Reading “African History for Beginners” by Herb Boyd

African History for Beginners by Herb Boyd. Illustrated by Shey Wolvek-Pfister. Writers and Readers Publishing, 1991. For Beginners 49.

I have recently written about both the challenges of writing the “short history” genre and writing the history of Africa, especially when such history is framed as a continental history. Herb Boyd’s African History for Beginners falls within and outside of these two categories, framing itself as a history of Africa for those with no knowledge, which is presumably the purpose of most entrants in the “short history” genre. But Boyd’s “beginner’s history” is something else entirely, neither a traditional academic narrative (and that’s great) nor really appropriate for beginners (at least insofar as it narrates a blinkered version of history). But it is a strikingly original and artistic engagement with the African cultural and historical imaginary from an Afrocentric perspective by a major voice in Black studies.

Herb Boyd / For Beginners

Herb Boyd, at the time of writing, is 85 years old. He still teaches at (or, at least, is affiliated with) City College of New York after nearly 60 years in and adjacent to the academy. Raised in Detroit, Boyd started the first Black studies courses at Wayne State University in the late 1960s and taught there for 12 years. He later developed a jazz studies curriculum at Oberlin College and became a journalist in the Black press, winning multiple awards for his journalism, service, and publishing. Author of nearly a dozen books, he won national fame in the early 1990s with his co-edited anthology Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America—An Anthology, which sought “to create a living mosaic of essays and stories in which Black men can view themselves, and be viewed without distortion.” Within a year, Brotherman had sold at least 50,000 copies and received the American Book Award. Boyd’s books since then have largely focused on the biographies of Black thinkers and activists, most recently the much-praised trade history Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination. Boyd’s career has been driven by a grassroots ethos that (rightfully) sees Black folks, especially in the African diaspora, as a major force in world history and that articulates Blackness as a source of pride and belonging.

Central to Boyd’s thinking about history and Blackness in Africa and the diaspora is the influence of his mentor John Henrik Clarke, a historian trained in the 1930s and 1940s under scholars like Arturo Alfonso Schomberg. He served in the Air Force during WWII, worked in the Black press movement and taught at the New School in the late 1940s and 1950s, then traveled West Africa in the revolutionary, de-colonizing years of the late 1950s, where he taught in both Ghana and Nigeria. He returned to the US in the 1960s, where he became a professor at Hunter College and later Cornell University. He was active in the Black power movement while also becoming a leading advocate for Afrocentric history and the founder of various academic organizations for the study of Black history. Clarke was heavily influenced by the work of Senegalese polymath and historian Cheikh Anta Diop; he was also close friends and colleagues with Leonard Jeffries. Clarke was an important figure in the formation of Black studies and in particular the ascendance of Afrocentric history within Black studies as a discipline. His influence on Herb Boyd is very clear—Clarke is referred to as a “griot” “indispensable to the completion of this book”—and informs the Afrocentric approach taken in African History for Beginners.

African History for Beginners was the 49th volume in the popular For Beginners series, the story of which is a player in the wild melodrama that is the history publishing in the era of conglomeration. The series’s concept—to introduce complex topics in a format that mixed visual and prose elements, not necessarily in the form of comics, but more inspired by the practice of self- and small-publisher zines that relied heavily on cut-and-paste techniques for mixing up graphics and prose—originated with the Mexican cartoonist and writer Rius, who created books on Cuba (1960) and Marx (1972). An English translation of the latter proved a hit for the London-based Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, whose founders also ran a bookstore and collectively shared profits. Among the Cooperative’s members was Glenn Thompson, a Black editor from Harlem. After internal fights that led to some members of the Cooperative’s members selling US publishing rights for part of the For Beginners series to Pantheon in the early 1980s (Rius’s Marx book is still with them), the Cooperative broke up and Thompson relocated to New York City to take sole control of the Cooperative. He renamed it Writers and Readers Publishing and asserted US publishing rights over the remainder of the series and all books going forward. The titles in the series (still published actively today as For Beginners LLC) demonstrate a clear interest in radical politics, civil rights, social justice. These books proved immensely popular for introducing readers to important political thinkers and ideas.

