I’ve been wanting to read more books about Africa so it was hard to resist borrowing a copy of Zeinab Badawi’s 2024 An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence when I spotted it the other day at the public library. Based on the buzz it’s generated I approached it optimistically, eager to learn about Africa from an African perspective. Thanks to Badawi’s conversational style I whipped through An African History of Africa quickly, and in the end found it worthy of all the hype.

When discussing Africa many are tempted to ignore the continent’s north portion, assigning it to the greater Middle East or Mediterranean world based on the region’s prevailing Arab ethnicity and culture, as well as deep historical ties to Classical Europe. Badawi on the other hand embraces the entire continent, taking pride in Africa’s diverse religious and ethnic make-up and close ties to past and present to Europe and the Middle East. Her book is a product of both scholarly research and a series of extensive travels across the continent interviewing notables and subject matter experts and visiting countless historical sites. From the vicissitudes of ancient Egypt to today’s Egypt, along with Ethiopia joining the BRICS An African History of Africa is chronologically sweeping. In addition from the Fall of Carthage in present day Tunisia to the end of white minority rule in South Africa to King Leopold’s genocide in Congo to the ancient kingdoms of Great Zimbabwe Badawi covers the width and breadth of Africa.

We Westerners are horribly ignorant when it comes to African history, and this book goes a long way to remedy that. Not only are we reminded the ancient Egyptians were in fact Africans, their southern contemporaries the Kushites were no less impressive in their many accomplishments. You also probably didn’t know about Mansa Musa, emperor of Mali and the 14th century’s richest man in the world. Flushed with gold, he spent so much of it on a pilgrimage to Mecca he sparked runaway inflation as far as Europe, depressing the price of gold for two years. Ethiopia possess a rich religious history that has encompassed all three Abrahamic faiths including Judaism. It’s also home to Geʽez, one of Africa’s only two indigenously created alphabets and has the distinction of being the only African nation that was never colonized. Lastly there’s Angola’s Queen Nzinga, whose larger than life adventures battling rival Africans and encroaching Portuguese colonizers could be described as Game of Thrones meets Marvel’s Black Panther.

It’s an understatement to say the slave trade had a damaging effect on Africa, especially along its central coast. For over 300 years millions of Africans, almost all of them young and able bodied were shipped to the Americas. Not only was the continent drained of its most youthful and productive individuals  it set rival communities against each other fostering years of cross-ethnic mistrust, political instability and agricultural stagnation.

So too was the damage done in later centuries by colonization. By 1900 only Ethiopia and semi independent Liberia remained free. In Congo, initially run as the private estate of Belgium’s King Leopold close to half the native population died of overwork, starvation and abuse. Around the same time in what’s now Namibia, Germany perpetrated its own genocide, prefiguring the Holocaust of the World War II. Lastly, in the British-held areas in what’s now Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa native Africans were pushed off their lands, impoverished and forced to work for starvation wages on farms and in mines as virtual prisoners in their own homelands. Finally, when decolonization did come in places like French Algeria and British Kenya the process was long and bloody. Though politically independent white minority rule persisted in Rhodesia until 1979 and South Africa until 1994.

Badawi ends her book on an optimistic note. According the latest poling information for the first time ever an overwhelming majority of Africans identify as citizens of their respective countries as opposed to individual ethnic group. Such adherence of national identity is paramount to promoting political and ethnic stability, an essential foundation for economic growth. Africa is also a young continent with a population with an average age of 19. (Compared to 49 in Japan and 41 in the United Kingdom.) By the end of the century 40% of the world’s workers, producers and consumers will be African. Although 600 million Africans don’t have access to electricity 92% of Kenya’s electricity comes from renewables while electric busses roam its cities’ streets. In addition, 95% of Kenyan households use mobile banking as do 70% of African households overall.

Perhaps my only complaint is while Badawi brings to light the many atrocities Europeans inflicted upon their colonial subjects she glosses over those committed by a rogues gallery of African strongmen in the decades following independence. Many in the West might be familiar with the human rights abuses of Idi Amin, Muammar Gaddafi, Mobutu Sese Seko and Robert Mugabe but the continent has produced other lesser known yet still horrible monsters. Equatorial Guinea’s Francisco Macías Nguema, a dictator so ruthless and insane he murdered or drove into exile a third of the country’s population and was the inspiration for the evil President Kimba in Fredrick Forsyth’s novel The Dogs of War and its subsequent film adaption. Jean-Bédel Bokassa, from the Central African Republic in the 1970s declared himself emperor, ordered protesting school children be machine-gunned down and practiced cannibalism by eating his executed political enemies. Understandably, a readable history of Africa that encompasses Lucy the Hominid to the election of Nelson Mandela can’t cover everything. To totally ignore these monsters by chalking it up to “bad governance” is like writing a history of Cambodia and neglecting to mention Pol Pot.

Are there be better histories of Africa? Probably. But you’ll be hard pressed to find one by an African, or anyone else for that matter so sweeping, readable and informative that vividly brings to life so much history that’s been overlooked, ignored and in some cases downright denied.