It’s a widespread apply to divide African historical past into three epochs: precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial. But because the thinker Olufemi Taiwo has convincingly argued, this strategy is flawed on two counts. First, it compresses and misrepresents millennia of African historical past within the “precolonial” interval and by so doing casts Africa as a land the place nothing modified for huge stretches of time. Second, it locations colonialism on a pedestal, thereby overstating the impression of colonization on historic processes in Africa, usually on the expense of acknowledging what Africans did. Though indirectly responding to Taiwo, Badawi’s encyclopedic survey of African historical past is a crucial installment within the present wave of scholarship on the deep histories of African societies. Badawi is a journalist, and her writing is accessible with out sliding into oversimplification. Given its huge scale and scope, the e-book doesn’t fake to supply definitive accounts of each main African polity or historic occasion. As an alternative, it brilliantly connects totally different elements of Africa into a standard historic timeline, highlighting conflicts, commerce, flows of concepts, and different interactions that knit the continent collectively. It can fulfill each informal readers and people searching for a gateway into deeper scholarly research of African historical past.
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