The African Revolution: A History of the Long Nineteenth Century
Richard Reid, Princeton University Press, £30

IF YOU have a preference for a well researched book about a much neglected period of African history before the “scramble for Africa” written by a white academic, then The African Revolution: A History of the Long Nineteenth Century is for you.

The author, Richard Reid, is a professor of African history at the University of Oxford and a fellow at the university’s St Cross graduate college.  

He is clearly extremely learned on African history, having written numerous books on modern Africa. His latest work innovatively uses a stretch of road in east Africa in what is now known as Tanzania to help him to paint a picture of events leading up to the feasting on African labour and resources that took place during what he terms the “long nineteenth century.”

Reid is referring to the period through the 19th century to the beginning of World War I in 1914.

This terminology was used by the legendary Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm to describe the period from 1789 to 1914, as he referred in his brilliant Age of Extremes to the “short twentieth century” of 1914-1991.

Comparing the writing styles — and accessibility — of any historian to the great Hobsbawm is perhaps an extremely high bar to set. But establishing a yardstick by which we can measure how both scholars and activists will be able to use an historical work is, I believe, entirely legitimate.

The fact that I found Reid’s work less accessible than any of the half a dozen Hobsbawm historical works sitting on my bookshelves is no cause not to recommend this book — which I do. Reid’s book is clearly aimed at graduate students and other academics which, of course, is by no means a bad thing.

Anything that challenges the gross misconceptions of Africa as only existing in relation to either the western interventions of the Romans or Napoleon in Egypt, the transatlantic slave trade or the carving up of the continent and its subsequent brutal colonialism, is to be welcomed.

This book certainly does that and I congratulate Reid for his thorough research and obvious commitment to shining a light on the continent as having had an existence prior to the rape and pillage of the continent by white colonialists.

Activists will want to dip in and out of this book to help them to nail the lie that world’s second largest continent, of 11.7 million square miles, second most populous (despite having lost so many to enslavement to the west and east), and which covers 20 per cent of Earth’s land area, has only existed in relation to Western interference.

Reid clearly demonstrates that the history of this vast continent was not some nirvana without its fair share of problems and conflicts. Even though many of these problems were caused by Western intervention they were and remain issues that should be left to Africans to sort out. 

Eastern and central Africa, the primary subject of this book, was subjected to enslavement from the 7th century well into the 19th century. So-called modern slavery still deprives this part of Africa of many of its people to supply forced labour in the Arabian peninsula and north Africa. 

In this book, warlords, merchants and insurgents take their places, along with itinerant European missionaries and ethnologists in a continent teeming with political instability and transformation. It is an important contribution to the decolonisation of our thinking about Africa. 

I can’t help thinking that this decolonisation must make more space for the voices of African historians such as the excellent Professor Hakim Adi who was recently made redundant by the University of Chichester.
 
Professor Adi was instrumental in founding the History Matters initiative which encourages the development of young historians of African and Caribbean heritage. Widening the base of African historians will be critical to the future study of the continent.

Of course much of this history is not under-researched by writers of African descent. They simply do not enjoy the same access as many white historians, particularly those lucky enough to work at the very top universities.

Howard W French, known primarily as a journalist, for example, wrote an excellent and detailed history of Africa: Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War. A book that places Africa at the centre of world development. A place in history largely ignored or denied.

Having said that, Reid’s book is an important contribution for allowing the history of Africa to stand in its own right rather than in relation to Europeans.