The Lost Cities of Africa
Basil Davidson
The book that put Kush, Aksum and Great Zimbabwe back into world history.
Writing as decolonization began, Davidson marshaled archaeology alongside Arabic and Portuguese sources to show that precolonial Africa had built cities, states and long-distance trade, from Kush and Aksum to Great Zimbabwe and the Sudanic empires. Against a colonial orthodoxy that denied Africa any history worth the name, it argued for the continent's civilizations before a broad public and helped make African history a serious field of study.
Its legacy. It helped inspire a generation of nationalist and academic historians.
- Author
- Basil Davidson
- First published
- 1959
- Genre
- History
- Theme
- The Continent's Own History
More from The Continent's Own History
- Africa: A Biography of the Continent — John Reader
The continent where humanity began, told from the bedrock up.
- 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.
- The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 — Christopher Ehret
Deep African history reconstructed from the evidence of language itself.
- 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.