New Books in African Studies

Much of the literature on modern Africa makes the unhappy comparison between hopes, especially upon independence, and reality. In Zimbabwe that link resonates even more than is normal. Zimbabwe only achieved full independence in 1980 after a brutal war involving several guerilla groups and the country’s white minority, which had tried to create a unilaterally independent state based upon their own minority rule. Zimbabwe was a cause for hope, after so many newly independent African states before it had run into trouble. It enjoyed many advantages, not least the good will of the international community, and the lessons that it could learn from other failures on the continent. Two decades on, however, and Zimbabwe had become a failed state, with massive hyperinflation, a government that routinely relied upon violence to achieve its ends, and the large scale outward migration of Zimbabweans desperate for a new life. How did this happen? Richard Bourne‘s Catastrophe: What Went Wrong in Zimbabwe? (Zed Books, 2011) leaves few stones unturned. He goes back before the days of Cecil Rhodes before taking us through the colonial period, the Unilateral Declaration of Independence and the rule of Mugabe. It is a compelling story and a sobering one, and Richard Bourne’s book does it justice. He avoids over-simplified conclusions, and the book is all the better for it. Too much of Zimbabwe’s modern history has involved simple solutions to politically convenient levying of blame. It’s a book that I heartily recommend for those interested in understanding how a country can fall from such promise to such a low, so quickly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Aside from being aesthetically equated to Elizabeth Taylor, Cleopatra has not fared well in history. In her riveting biography Cleopatra: A Life (Back Bay Books, 2011), which is now out in paperback, Stacy Schiff establishes that this was primarily because Cleopatra’s story was penned by a crowd of Roman historians for whom “citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts.” Schiff exhibits no such discomfort and, in brilliant contrast, seems to revel in her subject’s lively intelligence. She establishes from the out-set that, above all, Cleopatra was a consummate politician–a visionary who shaped her own persona and her people’s perception through both exceptional leadership and canny political stagecraft. One of the most significant contributions of Cleopatra: A Life is that it provides us with the least tainted view of the Egyptian queen to date. Schiff assiduously teases out the motivations of Cleopatra’s chroniclers, and the result is a compelling rendering wherein the myths surrounding the last Egyptian queen are not only deconstructed but their origins are also explained. With the veils of myth removed, the Cleopatra that emerges in Schiff’s sensitive and probing portrait is a smarter, wiser woman, and one of the strongest, most influential rulers of the ancient world.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

We’ve dealt with the question of how racial categories and conceptions evolve on New Books in History before, most notably in our interview with Nell Irving Painter. She told us about the history of “Whiteness.” Today we’ll return to the history of racial ideas and listen to Andrew Curranexplain the history of “Blackness.” Doubtless Europeans have noted that different humans from different parts of the globe lookdifferent for millennia. But it was only relatively recently, as Curran explains in The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011), that they took a serious interest inexplaining these differences in a manner we would call “scientific.” There are two major reasons for this tardiness. First, metaphysical and biblical schemes provided the primary context for the interpretation of the human until the mid eighteenth century. Second, the most important scientific communities in Europe-those of France and England-only began to examine the African in earnest at the same time that their plantation- and slave-based colonies in the Caribbean came on line in the seventeenth century. “Colonial expansion” and “Scientific Revolution” ran together, it seems, and it is in their confluence that we see the origins of modern color-based racial discourse. That discourse, as Curran shows, was first worked out in what are sometimes called “Travel Accounts,” books that look for all the world like ethnographies. Europeans wrote thousands of them about every corner of the globe (Full disclosure: long ago I wrote a book about early European ethnographies of Old Russia). These books, in turn, provided grist (or “data”?) for the scientific mills of “naturalists” back home. At the same time these naturalists were looking outward for the origins of human difference, other scientifically-minded types were looking inwards. They were medical doctors, and more particularly anatomists. They wondered why, in the mechanical sense, black skin was black, and so they took black skin apart looking for mechanisms. And of course these twin discourses, ethnographic and medical, were intertwined with a third–that centered on the ethics of the then booming Atlantic slave-trade. Europeans wondered what science could tell them about the rightness or wrongness of African slavery. This is an important contribution to an important topic. But it is also a model of how intellectual history should be done. Curran moves well beyond the parade of Big Thinkers that have long dominated the history of ideas. He reads them, to be sure, but he also reads what they read. By this technique, he moves deeper and deeper into the culture of ethnography, anatomy, and slavery in search of  the origins and forms of “Blackness.”   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Few places can match the Djemaa el Fna in Marrakech for spectacle. As the shadows lengthen and dusk approaches, the square seethes with snake charmers, charlatans, showmen and chancers, all shrouded in charcoal smoke from dozens of makeshift food stalls. It feels like a glimpse into a different world in a different age. One part of that different age, however, is dying out. A handful of storytellers still make their living by captivating audiences with tales and stories of love and death, trickery and justice. Richard Hamilton came across the storytellers while working in Morocco for the BBC, and realised that the tradition was on the brink of extinction. He travelled back to the Djemaa el Fna again and again, tracking down the last of these remarkable men, before advancing years and the age of the television killed Moroccan storytelling once and for all. The Last Storytellers: Tales from the Heart of Morocco (I. B. Taurus, 2011) is the result of those visits. Richard talks about the roots of storytelling, the storytellers themselves, and the stories that they built their livelihoods around. He then treats us to a generous selection of the tales. I’m glad we had time in the interview to touch on some of them. It would be even better to hear some of the tales from the storytellers themselves, mesmerizing their audience in the Djemaa el Fna itself. But even if – as we fear – storytelling itself passes into history, thanks to Richard it will not be completely lost. I hope you enjoy the interview.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

