The Africa Factbook
Edited by Baffour Ankomah
$50 Book of African Records
ISBN: 978-1-77925-413-9
This book is, in many ways, a continuation of a project initiated in the 1960s by Ghana’s first President Dr Kwame Nkrumah and other newly liberated African leaders who, at the founding meeting of the Organisation of African Unity, requested the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to undertake a ground-breaking project in an effort to decolonise their history,
This brought about the largest group of historians ever assembled, around 350 scholars in total, to complete a seminal history of Africa. Its 11 volumes were entitled the General History of Africa (GHA).
Jan Vansina, a pioneering figure in the study of African history, called the GHA “the most important venture of this century, not only because of its size or complexity, but because it involved authors from the most diverse origins belonging to all the schools of thought then active in international academic circles”.
Vansina’s insistence that it was possible to study Africa in the era prior to European contact, and his development of rigorous historical methods for doing so, played a major role in countering the idea that cultures without texts had no history.
However, not all readers of the GHA were as uncritical of the work as Vansina. There was disquiet that women were only mentioned on four pages of the 11 volumes. It was typical of the under-representation of women in historical texts of the time.
But this is a different era and a similar criticism cannot be levelled at the Africa Factbook, a work supported by the African Union. Nine contributors and 13 researchers helped to assemble the studies in this volume which relys in large part on the archives of New African magazine and the contributions of its former editor, Baffour Ankomah.
The book is in four alphabetically demarcated sections:
Section A sets out to bust some of the prevailing myths about Africa; Section B deals with country data and profiles Africa’s 55 nations.; Section C is about African inventions, journeys, pioneers, discoveries, innovations, writing systems, etc., while section D deals with the African diaspora, otherwise known as Global Africa.
Section A quickly demonstrates gender equality using an image of one of the most significant woman of ancient Egypt, Queen Tiye, the wife of the pharaoh Amenhotep III.
Although she is less well known than Queens Nefertiti or Cleopatra, an image of her statue illustrates an early chapter ‘Who were the Ancient Egyptians?’ profiling the work of Ayi Kwei Armah, the Ghanaian scholar and Egyptologist. Armah is perhaps best known for his memoirs, The Eloquence of the Scribes, that traces, ”without a shadow of doubt” according to this book, the identity of modern Black Africans.
This remains a controversial view, perhaps because Europeans (who monopolised early studies of Egypt) doubted the ability of Black Africans to develop such a sophisticated civilisation.
Queen Tiye (1398-1338 BCE) was a queen of Egypt of the 18th dynasty, mother of Akhenaten, and grandmother of both Tutankhamun and Ankhsenamun. She had an enormous influence on the reigns of her husband and son as well as holding sway with rulers of foreign nations.
Although of polytheistic faith, she supported the Pharaoh Akhenaten and his monotheistic reforms. She was buried in the Valley of the Kings. Her mummy has positively been identified as that known as the Elder Lady, and a lock of her hair, probably a keepsake of the young king’s, was found in Tutankhamun’s tomb.
More than 120 pages (over four chapters) are devoted to Egyptian and Sudanese history that, rather than simply replicating the many studies that are available, takes aim to correct the Eurocentric myths that continue to perpetuate about these extraordinary civilisations.
Trevor-Roper is challenged
Following the first four chapters, the reader is offered a demolition of the assertions of British academic Professor Hugh Trevor- Roper that “Africa has no history”.
The facts presented might have been able to patiently enlighten the late Professor (a confused European if ever there was one!) about the flourishing kingdoms, cities and towns that astounded Europeans when they first arrived on the continent.
Among the many examples of civilisations that the 15th century visitors were confronted with were the 1,000 year-old Eredo ruins of south-west Nigeria, a metropolis that would have dwarfed Baghdad, Cairo, Rome, Lisbon or London.
Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, who died in 2003 aged 89 years-old, might also have changed his ideas about African history if he had known about the remarkable Kingdom of Kongo and its capital Mbanza Kongo; the magnificent Benin City; or the astounding Nok civilisation.
And Trevor-Roper might have needed to review his opinions regarding Africa if he had learnt about the Khoisan of southern Africa (the first Africans); the Later Stone-Age cultures of southern Africa; the African foundations of world’s religions; the Moors; the Dogons (pre-eminent African astro-physisists); and the Great Zimbabwe complex.
The Africa Factbook devotes a chapter to each of these themes before taking the reader into one of history’s most appalling episode.
History’s most appalling episode.
The book discusses how enslaved Africans were taken from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa and beyond, and discusses both the trans-Atlantic and trans-Indian Ocean slave trades.
The focus is on accountability, specifically on just who was responsible and who profited from this barbaric commerce.
Alarmingly, the roles of the Christian churches (as well as those of the Islamic faith) are clearly at the forefront.
For example, in the chapter quantifying the “true cost of slavery’ the book states that in the early 15th century, the first record of enslaved Africans brought to Europe were of 10 captives who were first presented to the Portuguese king who made a gift of them to the Pope.
The Pope was so delighted that he bestowed “the right to possession of all the areas” that the Portuguese crown ‘discovered’. It gave the green light to the nascent trade in African slaves that exploded with the European’s discoveries of the New World, i.e. the Americas.
