Africa in World History

My first academic job in 1962 involved teaching a course on History of Civilization. We had a text that essentially involved Western Civilization with chapters on India, China, and Japan interspersed. Two years later, when I returned from my doctoral thesis research in Africa, my thesis supervisor, William Halperin, recommended me for a ten-week adult education group discussing William McNeill’s Rise of the West. I was stunned that in a history of Eurasia, McNeill devoted only five pages to Africa. The incorporation of Africa in world history has been slow. For many of us in that first generation to study African history in Europe and North America, the marginality of Africa in the study of history was sometimes what drew us to study it. (There were a small number of African-American historians who wrote about Africa, but they had little impact on history curricula outside the small world in which they operated.) As a graduate student, I did a field on the Expansion of Europe and was struck by the inferior quality of much that had been written about Africa, largely by missionaries and colonial administrators. Until the Foreign Area Fellowship Program sent me to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to “tool up” with Jan Vansina, I was oblivious to the work that scholars like Vansina, Oliver, and Curtin were doing. Once I began researching Africa, the excitement was that of creating a new field of historical research.

focused on seeing African history in a global context.They found a very enthusiastic interlocuteur in Gill Berchowitz.There are many fine university press editors, but few of them are expert in the works they publish.Berchowitz is from South Africa and is important for her knowledge of Africa, which has enabled her to help a small university press become one of the most important publishers of works on African history.
In their preface to the inaugural book in the series, James McCann's Stirring the Pot, the editors laid out their concerns.They were unhappy that, though African history had produced outstanding scholarship, "its discoveries and insights are rarely acknowledged outside the continent."They wanted to make African history relevant to courses on world history, the Americas, and regions with which Africa interacted or could be compared: In modern settings rife with the residues of centuries of slaving and racial stereotyping, we hope that these descriptions of Africans at work, at home, and engaged in sport and cultural activities will bring out the universal human experience that Africans have expressed in their own particular ways (McCann, ix).
All of the books the series has produced are primarily about African history, but they involve interesting comparisons or connections with other continents and are influenced by a movement away from the study of kings, states, and military conquests to the study of the way people live and relate to each other.Over the last 70 years, our ideas of what students should learn have become more global.What Robinson, Miller, and Berchowitz were trying to do was to make the African experience more relevant to that global picture.I do not intend to do thorough reviews of each book, but rather to focus on their value in the classroom, their contribution to world history, and their contribution to the understanding of ordinary life.

African Cuisine
Those of us who create book series do not always end up with what we want.In my case, I wanted the Cambridge University Press series to deal with the complexity of precolonial Africa.I started by writing to about two dozen colleagues and asking them to identify important gaps in the available pedagogical materials.Fred Cooper wrote back saying that he would like to do a book on postcolonial Africa.We jumped on it, and Africa Since 1940 was out in about 18 months.It has been by far our most successful title.Miller and Robinson were discussing what to do next when the tragic death of Harold Marcus led to James McCann being invited a number of times to Michigan State to assist Harold's graduate students.McCann had worked on Ethiopia, which probably has produced Africa's most interesting cuisine, and he was Africa's top agricultural historian.After a short time and some productive conversations with Robinson, McCann produced a volume that connects edible crops to the ways they were cooked.The book concentrates somewhat on the Ethiopian and East Africa cuisines McCann knows best, but he is careful to include the variety of African cuisines across the continent.
McCann starts with a massive banquet organized by the Ethiopian queen Taytul Bitul in 1887, which leads to a discussion of dinner as theater and to eating as a social gathering.Preparing food was traditionally women's work, but cooking it and eating it is a social event for everyone.Though famine is a recurrent event in many parts of Africa, it is important that a guest have enough to eat.These, of course are universal values, though who eats with whom may vary.McCann could have gone more fully into what good manners dictate.For example, it is important to your hostess almost everywhere that you eat.On the other hand, if extra mouths suddenly drop in, it is important not to eat too much.
In subsequent chapters, McCann deals with spices, many of which are local.In some areas, the seasonality of crops determines what is available in different parts of the year, though most staples are grains which can be stored.Staples are important.A Guinean friend explained to me that it was important that he have rice for his mid-day meal.When he arrived in Paris for his doctoral studies, he often wandered the city looking for rice until he discovered that he could find it in Vietnamese restaurants.McCann discusses how new crops often spread rapidly, even across oceans, but they were not always eaten in the same way.
