John reader africa

“Were it not for the importunities of Europe, Africa might have enlarged upon its indigenous talents and found an independent route to the present – one that was inspired by resolutions from within rather than examples from without. The moment passed, however, during the fifteenth century and cannot be retrieved. Since then the history of Africa has been the story of an ancient continent and its inhabitants trying to accommodate the conceits of modern humans whose ancestors left the cradle-land 100,000 years ago, and who came back 500 years ago, behaving as though they owned the place…”
- John Reader, Africa: A Biography of a Continent

John Reader’s Africa is about as ambitious a volume as you can imagine. In 682 pages of text, he attempts to encompass the entire existence of a vast continent, from its literal formation at the dawn of time, right up till the book’s 1997 publication date. Instead of diving deeply into one or two big themes, Reader attempts a massive multidisciplinary effort that interweaves geology, ecology, climatology, agriculture, anthropology, and history.

There is simply no way to perfectly accomplish what Reader is trying to do. It cannot be done in a single book, or in a hundred books. There is just too much to cover, and every time you start examining one subject, you find yourself facing three others, in an investigatory game of whack-a-mole. Still, Africa is a marvelous synthesis, one that is consistently engrossing even as the coverage becomes increasingly scattershot as we progress down the timeline.

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In telling Africa’s story, Reader starts at the very beginning, with entire chapters devoted to the continent’s physical creation. He ponders numerous rock formations, and engages in a great deal of talk about cratons, fissures, and the Bushveld Igneous Complex. As a person who connects to the past through people, an entire section meditating on inanimate processes – most derived from competing hypotheses that must be collated – is generally uninteresting to me. Thus, it is a testament to Reader’s writerly abilities that I pushed onward, through the lava and tectonic forces, until we reached that strangest of species: homo sapiens.

Once humankind shows up, Africa picks up its pace. For the most part, I’ve expended very little effort pondering our super-ancient ancestors, so it was enlightening to think about something as simple as a bowl being a huge technological leap with far-ranging consequences. Human development proceeded as it did due to innumerable factors, and Reader fascinatingly leads you through them, from the big stuff like plant arrays and viruses, to smaller things like bipedalism, lactose intolerance, and the virtues of bananas.

All the big stuff and the small stuff adds up, which is why we get two info-dense paragraphs on camels having sex.

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Africa is at its strongest when it focuses on a particular storyline and follows it for a while. Obviously, this is easier said than done, since there are near-infinite storylines to follow in Africa, with its panoply of civilizations, and with the ups-and-downs that comes from existing forever.

Unfortunately, a substantial part of Africa’s tale revolves around slavery and the slave trade, and Reader handles this material quite well. As he notes, slavery existed in Africa long before the slave trade, a function of generally low population densities and a difficulty in creating surplus wealth out of agriculture. Nevertheless, Reader points to the trade itself as the disrupting element. It not only subjected millions of men and women to the horrors of the Middle Passage, but it allowed Europe to latch onto Africa like a parasite. The slave trade became the foot in the door that led to colonization, and to the exploitation of natural – as well as human – resources.

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According to Reader, Sub-Saharan Africa was mostly stateless before the arrival of Europeans, who then proceeded to draw a bunch of lines on a map that were convenient for them, but ignorant of the cultures they either divided or pressed together.

In distilling the experience of colonization, Reader opts to highlight a few case studies, rather than make a survey. He spends a goodly amount of space on South Africa and the Congo, and on the Zulu and the Xhosa, at the expense of other regions and people. Indeed, Reader’s narrative remains almost completely tethered to Sub-Saharan Africa, with surprisingly little devotion to North Africa – including Egypt – or the influences of Islam.

Having gathered all his sources, it seems that Reader decided to approach things by feel, rather than systematically accounting for all of Africa’s different regions and modern nation-states. This is not a criticism. After all, if he had tried to go country-by-country, Africa might have become an exercise in pedantry, inviting repetition and overlap. Furthermore, it is unlikely that such comprehensiveness could have been contained between two covers. By following his own interests, Reader demonstrates an unflagging enthusiasm, and provides illustrative examples. The downside, though, is that there are a lot of gaps, and so Uganda barely gets mentioned, while places like Libya and Somalia are not mentioned at all.

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There is a lot – arguably too much – to absorb in Africa, and it can verge on the overwhelming. The project is ultimately saved by Reader’s talents: his ability to describe a place, to explain a process, and to support a conclusion. Africa is also lifted by Reader’s transparent passion for what he is writing about.

Too often Africa is defined by its very-real tragedies, whether it is the slave trade, colonial exploitation, or post-colonial dictatorships. But this is just one part of the story. Here, Reader writes profoundly about those other aspects that are just as important. Having sprung from Africa, it is perhaps not surprising that this continental biography has so much to say about humanity as a whole, for the good as well as the bad.