African History for Beginners

It’s in this new, graphically exciting format and into this historical and scholarly context of the early 1990s—a period of excitement for both Black activism and Afrocentrist thinking, which I’ll detail more fully in the last half of this essay—that Herb Boyd’s African History for Beginners is published. I’ve tried to put African History for Beginners in this perspective, as a particular kind of book written from a particular scholarly perspective, because, frankly, this is not a good introductory history of Africa. But it has significant value for the cultural and artistic work it does and for the way it articulates certain Afrocentric ideas and fights to preserve Black studies and the Afrocentric intellectual traditions for a new generation.

Published in 1991, Boyd’s volume was given the full title African History for Beginners, Part 1: African Dawn—A Diasporan View, though this is only acknowledged on the interior title pages. Though the idea of (at least) a part two is implicit—the book ends with “To Be Continued…”—no such volume ever appeared, which is a shame, given that part one leaves off at circa the 16th century without having covered, really, anything happening in Africa south of the Congo, and the emphasis largely being on ancient Egypt and the major polities of West Africa. The book is illustrated by Shey Wolvek-Pfister, who is identified in the volume as a painter and illustrator; African History for Beginners was her fourth book for the series. Illustrations, in this case, included both line drawings created for the volume as well as collage-style use of photos and drawings taken from other sources (the cover gives a great example of the kind of cut-up style Wolvek-Pfister uses, though the interior is rendered entirely in black and white).

Boyd’s book is divided into three sections that cover the prehistory of Africa (“Sunrise”), the recorded and archaeologically known history of Nubia and Egypt (“People of the Nile”), and the recorded history of several West African peoples (“People of the Drum”), ending with the hint of the coming of Europeans, particularly the Portuguese, to the shores of western Africa and especially the Gulf of Guinea in the 15th–16th centuries.

Part I is called “Sunrise” and frames the narrative-driven approach to history used by Boyd throughout the book. Boyd introduces us to a first-person narrator, Olagun, son of Omawale, a griot descended from “the immortal griot Mamadou Keita of Mali” and living in the village of Belandougou (“an arrow’s flight from the tomb of Sundiata”—a sly, knowing reference, since the Malinke kept the location of Sundiata’s tomb secret). This brief introduction tells us so much about Boyd’s book and the way it will use and interpret African history. Boyd immediately puts us in a place (in the lands of the Malinke, the former Mali Empire, in the central region of West Africa), connects us to a cultural tradition (that of the griots, keepers of oral traditions, including the Sundiata or Sunjata [ߛߏ߲߬ߖߘߊ߬ / Sònjàdà in Manding], a medieval epic cycle still performed today), and demonstrates his deep knowledge of both, namely through the invention of “Mamadou Keita of Mali,” a likely portmanteau figure that links both Mamadou Kouyate—the modern griot who performed a version of Sundiata recorded in the 1960s and considered one of the standard renderings of the cycle (there are several different performances in print today)—and the Keita dynasty to which the titular Sundiata belonged.

It is significant that Boyd introduces the narrator as a griot, since that cultural figure from West Africa has taken on great importance in Afrocentric, pan-African, and Black nationalist thought, with it sometimes being used to refer to community elders, knowledge-keepers, and storytellers. Thomas A. Hale provides a good history of the term’s emergence in the Black diasporic imagination in the 1970s, and its complicated relationship with the actual social role of the griot in 20th century West Africa, in a 1997 article for Oral Tradition. The term’s use is not only consistent with Boyd’s position in Afrocentric thought, but also symptomatic of the tradition’s free use of African concepts for new purposes, and its blending of traditions for new (diasporic) meanings. It’s worth noting, for example, that Malians and especially the Malinke use the term jeli (sometimes written as djeli), not griot, which is a French term possibly derived from Portuguese (i.e. from grito, “shout”), and which has for whatever reason become the popular reference in English for this (hereditary) class of oral storytellers, historians, and occasional political advisors. Further, Boyd’s choice of character name—Olagun—is not a Malinke name, but a common Yorùbá one.

Boyd’s narration in Part I establishes that “a storm is gathering in the north” to threaten Africa, and that griots have “assembled from the four corners of the continent” (regardless of the existence of griots or not in those four corners) to tell the full history of Africa and “to make sure the past is secured from the invaders.” Boyd’s narrative style and this frame—bringing us into history, to participate in safeguarding it—is enticing and inviting, and a rather brilliant framing. It does suffer somewhat narratively in that Boyd had the opportunity to speak from multiple perspectives, through the many assembled griots, rather than through the singular, pseudo-omniscient voice of Olagun. But this, too, mirrors Boyd’s Afrocentric approach to telling African history as a monolithic thing that can be told from just one perspective.

