Reddit reviews Africa: A Biography of the Continent

The problems in Africa can mostly be boiled down to two words: Resources and politics. See, there are a lot of metals and liquids and so forth in Africa that other countries would like to have. Those things are resources. But things like food and medicine are also resources, and Africans don't have a lot of those. In part, it's because the first people came from Africa, so humans -- all humans -- are evolved from animals that grew up in that environment. And, among other things, that means there are lots of diseases in Africa that are dangerous to humans: moreso than diseases that developed in other parts of the world.

It also means that Africa filled up with people more quickly than other parts of the world. After a while, there were so many people in Africa that it was hard to farm enough to make sure that there would be food for new babies. At a certain point, large parts of Africa had as many people as it could hold.

About 5 or 6 centuries ago, people in two countries in Europe, Spain and Portugal, figured out how to make really good boats that would let them sail all over the world, and not just close to Europe. They decided that they could use those boats to trade with far away countries, and then they decided that it might even be easier to just to take over those counties, and kill anyone who got in their way. They took over parts of America, but to make money off of those places, they needed people who could work hard in the hot weather, and who wouldn't catch disease too easily. They tried doing it with the Native Americans they found, but some died too easily, and the Church, which had a lot of say in those days, took the others under their protection, so that Europeans had to treat them mostly the same way they'd treat other Europeans. About that time, the Spanish and Portuguese realized that Africa had another resource they could use: people. So they'd pay Africans who lived on the coast to capture Africans who lived inland. Then they'd buy those Africans, put them in big boats, sail them over to the New World, and force them to work, mostly until they died.

After about three hundred years, people started to change their mind about that. So they ended the Atlantic Slave trade (that's what they called it), and abolished slavery. By that time, the United States had been founded, and they held onto the practice of slavery for almost another 100 years, but only slaves that were already in the U.S., since no one was shipping slaves across the ocean anymore.

But even though the Europeans had decided slavery was bad, they still kept control of Africa, because, by now, they realized that there were other kinds of resources they could get from Africa, and that they could still make Africans work for them so long as they didn't treat them too much like slaves. To make it easier to get the resources they wanted, they created counties with borders and their own governments. They divided the Africans up into "tribal" groups in the way that suited the European businesses best, and forced the Africans to learn their languages, especially French and English, since the main countries now were no longer Spain and Portugal (they had bet heavily on South America), but Belgium and England. Sometimes, when the Africans resisted, the Europeans fought wars against them, and sometimes they made other Africans help them win those wars.

Then, about 50 years ago, Europeans started to change their minds again, and one by one, they let the countries they had made in Africa start to rule themselves. Some people said that they were only doing that because Europe had just gone through an expensive and devastating war, and could no long afford to deal with both the problems at home and the problems in their African colonies. But even if that's true, most people imagined that giving the African countries independence would make life a whole lot better for the Africans.

Some African countries did get better for a little while, but the problems they had when they were ruled by Europeans didn't just disappear, and those problems were hard to solve. For one thing, most Africans didn't know how to run government by themselves. They had been ruled by Europeans for hundreds of years, and were used to being ruled, even if they didn't like it. So when they took over their own governments, they made lots of mistakes.

For another thing, even though the European countries were giving them the countries they had made, most of them still wanted to be able to use African resources, so they kept troops there, or worked out special deals where only the country that used to rule them would get to buy their resources. Because the Europeans still had a lot of power in those countries, Africans who wanted power for themselves would sometimes cheat or even murder their fellow Africans to get the Europeans to give them more power. The more that happened, the worse their governments got. Sometimes, people who wanted their governments to get better would rebel against bad rulers (called dictators), and sometimes those rebels would even win, but it didn't always turn out good, even when they did. Sometimes they were just as power-mad as the dictators they had beaten, or they found that they had to work with other greedy governments to stay in power. Sometimes, the European governments (or the U.S., who had grown up since the 19th century) would get involved to try and decide who should win, and they usually wanted to make sure that the winner was someone who would let them buy their resources for cheap, even if that someone was a bad ruler.

