Volume 45, Number 20 · December 17, 1998
Africa: The Hidden History
By Kwame Anthony Appiah
Africa: A Biography of the Continent
by John Reader
Knopf, 801 pp., $35.00
Some thirty-five years ago, H.R. Trevor- Roper—in a moment of condescension that quickly became notorious—declared to an audience on the BBC: 'Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But, at present there is none: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness….'[1] Trevor-Roper had not then been ennobled as Lord Dacre of Glanton; but if he spoke without the authority of the peerage, his pronouncement still came, as it were, ex cathedra, from the podium of the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford.
Review, 8487 words
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