Africans have done a lot to bring themselves to their present stage, there is no denying author's arguments, that Europe is majorly responsible for Africa’s woes. As the people of Africa try to come together and carve out a more prosperous future for themselves, this book shines a new light as to how history is much more than just humans. History is like our universe, the farther and deeper one goes and observes, the more clearly it explains our present and the impending future.
August 26, 2008
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.
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.
August 16, 2013
Llegué a este libro sin tener apenas idea de la historia de África, y su lectura fue una experiencia enriquecedora. En sus ochocientas páginas John Reader intenta abarcar lo más posible, seleccionando los temas para dar una visión global de la historia del continente. En sus páginas oí hablar por primera vez de la expansión Bantú, de el olvidado reino de Askum, de como el clima y el entorno (y la mosca tse-tse) configuraron los primeros asentamientos. Luego asistimos a la llegada de los europeos y cómo dieron ímpetu al comercio de esclavos, al reparto de la tierra entre las potencias y a la desconolización, para acabar con el genocio ruandés.
Un gigantesco fresco narrado de forma amena que ayuda a entender el presente del continente. Como única pega Reader retrocede a mi entender demasiado, empezando con la misma formación geológica del continente. Esta primera parte se me hizo muy pesada y estuve a punto de abandonar el libro. Afortunadamente al final me conformé con saltarme esta parte y empezar desde la aparición del hombre y las primeras sociedades.
Un gigantesco fresco narrado de forma amena que ayuda a entender el presente del continente. Como única pega Reader retrocede a mi entender demasiado, empezando con la misma formación geológica del continente. Esta primera parte se me hizo muy pesada y estuve a punto de abandonar el libro. Afortunadamente al final me conformé con saltarme esta parte y empezar desde la aparición del hombre y las primeras sociedades.
January 17, 2013
I read this book in the lead up to my recent trip to Namibia. Reader provides a great broad-brush overview of African history from an Africa-centred perspective, drawing heavily on the evolution of hominids, geology and geography to paint a very different picture than what you read in most post-colonial modern history texts.
Reader turns many widely-accepted notions of Africa on their heads. The competition for resources is seen as much more important than warfare, small peaceful communities as more significant than the noisy leadership of “big men”, and the developments and innovations of Africans as much more significant than was previously acknowledged by those who prefer to see the continent as stagnant and undeveloped until “liberated” by the West.
It’s a massive book, but well worth your time. Essential reading for anyone traveling to the Dark Continent.
Reader turns many widely-accepted notions of Africa on their heads. The competition for resources is seen as much more important than warfare, small peaceful communities as more significant than the noisy leadership of “big men”, and the developments and innovations of Africans as much more significant than was previously acknowledged by those who prefer to see the continent as stagnant and undeveloped until “liberated” by the West.
It’s a massive book, but well worth your time. Essential reading for anyone traveling to the Dark Continent.
June 17, 2018
Some of the material covered here, on things like fossils and plate tectonics, might be more technical than a general reader (like me!) would be comfortable with.
That said, this is a well-written, absorbing, and commendably comprehensive account of Africa's history. The passages dealing with slavery are very fair, but still harrowing, and the account of the 1994 Rwanda massacre is chilling.
Most chilling of all is that, as that awful thing was happening, South Africa was installing Nelson Mandela as president of its first government after the horror of apartheid. The contrast is mindboggling.
That said, this is a well-written, absorbing, and commendably comprehensive account of Africa's history. The passages dealing with slavery are very fair, but still harrowing, and the account of the 1994 Rwanda massacre is chilling.
Most chilling of all is that, as that awful thing was happening, South Africa was installing Nelson Mandela as president of its first government after the horror of apartheid. The contrast is mindboggling.
