Parker John - African history: a very short introduction

John Parker and Richard Rathbone

A Very Short Introduction

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6 DP
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the Universitys objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in

Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries

Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

John Parker and Richard Rathbone 2007

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

First published as a Very Short Introduction 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Data available

Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by

Ashford Colour Press Ltd, Gosport, Hampshire

ISBN 9780192802484

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

The Mediterranean-centred world

akg-images

A house in Jenne

Casa das fricas, Brazil

Terracotta figure of a mounted warrior

Werner Forman Archive. Courtesy of Entwistle Gallery, London

Tuareg horsemen

Casa das fricas, Brazil

A signar, or woman of colour of Senegal

The British Library

A commando of National Party supporters

Photograph by David Goldblatt

Three officials of the Omani government of Zanzibar

The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs, Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University

President E. J. Roye of Liberia

The Library of Congress

Shaka Zulu

The British Library

Priests of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church

Mary Evans Picture Library

Translating the Bible in Abokobi, Gold Coast

Archives Mission 21: Basel Mission ref. QD-32.032.0005

Kuba royal statue

The Trustees of the British Museum

Capuchin missionary in the kingdom of Kongo

Biblioteca civica centrale di Torino, Sezione Manoscritti e rari

A slave coffle

The Library of Congress

Biography of Mahommah G. Baquaqua

The Library of Congress

Zanzibars ivory market

The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs, Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University

Mahdist commander Mahmud Ibn Ahmad

Mary Evans Picture Library

Apolo Kaggwa and Ham Mukasa

The National Portrait Gallery, London

Laying railway tracks in the Belgian Congo

Mary Evans Picture Library

Saint-Louis, Senegal, 1900

Casa das fricas, Brazil

King Njoya of Bamum

Archives Mission 21: Basel Mission ref. E-30.29.048

A student at Yaba College, Lagos

By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

Voting in Accra

By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

Demonstration in Southern Rhodesia

SVT Bild/Das Fotoarchiv

The Battle of Algiers

Rialto Pictures/Photofest

African American politics in Harlem

The Library of Congress

Dancers in Johannesburg

Photograph by Jrgen Schadeberg

UNITA in Huambo

Fred Bridgland/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Le chef, by Samuel Fosso

Courtesy of J. M. Patras, Paris

The publisher and the authors apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.

Africa: main physical features

The present-day nation-states of Africa

The Middle Niger region of West Africa

This book is a very short introduction to a very big topic. In fact, it is a very short introduction to two very big topics. On the one hand, it is about a place and its people: Africa. On the other, it is about the past of that place, as it has been envisaged by Africans and written about by historians. The sheer scale of both place and past is colossal. Africa: an entire continent, in terms of language and culture the worlds most diverse, stretching from the southern shores of the Mediterranean to the Cape of Good Hope and today comprising over 50 separate nations. The cradle of mankind, where humans first evolved and from where they fanned out to settle the earth, Africa also possesses a recoverable history stretching back five millennia to the earliest of the worlds ancient civilizations, that of pharaonic Egypt.

To provide even the sparest chronological outline of this history as it unfolded across the diverse regions of the continent is way beyond our scope here. Besides, it would be as dry as the dust that each year the harmattan wind blows south from the Sahara desert, discolouring skies from Senegal to Sudan. There are already many volumes that provide overviews of African history, or of different parts of it. We recommend a selection of these at the end of the book. Rather, our aim is to reflect upon the changing ways that the African past has been imagined and represented. That said, we have not focused exclusively on history as the representation of the past to the exclusion of history as a sequence of actual events. Our arguments are illustrated by a range of events and processes drawn from across the continent, as well as from the African diaspora beyond its shores. From these examples, hopefully, will emerge some of the main issues, problems, and debates that have arisen from the study of the African past. These issues are critical not just for an understanding of Africa, but for an understanding of the entire discipline of history.

Neither is it simply the physical immensity of Africa coupled with the great depth and diversity of its past that makes our topic such a challenging one. It is also because the notion of African history itself has been so controversial and contested: dismissed as unimportant by some, embraced as an ideological weapon by others, and all the time stubbornly resistant to precise definition. This last point may appear strange. Africa, as we have just stated, is a continent, and its past is what constitutes African history. But does a continent possess a history? It is almost inconceivable that a book similar to this will be written on, say, Asian history or European history. Underlying the idea of a singular African history is the assumption that the continent possesses some kind of essential unity beyond the mere geographic, a unity that not only binds it together but that also sets it apart from other parts of the world.