Images of Africa: Stereotypes and Realities

by Daniel M. Mengara (editor)

This book offers those rare and exceptional insights into the historical and cultural processes through which various perceptions of Africa were crystallized into negative images and stereotypes that became so pervasive and profound that Africa is still trying to shake them off. Working from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, the contributors to this volume, including Martin Bernal, the world-renowed author of the revolutionary Black Athena, add to the pool of new Africanist/Afrocentrist knowledge and revisionism through which huge chunks of purposefully hidden and deformed African history have been uncovered. This book aims to set the record straight by deconstructing the multifarious images and stereotypes that came to deform, invalidate, and misconstruct Africa century after century and buried it under layers of historical fallacies. Contributors to this impressive volume

Martin Bernal, Miriam Dow, Buluda Itandala, Janet S. McIntosh, Mahamadou Diallo, Kristof Haavik, Mongi Bahloul, Jonathan Gosnell, Valerie Orlando, Jeannette Eileen Jones, John Gruesser, Victoria Ramirez, Jessica Levin, Martha Grise, Jean Muteba-Rahier, Bill Gaudelli, Augustine Okereke, David Pattison, and Sharmila Sen

413 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gabon

"One of the factors that can help to explain the reshaping, renaming and re mapping of the African continent can be found in the necessity for Europe to recreate a new home for itself in Africa."

"For the imperial process to be effective the knowledge that Africans had of themselves and if their own environment also had to be obliterated."

"Clearly, the Africa that we know or hear about today is, essentially, a European-made Africa."

"The rationale was therefore to show that Africa had a history of its own prior to European invasions, and that this history had been hijacked by the West for the purposes of colonization and world supremacy."