McCann is interested in change, which is constant.From Asia, forms of banana, plantain, yams, and rice were incorporated, and from the Americas maize and tomatoes.There is a colonial impact on cuisine.Short distances apart, people in Senegambia breakfast on French coffee, British tea, and indigenous kinkeleba tea, along with different kinds of bread.In East and South Africa, curries are part of the cuisine, though often with local variations like South African Bobotie.But in many areas, different kinds of insects can be prepared in tasteful ways.McCann ends with a discussion of diaspora cuisine, foods and ways of cooking that cross the Atlantic in two ways.All in all, McCann has produced a rich narrative of the ways Africans have adopted different foods and produced different cuisines.Cuisine is rarely included in survey courses, but for those of us who have spent time in Africa or eaten at African restaurants, which have proliferated in North America or Western Europe, the subject is an essential one when considering the connections between Africa and the world.

Soccer
The second volume in the series is very different, but it is also concerned with daily life.With the study of African soccer by Peter Alegi, a colleague of Robinson at Michigan State, we are moving from how people eat to how they play, which is also very international.Soccer is the most popular sport in Africa because it is the most accessible.Beyond the ball, there is no other equipment involved.It can be played on any flat surface, even in the street.Africans have played it with a variety of round objects.In the early years, it was often played with a tennis ball, and even today, young players will craft their own homemade soccer balls.The sport was introduced in the early 1860s by European soldiers and civil servants, and for almost a century it remained racially segregated.When teams and leagues were organized, they were for whites only.
Soccer was played at elite schools all over Africa.Missionaries saw the game not only as a way for boys to blow off steam, but as a way to form character and to develop discipline and self-control.Alegi describes this as "muscular Christianity" and sees it as a crucial method of character formation.European employers, for example on the railroads, encouraged soccer as a valuable form of diversion.Many of those who played soccer at school enjoyed it and continued to play after leaving school, while others enjoyed watching the game.The period between 1920 and 1940 saw the development of clubs and leagues.Some were company teams; others were neighborhood or ethnic teams.Colonial governments encouraged the sport, but not to the point of letting white teams play black teams.Equality was an unacceptable dream.
The most interesting part of this history is the social role that soccer has played, both as recreation and as a spectator sport.It could reinforce ethnic divisions, but company teams, urban clubs, or school teams were important in transcending social divisions and creating new unities.Alegi argues that soccer played a role in developing nationalism.After World War II, there were increasing competitions between national teams, and for the first time, African teams visited Europe.Sport, and soccer in particular, played an important role in nation-building.African countries joined the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, the governing body of world soccer, and because of their numbers, they played a major role in FIFA politics.The biennial African championship is a major event, and African teams in the World Cup are followed not only by their own nationals, but also by other Africans.In some European countries, Africans face ugly racism, but in others, the importance of players from former colonies leads to new definitions of national identity.In Toronto, where I live, during the World Cup, the flags of all competing countries are available from vendor trucks.As their teams are eliminated, Africans rally behind other teams from the continent.And when all the African teams have fallen, most turn their support to Brazil as a representative of the Global South.
Alegi also offers a nuanced discussion of the impact of television and the development of sports capitalism.Income from television makes major clubs in Europe very large enterprises and enables them to pay players from Africa salaries with which teams in the Global South could not compete.Alegi argues that attention to major European clubs has had a deleterious effect on African soccer.African fans can and often do watch major European teams.My only criticism of Alegi's book is that some of the later chapters become just lists of famous African players.Alegi does, however, illustrate the importance that soccer plays in defining identities in Africa.The money that African governments spend supporting national teams is not wasted.The sport is yet another way that Africans have participated in the larger world.Soccer contributes to national identities in Africa, but also defines European identities, where the best teams often include players from former colonies.