This short introductory moment alone conflates cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and geographical differences in order to present a sort of singular vision of Africa as defined by the amalgamation of all things West African and which all have histories in Afrocentric and pan-African thought circulating in the Black diaspora. Another smart reference by Boyd is the name of the narrator’s Olagun’s father, Omawale—this is probably a reference to Malcolm X being given the Yorùbá name Omowale, meaning “the son who has come home,” by students at the University of Ibadan. Connections and conflations like these pepper African History for Beginners, showing both a deep knowledge of African stories, histories, and traditions, but also a strong disregard for their cultural, linguistic, ethnic, regional, and historical specificities.

Part I proceeds to provide information about the evolution of hominids in Africa beyond the “Mountains of the Moon” (a term from Greek writings), saying that this story was passed down by Ogun and Shango (Yorùbá gods), and tells the story of the discovery of early hominid remains. Much of Part I is concerned with an outline of different types of gendered social and family arrangements across African societies (Ashanti, Wolof, Baganda, Gola, Dogon, Shona, Wodaabe, Lele), introducing concepts like patriarchy, matriarchy, and gendered familial descent models. Adding a discussion of contemporary (or, at least, 20th century) social dynamics across African cultures in this section, which is meant to be about paleo- and neolithic Africa, is quite awkward, since it risks—as so much Afrocentric thought does—creating an ahistorical understanding of African social systems by framing these very recent ethnic and regional practices as pre-ancient Egyptian. As if to emphasize the temporal awkwardness of this approach, the discussion of social roles is then followed by the emergence of agriculture and the stone age, leading to the “dawn” of African civilization described in Part II.

Part II is titled “People of the Nile” and covers the history of ancient Egypt. Curiously—though, perhaps not, as I explore below—most of the sources Boyd relies on are from ancient Greece or Victorian England, with him citing “English griot with a pen and renowned Egyptologist” E.A. Wallis Budge as a reliable source for the claim that the people who founded Egypt may have come from as far south as Uganda. At stake here, as I’ll explore in the next section, is the question of Egypt as not just an African civilization—that is, a culture located geographically in Africa—but as a Black African civilization. The question of Egypt’s Blackness is absolutely central to Afrocentrism and is no less important in African History for Beginners, where Boyd argues that Black Africans from Nubia established ancient Egypt and that, therefore, the base of Western civilization—Egypt—is a Black African accomplishment. A great deal can be said of the push to make these claims, to shoehorn evidence, but most importantly to obscure the even more interesting story of ancient Egypt as an always cosmopolitan, always racially diverse, and incredibly autocratic ancient society at the center of the ancient Mediterranean world—a civilization that had no concept of Africa as a distinct continent. As Kwame Anthony Appiah notes below, this is distinctly Victorian concern that largely reduplicates Victorian obsessions with biological racial difference and civilizational development.

This middle chapter is a mostly chronological survey of major Egyptian rulers along with some commentary on Egyptian mythology, references to the work of Afrocentric historian Yosef Ben-Jochannan, and stories of Greek and Roman encounters with Egyptian and Ethiopian rulers. The narrative then shifts, rather suddenly with a surprise “Once upon a time” transition, to medieval West Africa, where Boyd/Olagun introduces the history of the Mali Empire, briefly recounts the narrative of Sundiata, and tells of the great wealth of Mali’s kings like Mansa Musa. Though Mali is his touchpoint, Boyd also introduces various other medieval and early modern West African kingdoms, such as the Kanem-Bornu, Songhay, Dahomey, Oyo—and, at the very end of the chapter, the people who built Great Zimbabwe and “the vast kingdoms” of the Congo and southern Africa. Boyd also makes an effort to refer in negative terms, several times, to “hordes of Muslim invaders” who converted many West African peoples in and around the Sahel.

The narrative incoherence of the latter half of “People of the Nile” is taken to greater heights in the third and final section, Part III, “People of the Drum.” Here, Boyd seeks to end his story of Africa by appealing lengthily to the narrative frame: the night is growing long, the drums are getting tired, and so on. Then, in a burst of energy, Olagun rallies and tells us of his many journeys across Africa in his lifetime. Here, he calls on and describes many deities in the Yorùbá pantheon, reciting prayers and blessings in their names, before taking off on a whirlwind tour of various African cultures not yet covered in this beginners history of Africa—almost as if they don’t fit the narrative of a singular, monolithic Black Africa. We hop from Timbuktu to Bushongoland, where we meet the invading Portuguese and flee to the Ituri rainforest to live among the Mangbetu and from there back to Yorùbáland and then on to the shores of the Zambezi river in Shonaland. We watch a sunset where Carthage once stood, see the Rock of Gibraltar, explore Casablanca, travel the Indian Ocean with Swahili fisherman, to the Azores, the Canaries, the Serengeti, Maasailand, the Kalahari, back to the Ituri before—finally—the drums halt and Olagun takes his rest.

