Introduction
The Gilf Kebir plateau is the size of Switzerland. Its name means ‘Great Barrier’. Several expeditions ventured there in the 1920s and 1930s in the hope of finding the ‘lost oasis’ of Zerzura, a legend mentioned in a fifteenth-century manuscript known as the ‘Book of Hidden Pearls’. The Book describes Zerzura as a whitewashed city of the desert on whose gate is carved a bird and it offers a guide to treasure hunters seeking its riches. ‘Take with your hand the key in the beak of the bird, then open the door of the city. Enter, and there you will find great riches . . .’ The word zerzura is also the Arabic name for a bird – the white-crowned wheatear – that is common in the eastern Sahara.
During an expedition to Gilf Kebir in 1933, a Hungarian aristocrat, Count László Almásy, discovered the Cave of Swimmers containing rock art dating back 10,000 years. In his 1934 book The Unknown Sahara, Almásy devotes a chapter to the cave. His exploits as an explorer and spy form the basis of Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient (1993) and the 1996 Oscar-winning film made of it. Saul Kelly (2002) provides a vivid account of the Zerzura Club and its members.
Modern researchers suggest that as the desert spread between 3000 BCE and 1500 CE, drying up water-bearing depressions and turning them into oases, many Zerzuras emerged in the eastern Sahara, known only to tribal elders for a while before being lost to human memory and becoming legend.
Part I
The word ‘pharaoh’ is related etymologically to the ancient Egyptian term per ao, which means ‘Great House’ and refers to the palace where the ruler resided. Ancient Egyptians called their territory kemet, which means ‘black land’ and refers to the fertile black soils of the Nile flood plains, distinguishing it from the ‘red land’ of the desert – deshret – that stretched to the east and west of the Nile. They called the Nile itself simply ‘Iteru’ – ‘the River’.
It was the Greeks who coined the word aigyptos (Egyptian) to represent the name of the inhabitants of the Nile River basin as well as the territory in which they lived. This Greek word had ancient Egyptian origins. It was a Greek corruption of the ancient Egyptian name for the pharaonic city of Memphis: Hi-kaptah, the castle of the god Ptah, who was said to be the creator of the universe. The Arab conquerors of Egypt later called their new capital located near Memphis Misr and the inhabitants Misriyyin.
The Greek historian Herodotus, often described as ‘the father of history’, visited Egypt in the fifth century BCE when it was under Persian rule and wrote a comprehensive account of the country in Book II of The Histories, much of it based on conversations he held with Egyptian priests in Memphis, Heliopolis and Thebes. ‘The Egypt to which the Greeks go in their ships is an acquired country, the gift of the Nile,’ he wrote.
The literature on ancient Egypt is voluminous. But several modern accounts stand out. Toby Wilkinson’s The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (2010) elegantly covers the whole period from 3000 BCE to Cleopatra; Joyce Tyldesley (2010) writes intimately about the Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt; John Romer (2012) focuses upon the importance of archaeological discoveries; George Hart (2010) provides a compendium on the thirty dynasties of Egyptian pharaohs; Joyce Tyldesley (2008) and Stacy Schiff (2010) delve into the career of Cleopatra VII; the Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000), edited by Ian Shaw, includes a wealth of information. Justin Marozzi (2008) follows in the footsteps of Herodotus. Robert Collins (2002) writes eruditely about the Nile. Martin Meredith (2001) deals with elephant history.
The name Nubia is derived from the ancient Egyptian word ‘nuba’ meaning ‘gold’. Standard works on Nubia, Kush and Meroe include those by William Adams (1977); David Edwards (2004); Robert Morkot (2000); and Derek Welsby (1998, 2002).
The people living in the desert region to the west of the Nile Valley were known to Egyptians as Libu, from which the name Libya is derived. The Greeks used the name Libyans to describe the inhabitants of Cyrenaica where they set up a colony based on Cyrene. The Libyans were part of an indigenous population living across north Africa that came to be known commonly as Berber. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans used the term Berber. It came into use only in the eighth century after the Arab invasion. The Berbers refer to themselves as Imazighen and to their language as Tamazight. Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress (1996) explore Berber history.
The history of Carthage and its rivalry with Rome is vividly portrayed by Richard Miles (2010). The Phoenicians called the city Qart-Hadasht, meaning ‘New City’. Roman usage turned it into Carthago. Hanno’s journey down the west coast of Africa is known primarily from a brief Greek account – Periplus or Circumnavigation – preserved in a single Byzantine manuscript. The text claims to be a version of an account posted in the temple of Kronos in Carthage which was destroyed by the Romans.
Rome’s occupation of north Africa is covered in detail by Susan Raven (1993). It was only under Roman rule that the names of Numidia and Mauretania, derived from local tribes, acquired territorial meaning. The term ‘Moor’ is derived from the Mauri.
Researchers in the twentieth century identified four main language-families:
• The Afro-Asiatic family, which includes Ancient Egyptian, Berber, Hausa, Omotic, Amharic, Arabic and Hebrew. Afro-Asiatic speakers expanded southwards into and around the Ethiopian highlands, through the Horn of Africa and on to the east African plateau where they became the ancestors of Cushitic-speaking peoples.
• The Nilo-Saharan family, which is based in the central Sahara and Sudan and includes the Nilotic languages spoken in parts of north-eastern Africa.