May 14, 2022
I usually don't like the "breadth over depth" approach to history, but in this case, the breadth is so wide, the scope so vast, that you have to respect it. The book starts off basically at the formation of the Earth, and goes through geology, plate tectonics, climate science, ecology, and biology. We start off human history literally with the evolution of humans. Then we go through the history of homegrown African civilizations, like the Nile valley and Aksum, all before the Europeans arrive and f**k everything up. I mean reaallllly f**k everything up. The greatest advantage of this book is how it shows so comprehensively every single way Europeans f**k'd up the Continent, and how even what appear to be exclusively African-on-African problems (like the Rwandan genocide) can be easily traced back to colonial root causes.
February 22, 2020
I have never read a more comprehensive dive into Africa than this. It is filled with nuance, understanding, and a desire to provide the African continent the justice it has long deserved. Reader clearly understands that African people suffer from the same sins of the rest of the world. However, he does not, nor should he, sugarcoat the extent of European oppression. The book ends with a mixture of hope and trepidation as to how the future of Africa may turn out. May it be one of success rather than destruction.
June 30, 2019
While there was a lot of good information here, I somehow wanted more. I hoped for a little more information about different African civilizations and cultures as well as the 19th and 20th centuries and colonialism. Still a nice introduction to many aspects about Africa, however.
June 11, 2015
I wish this system allowed half-stars. This book's merits are only slightly diminished by it's weaknesses, but a five-star rating is impossible. When I initially approached this, I anticipated learning about each individual nation as it was formed. I was pleasantly surprised at the sheer breadth of the work, including aspects of geology, evolutionary science, genetics, linguistics, and countless other specialized fields all collected in one sweeping narrative. From the construction of the continent itself billions of years ago to the end of apartheid, Reader's work is limitless in ambition and more than adequate for an understanding of the continent of Africa.
That being said, several shortcomings are evident. The emphasis on climate and geographical peculiarities is very helpful and enlarges the picture Reader constructs exponentially; though the repetitive nature of this information and Reader's emphasis on the reason for its inclusion often acts as an apology for why Africa never reached the "level of civilization" achieved by other world areas. It's as though by trying to reject Orientalism, he in fact embraces a tried and true aphorism of Eurocentrism- Said by way of Jared Diamond. For those interested in how Africa became the Africa popular imaging invokes, this may not be the book for you. Reader hops around both chronologically and geographically, never quite confining his knowledge to a particular area long enough for a complete narrative of a given region. Given that the book is arranged thematically and chronologically simultaneously, this isn't too surprising. By far the most challenging aspect is the lack of adequate maps. When hopping, skipping, and jumping across a continent for almost 700 pages, more than ten maps, none of which show cities, rivers, or regions constantly referenced, makes the tale extremely hard to follow once the historic period is reached. Additionally- though I can appreciate that the pictures included were supplied by the author, perhaps they should have pertained to the topics under discussion, rather than simply thrown in at random.
Overall, a challenging though highly informative work on a continent often misunderstood and much maligned.
That being said, several shortcomings are evident. The emphasis on climate and geographical peculiarities is very helpful and enlarges the picture Reader constructs exponentially; though the repetitive nature of this information and Reader's emphasis on the reason for its inclusion often acts as an apology for why Africa never reached the "level of civilization" achieved by other world areas. It's as though by trying to reject Orientalism, he in fact embraces a tried and true aphorism of Eurocentrism- Said by way of Jared Diamond. For those interested in how Africa became the Africa popular imaging invokes, this may not be the book for you. Reader hops around both chronologically and geographically, never quite confining his knowledge to a particular area long enough for a complete narrative of a given region. Given that the book is arranged thematically and chronologically simultaneously, this isn't too surprising. By far the most challenging aspect is the lack of adequate maps. When hopping, skipping, and jumping across a continent for almost 700 pages, more than ten maps, none of which show cities, rivers, or regions constantly referenced, makes the tale extremely hard to follow once the historic period is reached. Additionally- though I can appreciate that the pictures included were supplied by the author, perhaps they should have pertained to the topics under discussion, rather than simply thrown in at random.
Overall, a challenging though highly informative work on a continent often misunderstood and much maligned.