Boyd’s finale is certainly impressive, maybe even virtuosic, stringing together so many places and peoples and disparate ideas as to overwhelm the senses, titillating with tidbits of information before moving on. The complexity arises from the whole, but there is very little in the specifics, and the only narrative that arises from the fast-paced tour of the African continent across time and space is the sense of a singular place that we know holds all of this complex: Africa. Joined together in a brilliantly conceived narrative project, of griots gathering to pass on Africa’s story to its children, Boyd’s African History for Beginners immerses us in historical moments, opening a window into many possible pasts. The book’s wellspring of decontextualized proper nouns gives us very little to hold on to, leaving our heads swimming with disconnected detail, as if we have truly been in the midst of a drum circle and heard from a charismatic storyteller.

But although we are immersed in history through this innovative narrative style, Boyd’s narration mixes and matches practices, gods, myths, and (oral) histories from disparate, but mostly West African, traditions to create a trans- or intra-African idea (I want to resist misusing “pan-,” and its specific usage in the African context, for this rhetorical move) of the “African griot” who speaks on behalf of all cultures and peoples of Africa, eliding important and meaningful differences in the name of a diasporic imaginary of Africa that, as I explore below, Beninois philosopher Paulin Hountondji decried as “unanimism”: the fantasy of a single African culture, of a unified theory of Africa. African history, told this way, is decidedly less interesting than the story of African societies’ complex interconnections, conflicts, alliances, cultural and linguistic differences (and overlaps), and so much more. A rich, magnificently complex, exciting, and most importantly living world is traded for a cardboard cutout of an imagined Africa that looks very similar in character if not tone to the Africa of Hollywood right up to the present (with few exceptions, e.g. Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King (2022)).

This impression is furthered by the artistic choices of Shey Wolvek-Pfister, which I’ve said next to nothing about but which deserve more attention. As noted, Wolvek-Pfister’s style is a sort of cut-and-collage technique, pulling images from myriad sources and mixing them together to create narrative relationships with Boyd’s text. Often, however, the photocopying process used to create the collage style for African History for Beginners rendered rather low-quality images throughout the book. Still, the illustrations are fascinating and laudable; Wolvek-Pfister is able to maintain the pace of Boyd’s narrative, to illuminate it with interesting visuals, and she designs the page in ways that enliven the text. But the images are all decontextualized and there are no references to their sources, let alone any notes on whether or not the images used relate in any way to the things they are meant to illustrate. Cut-outs from who-knows-where of a Black person, by virtue of being Black and put next to certain text, can be imagined as a Shona or Gikuyu person regardless of who they represent. In short, Wolvek-Pfister’s illustrations perform the same ideological function of siphoning ideas about Africa into a formless soup.

Afrocentrism for Beginners

Boyd’s African History for Beginners is a wonderfully 90s fever dream of what an alternative mode of education, of telling history, could look like. It’s wild, inventive, immersive, and at times quite fun. It retells important African folktales (from the Nupe and Gola), epics (from the Malinke), and origins myths (from the Gikuyu and Yorùbá) and offers useful summaries of ancient Egyptian and medieval Malian (and other West African kingdoms’) histories. It is also a text deeply and evidently informed by Afrocentrism, an intellectual tradition I want to explore in some detail. All history is written within the shadow of a political project and takes for granted certain ideological stakes, and knowing the aims, methods, and practices of the intellectual tradition(s) that inform our historical narratives are important to understanding why a work of history says what it says—and why it matters that it says what it says, in those ways.