• The Niger-Congo family, which is spread across the southern half of west Africa and includes as a sub-family all the Bantu languages spoken in Africa south of the equator.
• The Khoisan family, which is an amalgam of two closely related languages spoken by San and Khoikhoi. San is the name of southern African aboriginal hunter-gatherers given to them by Khoikhoi, originally used in a pejorative sense. European settlers later referred to San as ‘Bushmen’, a name that some San still prefer.
Africa’s rock art provides a vital guide to its prehistory. There may be as many as 200,000 rock-art sites on the continent. A useful introduction to San art and culture is provided in Origins (2006), a collection of essays edited by Geoffrey Blundell. Some of the best preserved rock-art sites are found in Niger’s Ahir mountains, in the Tibesti mountains of northern Chad and southern Libya, and in the Tassili n’Ajjer range in south-east Algeria. Other early art forms include terracotta sculptures and bronze-casting. The ‘Nok Culture’, named after a site near Taruga, in central Nigeria, was well established by 500 BCE; sculptors there produced a large number of beautifully constructed terracotta pottery heads. An archaeological site at Igbo-Ukwu in the forests of south-eastern Nigeria yielded cast bronzes of great skill and artistic beauty dated to the tenth century CE (see Thurstan Shaw, 1977). In the thirteenth century, Ife metalworkers were skilled enough to cast sculptures in zinc brass, using the sophisticated ‘lost wax’ process. An encyclopaedic work on African art was produced for the occasion of a London exhibition in 1996 by the Royal Academy of Arts, edited by Tom Phillips.
A number of single volumes deal with Africa’s early history and general history. They include Robert Collins and James Burns (2007); Christopher Ehret (2002); John Iliffe (2nd edn, 2007); John Reader (1998); and Kevin Shillington (3rd edn, 2012).
Part II
Although many traditional beliefs survive, Christianity and Islam have become the dominant religions of Africa. Diarmaid MacCulloch (2009) provides an erudite history of Christianity. Nehemia Levtzion and Randall Pouwels (2000) have brought together a useful collection of essays on The History of Islam in Africa. Joyce Salisbury (1997) examines the life of Vibia Perpetua. Athanasius’s Life of St. Antony was republished in 2003.
The main source for the life of Frumentius is an account made by the fourth-century Roman church historian Rufinus. During a visit to Tyre, Rufinus met Edesius, the brother of Frumentius, who relayed the story of what had happened to them. Details of the story are included in Stuart Munro-Hay’s Aksum (1991). In Ethiopian church tradition, Frumentius is given the name Abuna Selama Kesate Berhan: Father of Peace, Revealer of Light. Frumentius is credited with the first translation of the Bible into Ge’ez. David Phillipson (1998) also deals with Aksum and early Abyssinian history.
Islam, like Christianity, was beset at an early stage by rancorous divisions between a number of competing sects, all of which made their appearance in Africa. Sunni Muslims accepted the legitimacy of the caliphs who succeeded to the authority of Muhammad and followed four main schools of legal interpretation. The major dissenting sect, the Shia, pledged loyalty to an alternate line of caliphs or imams, descended from Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet through marriage to Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima; and it produced a different set of sharia interpretations and ritual practices. Another dissenting version of Islam with strong appeal in north Africa was Kharaj – secession. The Kharijites refused submission to any line of hereditary caliphs. Jamil Abun-Nasr (1987) covers the history of the Maghreb in the Islamic period.
For several centuries before the introduction of the camel, horses, oxen and donkeys were employed in the Sahara to transport goods. Rock engravings and paintings at hundreds of sites in the desert also depict the use of horse-drawn chariots and wagons. But these were never used for the purposes of commerce, only for fighting, hunting, racing and ceremonial parades. Edward Bovill (1958, 1995) produced a pioneering work on The Golden Trade of the Moors; Ralph Austen (2010) provides a wealth of scholarly detail.
The long-distance traffic in slaves across the Sahara is tackled by Paul Lovejoy (3rd edn, 2012) as part of his wider history of slavery in Africa which includes much statistical evidence. John Wright (2007) also covers the trans-Saharan slave trade.
In The African Past (1964), Basil Davidson has compiled a wide range of chronicles and records of chiefs and kings, travellers and merchant adventurers, poets, pirates, priests, soldiers and scholars. His anthology includes an account written by Ibn Fadl Allah al-Omari about the visit made by Mansa Musa to Cairo in 1324. Al-Omari travelled to Cairo twelve years after the event and spoke to officials who were still dealing with the aftermath. In 2012, a list of the richest people in the history of humankind compiled by researchers for the US website celebritynetworth.com placed Mansa Musa at the top. Davidson also includes an extract from Ibn Battuta’s account of his travels in Mali. A fuller version of Ibn Battuta’s travels in Africa is provided in a 2002 edition edited by Tim Mackintosh-Smith.
When The Thousand and One Nights was translated into European languages in the eighteenth century, Sindbad the Sailor and his adventures became a permanent part of Western folklore. According to Sindbad, on his seventh and last voyage to the Zanj coast, he came across an elephant’s graveyard. It happened, he said, after he had been captured by pirates and sold to a rich merchant. The merchant gave him a bow and arrows and ordered him to shoot elephants for their tusks from hiding places in trees. For two months, he managed to kill an elephant every day. Then one morning he found himself surrounded by a herd of angry elephants. They tore down his tree and carried him off on a long march, leaving him on a hillside covered with elephant bones and tusks. He realised, he said, it was an elephant’s graveyard and that he had been brought there to be shown there was no need to kill elephants when their tusks could be obtained merely for the trouble of picking them up.
