African History: A Very Short Introduction

by John Parker

published Basekabaka be Buganda (‘The Kings of Buganda’), the first of three works in Luganda on the history and customs of his people.

recension

colonial rule in Africa was done on the cheap.

officials believed

chief agents of economic advance should be white settlers

For indigenous African populations, this influence tended to be detrimental: settlers

Gentrification

were usually allocated the best agricultural land, whose previous guardians were reduced to being landless labourers or were forced into overcrowded ‘native reserves’.

Gentrification

contradiction at the heart of colonialism.

either outright ‘resistance’ or self-interested ‘collaboration’.

Coercion and domination, in short, are out;

‘accommodation’, ‘encounter’, ‘appropriation’, and ‘African agency’ are in.

David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism

Niall Ferguson’s Empire.

Cann...

argues that the key to understanding imperial rule was not the perceived racial difference between the British ruler and the native ‘other’, but the mutual class affinity ...

Ferguson’s ...

argues that the British empire was a positive force in spreading free market capitalism, the rule of law, and democracy – values that m...

‘colonial rule’

‘invention of tradition’

According to one scholar, Mahmood Mamdani,

indirect rule created a series of ‘decentralized despotisms’, illegitimate power structures that survived the end of colonial rule and that in part explain the political authoritarianism of contemporary Africa.

‘constructivist’;

King Njoya of Bamum

oversaw the invention of a new religion combining Islam, Christianity, and indigenous practices,

Britain and France, attempted to control change by creating reformed, more inclusive colonial systems.

In 1945, only four African countries, Ethiopia (liberated from Italian rule in 1941), Liberia, Egypt, and South Africa, were independent

By the mid-1950s, all of North Africa except Algeria was independent

the era of anti-colonial nationalism and liberation was also that of the emergence of African history as an academic discipline.

Léopold Senghor,

Félix Houphouët-Boigny,

Lamine Guèye

Kwame Nkrumah,

Mau Mau uprising

Milton Margai

1948

the creation at Northwestern University

of the first interdisciplinary African studies programme in North America,

‘History’ at the new African universities still meant essentially European history,

a course titled ‘The History of European Activities in Africa’, the main text for which was The Colonization of Africa by Alien Races

The ‘Ibadan School’,

came to be associated with a particular research agenda:

a concern with the precolonial period, especially precolonial state formation; with the equation of ‘trade and politics’ in particular localities; with resistance to colonial conquest; and with the eme...

Trade and Politics in the Niger ...

a study of African-European interaction using European written sources but from a disti...

Basil Davidson

Thomas Hodgkin.

Nationalism in Colonial Africa (1956),

set out to locate the emerging anti-colonial struggles in historical context.

historians strove to bring to life in their writings powerful precolonial states,

nationalist politicians sought