Given that the African diaspora in the Americas was created out of the violence of the transatlantic slave trade that tore Africans from their homes and brought them to the plantations of newly rising European empires and their offshoot nation states in the Americas, it is no surprise that Africa weighed heavily on the intellectual traditions of Black thinkers and leaders in the diaspora. The African imaginary in the Black diasporic imagination, especially in the United States, has been informed by four primary sources of influence:

(1) West African kingdoms and empires, especially those of Nigeria, Mali, and Ghana;

(2) Ethiopia, with its status as an independent African nation throughout the colonial period, only and then briefly conquered by a European power (Italy) during WWII, and throughout its long independence ruled by a Christian emperor, no less (see for example Nadia Nurhussein’s Black Land [2019] and Ras Wayne A. Rose’s W.E.B. Du Bois, Ethiopianism, and Black Internationalism [2023]);

(3) the Congo (see Ira Dworkin’s Congo Love Song [2017]); and, of course,

(4) ancient Egypt, often with reference to the Nubians and various associated toponyms and ethnonyms, like Meroë and Kush (see for example Pauline Hopkins’s incredible novel Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self [1902–1903])

Most of these inspirations for Black diasporic imaginings of Africa appeared throughout the history of the African American intellectual tradition in the 19th and early 20th century, as the sources linked above attest.

Despite earlier discourses on Africa in the Black diaspora, however, historian Mia Bay argues in “The Historical Origins of Afrocentrism” (2000) that there is a clear epistemic break between earlier African American thought on Africa and Afrocentrism proper. The latter emerged only in the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of Cheikh Anta Diop’s publications in the 1950s and 1960s, which argued for not only that the Egyptians were a Black African civilization but also that they had spread to and populated West Africa, home of later medieval kingdoms and empires that we have seen played an important role in the historical narrative of Afrocentrism. Diop’s work on ancient Egypt was transformed into a theory of Afrocentrism in the writing of Molefi Kete Asante, namely in Afrocentricity: A Theory of Social Change (1980). Afrocentrism grew out of the work of Asante and others—Yosef Ben-Jochannan, Ivan Van Sertima, Maulana Karenga, Frances Cress Welsing, and many more, including Clarke, Jeffries, and Boyd (though white, Martin Bernal and his Black Athena [1987] played an important role as well)—into a school of thought that circulated almost exclusively in the US among Black diaspora scholars and in Black communities, and that has been largely associated with Black studies departments, for example those at Temple University (Asante’s home department) and City College (home to Clarke, Jeffries, Boyd, and others).

Bay, a historian of African American intellectual traditions, charts a careful history of the intellectual developments in Afrocentrism across multiple fields of scholarship from the 1950s to the 1990s. Similar histories and differing appraisals of Afrocentric thought can be found in Stephen Howe’s Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (1998) Clarence E. Walker’s We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument About Afrocentrism (2001). What is clear about Afrocentrism as an intellectual tradition is that it responds to historical, modern, and contemporary injustice; that it does so through narratives of Black nationalism, pride, community, and belonging; that it understands African heritage and Blackness as intrinsically connected; and that it sees Africa as the origin of enlightened civilization and culture. Different thinkers and strands of thought emphasize different aspects to different degrees Some, like Welsing and Jeffries argue for rather extreme interpretation of the biological and psychological differences between Black and white people (I explore Jeffries’s thought more below). Others, such as Clarke and Boyd, as evidenced in the historical narratives offered in African History for Beginners, adhere to a milder version of Afrocentrism that emphasizes African origins and a monolithic vision of Africa, but which draws the line (or at least doesn’t comment on) the bio-racial essentialisms (or anti-Semitism) of other Afrocentrists.

Whatever the extremes it has been stretched to, it is clear that Afrocentrism emerged as an important political project in the wake of multiple and overlapping world-historical sea changes for African and African diasporic peoples, starting with the coeval projects of African decolonization and American Civil Rights in the 1950s and 1960s, to the retrenchment of both political projects in the 1970s and 1980s in the face of neocolonialism and racist backlash. For more on this, and if you prefer an audio version of this history, see the two episodes on Afrocentrism (on its origins and on Asante) that appeared in Chike Jeffers and Peter Adamson’s History of Africana Philosophy podcast (I also suggest Jeffers’s article summarizing and working through what it means to narrate the history of Africana philosophy, which offers some important reflections on Africa as a concept).

At best, Afrocentrism created a political consciousness that allowed the ravages of colonialism and white supremacy to be laid bare for a politically galvanized generation of young intellectuals, and which used new histories—sometimes imagined and often over-simplified for the sake of rhetorical convenience—to challenge the racial hierarchies of Black life in both Africa and the diaspora. Put simply, Afrocentrism was and remains a political project, a kind of intellectual nationalism in service of a new way of conceiving Blackness in the world: in the past, today, and going forward. Afrocentrism is not simple, and (ironically) certainly not monolithic, as it has many theorists with varied goals and arguments. But, as we have seen and as Boyd’s African History for Beginners demonstrates so clearly, Afrocentrism is often used to simplify and in the process to reify a monolithic story of Blackness, of Africa, and of Africans.

