The Continent's Own History
Ten works that recovered Africa's deep past on its own terms, from the cradle of humanity to the eve of colonial rule. They replaced the colonial fiction of a continent without history with evidence drawn from archaeology, language, oral tradition and African sources.
Africa: A Biography of the Continent
John Reader
The continent where humanity began, told from the bedrock up.
Read why it mattered →Africans: The History of a Continent
John Iliffe
A history built on a startling claim: Africa's central problem was too few people, not too many.
Read why it mattered →The Lost Cities of Africa
Basil Davidson
The book that put Kush, Aksum and Great Zimbabwe back into world history.
Read why it mattered →The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800
Christopher Ehret
Deep African history reconstructed from the evidence of language itself.
Read why it mattered →Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680
John K. Thornton
Africans as agents, not merely victims, in the making of the Atlantic world.
Read why it mattered →The Fortunes of Africa
Martin Meredith
Five thousand years of Africa, told through the wealth others came to take.
Read why it mattered →A Short History of Africa
Roland Oliver and J.D. Fage
The pocket survey that helped launch African history as a university discipline.
Read why it mattered →Histoire de l'Afrique noire
Joseph Ki-Zerbo
The first sweeping history of Black Africa written by an African historian.
Read why it mattered →A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution
Toby Green
West Africa's rise and crisis, told through money, from cowrie shells to gold.
Read why it mattered →Precolonial Black Africa
Cheikh Anta Diop
A comparative anatomy of African states, measured directly against medieval Europe.
Read why it mattered →More from the library