African History - A Very Short Introduction

by: John Parker & Richard Rathbone

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 world’s 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 world’s ancient civilizations, that
of pharaonic Egypt.

List of illustrations ix
List of maps xi
1 The idea of Africa 1
2 Africans: diversity and unity 25
3 Africa’s past: historical sources 48
4 Africa in the world 70
5 Colonialism in Africa 91
6 Imagining the future, rebuilding the past 114
7 Memory and forgetting, past and present 135
References 151
Further reading 155
Index 161