This followed hot on the heels of Christopher Columbus who in 1492 who ‘found’ America, and Pedro Alvaras Cabral who arrived in Brazil in 1500, as well as the later arrival of French, Dutch, Spanish and British adventurers who flocked to colonise the Caribbean and the ‘New World’
With the Europeans colonisation came the need for cheap labour to exploit the potential for mining and growing sugar, cotton and tobacco; enslaving Africa’s peoples held a solution.
So began the appalling triangular transatlantic slave trade – where trade goods were taken to Africa by ship to barter for enslaved people that were then transported to the Americas.
Estimates of the number of enslaved that made the notorious middle passage vary, but it is thought some 12 million were transported and possibly two million perished either on the forced march from Africa’s interior to the coast, or on the subsequent voyage.
After delivering the enslaved, the ships then loaded agricultural goods, principally sugar and cotton, for a return voyage to Europe. This trade was extremely lucrative, and the Africa Factbook identifies many of the European monarchs and personalities who became hugely wealthy and influential.
The profits of slavery
This book tends to focus on the British merchants and plantation owners, which included the Church of England (CofE) that profited by this despicable trade. It offers a whole chapter on how the CofE treated its enslaved, its involvement in the sugar trade, and its ownership of the 700-acre Codrington plantation in Barbados.
Meanwhile, Arab slavers both marched African captives across the Sahara to North African ports or delivered them to ports on the Indian Ocean to be sent to the Gulf.
The book quotes the historian Paul Lovejoy who estimates that the Arabs shipped more than four million Africans across the Indian Ocean and Red Sea to India and the Gulf.
The demand for reparations
The African Factbook strongly argues for reparations for the descendants of the enslaved over five chapters. Barbadian Ambassador David Comissiong is a leading voice on the Reparations Committee. In July 2013, 15 heads of government of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) made an historic decision to launch a reparations claim against eight European countries.
The claim was for £178.6bn ($290bn) in today’s money values. But the claim did not include reparation to compensate for the loss to Africa’s development nor for the misery endured by her peoples.
It should not be forgotten that the enslaved Africans carried with them considerable intellectual property. For example, French and English accounts of sub-Saharan Africans from the West African hinterlands describe inoculation methods for the deadly smallpox and yaws (another pox-producing disease) which predate Western Europeans’ familiarity with the practice.
In addition, many enslaved Africans had knowledge of agricultural practices that they carried to the New World and helped develop the very plantations where they toiled.
Black lives matter
One of the historical consequences of slavery is Global Africa, otherwise known as the African diaspora. The word diaspora is from the Greek meaning ‘dispersal’, and also, in this sense, includes the voluntary movement of those of African descent who have left the mother continent.
Global Africa is of such importance that the African Union defines the diaspora as its sixth region (after west, east, north, south and central) with a diaspora division that is tasked with “managing and coordinating other forms of interaction between the AU and diaspora organisations worldwide”. It’s a global population of nearly 350 million people.
Africa Factbook’s section D, which is an addition to previous editions, deals with the African Diaspora by outlining some of its peoples’ past achievements, everything from the invention of traffic light to the development of CT scanners that underpin modern medicine.
The African diaspora continues to develop as a demographic that will soon make up over 25% of the global population.
Nevertheless, those of African descent worldwide still suffer, to a greater or lesser extent, discrimination.
The book profiles various global diaspora communities. As well as the African descendants that have settled in Europe in countries such as Britain and France, the book covers Germany (with a chapter on Africans who lived in the country before the Nazi era); And the African diaspora in both the South Pacific and India are featured.
The USA also figures prominently The book celebrates the “long, rightful strides towards progress” that Black America has made while also accepting the journey is still not completed.
African-Latinos, those of the Americas – Brazil, Argentina, Columbia, Mexico, and Chile – all have chapters, as does one that describes Haiti’s history – global Africa’s first independent state.
Brazil, as South America’s largest country by area (roughly the size of the USA) and demography (a population of 217 million), is especially interesting.
As the African Factbook states:” Today, Brazil’s economy, demography, culture, languages, faiths and religions have been shaped by its history of enslavement.”
Millions of African were taken to Brazil to work on the sugar plantations and in the mines, and it is thought that today about half of the population have African ancestry.
One of the most fascinating things about the history of Africans in Brazil is the development, possibly uniquely of quilimbos (although Jamaica’s Maroons followed a similar concept). Quilombos were created by Africans who escaped their captors to establish their own settlements, indeed their own nations.
But, as is the case in so many countries, prejudice against a darker skin is still evident. In short, it is as Dr Melida Harris Barrow, vice president of the AU’s 6th region and African Diaspora ‘s Economic Community says: “Now is the time for Africa and all of her children to come together and unite. We must learn our history, heal and harmonise for our social, economic and political benefit.”
This weighty book (at four kilos) follows in the tradition of the General History of Africa, but is in one tome, not eleven volumes. It is a magnificent effort on the part of the editor, Baffour Ankomah and the other contributors to present the real Africa obscured by centuries of prejudice and ignorance. What is more, it sells for just $50 if you can find it.