Diamonds
With Todd Cleveland's book on diamonds, we move from social and culinary history to a book which is both economic history and social history.It involves not only the incorporation of parts of Africa in a Euro-centric capitalism, but also the emergence of a coerced working class.Cleveland starts with the quest for Eldorado, which was important in European imperialism, and the delusion that there was a pot of gold, or in this case diamonds, that might bring instant and unmerited wealth to seekers, sometimes a humble seeker, sometimes a government, sometimes a capitalist entrepreneur.Those entrepreneurs came mostly from Europe, while the Africans came from diverse ethnic groups.Ironically, Africans were generally not as interested in diamonds as they were in gold, and gold was never as important to Africans as salt, iron, copper, and the sale of human beings.The discovery of diamonds at Kimberley in South Africa led to a diamond rush and the colonization of the interior of what is now South Africa, but within a little over a decade, as the miners went deeper and deeper, the industry came to be dominated by a single company.De Beers was named for a farm owned by two Afrikaner brothers; it fell into the hands of Cecil Rhodes, who never used a shovel but was a master of capitalist accumulation.
The story Todd Cleveland tells is one of dreams and delusions, but it is dominated by three characteristics.First, a single stone could bring a digger, whether white or black, great wealth.Diamonds can be hidden and smuggled in a person's belongings or in the hair or crevices of the human body.The second is that while the first diamonds were alluvial or were found close to the surface of the earth, the search for diamonds soon involved going deep underground, and they could only be found in significant amounts by using heavy equipment.This later happened also with gold.The third is that whereas the initial discovery brought a substantial return, diamonds turned out to be available in many places.De Beers was for many years a monopoly, which only provided greater incentive to look elsewhere for diamonds, but this meant that the returns were based on the ability to control smuggling and to limit the number of diamonds on the world market.Their success led to the discovery of markets elsewhere.
Where McCann and Alegi are concerned with activities that enrich daily life, Cleveland tells a tale of brutality and exploitation.He starts with the question of whether it is socially responsible to buy a diamond.He describes incredible greed, beginning with the effort of white diggers to exclude Africans from the potential wealth of Kimberley and then proceeding to the efforts of De Beers and others to control African labor followed by forms of resistance, which include both the formation of unions and theft.The ultimate horrors came after independence, when wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone were financed by "blood diamonds."The last two chapters, however, look at Botswana and Namibia, two countries which have controlled the exploitation of diamonds and used the wealth derived from them for development and the betterment of their citizens.

Swahili
Each of these books is different in what it does and how it relates to world history.Other books published in the series involve how people communicate with each other.Swahili is important as the language of a refined coastal society immersed in the Indian Ocean World, as Africa's most important lingua franca, and as a language studied by outsiders interested in connecting with Africa.John Mugane's book deals with both the history of the language and of the people who speak it.Swahili is a Bantu language that first developed on the Indian Ocean coast and spread along the coast, north to Mogadishu, south to Sofala in Mozambique, and with ocean mariners onto the Comoro islands.With the development of trade and the conversion of coastal people to Islam, a series of cosmopolitan cities developed along the coast during the period from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries.This is the period of the coast's greatest wealth, but also a period of cultural flowering rooted in the meeting of different cultures.The coast also profited from the fact that these were small cities, and any hegemony was limited, even during periods of Portuguese and Omani domination.For most of its history, the Swahili cities looked outward to the sea, but from the late eighteenth century, trade spread the language into the interior, where it was for most speakers a lingua franca.This made it useful to colonial regimes, to those spreading Islam and Christianity, and subsequently to independent governments.
Swahili is the most widely spoken African language, and as Mugane points out, the African language most widely studied and spoken outside of Africa.Much of its success is due to its ability to absorb words and cultural phenomena.Its structure is Bantu, and a majority of its vocabulary is Bantu, but it was very flexible, first incorporating Arabic and Persian words and then developing a diversity of specialized dialects, such as Ki settla, the language settlers used to speak to servants and workers; Kihindi, an Indian dialect; Kikar, a military dialect; and Kiswahili ya Minière, a dialect spoken on Union Minière work sites in the Congo.While its simplicity made it easy to learn and adapt, it is also expressive.My favorite word was always wa-benzi for a rich man, meaning, the owner of a Mercedes-Benz.Mugane spins out the varied histories embedded in Swahili's rich vocabulary.