Randall Pouwels (1987) covers the impact of Islam on the east African coast. Peter Garlake, an authority on early Islamic architecture on the east African coast and on the ancient city of Zimbabwe, provides a useful illustrated account of The Kingdoms of Africa (1978). David Beach (1980, 1994) writes about the Shona and Zimbabwe. Paul Henze (2000), Harold Marcus (2002) and Richard Pankhurst (2001) cover the peoples and history of Abyssinia/Ethiopia.
Part III
Prince Henry (1394–1460), often known as ‘Henry the Navigator’, supervised Portugal’s early expeditions to the west coast of Africa but did not join them. His role was recorded by Gomes Eanes da Zurara (Azurara), chronicler, royal librarian and keeper of archives, in Discovery of Guinea, completed in 1453 and translated by C.R. Beazley and Edgar Prestage (1896–9). Peter Russell (2000) provides a modern biography of Henry. Alvise da Ca’ da Mosto is usually known as Cadamosto. The original account of his travels was published in 1507 and translated by G.R. Crone (1937). Eric Axelson writes about the voyages of Diogo Cão in Congo to Cape (1973). The kingdom of Kongo is explored by Georges Balandier (1968); Anne Hilton (1985); and John Thornton (1983). The texts of Afonso’s letters to the kings of Portugal are included in Correspondence de Dom Afonso, roi du Congo, 1506–1543, edited by Louis Jadin and Mireille Decorato, published by the Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, Brussels (1974). Extracts can also be found in Basil Davidson’s anthology. Peter Forbath (1977) writes vividly about the history of the Congo River.
Vasco da Gama’s epic voyage around Africa to India and back to Portugal lasted in all 732 days during which he covered 24,000 miles. Alvaro Velho’s roteiro was published in 1898 as A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, translated and edited by E.G. Ravenstein. Nigel Cliff (2013) provides a modern account. Richard Hall (1996) writes about the exploits of Ahmad Ibn Majid. Portuguese activities in south-east Africa are covered by Eric Axelson (1973) and Malyn Newitt (1973). Francisco Alvares’s account of the land of Prester John runs to 151 chapters. It was published in Lisbon in 1540 in a book entitled ‘A true relation of the Lands of Prester John’. It was translated by C.F. Beckingham and G.W.B. Huntingford and published in an English edition in 1961. Tadesse Tamrat (1972) provides an outstanding modern account of the period.
Modern research on the trans-Atlantic slave trade starts with Elizabeth Donnan’s Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, published in five volumes (1930–5). Philip Curtin’s pioneering census was published in 1969. Curtin’s other work on slavery includes Africa Remembered: Narratives of West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade (1967). Curtin’s census was taken further by David Eltis and colleagues in 1999 with a statistical analysis of 27,233 slaving voyages. In 2010 David Eltis and David Richardson published an Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which included the 1999 analysis. Paul Lovejoy’s Transformations in Slavery (3rd edn, 2012) provides a wealth of material on the slave trade across Africa. Hugh Thomas (1997) covers four hundred years of the Atlantic trade in a grand narrative. John Thornton (1998) adds further perspectives. Olaudah Equiano’s autobiographical account was first published in 1789.
Studies of specific locations add much detail: James Searing on Senegal; Patrick Manning on Dahomey; Robin Law on Ouidah and on the Slave Coast; Alan Ryder on Benin; Robert Harms on the Congo Basin; Joseph Millar on Angola. Bruce Chatwin’s historical novel dealing with the slave trade The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980) is based on the career of the Brazilian slave-trader Francisco Félix de Souza, who settled permanently in the town in the 1820s.
Southern Africa’s history has been examined more thoroughly than any other region. Leonard Thompson (2001) provides a magisterial overview. Another outstanding work is the volume of essays The Shaping of South African Society, edited by Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (2nd edn, 1989). The Cape’s slave society is dealt with by Elizabeth Eldredge and Fred Morton (eds., 1994); Robert Ross (1983); Robert Shell (1994); Nigel Worden (1985); and a collection of essays edited by Nigel Worden and Clifton Crais (1994). Hermann Giliomee (2003) provides a detailed biography of the Afrikaner people.
Part IV
The standard work on Egypt’s history through thirteen centuries from the Arab conquest to the twentieth century is the two-volume Cambridge History of Egypt: Volume 1 (2008), edited by Carl Petry, covers the Islamic period from 640 to the Ottoman conquest in 1517; Volume 2 (2008), edited by Martin Daly, covers the period from the Ottoman conquest to the twentieth century.
Hizir Barbarossa (a name meaning ‘Redbeard’ in Italian) was so successful in his maritime jihad against European Christians that in 1533 he was summoned to Istanbul, appointed admiral of the Ottoman fleet and chief governor of North Africa, and given the honorary title of Khair ad-Din – ‘Goodness of the Faith’, the name by which he is best known today.
Using historical records, Robert Davis of Ohio State University has compiled a detailed account of European slave populations of the Barbary Coast. In Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters (2004) he calculates that during the boom years of the white slave trade – the century from 1580 to 1680 – a ‘workable total’ for the number of white slaves held there ‘averaged out’ at about 35,000: 27,000 in Algiers and its dependencies; 6,000 in Tunis; and 2,000 in Tripoli and other smaller centres. With an annual attrition rate of about 25 per cent from death and redemption, this meant that some 8,500 new captives were needed each year to sustain a slave population of 35,000.
Taking the 250-year period during which corsair slaving was a significant factor in the Mediterranean, Davis estimates that the total number of slaves exceeded one million. ‘Between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.’ He comments:
The estimates arrived at here make it clear that for most of the first two centuries of the modern era, nearly as many Europeans were taken forcibly to Barbary and worked or sold as slaves as were West Africans hauled off to labour in plantations in the Americas. In the sixteenth century especially, during which time the Atlantic slave runners still averaged only around 3,200 annually, the corsairs of Algiers – and later Tunis and Tripoli – were regularly snatching that many or more white captives on a single raid to Sicily, the Balearics, or Valencia. Hardest hit in these escalating raids were the sailors, merchants and coastal villagers of Italy and Greece and of Mediterranean Spain and France.
For a general account, see Adrian Tinniswood’s Pirates of Barbary (2010). John Ward was perhaps the most notorious Barbary Coast renegade of his time. Born in Kent in about 1563, after serving in the English navy, he arrived in Tunis in 1605, ‘turned Turk’ in 1610, lived in a ruined castle and died of the plague in 1622. Giles Milton (2004) writes vividly about the exploits of Salé’s corsairs and the tyranny of Moulay Ismail.
A copy of Abdurrahman as-Sadi’s Tarikh es-Sudan was handed to the German traveller Heinrich Barth during his travels across western Sudan in the 1850s, providing Europeans for the first time with a glimpse of the region’s rich history. Barth was employed by the British government to gather intelligence and seek out commercial opportunities in the western Sudan. He landed in Tunis in December 1849 and spent nearly six years travelling, sending back dispatches to London and making detailed observations of the lands and peoples he encountered. His monumental five-volume Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, published in 1857–8, is regarded as a masterpiece of travel-writing. His journeys are examined by Steve Kemper (2012).
Mervyn Hiskett (1973) explores the life and times of Shehu Usuman dan Fodio. David Robinson examines Muslim societies in African history (2004) and covers Umar Tal’s Holy War (1985).
Advances in the study of Abyssinia were first made in the seventeenth century by Job Ludolf, a talented German linguist. Although he never visited the country, Ludolf formed a close working relationship with an Ethiopian monk named Gregorius during a visit to Rome in the 1650s. The results included grammars and dictionaries in Amharic and Ge’ez and a lengthy history, Historia Aethiopia, published first in Latin in 1681 and in English in 1682, with two English reprintings in 1684. Pedro Paez’s account Historia da Etiopia, though completed in 1620, was not published until 1946 (Livraria Civilização, Oporto, 3 vols). A Portuguese Jesuit missionary, Jerónimo Lobo, spent ten years in Abyssinia (1625–34) and wrote about his experiences in Itinerário which was translated into English by Samuel Johnson in 1735. An English translation from the Portuguese text was published in 1984. Paez reached the source of the Little Abbai in 1613, Lobo in 1629. A first edition of James Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile was published in 1790. Miles Bredin (2000) examines Bruce’s life and travels.
Kaffa, the native region of coffee, is often assumed to be the origin of the name. However, the plant, the bean and the beverage are all known throughout Ethiopia as buna, from which the Arabic word bunn for the bean seems to have been derived. The Arabic term for the beverage is qahwa and the Turkish, kahve, and it is from this name that the word coffee was adopted by various European languages. Introduced into Europe from Arabia by the Ottoman Turks, it acquired the scientific name Coffea arabica.
Part V
Portuguese sailors in the fifteenth century gave the peninsula where the Bulom lived the name ‘Serra Lyoa’ or lion mountain, a name that changed over time to Sierra Leone. In his account of the Guinea coastline, titled Esmeraldo de situ orbis, written in about 1505, Duarte Pacheco Pereira explains how it came about:
Many people think that the name was given to this country because there are lions here, but this is not true. It was Pero de Sintra, a knight of Prince Henry of Portugal, who first came to this mountain. And when he saw a country so steep and wild he named it the land of the lion, and not for any other reason. There is no reason to doubt this, for he told me so himself. (Taken from the translation by G.H.T. Kimble, 1937)
Stephen Braidwood (1994) writes about London’s black poor, white philanthropists and the founding of Sierra Leone.
One of the difficulties that European geographers faced in identifying the course of the Niger was that not only did the river flow in different directions – north, east and south – over a distance of 2,600 miles, but various stretches were known locally by different names. Its upper reaches were called Joliba; its lower reaches Quorra; the Tuareg knew it as egerew n-igerewen. Nineteenth-century geographers listed twenty-nine names for the main river and nineteen for the Benue, its chief tributary. The twenty rivers of the Niger delta were thought to be no more than coastal wetlands. Anthony Sattin (2003) gives a vivid account of the endeavours of European explorers, including Daniel Houghton, Mungo Park, Gordon Laing and Hugh Clapperton.
Napoleon’s venture into Egypt is covered by Paul Strathern (2008). The account of the French occupation by Abd al Rahman al-Jabarti was republished in English in 2005. Khaled Fahmy deals with Muhammad Ali’s rise to power (2009) and the making of his army (1997).
France’s occupation of Algeria from 1830 is covered in English editions by Charles-Robert Ageron (1991) and Benjamin Stora (2001). John Kiser deals with the life and times of Emir Abd el-Kader (2008). There are several explanations for the origin of the name Pieds Noirs. Some say it may have been invented by Arabs describing the black boots that French soldiers wore. Others suggest that it was the colour of the feet of French wine growers in Algeria, trampling grapes to make wine. The term kouloughli comes from a Turkish word meaning literally ‘sons of slaves’. It was used to distinguish the half-caste offspring of Turks and Algerian women from janissaries who were slaves of Ottoman sultans.
The high mortality rate from malaria led the west coast of Africa to be known as the ‘white man’s grave’. Long before the Baikie expedition of 1854, quinine, an extract taken from the bark of a cinchona tree native to Peru, was used for medical purposes, but as a curative rather than as a prophylactic. Baikie proved that by taking quinine as a prophylactic, it could help overcome malaria. By the 1860s and 1870s quinine was in regular use by European missionaries, merchants and soldiers, opening the way for the deeper penetration of Africa.
Part VI
The exodus of Boer communities from the Cape Colony in the 1830s into the interior of southern Africa, usually known as the Great Trek, gave rise to a powerful mythology about the Afrikaner people that was built up later in the nineteenth century to counter the menace of British imperialism. The mythology is unravelled expertly by Leonard Thompson (1985). Zulu history is covered by Donald Morris (1966) and by John Laband (1998). Xhosa history and the disaster of the cattle-killing of 1856–7 are tackled by J.B. Peires (1981, 1989). David Livingstone’s career as a missionary and as a traveller is explored by Tim Jeal (1973).
Part VII
A number of scholarly accounts examine Zanzibar’s role in the nineteenth century at the centre of the ivory, slave and spice trade: Edward Alpers (1975); Frederick Cooper (1977); and Abdul Sheriff (1987). Following in the wake of Alan Moorehead’s two-volume classic, The White Nile (1960) and The Blue Nile (1962), Tim Jeal (2011) writes vividly about the exploits of European adventurers searching for the source of the Nile, including Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, James Grant, David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley and Samuel Baker. Alfred Swann’s account of Fighting the Slave-Hunters in Central Africa was published in 1910.
In a diary entry that Stanley made on 8 April 1875, he described the kabaka’s capital at Nabulagala, now part of modern Kampala, as he approached it from Usavara (modern Entebbe):
It is sited on the summit of a hill overlooking a great and beautiful district. Great wide roads lead to it from all directions. The widest and principal road is that overlooked from the Durbar [council chamber] of the King’s Capital. It is about 400 feet wide and nearly 10 miles long . . . Either side is flanked by the houses and gardens of the principal men.
The Royal Quarters, Stanley wrote, were a vast collection crowning the eminence, ‘around which ran several palisades and circular courts, between which and the city was a circular road . . . from which radiated six or seven magnificent avenues’.
The flow of ivory from Africa in the nineteenth century reached around the world, to Europe, North America, India, China and Japan. African ivory was prized more than any other. It was finer-grained, richer in tone and larger than Indian ivory. East Africa on its own ranked as the world’s largest source of ivory throughout the century. It produced what was known as ‘soft’ ivory that was white, opaque, smooth, gently curved and easily worked. West Africa tended to produce ‘hard’ ivory that was less intensely white, but glossy and more translucent.
In the industrial era of the nineteenth century, the uses to which ivory could be put seemed unlimited. No other material responded so well to the cutting tools and polishing wheels of the Victorian age. It could be cut, sawed, carved, etched, ground or worked on a lathe. It could be stained or painted. It was so flexible that it could be turned into riding whips, cut from the length of whole tusks. It could be sliced into paper-thin sheets so transparent that standard print could be read through it. An ivory sheet displayed at the Great Exhibition held at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851 was fourteen inches wide and fifty-two feet long.
Ivory was in many ways the plastic of the era. Ivory workshops turned out a vast range of products: buttons, bracelets, beads, napkin rings, knitting needles, door-knobs, snuff-boxes, fans, shaving-brush handles, picture frames, paper-cutters, hairpins and hatpins, and jewellery of all kinds. Ivory handles were fitted to canes and umbrellas, to hairbrushes and teapots. Ivory inlay work embellished mirrors, furnishings and furniture. Above all, ivory became the ideal material for piano keys and billiard balls.
Mordechai Abir (1968) covers the era of Abyssinia’s Zamana Masafent. Sven Rubenson (1966) is the pioneer of scholarship on Tewodros. Philip Marsden provides a gripping account in The Barefoot Emperor (2007). One of the hostages, Henry Blanc (1868), wrote after his release:
In 1866 when I first saw him he was about 48 years old. His complexion was darker compared to the majority of his fellow Ethiopians. His nose is aquiline; his mouth is broad, but his lips are very small; his physique was medium but well built. No one was compared to him in his ability of mounted horse spear hurling; even the strongest ones, if they follow in the footsteps of Tewodros, they get tired. His eyes are slightly bulging in, smooth and flickering; when he is in a good mood, people were forced to like him, but when he is angry those eyes suddenly become blood-stained and seem to erupt fire. When the king is angry his overall condition is frightening; his black face turns ashy; his tight soft lips resemble to hold some white lining; his hair stands straight up. His overall behaviour is a good example of a loose and dangerous person. Nevertheless, despite his moody personality, no one was comparable to him in his canny ability of communication and reconciling differences. Even after I met him a few days before his death, he still acquired a king’s grace and charisma . . .
General Napier’s army took away a huge amount of booty including more than 1,000 Ge’ez and Amharic manuscripts which Tewodros had assembled. The expedition’s archaeologist selected 350 items judged to be the most valuable for the British Museum’s collection, which served as the basis of valuable scholarship on Ethiopia.
Part VIII
Peter Holt and Martin Daly (2011) provide an authoritative general history of Sudan. Holt’s work also includes a study of the Mahdist state (2nd edn, 1970). Daly’s work includes two volumes on the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1986, 1991). Richard Gray (1961) covers the history of southern Sudan between 1839 and 1889. Fergus Nicoll (2004) provides a detailed biography of the Mahdi. Michael Asher (2005) gives a colourful account of the Nile campaigns between 1883 and 1898, including the disaster that overtook General Hicks, General Gordon’s last stand in Khartoum and the battle of Omdurman. Father Joseph Ohrwalder’s account Ten Years’ Captivity in the Mahdi’s Camp was published in 1892.
Wilfrid Blunt was an Arabic-speaking traveller who had served in the diplomatic service for ten years. He arrived in Cairo in September 1881 assigned by the British government to assess Egyptian public opinion. He admired Colonel Urabi, looked on the Urabists as a source of optimism and held Islam in high regard. Blunt went to great lengths to arrange a defence at Urabi’s trial and corresponded with him frequently. In 1903, after Urabi had returned to Egypt, he recounted to Blunt his version of the events of 1878–82 which Blunt then incorporated into his Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt, published in 1907.
Part IX
In his Economic History of South Africa (2005), Charles Feinstein provides a masterly account of the transformation that occurred in southern Africa as a result of the discovery of diamonds and gold in the nineteenth century. Rob Turrell (1987) and William Worger (1987) deal with the development of the diamond industry at Kimberley. Martin Meredith (2007) follows the careers of Cecil Rhodes and Paul Kruger and covers the forty-year period from the discovery of diamonds through to the Anglo-Boer war and independence in 1910. Richard Cope (1999) explores the origins of the Anglo-Zulu war; Saul David (2004) gives a compelling account of the course of the war; and Jeff Guy (1979) describes the aftermath. In her novel The Story of an African Farm (1863), Olive Schreiner brilliantly evokes the semi-desert landscape of the Karoo.
Part X
Thomas Pakenham (1991) provides an outstanding narrative about Europe’s scramble for African territory. Neal Ascherson (1963) and Barbara Emerson (1979) tackle Leopold’s involvement. Among the many biographies of Henry Morton Stanley, Tim Jeal’s account (2007) deserves special mention. Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher and Alice Denny (1965) deal expertly with Britain’s role in Africa in the nineteenth century, including the machinations of British politicians over Egypt, Uganda, west Africa and southern Africa.
In The Lunatic Express (1972), Charles Miller describes the hazards involved in the construction of the Uganda railway and the exploits of early white pioneers and politicians. An army engineer, Lt. Col. John Patterson (1907), wrote a best-selling book, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, about his experiences in charge of constructing a bridge over the Tsavo River and the marauding lions with which he had to contend. Winston Churchill visited Uganda in 1907 and took tea with eleven-year-old Daudi Chwa in the kabaka’s palace, beneath portraits of Queen Victoria and King Edward: ‘a graceful, distinguished-looking little boy’ who, after overcoming his initial shyness, confessed to a passion for football.
Africa’s Great Rift Valley is the greatest rupture on the earth’s land surface. It was given the name by the English explorer John Gregory (1896) in his account of his journey in east Africa in 1893. He first caught sight of the Rift Valley at the Kikuyu Escarpment, just north-west of modern Nairobi. ‘We stopped there, lost in admiration of the beauty and in wonder at the character of this valley until the donkeys threw their loads and bolted down the path.’ Part of the Great Rift Valley in Kenya and northern Tanzania is still known as the Gregory Rift Valley. Several accounts by early white settlers in Kenya deserve mention. In The Flame Trees of Thika (1959) and The Mottled Lizard (1962), Elizabeth Huxley recounts in vivid colour the years of her childhood, growing up in a pioneer family at the beginning of the colonial era. In Out of Africa (1937) Karen Blixen describes her endeavours to establish a coffee farm at the foot of the Ngong Hills; a suburb of modern Nairobi is named after her.
Michael Crowder (1968) gives a masterly survey of west Africa facing European encroachment. Accounts by two European visitors to the Asante kingdom, Thomas Freeman (1843) and Thomas Bowdich (1819), provide vivid detail. Ivor Wilks (2nd edn, 1989) covers the rise of the Asante kingdom; Robert Edgerton (1995) deals with the fall.
King Prempe and other members of the royal family were first imprisoned in the fortress at Elmina, then sent into exile in Sierra Leone. But so many Asante subjects travelled all the way to Sierra Leone with gifts of gold dust and news of Asante politics that the British authorities moved them to the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean. On his return to Asante, Prempe was officially recognised not as the Asantehene but as the Kumasihene – the king of Kumasi. In 1935, the title of Asantehene was restored to his successor, Prempe II. The Golden Stool was hidden from the British until 1920 when they gave an assurance that it would remain in Asante hands. In 1935 it was displayed in public for the first time since 1896 at the instalment of Prempe II.
Part XI
The British traveller Richard Burton (1856) spent six months in Somaliland in 1854 and noted the Somalis’ love of both camels and poetry:
Every man has his recognized position in literature as accurately defined as though he had been reviewed in a century of magazines – the fine ear of this people causing them to take the greatest pleasure in harmonious sounds and poetic expressions, whereas a false quantity or prosaic phrase excites their violent indignation . . . Every chief in the country must have a panegyric to be sung by his clan, and the great patronize light literature by keeping a poet.
For an informative account of the Somali leader Muhammad Abdullah Hassan, see Robert Hess’s essay on the ‘Mad Mullah’, Journal of African History V, 3 (1964), pp 415–33.
The Maxim gun, a prototype of the modern machine gun, designed and produced by Hiram Maxim in a London factory in the 1880s, was used with devastating effect in the course of several African campaigns, including Omdurman. In a poem titled ‘The Modern Traveller’, the Anglo-French writer Hilaire Belloc summed up the advantage it gave to European powers:
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.
The French retreat from Fashoda and with it the end of their ambitions to establish a French territory extending across the middle belt of Africa from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea cast a pall over French officialdom that lasted for generations. In his memoirs, General de Gaulle listed the disasters that had afflicted France in his youth and that had led him to devote himself to upholding France’s ‘grandeur’: the first on the list was the Fashoda incident. In the twentieth century, France’s vigilance against Anglophone encroachment in what they considered to be their own backyard in Africa – ‘le pré carré’ – became known as the Fashoda syndrome. Martin Meredith (2011) examines its fatal consequences in Rwanda.
Part XII
Joseph Conrad’s journey up the Congo River from Stanley Pool to Stanley Falls in 1890 took him four weeks. On the return journey, a French agent for an ivory-collecting company died on board. A few years later, a Belgian officer in the Force Publique, who had been posted to Stanley Falls as station chief, gained notoriety for decorating the flower bed in front of his house with the heads of twenty-one women and children killed during a punitive military expedition.
Stanley returned to the Congo in 1887 at the head of an expedition to rescue a European official, Emin Pasha, under siege in the southern Sudan. In his account of the expedition, In Darkest Africa (1890), Stanley railed against the depredations of the ivory trade:
Every tusk, piece and scrap of ivory in the possession of an Arab trader has been steeped in human blood. Every pound weight has cost the life of a man, woman or child; for every five pounds a hut has been burned; for every two tusks a whole village has been destroyed; every twenty tusks have been obtained at the price of a district with all its people, villages and plantations. It is simply incredible that, because ivory is required for ornaments or billiard games, the rich heart of Africa should be laid waste at this late year in the nineteenth century, and that native populations, tribes and nations, should be utterly destroyed . . .
Adam Hochschild (1998) covers the story of Leopold’s Congo Free State in riveting and meticulous detail. The plunder of the Congo Basin for wild rubber was carried out not only by Belgian companies but by French concessionary companies which used similar methods of forced labour, hostage-taking, flogging and murder. As much as two-thirds of the territory of French Equatorial Africa was allocated to them.
Part XIII
Much of the evidence about the Rhodes conspiracy and Joseph Chamberlain’s role in it remained hidden until Jean van der Poel’s pioneering work was published in 1951. In 1961, J.S. Marais followed van der Poel with a magisterial study of the fall of Kruger’s regime. Elizabeth Longford’s 1982 narrative adds further detail.
Controversy over the causes of the Anglo-Boer war lasted for much of the twentieth century. It started in 1900 with the publication of John Hobson’s book The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects, in which he claimed that ultimately Britain had gone to war ‘to place a small oligarchy of mine-owners and speculators in power at Pretoria’. In essence, he said, the war grew out of a conspiracy by gold millionaires and Jewish financiers, aided and abetted by British politicians, aimed at making mining operations more profitable. Hobson developed this theme into a general analysis of the relationship between capitalism and imperialism in his book Imperialism published in 1902. Hobson’s work had a profound influence on Lenin who acknowledged it in his treatise Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, published in 1917. It was subsequently used by generations of Marxist and left-wing writers to illustrate the evil machinations of capitalism.
But Hobson’s perspective of the war was limited. He had no knowledge, for example, of the role played by Milner. When historians later searched government archives and the private papers of politicians and magnates for evidence about the conspiracy, there was little to be found. The archive evidence showed that British ministers, when taking decisions about the Transvaal in 1899, were motivated not by any concern about mining company profits or about ambitions to control the gold trade, but by the need to strengthen Britain’s political hold over the Transvaal to reinforce British supremacy in the region. Milner himself claimed responsibility for starting the war. ‘I precipitated the crisis, which was inevitable, before it was too late.’ The historian Iain Smith unravels the issues in his book The Origins of the South African War (1996). The best single narrative of the war is given by Thomas Pakenham (1979).
Germany’s brutal occupation of South West Africa is covered by Horst Drechsler (1980); and by David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen (2009).