A couple of days ago I had an unusual experience. I was staying in a hotel in Kampala, with a stunning view of the southern reaches of the Ugandan capital and the northern edge of Lake Victoria. It was the weekend, and in Africa that usually means football (soccer, to our friends over in the US). Two of the guys I was with – Alex and then Fred – filled me in with the details of why they supported their favourite teams: Arsenal and Liverpool. Fred helped my wife and I decipher the superb Lugandan radio commentary during a match between Bolton and Manchester City. Every bar and shack we passed seemed to have sound – and usually pictures – from the matches. So far so ordinary. What was unusual, however, was that the hotel where we were staying had no coverage of any of this. Somehow, and to my wife’s delight, we seemed to have ended up in one of the few hotels on the entire continent that seemed oblivious to football. After a week on the DRC border, examining vanilla farms for my wife’s work, this was a cruel and unexpected let down. Football is ubiquitous in Africa. As Fred told us as we chugged along in a Kampalan traffic jam, ‘I love football!’ Village kids kick balls of tied rags about; every streetwise hustler wears the shirt of their favourite (usually English) team; and almost any male on the street of almost any town or city can be diverted by asking them who they support, and whether Arsenal are terminally on the slide. The major leagues are riddled with an increasing number of influential and skillful African players, and the biggest hard luck story of last year’s World Cup was the elimination of a superb Ghanaian team thanks to the skulduggery of Uruguay’s Luis Suarez. This African love of football is what makes Steve Bloomfield’s entertaining book, Africa United: How Football Explains Africa (Canongate Books, 2010), such an excellent read. Like life in Africa, football has drama, skill, luck, triumph, disaster, pathos, pain, banality and moments of exquisite joy. While working as the Africa correspondent for The Independent, a British newspaper, Steve reported from all over the continent. Wherever he travelled – to Somalia, Egypt, Sierra Leone, Cote D’Ivoire and beyond – he watched football matches and asked questions. Sometimes the football acted like a mirror to real life in these countries; sometimes it was an alternative reality; sometimes the football itself played a real and vital role in the stories that Steve was covering. The resulting book is fascinating, and not just for fans of football or those who are interested in Africa. I hope the same can be said for this interview with Steve. I hope you enjoy it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Globalisation has not passed Africa by. The recent boom in commodity prices has had a direct impact on African markets, as has the inescapable presence of new global powers like China on the continent. The massive amount of under-utilised agricultural land in Africa has also drawn buyers from the United States, East Asia, and Middle East. Globalization has also led to opportunities, as infrastructure is developed and mobile-phone based technologies revolutionise the way Africans live and work. Growth rates in many countries in this new, outward-looking Africa are high enough to make even the Chinese jealous. It is this wider global context that Stephen Ellis tries to draw out in his new book Season of Rains: Africa in the World (Hurst, 2011 ). Ellis does more, though, than place Africa in the context of globalization. He also shifts perceptions of Africa away from the familiar historical framework of colonialism and post-colonialism. There is of course far more to Africa than that. Season of Rains is an enjoyable read, full of interesting insights and provocative opinions. But beyond this, it offers the reader a new way of viewing Africa in a quickly changing world.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