In some cases, Africans would fight one another just because they belonged to different groups. In Rwanda, for example, a group called the Hutu decided they didn't like another group called the Tutsi, and they tried to kill all of the Tutsi in their country -- twice! The strange part about it is that the Hutu probably didn't hate the Tutsi before the Belgians took over several hundred years ago, and there may not have even been a Hutu and Tutsi. The Belgians decided who was a Tutsi and who was a Hutu, and they issued cards like drivers' licenses that said whether a person was one or the other. The Hutu learned to hate the Tutsi because the Belgians liked the Tutsi more, and treated them better, and many of them kept on hating, even decades after the Belgians let the Rwandans rule themselves.

If you want to know more about it, I recommend you read Africa: A Biography of the Continent by John Reader. If nothing else, it lists a lot of great books and articles on the subject that will let you find out more.

Obviously there's Arabic but there's a bunch of other scripts : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_systems_of_Africa

There's no such thing as "truthful history" because history is always viewed through a prism, but I've heard good things about John Reader's Biography of the Continent:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/067973869X/ref=pd_aw_sim_sbs_14_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=ZC56YTYN2PH4VYTDAQCT&dpPl=1&dpID=51vnkPaUS6L

I'm going to be lazy and simply repost a post of mine from a year ago. :)

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is a well deserved winner of the Pulitzer Prize. A combination of history, science and biography and so very well written.

A few of my favourite biographies include the magisterial, and also Pulitzer Prize winning, Peter the Great by Robert Massie. He also wrote the wonderful Dreadnaught on the naval arms race between Britain and Germany just prior to WWI (a lot more interesting than it sounds!). Christopher Hibbert was one of the UK's much loved historians and biographers and amongst his many works his biography Queen Victoria - A Personal History is one of his best. Finally, perhaps my favourite biography of all is Everitt's Cicero - The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician. This man was at the centre of the Fall of the Roman Republic; and indeed fell along with it.

Speaking of which, Rubicon - The Last Years of the Roman Republic is a recent and deserved best-seller on this fascinating period. Holland writes well and gives a great overview of the events, men (and women!) and unavoidable wars that accompanied the fall of the Republic, or the rise of the Empire (depending upon your perspective). :) Holland's Persian Fire on the Greco-Persian Wars (think Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes! Think of the Movie 300, if you must) is equally gripping.

Perhaps my favourite history book, or series, of all is Shelby Foote's magisterial trilogy on the American Civil War The Civil War - A Narrative. Quite simply one of the best books I've ever read.

If, like me, you're interested in teh history of Africa, start at the very beginning with The Wisdom of the Bones by Alan Walker and Pat Shipman (both famous paleoanthropologists). Whilst not the very latest in recent studies (nothing on Homo floresiensis for example), it is still perhaps the best introduction to human evolution available. Certainly the best I've come across. Then check out Africa - Biography of a Continent. Finish with the two masterpieces The Scramble for Africa on how European colonialism planted the seeds of the "dark continents" woes ever since, and The Washing of the Spears, a gripping history of the Anglo-Zulu wars of the 1870's. If you ever saw the movie Rorke's Drift or Zulu!, you will love this book.

Hopkirk's The Great Game - The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia teaches us that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I should imagine that's enough to keep you going for the moment. I have plenty more suggestions if you want. :)

Africa: A Biography of the Continent by John Reader

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

Both cover some of the same concepts as GG&S, but in a much more rigorous fashion. Both are better reads with a less self-congratulatory tone and much more interesting information. GG&S is a kids book compared to these works, which is fine because GG&S is a great introduction to these sorts of concepts. Now you can get down to reading the good stuff.

Just did a quick search on Amazon and found this:

http://www.amazon.com/Africa-Biography-Continent-John-Reader/dp/067973869X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1416807357&sr=8-2&keywords=history+of+africa

It looks like a good overview of the entire continental history (both North African and Sub-Saharan), and it's not written like a textbook. That's usually a plus in my opinion.

