#history of africa
Portrait of a woman spinning wool somewhere in Algeria, c. 1870-1900. Published by French photography firm Neurdein Brothers.
Source: Library of Congress.
Post link
Daguerreotype portrait of a young Nubian man possibly selling food in Aswan, Egypt, 1844. By French photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey.
Source: Gallica Digital Library.
Post link
Girls package cigarettes in a factory in Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana. Using tobacco grown in Ghana, the factory could produce 160 packets of twenty cigarettes every minute. January 1957.
(The National Archives UK)
Post link
A Dental Assistant attends a patient at the Dental Unit, Princess Margaret Hospital, Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika (modern day Tanzania), c. 1959-1960.
(National Archives UK)
Post link
A History of Sub-Saharan Africa, 2nd ed, by Robert O Collins and James M Burns, 2013
This was an attempt to combat my very Euro-centric knowledge of history, and I think it would be a great start for anyone wanting to do the same. It works both thematically and chronologically, with dips into detail of individuals and areas which I find keeps me more engaged with ‘stories’ in history. Any survey history with this sort of breadth is going to both pass over some things, and paint others with a broad brush (for example, the Mau Mau Uprising gets two sentences), but from the perspective of someone coming to this subject with only patchy background knowledge it feels like they have chosen well.
The impact of the environment in shaping political issues is well presented - like empires of horsemen who came to a dead stop at tetse fly areas, as they just couldn’t keep the horses alive to keep expanding. (It’s a pity that books which look into this in more detail eg Sub-Saharan Africa: An Environmental History are so incredibly expensive).
Each chapter ends with “Further Reading”, so it can be used as a guide to go deeper into the subject.
Post link
