Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

by Howard W. French

If the outflow of Africans that began in the late Middle Ages and peaked between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries represented a radical break with the continent’s past, the belated but dramatic rebound in African population growth that began during the interwar years of the twentieth century can be seen as another radical break—this time, though, not merely for Africa, but for all of humankind. The population of Africa, which in all of its history had never been known to undergo rapid sustained growth, increased by about 600 percent in the twentieth century, rising from perhaps 130 million people to 1 billion in one hundred years. Although this surpasses the pace of population growth ever previously seen on any continent in human history, most if not all of this growth should be understood as a kind of recovery or rebound from the depredations of the past. Africa’s twentieth-century population boom, however, came too late to position it well for competition with Europe, North America, and other global centers of wealth and power. That is because the foundations of the ascension of these regions had already been laid a century or more earlier, as the world became tightly stitched together via maritime transport and trade, helping ensure the North Atlantic countries a much more favorable position in an era of highly globalized economies.