In today's #readingAfrica listicle, we turned to a couple of experts to ask for recommendations of non-fiction books about Africa that are accessible to non-academics, in addition to our own recommendations. Many people who live outside of the continent are unfamiliar with most of the history and culture of Africa. Hopefully, these books will help!
The following recommendations were made by Wendy Urban-Mead, PhD, a professor of African history and education at Bard.
David Olusoga, The World's War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire
Publisher: Head of Zeus, 2014
From Dr. Urban-Mead: I love this book! It's thick but don't be put off. Olusoga is an engaging writer who brings passion and very deep research to generate a sweeping, compelling account of the soldiers who served in the Great War who came from all over the world -- colonial subjects pulled into a war not of their making. It's not only about Africa, but Africans' role in the war is prominently featured, both their roles as laborers on the western front and as carriers and fighters in the long, devastating East Africa campaign.
Richard S. Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army 1914-1918 Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008
From Dr. Urban-Mead: While the scope of this book includes others in the French Empire, such as those from Indochina, the bulk of the attention is placed on French West Africans and Northern Africans who fought for France in World War One. Fogarty's writing is clear, and draws you right into his discussions of little-understood elements of the African experience of the war, such as a fascinating discussion of the nuanced politics of language, the religious needs of Muslim Africans on western front, or the complex racial and gender dynamics in interactions between French women and African combatants.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir
Publisher: Anchor Books
From the publisher: Born in 1938 in rural Kenya, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o came of age in the shadow of World War II, amidst the terrible bloodshed in the war between the Mau Mau and the British. The son of a man whose four wives bore him more than a score of children, young Ngũgĩ displayed what was then considered a bizarre thirst for learning, yet it was unimaginable that he would grow up to become a world-renowned novelist, playwright, and critic. In Dreams in a Time of War, Ngũgĩ deftly etches a bygone era, bearing witness to the social and political vicissitudes of life under colonialism and war. Speaking to the human right to dream even in the worst of times, this rich memoir of an African childhood abounds in delicate and powerful subtleties and complexities that are movingly told.
Emily Burrill, Ph.D., University of Virginia professor of History recommends the following book:
Howard French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War.
From the Publisher: Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the "New World." Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity? In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe's dehumanizing engagement with the "dark" continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not--as we are so often told, even today--Europe's yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa.
Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history. While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories--siloed and piecemeal--were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic "rise of the West" theories that have endured to this day.
"Capacious and compelling" (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton--and of the greatest "commodity" of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the "New World," whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.
AND....I have a few of my own recommendations. I was a student of African history and earned two graduate degrees in it, but it's been many years since I actively studied African history. (I went into writing and publishing instead.) --Jessica Powers, Publisher, Catalyst Press
Douglas Rogers, The Last Resort: A Memoir of Mischief and Mayhem on a Family Farm in Africa.
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
From the Publisher: Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Douglas Rogers is the son of white farmers living through that country's long and tense transition from postcolonial rule. He escaped the dull future mapped out for him by his parents for one of adventure and excitement in Europe and the United States. But when Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe launched his violent program to reclaim white-owned land and Rogers's parents were caught in the cross fire, everything changed. Lyn and Ros, the owners of Drifters-a famous game farm and backpacker lodge in the eastern mountains that was one of the most popular budget resorts in the country-found their home and resort under siege, their friends and neighbors expelled, and their lives in danger. But instead of leaving, as their son pleads with them to do, they haul out a shotgun and decide to stay. On returning to the country of his birth, Rogers finds his once orderly and progressive home transformed into something resembling a Marx Brothers romp crossed with Heart of Darkness pot has supplanted maize in the fields; hookers have replaced college kids as guests; and soldiers, spies, and teenage diamond dealers guzzle beer at the bar. And yet, in spite of it all, Rogers's parents-with the help of friends, farmworkers, lodge guests, and residents-among them black political dissidents and white refugee farmers-continue to hold on. But can they survive to the end? In the midst of a nation stuck between its stubborn past and an impatient future, Rogers soon begins to see his parents in a new light: unbowed, with passions and purpose renewed, even heroic. And, in the process, he learns that the "big story" he had relentlessly pursued his entire adult life as a roving journalist and travel writer was actually happening in his own backyard. Buy here.
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
Publisher: Mariner Books Classics
From the publisher: In the late nineteenth century, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium carried out a brutal plundering of the territory surrounding the Congo River. Ultimately slashing the area's population by ten million, he still managed to shrewdly cultivate his reputation as a great humanitarian. A tale far richer than any novelist could invent, King Leopold's Ghost is the horrifying account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who defied Leopold: African rebel leaders who fought against hopeless odds and a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure but unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust and participants in the twentieth century's first great human rights movement.
Henry Trotter, Sugar Girls & Seamen: A Journey into the World of Dockside Prostitution in South Africa.
Publisher: Ohio University Press
From Jessica Powers: Hilarious and, at times, ribald--or tongue-in-cheek--this is one of the best books to examine the way culture is spread across the world in dockside culture, where ladies of the night and sailors exchange more than bodily fluids.
From the publisher: Sugar Girls and Seamen illuminates the shadowy world of dockside prostitution in South Africa, focusing on the women of Cape Town and Durban who sell their hospitality to foreign sailors. Dockside “sugar girls” work at one of the busiest cultural intersections in the world. Through their continual interactions with foreign seamen, they become major traffickers in culture, ideas, languages, styles, goods, currencies, genes, and diseases. Many learn the seamen’s languages, develop emotional relationships with them, have their babies, and become entangled in vast webs of connection. Henry Trotter argues that these South African women are the ultimate cosmopolitans, the unsung sirens of globalization. Based on research at the seamen’s nightclubs, plus countless interviews with sugar girls, sailors, club owners, cabbies, bouncers, and barmaids, this book provides a comprehensive account of dockside prostitution at the southern tip of Africa. Through stories, analysis, and firsthand experiences, it reveals this gritty world in all its raw vitality and fragile humanity. Sugar Girls and Seamen is simultaneously racy and light, critical and profound.
--Listicle compiled by Jessica Powers
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