Africa, Old and New
Curtin, Philip D.
Africa, Old and New AFRICA: HISTORY OF A CONTINENT, by Basil Davidson. Photographs by Werner Forman. Macmillan. 320 pp. $25. Reviewed by Philip D. Curtin A FRiCA emerged all too suddenly...
...But this is the deception...
...The format of Basil Davidson's most recent book is that of a Christmas gift book, beautifully illustrated with forty-two full-page color photographs by Werner Forman, 240 black-and-white photographs, and thirteen maps...
...Reviewed by Philip D. Curtin A FRiCA emerged all too suddenly into the consciousness of the American public...
...Many journalists were sent to Africa with no more background than the old myth of African savagery...
...It would be worth its price for the photographs alone...
...When this was overlaid by three or four days of bar-room conversation in each capital, the result was a series of dispatches that provided informa tion but not understanding...
...More important still, Davidson writes the history of Africa, not merely a shallow background for present day events...
...Rather than boiling down or rewriting the synthetic works of scholars to make them palatable to the general public, he went to the latest research findings and published his own syntheses—and long before the scholars had got around to that part of their work...
...Coming to grips with conflicting views of this many-sided continent is far from easy...
...The general reader with time to read only one book about Africa could do far worse than choosing this one...
...Two decades ago, the ordinary educated man was likely to know almost nothing about the tropical part of the continent...
...Africa, Old and New AFRICA: HISTORY OF A CONTINENT, by Basil Davidson...
...In this sense, he is very much concerned with Africa of the present, but he seeks to explain it in perspective by looking for fundamental patterns of change in the African past...
...Since then, he has published a half-dozen books in a style all too rare in this country...
...He is therefore concerned with isolated iron-age African civilizations, with the results of maritime contact since the Fifteenth Century, and with the long-term consequences of the slave trade—with these, rather than the particular failings or successes of British, French, or Belgian colonial rule...
...This is the real significance of Davidson's contribution...
...Nor is Davidson's account on the old-fashioned pattern of names and numbers without meaning or interpretation...
...Then came the rise of national independence, the Congo crisis, the Rhodesia crisis, the Algerian war—and along with these a new attention to African affairs in the press, the mass media, and the book publishing industry...
...The old image began to change, but the changes are still incomplete and contradictory...
...Africa has therefore continued to be the worst reported of major world areas...
...It is not an ordinary "gift" book: The printed text is a major contribution in its own right, and the pictures were obviously chosen to go with the text, rather than the other way round...
...Specialists will disagree in detail, but few will disagree with the main line of interpretation...
...He had, of course, the vague impressions drawn from Tarzan movies, cartoons of cannibals around the stew pot, and stories of big game hunting, and he also had a profound impression that there was little more worth knowing...
...The result is a book up-to-date and scholarly in the best sense of the term, but popular in style and eminently readable...
...Africa: History of a Continent is revisionist, in that it seeks to overturn the old myth of a savage Africa, but it is not a false glorification of an imaginary African past...
...More than half the book passes before its narrative reaches the Twelfth Century, and the Nineteenth Century European conquests appear only on Page 275...
...Beginning a quarter-century ago with an interest in current African events, he moved in the late 1950's to a writing career devoted principally to African history...
...The history also covers the entire continent, so that crucial historical relations are not lost by a false division of black Africa from white along the line of the Sahara...
...Book publishers have come forth with a mass of "backgrounders" of unequal merit, picture books of striking beauty, and frankly partisan tracts...
Vol. 31 • April 1967 • No. 4
