Global Africa Into the Twenty-First Century ed. by Dorothy Hodgson, Judith Byfield (review)

In the collection of essays Global Africa Into the Twenty-First Century, editors Dorothy Hodgson and Judith Byfield tackle the challenge V.Y. Mudimbe identified as “the idea of Africa.” Their aim is to push readers to think deeply about and grapple with the dynamic nature of Africa as a geographic space, situating Africa at the center of global processes by demonstrating the pivotal roles Africans have played in producing and circulating ideas and initiating “transformations throughout the world” (1). Hodgson and Byfield present alternatives to the manner in which Africa is typically perceived, employing the volume’s diverse chapters to reconstruct the continent and to restore a more holistic, invigorated, and rigorous view of Africa’s past, present, and future. While the text draws on scholarly expertise, it models praxis by also bringing in the voices, knowledge, and approaches of practitioners (such as journalists, artists, policy makers) and activists.

Global Africa’s immense geographic, temporal, thematic, and disciplinary scope is impressively covered in thirty-seven chapters elucidating both well-known and less familiar narratives of Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. Covering disciplines from history to biology, the text is divided into five sections: 1) Entangled Histories, 2) Power and its Challenges, 3) Circulation of Communities and Cultures, 4) Science, Technology, and Health, 5) Africa in the World Today. There is an overall introduction and conclusion, and each section of the book also has its own individual introduction. This organization allows the text to achieve the editors’ goals of raising questions, introducing themes, challenging readers to rethink paradigms, and sparking readers to consider dynamics of power and how they shape the stories we tell. The chapters collectively provide the novice with strong evidence of the many layers of human agency and social negotiation available to be explored in Africa, while, for the most part, maintaining at least a semblance of narrative cohesion. The essays illustrate the multiple ways in which people in Africa and the diasporas have driven economic, historical, political, and scientific activities that have in turn contributed to regional and transcontinental material needs and intellectual developments.

“Entangled Histories,” the first section of the text, models the historical depth, geographic scope, and topical breadth of each of the book’s five sections. This first part of the text demonstrates, using seven case studies, that far from remaining on the sidelines or at the margins, individual Africans have long initiated expeditions that brought them into contact with distant communities while forging networks linking them to people and resources both in Africa and beyond. Africans of varied social statuses and genders, represented by the examples of Ibn Khaldun (fourteenth century), Abû Abayd Abd Allâh al Bakrî (eleventh century), Fatma of Timbuktu and Goulimine (twentieth century), Odette du Puigaudeau (1894-1991), Sophie mint Ali ould Ali Wali (twentieth century), Diego Suárez (sixteenth century), and Charles Morris (nineteenth century), traversed the continent or its bordering waterways for economic, religious, and personal reasons. While some operated as free persons, several early chapters reveal the complexity of people’s lives with regard to opportunities, limitations, and social norms.

This approach is demonstrated well in E. Anne McDougall’s chapter “Three Saharan Women,” which challenges stereotypes about women and non-elites, foregrounding the experiences and the intellectual and material contributions of those typically invisible in the record. Generalizations about life in a given place and time leave us with flat narratives, while in fact the ways that social class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity in one sub-region shaped experiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries makes for a far more lively account. Through the frame of colonialism, McDougall analyzes how the interests of these three women produced differing reactions to the end of colonial rule and the formation of national borders, even though each woman clearly identified as Saharan.

Leo...