June 1, 2018
Seven hundred pages of a continental biography was initially daunting, and it took me three and a half months to consume the thing. But as John Reader covers Africa from Pangea to the birth of Homo Sapiens to Nelson Mandela's election, it's necessarily still a survey. There was a whole chapter devoted just to the way the human body cools itself differently from other beasts. That suited me fine for my purposes, which was to try and understand a continent after coming back from a two-week safari in East Africa. I am closer to understanding Africa, but only like an astronaut is closer to understanding the universe after traveling to the moon.
My favourite aspect of the book was the challenging and demolition of many stereotypes, assumptions and ingrained beliefs we (I) hold about the continent. Among the most relevant for me after the safari was the discovery that the Serengeti is not a centuries-old slice of Authentic Africa preserved by the tireless work of conservationists. Before the 1900s it was land that humans shaped and used for pasture and farming, and human intervention made the landscape we see today. It was only when the Rinderpest disease killed 95% of Africa's cattle, and the tiny tse-tse fly flourished in the ensuing landscape, that cattle and people avoided the Serengeti. When colonialists "discovered" the plains filled with wild animals immune to the tse-tse and Rinderpest, they believed they'd found an African Eden. Then they did everything they could to keep people out of it, expelling the tribes like the Maasai and others from land that had been used by them for centuries. It's still going on now.
There's no clear answer to this of course - the dilemma of space for wild animals and people is eternal in Africa. I was thrilled to be in that landscape surrounded by literally millions of creatures that filled my childhood and adult dreams.
In all, an informative read that for me achieves a good balance between popular and academic writing, neither overwhelming with terminology nor overreaching in sentimentality.
My favourite aspect of the book was the challenging and demolition of many stereotypes, assumptions and ingrained beliefs we (I) hold about the continent. Among the most relevant for me after the safari was the discovery that the Serengeti is not a centuries-old slice of Authentic Africa preserved by the tireless work of conservationists. Before the 1900s it was land that humans shaped and used for pasture and farming, and human intervention made the landscape we see today. It was only when the Rinderpest disease killed 95% of Africa's cattle, and the tiny tse-tse fly flourished in the ensuing landscape, that cattle and people avoided the Serengeti. When colonialists "discovered" the plains filled with wild animals immune to the tse-tse and Rinderpest, they believed they'd found an African Eden. Then they did everything they could to keep people out of it, expelling the tribes like the Maasai and others from land that had been used by them for centuries. It's still going on now.
There's no clear answer to this of course - the dilemma of space for wild animals and people is eternal in Africa. I was thrilled to be in that landscape surrounded by literally millions of creatures that filled my childhood and adult dreams.
In all, an informative read that for me achieves a good balance between popular and academic writing, neither overwhelming with terminology nor overreaching in sentimentality.
August 10, 2013
A truly incredible book. The author brings together geology, geography, history, economics, politics, linguistics and several other disciplines into a sweeping and breathtaking description of Africa. What can one say about a book which begins at 3.7 billion years ago as the continent forms, moves on to a "mere" 5 million years ago when the first humanoids are said to appear in Tanzania, describes how a mere handful of humans (maybe as few as 50) made the journey out of Africa 200,000 years ago to eventually populate Eurasia.
The book does a fantastic job of describing the differences in the nomadic pastoral tribes and the stationary agricultural tribes in Africa and how those lifestyles influenced evolution of the various people and the continent. There is also a great overview of the climatic impact and the sometimes violent climatic changes which drove human movement and development as once fertile valleys turned into a giant desert 100,000 years ago.
There is a great description of the African local commerce and the eventual encounter between the Europeans and the Africans which led to a combination of violence, slavery and development across Africa. The story of Belgian King Leopold II was especially interesting. The King managed to create a private rubber corporation for himself out of the entire Congo area vastly enriching himself and also sending vast riches to Belgium.
Eventually, the book brings the reader to the struggle for independence and the violence which ensued as local tribes fought for control over newly independent territories. The book ends around mid 1990's on a mixed note as the author highlights the recent tragedies of tribal slaughter in Rwanda and the peaceful transfer of power in South Africa. This is to highlight the author's view that Africa remains a land of trouble and a land of hope, I think.
