I just finished reading 1491, and I’m much enlightened, as well as royally pissed off on behalf of the Indians. Can someone recommend a similarly good and interesting book on the history of Sub-Saharan Africa, so I can be pissed off on behalf of black people?
Oops. Mods, could you please move this to Cafe Society?
The Fate of Africa is a good, sweeping, continent wide history of post-Independence Africa. I haven’t read the Fortunes of Africa, by the same author, but I would guess it is equally as good, and would probably start there. I recall Africa, Biography of a Continent as being just okay.
More recent, but are also a couple of good big histories of the Second Congo War-- Dancing in the Glory of Monsters and Africa’s World War. I would start with the former.
If you want to get really pissed off and are willing to keep things country-specific, read King Leopold’s Ghost, and then any Michela Wong’s books.
I’ve got tons more recommendations if there is something specific you are looking for.
The Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham is a really good history of the European conquest of the continent.
I came in to recommend The Fate of Africa, too. Very interesting stuff, though be advised that you’ll need a strong stomach: my primary memory of the book is that it seemed like one gruesome episode after another.
David Lamb’s The Africans is pretty out of date for a journalistic book (I believe it first came out in the mid-90s), but still worthwhile. And though it is mostly journalism (the author was a foreign correspondent in multiple places on the continent) he includes enough history and background that it makes for a good introduction.
I’m just finishing up 1491, too! (Were you inspired by that thread, I think in GD or GQ last week?) Really love it. Makes me realize how little of history I know/was taught and how much more there is to learn!
Maybe. I know I saw it somewhere on the Dope; I don’t remember where.
What stunned me is the Indians were not the primitive hunter gatherers I had thought. They had farms. They had cities! They built engineering works! Two continents worth of sophisticated cultures, wiped out by an infectious disease apocalypse.
King Leopold’s Ghost should do it, specifically about only the Congo and mostly specializing in the Belgian effort to extract maximum resources from the region.
Condensed horror, is that book.
Seconding King Leopold’s Ghost
Frontiers by Noel Mostert is a good book on South Africa
Sarkin’s Germany’s Genocide of the Herero is a nice unsettling read, if you want to see how deep the the roots of the Holocaust go.
I know it’s a hijack, but… what had your history and art lessons included on that subject? Mine were definitely skimpy, and we got more on precolombian art and architecture than detailed history (I think we know more about the first than the second, too), but the aztecs and the incas were mentioned quite a few times in both.
coffecat’s talking about the people in what would become the United States, I gather. Not many history books touch on Cahokia and the SCC.
There would be more information on pre-Columbian art and architecture than on history. A lot of the pre-Columbian Native American civilizations were not literate. In some cases, a civilization was literate, but another civilization was determined to destroy all of their writings (the Spanish destruction of Aztec books would be an example, and the Aztecs did some of that to the peoples they conquered, too). It would have been much harder to destroy all architectural evidence of the Aztec empire.
David Lamb’s book is terrible. Very superficial and coloured with Cold War-era biases. I was a fan of it when I was a teenager, for about a year I think, until I read more in depth.
One of the things I love about Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe (the last two books of which are The Cartoon History of the Modern World) is that he covers areas of the world usually ignored by other comprehensive histories, such as India, China, and Sub-Saharan Africa. He only gets to sub-Saharan Africa in the two volumes of the Cartoon History of the Modern World, but it’s worth having a look at.
He doesn’t really cover most of colonialism and the slave trade, though. But having a lot of early neglected African history – especially in comic book form – is a hoot.
J.B. Peires, The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of Their Independence
Martin Hall, Farmers, Kings, and Traders: The People of Southern Africa, 200-1860
J.D. Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa
But if the OP wants the African equivalent of 1491, clearly he is asking for something about pre-colonial Africa.