In Chapter 3 of Erin Haney’s excellent book Photography and Africa (Reaktion Books, 2010) there are seven photos taken in central Africa at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Six advertise progress – from the smartly dressed and armed native troops (though still barefoot) to a posed photograph of a caravan of ivory and a depiction of rubber tapping. These images were taken to show the success, the organization, and the wealth of the Congo to the people of Brussels, Antwerp and beyond. The seventh photo shows a man sitting silently next to two indistinct objects, with a bland backdrop of open ground and two or three palm trees. This photo was also taken to inform public opinion in Europe (mainly Britain), but in this case as part of a movement against Belgian interests (and atrocities) in the Congo. The two indistinct objects in front of the man, incidently, are the severed foot and hand of his murdered five year old daughter. Not all of the photographs in Erin’s book are as politically charged as these. The book is remarkable for its variety, from a publicity self-portrait of a pioneer West African photographer taken in the 1890s to photojournalism from the last days of Apartheid and images of more than a century of industrial development on the continent. I wasn’t sure whether an audio interview with the author of a book of photography would work, but I think it did. That’s partly thanks to Erin herself, and partly thanks to the book itself and the stories it has to tell. I hope you enjoy the interview! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Chances are, if you were one of the 700 million people who watched the 2010 World Cup, you likely heard mention of the soccer games that prisoners on Robben Island played during the decades of apartheid rule. The stories of these soccer matches on the barren island, played by political prisoners sentenced to years of hard labor, were cast as evidence of the sport’s power to lift the human spirit, to bring inspiration in the midst of oppression. But the matches on Robben Island were much more than a diversion from the tedium and harshness of prison life. Hundreds of inmates participated in creating a fully organized league, the Makana Football Association, with multiple divisions, clubs governed by constitutions and officers, fixtures and tables, and league administrators. The workings of the association produced hundreds of pages of documents that ended up in 1993, by chance, in the hands of American sports historian Chuck Korr. Drawing from these boxes of materials and from interviews with the men who played on Robben Island, Korr produced a complete and moving account of soccer in apartheid’s most notorious prison.  This book, which he co-wrote with British writer Marvin Close, is More Than Just a Game–Soccer vs. Apartheid: The Greatest Soccer Story Ever Told (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2010). Korr brings to this story the perspective of an experienced historian of sports. And as he explains in the interview, never has he encountered such dedication to the ideals of sports as he discovered in researching the book. It is a story based on a sport, he explains, but it is also about the struggle for dignity and the conveying of values. The book reflects the conviction, as one of Korr’s subjects explained it, that “sports is much too important to be just fun.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

In February 2002, British journalist James Brabazon set out to travel with guerrilla forces into Liberia to show the world what was happening in that war-torn country. To protect him, he hired Nick du Toit, a former South African Defence Force soldier who had fought in conflicts across Africa for over three decades. What follows is an incredible behind-the-scenes account of the Liberian rebels known as the LURD as they attempt to seize control of the country from government troops led by President Charles Taylor. In this gripping narrative, James Brabazon paints a brilliant portrait of the chaos that tore West Africa apart: nations run by warlords and kleptocrats, rebels fighting to displace them, ordinary people caught in the crossfire and everywhere adventurers and mercenaries operating in war’s dark shadows. It is a brutally honest book about what it takes to be a journalist, survivor, and friend in this morally corrosive crucible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Africans were the first migrants because they were the first people. Some 60,000 years ago they left their homeland and in a relatively short period of time (by geological and evolutionary standards) moved to nearly every habitable place on the globe. We are their descendants. The Africans never stopped migrating, but they began to do so with particular vigor beginning about 1400 AD. Patrick Manning tells the story of their movements in his remarkable new book The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture (Columbia UP, 2010). The tale Pat tells might well be divided into three phases: before slavery, during slavery, and after slavery. The middle period usually gets the most attention, but happily Pat well covers the “before” and “after” phases as well. This is an excellent corrective to the standard story because it shows us that for most of modern history African migrants were not really victims, but agents. Prior to the emergence of the international slave trade, they travelled and migrated to North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Near East in large numbers. Slavery of course violently brought millions of them to the Americas. But once it was officially ended (slavery continues to exist today…), the Africans in the diaspora set about considering their rightful place in the world. Should they build lives for themselves “abroad”? Or should they return to their African homeland? Should they integrate? Or should they remain apart? These questions–which are asked by every large diaspora community–were hotly debated in the cultural and political efflorescence of the 20th century. To some extent the debate still goes on; and to an even greater extent the African diaspora continues to grow both in numbers and in power. This is an important and neglected topic, and we should all thank professor Manning for shedding light on it. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies