A grand attempt to illuminate the history of the "dark continent,"
using an almost stunning blend of disciplines from geology to
anthropology to agronomy. Despite the breadth of the title, Reader
(Missing Links, 1981, etc.) largely ignores Africa north of the
Sahara - a significant lacuna. Still, any attempt to cover billions
of years of history (never mind 50-plus countries), will always
result in gaps, elisions, and exclusions. One can quibble with his
extremely detailed treatment of human evolution - a subject he has
written about extensively - or the relative short shrift he gives
to modern African history, but it all comes down to a question of
balance, and for the most part Reader does an admirable job of
keeping his story rolling along. He begins right at the beginning
with the formation of Earth and the primitive stirrings of life.
Through an impressive mustering of scientific data, he recounts how
changing conditions on the savanna opened a narrow niche that
favored the evolution of hominids and eventually, through the
relentless process of survival of the fittest, Homo sapiens. Reader
is not so much a historian of dates and personalities, but of mass
events and movements. He regards competition for resources,
climatic shifts, geology and geography as infinitely more important
in shaping history than any number of "great men" and their
ideologies. For example, he sees slavery as a continent-wide
catastrophe that drove everything from the rise of African kingdoms
to the loss of the labor - and all that it could have created - of
11 million people, to the great South African diaspora that is
usually attributed to the predations of Shaka Zulu. Once Africa
entered the realm of formal, written history, the results have been
almost unremittingly bleak. It's an old mantra, but the price of
European civilization has been enormously high. And the
postcolonial era hasn't been much better. That hairless hominid who
spread out across the world has changed everything except his
essential, animal self. Formidably researched, always readable, but
necessarily incomplete. (Kirkus Reviews)
The roots of our ancestry lie in Africa. John Reader's brilliant, panoramic survey traces the development of this huge continent from its earliest geological formation and the beginnings of life, through to the civil war and genocide that mark it today. He explores the complex, widely differing societies from the great inland estuaries of the Niger and the Okavango, to the rain forests of the Equator and the deserts of the North, the devastating impact of European exploitation on those societies and the recent emergence of independent nations. Challenging many widely held misconceptions, his illuminating account will change the way many people think about Africa.
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