![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Bill Freund, The making of contemporary Africa
My MA is actually in African/Asian history, but I know nothing about African history, fortunately they let us specialise in our own areas of interest. However, for my historical research methods exams we have to use examples from all over Africa and Asia, so with this in mind I decided it would really help to have a bit of background on the whole thing. I asked my professor for some books and this was the first on the list. It was very much a Marxist economic history of the formation of Africa from the 18th century on, mostly focusing on colonial Africa. Not the sort of thing I find terribly interesting, but still it did contain a lot of really useful information and filled in a lot of the background of the area that I felt I had been missing. I tend to think of colonisation as the Americas ,and Australia which were almost genocidal to the native population and a lot longer ago than most "post-colonial" discussions seem to be. But I understand better now why people refer to 20th century colonialism. I was surprised by how late control over Africa lasted, and the different effects that it had. I felt this book was a really useful piece of background information, well presented, just a little dry. There was about 10 pages in the social history chapter when they mentioned religious movements that sprung up at the beginning of the 20th century that were very interesting, but unfortunately not enough detail was given. Not really my sort of book, but definitely one I'd recommend for anyone wanting to know about the modern history of Africa.
My MA is actually in African/Asian history, but I know nothing about African history, fortunately they let us specialise in our own areas of interest. However, for my historical research methods exams we have to use examples from all over Africa and Asia, so with this in mind I decided it would really help to have a bit of background on the whole thing. I asked my professor for some books and this was the first on the list. It was very much a Marxist economic history of the formation of Africa from the 18th century on, mostly focusing on colonial Africa. Not the sort of thing I find terribly interesting, but still it did contain a lot of really useful information and filled in a lot of the background of the area that I felt I had been missing. I tend to think of colonisation as the Americas ,and Australia which were almost genocidal to the native population and a lot longer ago than most "post-colonial" discussions seem to be. But I understand better now why people refer to 20th century colonialism. I was surprised by how late control over Africa lasted, and the different effects that it had. I felt this book was a really useful piece of background information, well presented, just a little dry. There was about 10 pages in the social history chapter when they mentioned religious movements that sprung up at the beginning of the 20th century that were very interesting, but unfortunately not enough detail was given. Not really my sort of book, but definitely one I'd recommend for anyone wanting to know about the modern history of Africa.