I might actually pick it up myself as my knowledge of the continent isn't too strong.

Starting at $1.22 used doesn't hurt either.

> African countries can't prosper without white intervention, Apartheid wasn't so bad in the grand scheme of things, it was harder to develop in Europe

At no point was it said nor eluded to that African countries can't prosper without white intervention. Only that trends indicate that African countries struggle to prosper if they were not an ex-colony of a more technologically developed civilization.

> I mean let's delve into some of these views that you call truth..

Let's

> Climate: Africa is supposedly the hottest continent. 60% of it is desert. Forget the Sahara, Botswana and Namibia are largely desert countries. Very dry, very hot in summer, very cold in winter. So I'm not too sure where this idea of Europe having a harsher climate comes from. Yet it is supposedly "truth".

Desertification has only taken hold of 40% of the African landmass, not 60%.
Source: Africa: A Biography of a Continent. Logic dictates that it makes no sense for more advanced civilizations to seek colonies in Africa if their own continents were far more fertile in natural resources.

> English is not an African language, yet in South Africa you won't get far if you can't speak it. Does that mean the other African languages are inferior? No.. it simply means that our society does not give the freedom and room for the African to prosper in his own way. In SA, the more white you act, the further you'll get.

Language was never brought up as part of the original discussion put forward. Besides which, this argument is weak, English is an international standard used to govern the world's institutions. This is not Africa-specific. Furthermore, the English spoken in South Africa is South African English, along with the other 11 official languages of which 75% are Bantu languages. Would you prefer Africa to be isolated from the rest of the developed world by enforcing ?

> So in terms of states, the question is.. can we mock African states for struggling to adapt to a world that tells them to not be African?

No one is mocking anyone. Again, this is only a factual discussion. Emotions are not allowed here.

> Suffering of Africans: I don't think you or the other commenter fully grasp the dehumanization that Africans underwent. Think of your pet (if you've ever had one) and then consider that there was once a time when your pet was treated to a higher standard than some black Africans.

No one is denying the historical struggle of Africans but what does this have to do with the original discussion? Many humans have been subjugated throughout history, Africans are not exclusive to struggle. Refer original discussion.

> We live in a world where bullying is known to be mentally scarring. Now imagine what happened to Africans under colonialism and apartheid.. to be treated as if you are fundamentally and inherently lesser. And then you have the nerve to call that a 'holiday'?!? How do you even contrast such atrocities? And of course when they're contrasted, it's the black struggle that's made to seem lesser.

This has already been compared and contrasted. The point being made here was that Apartheid was far less dehumanizing than say the Rwandan Genocide, Soviet Forced Labour Gulags, Nazi Concentration Camps to name just a few. In light of this comparison Apartheid could be seen as a holiday in contrast.

> The reason I was so unwilling to discuss with the other commenter is because I'm tired of having to convince people that I am just as human as they are. That my blackness does not make me lesser.

No one is saying that you are less human for being black. The point being made is ...the realisation that the multicultural, rainbow experiment has failed and people are now turning to tried and tested governance strategies. We know that very homogeneous societies can work really well. We have not figured out how to deal with highly diverse societies because long term they tend towards instability.

> When people discuss this kind of stuff here, it's never from a human aspect. It's never "post-colonial African states fail because any human would struggle to find success under those settings" .. it's always "post-colonial African states fail because of blacks"

Failed post-colonial states could be made up of neon green one-eyed man-girls, the fact remains that they are failed post-colonial states no matter what the people look like that live in them.

> Even in this day and age, in 2018.. you still, as a black human, have to fight to try convince people that you're just as human as they are.

This strikes at the heart of the issue. You needn't convince anyone that you are human, I have only seen people being treated with dignity and respect, on this sub and on the street, both black and white. It is only those that have to fight to try convince people that reduces the inherent human respect that already existed. Those that fight for no valid reason (ie. you are not being subjugated nor dehumanized) create their own undoing.

I trust this clarifies.