The Mau Mau General
The first four books in the series are histories that develop broad global themes marginal to the political narratives historians usually focus on and do so over long periods of time.The Boy is Gone is microhistory.Microhistory focuses on small units such as single events, communities, persons, or moments that open the doors to the understanding of larger questions.This book is not a biography, but rather a series of conversations with a man who was not a national figure, but who stood at a focal point not only of Kenya's history, but also of the process of decolonization.Its author, Laura Lee Huttenbach, is not a professional historian, but she is a good historian.Huttenbach was a student of Joseph Miller.After graduating from the University of Virginia, she decided to travel in East Africa, and a Kenyan friend of one of her neighbors suggested that she look up a friend of his, Japhlet Thambu.The high point of her travels was the time she spent with Thambu in Kenya.She found him so interesting that she asked if she could record his life story.He agreed, and she returned to Kenya.She lived with his family, spent time picking tea, and met colleagues and veterans of the struggle.She ended up with 100 hours of interviews and 1,500 pages of transcripts, which she edited down to the 220 pages of this book.
Japhlet Thambu was a Meru who came from a poor family at the edge of the White Highlands.He was born in 1922 and, at his father's insistence, went to a mission school; after eight years of schooling, he became a teacher who also bought land and marketed timber.As a Christian, landowning teacher, he could easily have become a Home Guard in the civil war that was known as Mau Mau.Instead, in 1952, he went into the forest and became the leader of one of the military units.He was known as General Nkungi.By 1955, he was convinced that the war was lost and turned himself in.Though he had been promised freedom, he was forced into the Pipeline, as the re-education process was called, but eventually he was released and he returned to teaching and farming, starting with coffee.He was briefly involved in politics, but became disillusioned; when he had enough land, he shifted in 1966 to cultivating tea.Much of his story is concerned with his learning technology and finance.In 1991, he and three colleagues organized a cooperative.He was elected chairman and was regularly re-elected until he died at age 95.This is African history as lived by one man, not a major political figure, but an able and insightful man who experienced a period of great change.

The Guinea Slave Trade
Making Money by Colleen E. Kriger is another micro-history, but of a different sort.It looks at the operations of a part of a single trading company, the Royal African Company, over a forty-year period.It focuses on the social relations of international trade in one area, the Upper Guinea Coast, when it was no longer a major source of slaves.The book deals with trade in gold, ivory, hides, and wax.Like Cleveland's book on diamonds, it deals with African's involvement in global markets.Kriger has been primarily an art historian who has done excellent work on iron and cloth.I know her work well because I was on her thesis defense at York where she studied with Paul Lovejoy.Her primary source here is the letters exchanged by the London Headquarters of the RAC and their agents at three factories in the area between the Gambia and Sherbro rivers.Kriger's work on James Island and the Gambia is particularly interesting as a comparison to the more intensively studied Senegal River system.These two rivers were the only places in West Africa where Europeans were stationed for significant periods in the interior and involved in the economic and social relations of the slave trade.
What is most fascinating is the company's relationship with a wide range of people: its agents, who were often trading on their own in violation of company rule, merchants in Africa and Europe, suppliers of commodities and provisions, laborers, artisans, seamen, porters, and slaves.The company was trading with Lusophone communities, Juula merchants, and independent European traders, many of whom left the company's service and raised families with their African wives.She starts with two chapters describing the commercial systems into which Europeans inserted themselves, the various monies, and the commodities that were being traded.The wives of the independent traders often outlived their husbands.They and their sons generally continued trading with the company, much like the signares of Senegal and donas of Angola.What is striking about the slave trade on the Upper Guinea Coast is that most transactions were relatively small, which suggests that the company was not dealing with huge caravans of captives taken in major military victories, but rather with those enslaved by small raids, kidnapping, and criminal penalties.
Mortality influenced the system in many ways.The men who took service in Africa did so knowing that there was a high likelihood that they would die in Africa.Some of those who lasted made substantial fortunes or left significant wealth to their heirs.Those who survived the first year or two sometimes had long careers in Africa, but the number who profited from the trade was not very large.The mortality rate of captives was also high.Every year at James Island, 36 percent of the company men died along with 43 percent of the male slaves.Only 21 percent of the females died, but then, women and girls were a small percentage of those exported, largely because they were either absorbed in communities en route to the coast or were shipped north across the Sahara.The slave trade operated in different ways in different regions, and this book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of those operations in James Island and the Gambia.
Were there Cannibals?
