Africa: A Biography of the Continent [Paperback]

"Base" suggests Reader's starting point, which opens with a description of the cratons forming Africa, the world's oldest bedrock. Rocks alone don't make a continent, and Reader continues with a discussion of how Africa's climate has been instrumental in guiding many aspects of Africa's development. The issue of rainfall or lack of it, its impact on river courses and lake formation are brought to bear as the story progresses. Reader goes on to describe the rise of life in Africa, most significantly, of course, the emergence of humans. His use of science is impressive, clearly the result of extensive and careful research.

From human beginnings he moves to the development of African civilizations. For years Egypt dominated western thinking in the equation of Africa and society. Reader's takes us through the societies that emerged apart from Egypt. He describes societies that developed in sub-Saharan Africa and how circumstances vary with location. That Africa set examples for later communal development is frequently overlooked, and he describes representative societies that developed in Africa. The Niger Delta and Aksum, two of the communities, one agricultural and the other a commercial centre, are samples of successful human organization in Africa. Clearly, the tradition of scattered tribes with garden farms supporting chancy hunting as the typical African condition is false and misleading.

Reader's chapters on slavery and the slave trade are enlightening. The Western Hemisphere remains self-congratulatory on the extinction of slavery, even though it took a war to accomplish it. Reader makes clear that the impact of the slavery endured into modern times, and the social consequences are both intense and widespread. Raiders and victims persisted for decades, and today's political clashes have roots in the slave trade. If we are to comprehend the African scene, Reader reminds us, we can start with a firmer knowledge of slavery's impact than our media has given us.

Reader's account of modern nation building in Africa is captivating reading. One glaring fact emerges - Africa has more national borders than any other continent. This artifact of colonization should be a starting point of any course on the continent. Reader notes that 177 "ethnic cultural areas" are crossed by these artificial boundaries, with predictable results. Uncertainties, lack of communication with urban centres, and rivalries all contribute to the failure of European and North American policy-makers to properly formulate responses to
African "national" conditions.

The scope of Reader's portrayal of Africa is too broad to allow a detailed account of modern events. This book being a "Biography of the Continent" and not a "current events" report precludes deep analysis of contemporary affairs. The fascinating life of Idi Amin, for example, is omitted entirely from Reader's roll call of African figures. That shouldn't dissuade anyone wishing to begin to understand the continent of our birth. Start with Reader's account then seek through his bibliography for further reading. This book is essential as a starting point in learning about the land of our beginnings and beyond.

Although sub-Saharan Africa was a topic of intense interest in the West during the 19th and early 20th Centuries, little of any value has been published about Africa in recent decades, largely due to the depressing performance of liberated African states. Much of what little gets published today is simply self-esteem therapy, like Henry Louis Gates' silly new coffee table book that accompanied his embarrassing PBS miniseries about the supposed architectural treasures of black Africa, although he wasn't actually able to find many.

In contrast, John Reader pulls off the difficult feat of being both highly sympathetic toward black Africans and quite realistic about their relative lack of tangible accomplishments. For example, although Africans' accomplishments in music and personal decoration were outstanding, their architectural achievements (the purported main topic of Gates' documenataries) is neglible. Other than in peripheral regions like Ethiopia and Zanzibar where black Africans came in contact with other races, there are almost zero ruins of any size. The main exception are the tall walls of Great Zimbabwe, but Reader's depiction is much less ecstatic than Gates': Reader says the most amazing thing about Great Zimbabwe is that it's in sub-Saharan Africa. The quality of construction is "poor" -- it's just a lot of local flat stones piled on top of one another. Nor did it require an enormous mobilization of manpower on the scale of the Pyramids -- a contemporary dry wall contractor gave an estimate of 200 men working for one year to build it. In Reader's view, Africa was traditionally too underpopulated and under-urbanized to generate impressive cities in the black heartland. He gives a variety of reasons. A major one is the horrendous burden of tropical diseases like sleeping sickness and malaria. Africans tended to be too sick to have a lot of surplus energy left over after they fed themselves to spend on construction projects. Further, it was healthiest to live spread out across the countryside, not in disease-infested cities. Another big problem was elephants. Elephants love to eat crops. These and Readers' other arguments are plausible, but to make them fully convincing, he'd have to explain why other tropical regions like Southern India and Southeast Asia (e.g., Angkor Wat) where there were also lots of diseases and elephants weren't equally debilitated.

I would also probably have emphasized the African family structure -- which tends toward polygamy with a relatively small role for the father in supporting his wives and kids -- as a playing a sizable role in Africa's traditional economic shortcomings, since it tends to encourage men to compete against each other for more wives rather than encouraging each man to support his own wife, and thus team up with other husbands in cooperative projects.Nonetheless, this is an impressive work, and well worth reading.