Almanac of African Peoples & Nations (review)

The preparation of any comprehensive reference work must be daunting to its editor and contributors, even more so one covering the entire African continent. According to the acknowledgments, the volume at hand involved eight years of extensive research. The result is this massive volume.

The introduction belabors the fact that European colonial interests have carved political entities "with no regard to people's wishes, aspirations, and ethnic or religious ties" (p. 3). Thus, "this almanac is a first interdisciplinary attempt at understanding African pluralism, past and present, and based on its findings, tries to forecast possible inter-ethnic conflicts in the future" (p. 6). As I browsed through this volume--and reference books are usually browsed--I could not find how it serves the editor's attempt at understanding African pluralism.

There are eight sections: Introduction, African Language Families, African Languages by Country, African Peoples and Nations by Country, African Peoples and Nations, Endnotes, Bibliography, and Index. The Introduction outlines the background and purpose of the work, and describes the contents of each section.

The second part is necessarily brief. Departing from the standard five major classifications, "African Language Families" includes a sixth African language family: European.

The following section, "African Languages by Country," probably should have been entitled "Official Languages by Country." Almost all entries begin with the official language(s) and may add a sentence that mentions other "popular" or widely spoken languages. It persists in including non-African languages.

"African Peoples and Nations by Country" features for each country a map showing the location of the major peoples. There is also a map of the continent that highlights the country in question. The text presents the statistical significance of each group and a list of "smaller ethnic groups and/or subgroups." There are entries for most of the subgroups--but not all--in the next section.

"African Peoples and Nations" is the major section. It is alphabetical by name of group. Entries vary considerably in length, from two or three sentences to more than a page of text. Understandably, the majority of entries lack enough information to "highlight the major contribution of many of these groups and the basic features of their respective cultures" (p. 6). Cross references abound to such an extent that one wonders why they were not placed in the index. It is unfortunate that there is no explanation of the meanings of language and ethnic prefixes, which would make browsing more meaningful and less confusing.¹ For instance, twenty-four entries begin with "Ait" and six with "Aith."

The "Endnotes" identify the sources used in footnotes; there are 459, but only thirty-six distinct titles. It appears that only the "African Peoples and Nations" section attributes sources. Some entries may contain five footnotes in a page of text (see Beja, e.g.), and many others have no footnotes at all.

As the editor acknowledges, "many important references and other published works were utilized and/or consulted." Indeed, the "Bibliography" is considerable, with over 280 entries, ranging across many periods of scholarship.

Finally, the "Index" is useless, because it lists only the entries in the main section (which were alphabetical to begin with). Also, it is a good example of publisher's puffery. Usually, indexes are set in two columns and in smaller type than the body of the main text; this one has about thirty-five entries to a one-column page (in the same type face as the text) and takes up pages 759-847.

There are inconsistencies and confusing entries throughout. For instance, on p. 11, we learn that the "Merina dialect of the Malagasy languages has been Madagascar's official language since 1820." On p. 20, "Malagasy and French are the official languages of the country." Two different definitions of tonal languages occur on the same page (12). Within the "Besharin" entry, the last sentence reads "The Berti are a Beri group." This belongs in the preceding...