A breathtaking read!
The book does a fantastic job of describing the differences in the nomadic pastoral tribes and the stationary agricultural tribes in Africa and how those lifestyles influenced evolution of the various people and the continent. There is also a great overview of the climatic impact and the sometimes violent climatic changes which drove human movement and development as once fertile valleys turned into a giant desert 100,000 years ago.
There is a great description of the African local commerce and the eventual encounter between the Europeans and the Africans which led to a combination of violence, slavery and development across Africa. The story of Belgian King Leopold II was especially interesting. The King managed to create a private rubber corporation for himself out of the entire Congo area vastly enriching himself and also sending vast riches to Belgium.
Eventually, the book brings the reader to the struggle for independence and the violence which ensued as local tribes fought for control over newly independent territories. The book ends around mid 1990's on a mixed note as the author highlights the recent tragedies of tribal slaughter in Rwanda and the peaceful transfer of power in South Africa. This is to highlight the author's view that Africa remains a land of trouble and a land of hope, I think.
A breathtaking read!
July 25, 2015
Not recommended - surely there are a few other books that better cover evolution, the geology of Africa, and its history and pre-history.
The New York Times Book Review is quoted on the cover: "... a masterly synthesis." A synthesis, yes, but not a masterly one. (Here I'd recommend "From Dawn to Decadence".)
Reader does well with several parts (evolutionary theory, several ancient civilizations like Aksum, several European schemes like King Leopold II's Belgium) but could have used stronger editing throughout.
For example, he gives 22 pages to South African gold and diamond mining. The book could have easily been pared down by a fifth.
Some of the freed pages could have then been turned into local area maps, diagrams, etc. While his photography is nice, it and a few continental maps in the appendix just don't draw enough of a picture.
The New York Times Book Review is quoted on the cover: "... a masterly synthesis." A synthesis, yes, but not a masterly one. (Here I'd recommend "From Dawn to Decadence".)
Reader does well with several parts (evolutionary theory, several ancient civilizations like Aksum, several European schemes like King Leopold II's Belgium) but could have used stronger editing throughout.
For example, he gives 22 pages to South African gold and diamond mining. The book could have easily been pared down by a fifth.
Some of the freed pages could have then been turned into local area maps, diagrams, etc. While his photography is nice, it and a few continental maps in the appendix just don't draw enough of a picture.
February 7, 2017
A tremendously informative book that IMO should be compulsive reading. The only issue I have is that it is dated, since the narrative ends around the mid 1990-s. Not sure if there is an updated version, but would love to read one either way. Highly, highly recommended!
September 24, 2018
An immense book! Such a vast breadth of African history. I was most impressed with how well (and at the same time terrifyingly) portrayed 400 years of slavery was described from the African viewpoint. The disaster of Europeans and colonialism - but from the point of view of the locals, just how disruptive it was on their communities and rulers for centuries.
It’s a challenging read, from slavery, colonialism, the horrors of the Congo, wars and even genocide - however one gets the sense that on the whole, Africans see the silver lining and the future may be brighter than we think.
It’s worth the read for those that want to understand the history of the continent a little better and to put modern African states into a clearer perspective.
It’s a challenging read, from slavery, colonialism, the horrors of the Congo, wars and even genocide - however one gets the sense that on the whole, Africans see the silver lining and the future may be brighter than we think.
It’s worth the read for those that want to understand the history of the continent a little better and to put modern African states into a clearer perspective.
February 1, 2018
This is one of my favorite books of all time. Helped that I read it while looking out at the Tugan Hills in Kenya from Lake Baringo. Still, it's a beautiful addition to the knowledge on international development. Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel), and Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens) are the other two that would be great to add to this perspective.
I particularly love how Reader takes the first one hundred pages of the book to talk about the geology of the continent and the implications of that geology as well as the migration of humans from the continent. His insights are interesting to ponder.
I particularly love how Reader takes the first one hundred pages of the book to talk about the geology of the continent and the implications of that geology as well as the migration of humans from the continent. His insights are interesting to ponder.
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