The German philosopher Hegel claimed that Africa “is no historical part of the world”. The corollary of this was taken to be that African history only began when Europeans started to arrive. This idea, and variants of it, became one of the fallacies deployed to justify the Atlantic slave trade, colonisation and the high-handed paternalism that characterised European rule right up until decolonisation in the 1960s. Even before the flags of the European colonisers had been lowered, and the newly independent nations of modern Africa emerged, urgent calls had been made for new histories of the continent that explored the longer and deeper history of Africa’s great civilisations.
Sadly, that corrective is still necessary as, outside of the continent, Africa’s past continues to be understood largely through the colonial era of the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet at times discussions of African history can become ensnared by a false dichotomy, a choice between the familiar, Eurocentric narrative – dominated by explorers, missionaries, gun boats and the Maxim gun – and a more Afrocentric story, focusing on pre-colonial Africa. This line in the sand, drawn between two forms of history, can obscure a key point; that before formal colonisation in the 19th century were several centuries of contact and interaction with outsiders, and not just Europeans. It is those centuries of interaction and their long-term economic impact on Africa that are explored in unusual detail in Toby Green’s remarkable new book, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa From the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution.
Content from our partners
