Book Report – Africa: A Biography of the Continent
Just to give you an idea of how fast I read, I picked up this book [shameless amazon.com link] over two years ago while stuck in O’Hare airport in Chicago (always, always stuck in that freaking airport), en route to Mexico City to visit a friend.
I thought, judging by its thickness and dense subject matter, it would be the perfect thing to wile away the hours of a plane delay. Little did I know that I’d be wiling away minutes on New York subways, or hours sitting on the deck at my parents’ house in Maine.
Anyway, the point is, I finished the book — finally!
This 700-page opus from John Reader, a photojournalist based in Nairobi, Kenya from 1969 to 1979, is extremely well researched and written. What cinches this opinion for me, in comparison to other historical texts I’ve read on various topics, is that Reader seems to keep Africa’s entire history in perspective at all times. He makes references which aren’t necessarily chronological, but make sense in another way.
This “biography” starts off where you might expect: birth…from its collision with Eurasia, and a discussion of the geology of the continent, through to ideas about the origin of humanity, and to the first primitive civilizations.
It continues to more or less the present day (mid-1990s), and much of the history contained in the book illuminates modern questions, like discussion about what kind of real effect the massive EuroAmerican slave trade had on the continent, why the Hutus went on a killing spree in Rwanda, and what’s causing problems in modern-day African governments.
The last problem was particularly troubling for me, as it was largely due to European tampering, unsurprisingly, but for surprising reasons. The Europeans essentially went to Africa and staked out territorial claims, then fought with each other (many times utilizing Africans as the bulk of their troops), until they finally carved the present-day African states out of the artificial boundaries existing when they stopped fighting. The end result? African national boundaries cut through natural ethnic groupings, preventing African countries from having the strong nationalistic tradition of Europe that allowed European countries to unite together as French, or German, or Italian, etc.
This is a long story which is sometimes saddening, sometimes angering, but almost often fascinating.
I’ll note two things about Reader’s perspective: Reader is British, and the perspective of the book is clearly alien (meaning, it is largely told from the angle Reader knows…as that of an outsider, and many issues are discussed from this perspective); however, Reader is, it seems to me, pretty even-handed in his approach, discussing all major topics in terms of the real mix of positive and negative that they were, and for the most part sticking to the real effects of the changes inside the continent.