John Reader’s 1997 volume fascinates throughout but taken as a whole fails to deliver on its initial promise. Although his narrative progresses roughly chronologically, he is forever diverting from the main stream. As topics arise he constantly races ahead to compare modern conditions – of farming practice, for instance – but does not quite link “then” to “now”. His ecological interests show strongly – even in the structure of the book – but are not tied into a continuous history, and the book is badly lacking in maps.
The best-constructed portion of the book is the opening section, which presents the geological origin and human evolutionary story (as of 1997 theories: whether changes have been made to accepted theory since then I don’t know). In the remainder, Reader is at his best drawing pictures of single sites and short periods. Descriptions of the Ethiopian citadel of Aksum, the Niger delta society, and Ukara (an island in what is now Lake Victoria) – societies of which I knew little or nothing – are exciting and produce a demand to know more, but they are disconnected: vignettes among others that fail to cohere. Narratives of colonial tribulations are moving – but disconnected: his attempts to suggest larger narratives fall short. Even in noting the similar behavior of European powers towards inhabitants of areas they colonized, Reader is much better in local stories than in general scope.
The obvious reason would seem to be a lack of written sources. Reader barely refers to any oral traditions, and definitely prefers archeological evidence to traditional narratives – not always, to my mind, convincingly. He also swings back and forth repeatedly between his own inclination to present African societies before contact with Europe as nearly utopian, and strenuous efforts to acknowledge previous utopian theories as having been insufficient, to have misinterpreted evidence, or even have been entirely debunked. He openly admits that he chose to emphasize a reading of African history in which, since contact was made with Europeans arriving by ship, the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa has been dependent on European whims.
That this was the case from the colonial era proper (as the early trading posts expanded into settlements by the early eighteenth century) can hardly be doubted. The choice not to include the Mediterranean coast in his history could be defended, I suspect, fairly easily; but the choice to mention but downplay the gold and slave trades with the Arab states in northern Africa leaves his overall narrative open to question. He admits, for instance, that the evidence on the subject of relative numbers and effects of the three trades in slaves – internal to southern Africa, trans-Saharan, and Atlantic – is ambiguous, but chooses to tell his story in which the European (and later American) depredations are pictured as taking an out-size toll, even before outright colonization, while the trade with the Muslim world hovers in the background but is never examined. (What more recent research shows I don’t know: certainly the tenor of what else I’ve read suggests he guessed right – but is that history, exactly?) Similarly, human sacrifice appears to have been widespread (and a major source of demand for slaves internal to Africa) but while admitted is never really examined.
Reader manages to tell only the story of Africa in its relation to European power, with the resulting structure: two hundred pages of origin; about a hundred reaching from early Egypt and Ethiopia but then jumping practically immediately to the fifteenth century AD; a hundred fifty more to reach the mid-seventeenth; and the remaining two hundred and fifty to work through the almost four hundred years of colonial and now barely-post-colonial history. That this matches the thesis he expresses about halfway through the book in discussing the first Portuguese expeditions makes this weighting, I suppose, fair enough: and when Reader is good, he is very very good. But that’s not exactly what he seemed to have in mind in the beginning. The book thus raises more questions than it answers, can hardly be said to tell the African history of Africa at all, and leaves me questioning the claim of “biography” in the subtitle rather strongly.
Romance of Victory 