Africa at the heart of world history
AN AFRICAN HISTORY OF AFRICA From the dawn of humanity to independence
ZEINAB BADAWI 544pp. WH Allen. £25.
WHAT IS – what has been – Africa’s role in world history? This is the question that Zeinab Badawi’s new book, An African History of Africa, seeks to answer.
We are roughly as far from colonial rule in Africa as those living at the moment of independence were from colonization. Britain ruled the territory of modern Ghana for approximately fifty-five years. France ruled Guinea for sixty years. The period from the Scramble for Africa in 1885 to the Year of Africa in 1960, when seventeen African countries became independent, was only seventy-five years. Even Angola’s long and complicated relationship with the Portuguese state was only formalized as colonial rule for under 100 years. Africa’s global history and its future, in other words, are much more than the European colonial past.
One might expect a history covering several million years and an entire continent to be overwhelming. But Badawi has a keen eye for story, lighting on royal intrigue and revolutionary politics, while also showing more familiar histories, of the Romans or ancient Egypt, for example, from an African perspective. She lays out how the kingdoms, states and empires of Africa traded, fought and merged with those staples of the history curriculum.
Beginning with humanity’s deep origins, Badawi frames the book as universally relevant. African history is everyone’s history, because we all came out of Africa. She travels to different rock art sites across the continent, including 10,000-year-old paintings of buffalo, giraffes and elephants at Tassili n’Ajjer in Algeria, and 26,000to 28,000-year-old paintings of animals in Namibia.
Jumping ahead a few millennia, the book then takes up the history of early civilizations as they emerged in eastern Africa – the Egyptians, the Kingdom of Kush, Aksum and Ethiopia, then across North Africa – always with an eye on the reciprocal influence of trade and migration between the continent and its neighbours across the Indian Ocean, the
Red Sea, the Sinai Peninsula, the Mediterranean. Badawi reconstitutes the history of Africa as a whole, drawing the narrative west with the expansion of Islam, then forward in time, zigzagging across the continent’s major kingdoms.
Take, for instance, Yousuf ibn Tashfin, the Berber (or Amazigh) Almoravid ruler, whose territory stretched from modern Spain to Senegal, Mauritania to Libya and Mali to Morocco in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Under his rule “the Almoravid gold coin was the most trusted currency in the whole of the Mediterranean”. When his son took over the capital at Marrakesh was “an artistic
