An African History of Africa, by Zeinab Badawi. Mariner Books, 532 pages.

The famed American journalist John Gunther opened Inside Africa, his expansive history of the continent in the evening of the colonial empires, with the words, “Africa is not in some respects a Dark Continent at all; it is flashing with vivid light. Much of it is luminous—in fact incandescent.” Almost 50 years later, in his popular history of the Belgian Congo, King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild wrote that the phrase “Dark Continent” “says more about the seer than the seen.” It is with the same epithet in mind that Zeinab Badawi begins her book An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence by telling readers she was “born under the African sun.” The book attempts the important task of teaching the public about a continent whose history has often been ignored if not intentionally misrepresented, where possible, from the perspective of its inhabitants. 

While the text does an adequate job of surveying a vast topic, it unfortunately expects so little from the reader that it seems to be targeted at children instead of adults—it even has unusually large text, making it a deceptively short book. More significantly, while the author may be of African heritage, she is an immigrant to the United Kingdom and wholly assimilated into the British post-imperial elite. Badawi does not come off as an African voice for African history, but instead the latest, and far from the best, in a long line of British academics taking on the task of writing about Africa. 

The primary strength of An African History of Africa is the same as its greatest weakness: it is easy to read and thus appropriate for a general public whom it seems Badawi holds in low regard. She commonly explains points any reader could understand in a way that feels like “hand-holding.” Throughout, the book feels like it would work better as a documentary series, as it lacks the depth one expects from a written history. The author, who says she spent seven years interviewing people and gathering material for the book, seems to be learning about Africa herself for the first time, but without the insight into human affairs one gets from an experienced journalist. She shows no specialist’s knowledge of the continent, which is strange, as she is the president of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and was also the chair of the Royal African Society. Further, Badawi is involved in an array of the neo-imperialist organizations that some would say have done much to hinder the development of post-independence Africa.

The author does make some references to her family history—she was born in northern Sudan but moved to the United Kingdom at the age of 2—but it is not deeper than what the child of any colonial administrator could have heard from a Sudanese nanny. What’s more, she lacks the passion for Africa one sees from many Europeans who have written about the continent. Indeed, she seems more obligated to feel an attachment to Africa than possessed of one in reality. Bear in mind that Africa is so incredibly vast that the coast of West Africa is closer to London than it is to Khartoum, and, as such, she has no greater birth connection to some of the regions discussed in this book than people of European descent who have written about Africa.

Despite her efforts to feature more African voices, Badawi runs into the common problem that most extant writing about African history is from outsiders. Strangely, the Oxford-educated Badawi says she didn’t learn about “rivalries between the North Africans themselves as a feature of the Punic Wars” because of the “Roman lens” of her schooling. This doesn’t make sense; both the Mercenary Wars and the great King Masinissa are major parts of Livy’s narrative. Further, Sallust is traditionally used to teach British students Latin prose, and his Jugurthine War is about such internal struggles in North Africa. One is reminded of those people we all know who don’t pay attention in school then claim they weren’t taught about slavery. The great North African city of Cyrene is not mentioned in the book at all—perhaps because the city was founded by Greeks, but there is no such hesitation to cover Arabs in the same region who arrived much later.

One strength of this text compared to prior surveys of the continent is the greater focus on the earlier history of sub-Saharan African civilizations. Archaeology in non-Mediterranean Africa has commonly been neglected or at times intentionally destroyed. In the past when it was discussed, there were often bizarre, racist claims that black Africans couldn’t have built cities like Great Zimbabwe. There has been a lot of work—though not nearly enough—excavating such ruins over the last few decades, so our picture of pre-European Africa continues to improve. Badawi explains well that, besides challenges such as slavery and disease, many of these civilizations fell for a more mundane reason: the arrival of Portuguese and Arab sea traders sent their trade-based inland cities into terminal decline. The book also contains a strong and fair discussion of the slave trade, including the less well-known but longer lasting East African slave trade. Notably, she corrects the myth that the African desire to sell slaves made such traffic inevitable. Furthermore, it is important to teach that not only did many Africans seek to end the practice, they were only “selling their own people” if you think everyone from Africa—the most diverse of the world’s continents—are the same people, when in reality that makes no sense than to say that Greeks capturing Slavs from the Black Sea region were “selling their own people.” 

