Price: $34.95 - $27.33
(as of Dec 10, 2024 09:32:08 UTC – Details)
“The West will begin to understand Africa when it realizes it’s not talking to a child—it’s talking to its mother.”
So writes Jeff Pearce in the introduction to his fascinating, groundbreaking work, The Gifts of Africa: How a Continent and Its People Changed the World.
We learn early on in school how Europe and Asia gave us important literature, science, and art, and how their nations changed the course of history. But what about Africa? There are plenty of books that detail its colonialism, corruption, famine, and war, but few that discuss the debt owed to African thinkers and innovators.
In The Gifts of Africa, we meet Zera Yacob, an Ethiopian philosopher who developed the same critical approach and several of the same ideas as René Descartes. We consider how Somalis traded with China, and we meet the African warrior queens who still inspire national pride. We explore how Liberia’s Edward Wilmot Blyden deeply influenced Marcus Garvey, and we sneak into the galleries and theaters of 1920s Paris, where African art and dance first began to make huge impacts on the world. Relying on meticulous research, Pearce brings to life a rich intellectual legacy and profiles modern innovators like acclaimed griot Papa Susso and renowned economist George Ayittey from Ghana.
From the ancient Nubians to a Nigerian superstar in modern painting and sculpture, from the father of sociology in the Maghreb to how the Mau Mau in Kenya influenced Malcom X, The Gifts of Africa is bold, engaging, and takes the reader on a journey of thousands of years up to the present day.
Past works have reinforced misconceptions about Africa, from its oral traditions and languages to its resistance to colonial powers. Other books have treated African achievements as a parade of honorable mentions and novelties. This book is different—refreshingly different. It tells the stories behind the milestones and provides insights into how great Africans thought, and how they passed along what they learned.
Provocative and entertaining, The Gifts of Africa at last gives the continent its due, and it should change the way we learn about the interactions of cultures and how we teach the history of the world.
From the Publisher
I believe we should start with a new approach.
This book is not intended to be a traditional, complete, and linear history of the continent. Rather than dwell on the famines, bloody civil wars, and colonialism, it attempts to trace ideas by Africans, ones that started in Africa, and even a few ideas about Africa that had impacts on the West. This book has other ambitions, too. It will explore some ideas that gained traction in Africa thanks to thinkers from elsewhere. And it will try to demolish a couple of destructive misconceptions about African history that stubbornly endure and affect how we see it.
Discover ideas of and from Africa throughout the ages
Map of Africa —1635
A map of Africa made in 1635 from the printing operation of Dutch cartographer Willem Blaeu. This map is clearly intended to be more decorative than functional. For all its exquisite attention to detail, we can see that much of its “information” is fanciful and inaccurate.
Queen Njinga — 1830s
A hand-colored lithograph portrait of the larger-than-life Queen Njinga made in the 1830s and now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. Njinga became queen of the Ndongo after her brother died from poisoning (whether it was an accident, self-inflicted, or murder is still unknown), and she employed a political cunning worthy of Machiavelli.
Griots Harouna Beidari and Idrissa Souley — 1981
Griots Harouna Beidari and Idrissa Souley performing The Epic of Askia Mohammed in 1981. Courtesy Thomas A. Hale. Griots—and griottes for women in the profession—hold a job that can be hard to define, and it’s one that’s unique to Africa. Genealogist, singer of praises, historian, political adviser, spy, mediator, translator, teacher—griots have been all these things and more.
Chapter 4: An African Midas — Excerpt
Imagine you’re a traveler in an antique land. It’s the early fourteenth century. Exhausted by the beating sun and slapping the dust of the road off your clothes, eager to rest, you’re about to enter Cairo. And this is what you see: a fabulous procession for a king winding its way to the city, with 60,000 warriors proudly marching in front as he rides on horseback, red banners of silk streaming with the breeze. There’s a personal retinue of 14,000 female slaves for the ruler and 500 more slaves in the caravan, every one of them gripping a staff made of 500 mithqals of gold, roughly four pounds, or 1.8 kilograms, each. Stories soon circulate of this king’s fabulous wealth; one unlikely tale even suggests that he built a swimming pool in the desert so that his wife and her female servants could bathe. His visit will be talked about in the city for years after he’s gone.
And we are still talking about him, for this king was Musa I of the Mali Empire, sometimes called different names but most popularly known as Mansa Musa. The mansa refers to his title, which translates as “Sultan” or “Emperor.” We have no idea if the numbers given for his procession were accurate, as they vary according to sources and might well be exaggerated. But Musa has captured the imagination for centuries right into our modern era, and the most compelling part of his legend is rooted in this anecdote by an Arab scholar, Shihab al-Umari. While on his pilgrimage to Mecca, Musa “spread upon Cairo the flood of his generosity; there was no person, officer of the court or holder of any office of the sultanate who did not receive a sum in gold from him. . . . So much gold was current in Cairo that it ruined the value of money.”
Time, Money, and Business Insider still gush over him in articles. Far too often, a portrait of Mansa Musa is a gilded one because it stops with his gold and very few specifics on what else he did or may have thought. But as with so many things, the reality is more interesting than the image.
Publisher : Prometheus; First Edition (April 15, 2022)
Language : English
Hardcover : 552 pages
ISBN-10 : 1633887707
ISBN-13 : 978-1633887701
Item Weight : 2 pounds
Dimensions : 6.53 x 1.77 x 9.32 inches
