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Review
| Africa in World History: From Prehistory to the Present, by Erik Gilbert and Jonathan T. Reynolds. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004. 387 pages. $40, paper.
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| Teachers of World and African history have been rendered a service they will long cherish. Gilbert and Reynolds have addressed a lacuna, long disquieting Africanists, that popular texts like McKay, Hill and Buckler's World Civilizations have overlooked. At the same time, they have plugged a gap in specialist efforts to explain Africa to non-Africanist colleagues. For the record, pre-colonial African history is not dominated by western-style states (as in McKay, et.al., Western African Empires, Ethiopia, Swahili City States and Great Zimbabwe), nor is it an anthropological grab bag of groups, once called "tribes," now anointed ethnic groups by non-Africa specialists. Gilbert and Reynolds' service to all and sundry—Africa specialists, specialists in other areas, and students—is that their emphasis on diversity shows that Africa is some of those things and so much more besides. The diversity these authors deploy presents African perspectives on world history that are neither radical alternatives to Western assumptions, nor eggshell choreography aimed at pacifying the easily offended. Gilbert and Reynolds explore all that African diversity was, is and can be. |
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In addition to a clear explanation of what is most African about a diverse continent, three and one-half times the size of the United States, the book has remarkable coherence. It starts with human (not just African) prehistory. As impressive as their command of recent archeological discoveries is, there is also coverage of Africa's environment and its effects not only on humanity's origins, but also on how African civilizations adapted to that environment. Without obfuscating theory, the book provides insightful accounts of all that 19th and 20th century imperialists got wrong about Africa (and Africans). A powerful case is made throughout for greater, more appropriate regard for the continent's challenges and accomplishments. |
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The book also explains the African origins of world religions. Where typical texts present Christianity as Middle-Eastern, then Western, Africa in World History explains what western Christianity left behind with the African neighbors of its Middle Easterner innovators. This part of the text concludes with an admirable regional, theological and ecumenical appreciation of Islam in Africa. No topic needs greater student appreciation of diversity than Islam. In their treatment of African Christianity, these authors present the topic with greater claims to attention than narrowly-construed Afrocentricity, another state-centric explanation that Gilbert and Reynolds treat evenhandedly. It is worth stressing that this litany is not without real historiographic merit. Our authors give coherence to vast amounts of information. Thematic approaches in opening chapters yield (after chapter 8 on the slave trade and the Atlantic World) to regional approaches to continental diversity. Chapters 8 to 13 present eastern, southern and western Africa for the period 1500 to 1800 in detail. From chapter 13 (colonialism and African resistance), the text again embraces thematic approaches to the origins, nature, and future of contemporary Africa. Of special merit are treatments of economic problems, globalization of Africa's Diaspora, and the end of Apartheid, with accounts of Rwanda's genocide, Sierra Leone/Liberia's tragedies and Somalia's civil war. Considered, too, is the prevalence of AIDS in Africa, "Africa's World War" in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the "failures" of African states of all kinds set against Cold War rivalries and the vibrancy of African cultural life. |
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Throughout the book, Gilbert and Reynolds draw on their specializations to provide regional and textual coherence to themes of continental importance. A specialist in Islam and colonialism in Northern Nigeria (Reynolds) and a historian of 19th and 20th century East Africa (Gilbert) illustrate continental history with west and east African material. Reynolds covers Islam, state formation and long-distance trade, Islamic revivalism, bori cults, and global Islam; Gilbert deals with indigenous origins, Indian Ocean trade and Swahili culture, Portuguese and Omani intrusion, 19th century economic integration, and Nyerere's Ujamma. The text's greatest asset is that it takes all that diversity and puts it together in an accessible package. Significantly, this has been realized with wit and insight, clarity and profundity, sophistication (a particular favorite, "the mellifluously named Zanzibari railway, the Bububu") as well as didacticism. In this text world and African history are whole and part of a myriad of clearly laid out human complexities. No student of either subject, at whatever level, could ask for more. This is the text the North America undergraduate market for African and world history has long awaited with justifiable impatience. |
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| Armstrong Atlantic State University |
John David Leaver |
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