The slave trade in west central Africa was massive.The processes Kriger describes resemble, in many ways, those which took place in the cities of the central African coast, which were racially mixed communities.Staller focuses not on the the urban relationships, but on how Europeans and other Africans viewed the communities living further inland from the coast.Many societies are fascinated by cannibalism, drinking of blood, witchcraft, vampires, and other forms of what are seen as barbarism or mystical powers.These beliefs recur in contemporary societies, for example, in horror movies, but they are also found in classical antiquity and the medieval world.People will often talk about barbaric others up-river or on the other side of some hills.
They are sometimes linked to metaphors of eating for taking of tribute or other forms of exploitation.Cannibalism was regarded as reprehensible by both Europeans and Africans and was often used as justification for enslavement.This belief that some Africans were cannibals was particularly strong in Central Africa, and was usually attached to warriors known as Jaga, who were originally from the Imbangala kingdom.
A student of Joseph Miller, Jared Staller did his doctoral research in Central Africa, and he tries to understand the origins of these beliefs.The first part of this book is a narrative of Central African history during the two centuries after the Portuguese entered into relations with the Kongo Kingdom.He discusses the various European accounts, many of them from men who lived with the Imbangala or with Queen Njinga, who used the mythology of cannibalism to spread fear among their enemies.Fear of being eaten was deeply rooted in the notion that certain war-like enemies were cannibals.Fear of cannibalism was widespread, and not only in Central Africa among people being enslaved or threatened by slavers.Few if any could imagine the fate that awaited them in the Americas, which in terms of suffering was probably worse than being eaten.Staller points out that very few of those who spoke of the Jaga as cannibals actually saw anyone eating human flesh, and at least one of them, the British seaman Andrew Battell, was given to fantasies such as children raised by gorillas.More importantly, Staller argues that the Christian publishers who printed these travel accounts were interested in making the argument that wars against Jaga were just wars and thus justified enslavement.Few scholars have discussed the Christian notion of "just war," which was similar to the Muslim notion of jihad.In both cases, it justified behavior that violated the religion's basic ethical principles.

Tourism
Todd Cleveland's second book in this series is about very different types of travel, all lumped together as tourism.It resembles the books written by McCann and Alegi in that it deals with large parts of Africa, and like those two books, it also deals with questions not generally discussed in survey courses, but which reflect major global processes of change.Though Cleveland starts with historic travelers such as Herodotus and Ibn Batuta, his focus is on the extension of the European travel business to Africa and the many forms it took.The founders of modern tourism were the British entrepreneur Thomas Cook and the nineteenth-century Ottoman ruler of Egypt, Mohammed Ali, who created the infrastructure for modern upper middle-class travel.Visits to Egypt and the Holy Land were in some ways an extension of the European Grand Tour and could be undertaken without the risks faced by explorers south of the Sahara.As colonial regimes extended their control over the rest of Africa, hunting became a recreation for the rich.One of Cleveland's examples is Theodore Roosevelt's year-long safari in East Africa, which involved more than 2,000 African employees and the promiscuous slaughter of untold African wildlife.
The creation of a European-ruled industrial society in South Africa and settler communities elsewhere led to the creation of a tourism infrastructure.Hunting remained important, but there were also new destinations such as the spectacular Victoria Falls.As hunting decimated African wildlife, there was a shift to a more conservation-oriented camera tourism.When cheaper air travel made Africa more accessible, a series of different kinds of tourism developed.As African governments were seeking new sources of revenue, they found these new kinds of tourism attractive.Opportunities to study abroad brought students for different periods of time, and church groups organized volunteer projects.I would quibble on three small points.First, Cleveland talks about Swedish tourists "discovering" the Gambia.Tourism in the Gambia was developed by Swedish entrepreneurs.Europeans have better wages and longer vacations than Americans.Gambian beaches were discovered by a Swedish organization that arranged and built hotels to host working-class Swedish tourists.Once the hotel infrastructure existed, there was a development of museums, markets, and other tourist experiences.Second, Cleveland examines the "roots" tourism that proliferated after Alex Haley's Roots was made into a TV series.The Slave House on Senegal's Goree Island and Ghana's castles became popular tourist destinations.I would argue that the rather small Slave House should be described as what it is, a fanciful tale about a horrible period in African history, rather than as a major source of slaves.However, it is not the only case of an elaborate mythology developed to attract tourists.Third, Cleveland, perceptively discusses the influence of such tourism both on the tourists and on the African communities that profit from entertaining them, but he does not give enough attention to the African entrepreneurs who profit from European travelers.He suggests that there was something superficial about the production of Dogon masks for tourist performances.The Dogon-inhabited Bandiagara escarpment became a popular trekking site in the 1990s.This encouraged the development of wood-carving, art markets, encampments, small hotels, and restaurants, all by local entrepreneurs.I have visited this site.The pieces being carved in villages embedded in the cliffs were mostly copies of classic Dogon art, but sometimes the carvers also copied Bambara pieces.There was nothing superficial, though the dances were not necessarily authentic.