Part XIV
The character of Egypt began to change during the early twentieth century with a steady exodus from rural areas and the rapid growth of Cairo and Alexandria. According to the 1927 census, Cairo’s population had reached more than one million and Alexandria’s stood at half a million. In his brilliant sequence of novels, The Alexandrian Quartet (1957–60), Lawrence Durrell describes the hedonistic lifestyle of the wealthy expatriate community that dominated Alexandria’s society in the interwar years.
Richard Mitchell’s seminal work on the Muslim Brotherhood (1969) covers its formative years before 1952. Gilles Kepel (1993) provides further detail. In Hasan al-Banna’s risala ‘Our Mission’, he wrote:
We believe that Islam is an all-embracing concept which regulates every aspect of life, adjudicating on every one of its concerns and prescribing for it a solid and rigorous order . . . Some people mistakenly understand by Islam something restricted to certain types of religious observances or spiritual exercises . . . but we understand Islam – as opposed to this view – very broadly and comprehensively as regulating the affairs of men in this world and the next.
While most of the Brotherhood’s early activities were directed towards incremental reform of Egyptian society, al-Banna embraced the Islamist concept of jihad. The use of force was legitimate, he argued, to defend the Muslim community when it was subjected to the rule of unbelievers or vulnerable to external threat. The primary targets of jihad were Western imperialists and Zionists who had colonised Muslim lands. But jihad was also justified in dealing with rival opposition groups and the Egyptian government.
Haile Selassie was worshipped as a living God (Jah) by adherents of Rastafarianism, a religion which emerged in Jamaica in the 1930s and took its name from his title of Ras Tafari. During a three-day visit that Haile Selassie paid to Jamaica in 1966, some Jamaicans were convinced that miracles had occurred. Anthony Mockler (1984) deals with Italy’s occupation of Abyssinia.
A census of South Africa’s population in 1910 recorded a total of 5,878,000, with 3,956,000 Africans; 1,257,000 whites, of whom about 700,000 were Afrikaners; 517,000 Coloureds; and 148,000 Asians. The Carnegie Commission’s report The Poor White Problem in South Africa was published in five volumes in 1932 (Pro-Ecclesia, Stellenbosch).
Part XV
The rise of African nationalism and the decolonisation period is covered in general surveys by David Birmingham (1995); Frederick Cooper (2002); Prosser Gifford and Wm. Roger Louis (eds. 1982); John Hargreaves (1995); Thomas Hodgkin (1956); and Martin Meredith (2011). Case studies include Dennis Austin on Ghana (1964); James Coleman (1958) and Richard Sklar (1963) on Nigeria; John Cartwright on Sierra Leone (1970); David Throup on the origins of the Mau Mau rebellion (1987); Ruth Morgenthau on French West African colonies (1964); Alistair Horne on Algeria (1987); Aristide Zolberg on Ivory Coast (1969); and Crawford Young on the Belgian Congo (1965). Ludo de Witte’s groundbreaking investigation into the murder of Patrice Lumumba was published first in Dutch in 1999, then in French in 2000, then in English in 2001. Nelson Mandela’s career is covered by his autobiography (1994) and by biographies by Anthony Sampson (1999) and Martin Meredith (2014).
Part XVI
The chapter title ‘The First Dance of Freedom’ is taken from a quotation from Lord Byron’s Detached Thoughts, 1821–2: ‘I sometimes wish I was the owner of Africa; to do at once, what Wilberforce will do in time, viz – sweep Slavery from her desarts, and look on upon the first dance of their Freedom.’
In his study of one-party states in West Africa, published in 1965, Arthur Lewis, a distinguished West Indian economist, observed:
What is going on in some of these countries is fully explained in terms of the normal lust of human beings for power and wealth. The stakes are high. Office carries power, prestige and money. The power is incredible . . . Decision-making is arbitrary . . . The prestige is also incredible. Men who claim to be democrats in fact behave like emperors. Personifying the state, they dress up in uniforms, build themselves palaces, bring all other traffic to a standstill when they drive, hold fancy parades and generally demand to be treated like Egyptian Pharaohs. And the money is also incredible . . . salaries . . . allowances, travelling expenses, and other fringe benefits. There are also vast pickings in bribes, state contracts, diversion of public funds to private uses and commissions of various sorts. To be a Minister is to have a lifetime’s chance to make a fortune.
Africa’s economic decline is examined by Robert Bates (1981); Thomas Callaghy and John Ravenhill (eds. 1993); David Fieldhouse (1986); John Ravenhill (ed. 1986); Douglas Rimmer (ed. 1992); Richard Sandbrook (1985, 1993); and Nicolas van der Walle (2001).
Between 1990 and 1996, 37 out of 48 African states in sub-Saharan Africa held multi-party elections. More than half of the elections resulted in a former dictator remaining in office. Military coups were a recurrent feature of the post-1990 period. Between 1991 and 2001 there were 47 coup attempts, of which 13 were successful.
China’s advance into Africa is analysed expertly by Deborah Brautigan (2009) and Ian Taylor (2010). The Chatham House report, Nigeria’s Criminal Crude (2013), was written by Christina Katsouris and Aaron Sayne. In 2013, the World Bank reported that the number of people living in extreme poverty in Africa had risen in the previous three decades from 205 million to 414 million.