Volume 5, Number 10 · December 23, 1965
Out of Africa
By Roland Oliver
A Political History of Tropical Africa
by Robert I. Rotberg
Harcourt, Brace and World, 440 pp., $12.50
The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa: The Making of Malawi and Zambia 1873-1964
by Robert I. Rotberg
Harvard, 360 pp., $8.50
A History of Postwar Africa
by John Hatch
Praeger, 432 pp., $8.50
Nigeria, the Tribe, the Nation or the Race: The Politics of Independence
by F.A.O. Schwartz Jr.
M.I.T., 501 pp., $10.00
The two works heading this list are the opening salvo of a young Harvard historian, of whom we shall certainly hear more. The first shot is a hasty one, fired from the battery of his early lectures. The second is more deadly, coming from his own first-hand research. Dr. Rotberg's Political History is nevertheless the most important work of historical synthesis about Africa which has yet been written by an American. It deals with the whole tropical zone of the continent, from the Sahara to the Limpopo, from ancient times until the present. Within the narrow limits of the author's conception of history, the research that has gone into it is exceedingly thorough. Its facts are seldom wrong. For all that, it is a strangely unimaginative and, in many ways, an old-fashioned book. Fifty years of anthropological work on Africa is virtually ignored. The use of archaeological evidence is slight and uncertain. Even in dealing with avowedly historical evidence Rotberg has come less than half-way to meet the current trend among historians of Africa, which is to be rigorous in using the external sources for what they tell us about Africa as opposed to Europeans in Africa. Rotberg has practiced no such economy. He has three long chapters on exploration, and a fourth on the slave trade, all of which might appear more appropriately in a textbook on European expansion.
Review, 2557 words
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