Studying World History
All of these books are designed for students, both undergraduates and graduates.They are all short and accessible.Cleveland provides a study guide with discussion questions.Mugane and Hutterback have a discussion of further readings rather than a simple list of books.Staller has appendixes which include texts that students can analyze, and McCann offers recipes.But is there a market for these kinds of books?Alegi is the bestseller among them, benefitting from the popularity of the sport and its publication right at the time that the World Cup was held in South Africa.McCann's book on cuisine has also done well, stimulated perhaps by the emergence of African restaurants in major cities and college towns in Western Europe and North America.Stones of Contention has proved to be popular, probably because of public concern about "blood diamonds" and the horrible conflicts they financed.Still, the vast majority of sales have been for courses on African history.Kriger offers students an excellent introduction to how the slave trade operated in one part of West Africa.Huttenback has produced a readable introduction to an interesting and locally important figure involved in the Mau Mau War, which historians continue to interpret.
The goals that Miller and Robinson sought are being met in other ways.When I was hired at the University of Toronto in 1970, one of my senior colleagues asked whether Africa should be taught in the Anthropology Department, not the History Department.For most of my 29 years, I taught only African history because I had a small group of students interested in a full sequence of courses on Africa.Today, on the three campuses of the University of Toronto, there are now eight historians who list Africa among their areas of specialization.Moreover, the department, which was once lily white, now has well over a dozen people whose origins are non-Western.When I look elsewhere, I see similar developments as Africanists and African history take a more prominent place in the discipline.The American Historical Review now has two Africanists on its editorial board, the American Historical Association has sought to become more international, and the Omohundro Institute has tried to understand American colonial history in an Atlantic context.African history is no longer a little bit of exotica.Younger colleagues have often taken courses on Africa and we are now free to develop courses on global themes.
Of course, these important changes are far from complete.There is much, much more work to be done both in African history and the discipline more widely.In the classroom we must continue to ask ourselves how history is conceived, how widely taught is Western Civilization, and how it has been or should be replaced.More broadly, how can we tell the stories of encounters between different parts of the world without prioritizing the experiences of Europeans?To what degree have departments broken away from Eurocentric approaches to history with courses on Atlantic history, women, imperialism, First Nations, slavery, ecology, decolonization, and various comparative subjects?
Shortly after I retired, I spent four months at Australian National University, where an important arena for scholarly discussion was the morning and afternoon coffee hour.Though I was there to study Asian and Pacific slavery, I was fascinated by Australia's historical experience and how my colleagues understood it.I found myself speculating on what an interesting course could be taught on settler societies.I would be unqualified to teach it, but I have taught a course on slavery in world history and for years thought of writing a book on that subject.What is taught in history departments has changed radically in the 70 years since I first enrolled in a history class.We are no longer focused on a narrow Eurocentric curriculum, and we are developing themes that cut across time and place.
To answer many of the questions historians ask, scholars will find the books of the Miller-Robinson series very helpful.Mugane would fit nicely into a course on the Indian Ocean, Alegi into a course on sport history, Huttenback into one on decolonization, Cleveland's two books and Kriger into a course on global capitalism.The books in this series not only contribute to the ways our students see and remember African history but also make broader connections that link the historical stories our students already know and place Africans at the heart of them.Joseph Miller is sadly no longer with us.Robinson and Berchowitz are retired.The series is now being edited by Todd Cleveland and Elizabeth Schmidt.I can only hope that they push the boundaries of the field as much as Miller and Robinson did and do so by inspiring young historians and their students to ask interesting questions and develop syntheses of different bodies of historical knowledge.