Approaching African History by Michael Brett (review)

This book, about the development of African history from the mid-twentieth century, has a complex tripartite structure and a complex goal: to examine that history in terms of the historical literature explaining it, to explicate that historical narrative, and to explore the relationships between the the history and the historiography. This is a daunting undertaking, and Brett is to be commended for attempting such a sweeping account of one of the most significant scholarly enterprises of the later twentiety century. To accomplish this, however, he is forced to limit his field, which he does by focusing largely on multivolume historical compilations such as the Cambridge History of Africa (1986) and the UNESCO General History of Africa (1990), together with broad interpretative accounts, such as Roland Oliver and John Fage’s Short History of Africa (Penguin, 1962), Graham Connah’s African Civilizations (Cambridge University Press, 2001), John Iliffe’s The Africans (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Anthony Hopkins’s Economic History of West Africa (Columbia University Press, 1973), some of which are several decades old. In taking these as his subjects, he ends up skating over the surface of the interpretative tertiary literature rather than probing into the methodological literature of how the field developed or the specialized secondary monographs that continue to provide the most detailed and innovative historical accounts. The result is dueling interpretations of events rather than original analysis.

A case in point is that of the development of the Swahili city-states of the East African coast. Brett’s sources consist of dated articles in the Cambridge and UNESCO histories, Insoll’s Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Chaudhuri’s Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean World (Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Horton and Middleton’s The Swahili: The Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society (Wiley-Blackwell, 2001). Only the latter is both a recent account and one that is based soundly on research in the primary sources. Yet Swahili history is one of the most developed, vibrant, and debated topics in African history and historiography, with a voluminous literature based on extensive archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic, and written sources that deserve first-hand analysis.

It is not clear who is likely to benefit from the approach of this book, as it is neither an introductory account of African history and its development that students might find informative nor a probing critique of them that might appeal to scholars. Developed over thirty chapters averaging fewer than ten pages each, it alludes to the historical literature and narrative rather than developing either in detail, resulting in progressively more abstract interpretations of interpretations that will mystify a reader who is not already familiar with the history or the texts and provide few fresh insights for the scholar who has read the material.

While the book focuses on the historical literature developed over the past three-quarters of a century, the history it narrates spans the last ten thousand years of the entire continent. This comprehensive approach, spanning Africa’s diverse regions and historical periods, is to be commended, yet Brett confesses that it was not possible to find common themes and periodizations that span them all until the last two centuries, leaving the earlier chapters divided among different regions and historical epochs. The extensive coverage of North African history, Brett’s specialty, is especially welcome, yet he tends to incorporate sub-Saharan history into North African historical frameworks rather than incorporating North African history into that of the wider continent. While North Africa was integrated into the wider Mediterranean world from Egyptian, Greek, and Roman times, sub-Saharan Africa entered the North African and wider worlds more recently, leaving a substantial gap between the two.

A similar division is seen in the literature that is discussed. While the analysis of the North African literature includes a range of British, French, and North African authors, the major players of the sub-Saharan literature are largely British, with African, American, French, and...