The text also does a good job at recounting the travels and records left by Portuguese traders, as well as Islamic travelers in East Africa. Such men extensively wrote about the civilizations they found in Africa, making it truly inexcusable that imperialists ever denied the existence of great historic African civilizations; this denial was particularly prominent in southern Africa, where minority rule lasted the longest and whites had the greatest incentive to deny that Africans were capable of civilization. While the Gulf of Guinea Empires are fairly well known because of the hajj of Mansa Musa and the Benin Bronzes, it is much less well known that there was an extensive network of trade cities from Mozambique up to the Horn, which were a key source of gold and other metals for the Indian Ocean trade. While it is true that at the time many in Africa still lived as hunter-gatherers or pastoralist nomads, much of what the first Europeans found when they reached Africa was comparable in terms of social and economic complexity to at least the less developed parts of the Mediterranean world at the time, something which many otherwise well-informed people would still try to deny. 

This book is written for people who don’t know much about the topic, but it cannot be ignored that there are times when the author is simply wrong or withholds information. For example, she writes that Sahelian mosques have wooden logs poking out to “reinforce” the structures. In reality, those serve as permanent scaffolding to spread new mud on the buildings annually. This is not a mere technical architectural detail: It’s a major social event in these cultures that demonstrates continuity from the great African empires, through European colonialism and into independence. These buildings would have washed away from the summer rains hundreds of years ago if the public did not come together to maintain them. In another instance, she briefly explains that Americo-Liberians (the descendants of freed American slaves) did not incorporate the Liberian natives into their society, but fails to mention that they themselves enslaved the natives and sold them to the Spanish into the interwar period, a major international scandal that took up much time at the League of Nations. At another point she uncritically recites a Tutsi woman’s claim that before the Belgians arrived there were no tensions between Hutus and Tutsis. This is only true insofar as Tutsi supremacy was undisputed, and thus is a bit like a French noble in 1800 London telling you everything was fine before the Revolution. Badawi acknowledges that her intent is to focus on the more positive aspects of African history, but that is no excuse to mislead readers about those bad events which she does reference. 

If a reader finishes this text and looks at the acknowledgments, he will see the author thank the team from the History of Africa television series. The book feels as if it would work better as a documentary series because it is one—something which both the author and publisher have clearly intentionally concealed from readers, given that Badawi tells of her travels over a number of years without ever mentioning that her activities were done in the process of filming a documentary series. Despite this, the book doesn’t even contain a section of color plates, but only monochromes scattered throughout the text. 

Subscribe Today

Get daily emails in your inbox

Email Address:

As Badawi travels across Africa she always wears a white sun hat—something one rarely sees a modern African wear. This is noteworthy because early British colonialists believed the African sun would kill Europeans, despite the fact that most of Africa is more temperate than is commonly imagined: Badawi’s assimilation into British neo-imperialism is complete. This author represents more the generation of formerly colonized people who took key roles in post-imperial Britain than an African voice, while not doing a much better job at giving a voice to Africans than everyone else who has attempted this task for decades.

An African History of Africa is a solid text for lower-level students but will be disappointing for anyone accustomed to reading histories targeted at an adult audience, whether or not he goes into it with a background on Africa. Worse, there is no good reason to read the book instead of watching the documentary series, which is free on YouTube under UNESCO sponsorship. It’s sad that the author and publisher seemed to take this as little more than an opportunity to further profit on the work already done; it shortchanges the importance of hearing more about Africa from Africans who have spent their lives on the continent and the preeminence of written history over television. Though they cover less of Africa’s ancient history, anyone who wants to make a serious effort to understand modern African would do well to skip over this book entirely and instead read John Gunther’s Inside Africa, David Lamb’s The Africans, and Martin Meredith’s The State of Africa, all three by white journalists on the continent who did a better job delving into the lives and struggles of African peoples and the continent at large than Badawi does.

\