Appiah and Reactive Afrocentrism

To end, I want to look at a particularly insightful (and concise) summary of Afrocentric thought up to the early 1990s, and, more importantly, an analysis of its methodological and theoretical problems: Kwame Anthony Appiah’s short essay “Beyond Race: Fallacies of Reactive Afrocentrism,” which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in 1993 and in a slightly longer version in a 1994 issue of Skeptic magazine. Appiah’s essay was part of a wider cultural and academic conversation about Afrocentrism that took place across the 1990s in newspapers, academic publication, conferences, and—especially after Leonard Jeffries became national news in 1991—in the media.

Particularly noteworthy is Appiah’s analysis of the anachronistic understanding of history espoused by Diop, Asante, and others who Appiah classifies as part of a “reactive” school of Afrocentric though—that is, a version of Afrocentrism that merely reacts to Eurocentric scholars with an inversion of their theses, rendering an intellectual project that is philosophically, historically, and anthropologically dubious in its understandings of “Africa.” Appiah notes that Afrocentric scholarship in the US from the 1970s onward essentially reduplicated Victorian ideologies of race, culture, biology, and civilization in a search for the “essential” nature of Africanness, drawing rarely from African scholars themselves apart from Diop (who can be said to have sparked the Afrocentric project for foundational thinkers like Asante), and eliding or erasing any scholarship that might suggest the complexity and diversity of African cultures, histories, languages, belief systems, and practices.

For Appiah, the quintessentially Victorian character of Afrocentrism reduplicated the Eurocentric obsession with racial origins from the wellspring of a great, ancient heritage as a marker of moral, intellectual, and civilizational value:

It is not surprising, for example, that in choosing to talk about Egypt and to ignore the rest of Africa and African history, Afrocentrism shares the European prejudice against cultures without writing. Eurocentrism, finding there a literate culture and a significant architecture, set about claiming that Egypt could not be black. Afrocentrism chooses Egypt because Eurocentrism had already made a claim on it.

Some thinkers, like Jeffries, even refashioned the biological narratives of race and culture for Afrocentric purposes, with Jeffries offering a view of history that imagines two races of humanity: the “ice people” of Europe (aka white people), who are “competitive, individualist, and exploitative,” and the “sun people” of Africa (aka Black people),” who are “cooperative, collective, and peaceful.”

Turning to perhaps the greatest intellectual weakness for any serious evaluation of the Afrocentric project, Appiah argues that:

one of the most tiresome features of Afrocentrism [is] its persistence in what the Beninois philosopher (and current Minister of Culture) Paulin Hountondji has called “unanimism”: the view that there is an African culture to which to appeal. It is surely preposterous to suppose that there is a single African culture, shared by everyone from the civilizations of the Upper Nile thousands of years ago to the thousand or so language-zones of contemporary Africa?

In aiming to identify some common core of African civilization, the Afrocentrists seem once again to be responding to earlier attempts to identify a common core of Western culture. One can be forgiven for wondering how unitary the West really is today. But it was always a strange idea that Alexander, Alfred, and Frederick the Great had something in common with each other and with the least of their subjects, which could be called Western culture. And in Africa, where whatever continuity there has been through all this time has not been mediated by even the broken textual tradition that in some sense unites “Western culture,” it is not only a strange idea but a silly one.

Importantly, Appiah (himself a Ghanaian-British-American) points to the erasure of African voices in so much Afrocentric writing—an erasure that suggests Afrocentrism’s fundamental lack of interest in anything but its own unanimist fantasy. Forgive me for quoting three full paragraphs, but they are gold:

A final irony is that Afrocentrism, which is offered in the name of black solidarity, has, by and large, entirely ignored the work of African scholars other than Diop. (This fact tends to be concealed because African-American scholars like Asante and Karenga have adopted African names.) Thus, much play has been given to another major source-book for the Afrocentrists, Janheinz Jahn’s Muntu: African Cultures and Western World, a work that appeared in English translation in the United States with great éclat in the early 1960s. The book revolves around the concept of ntu, the stem of the Kinyaruanda-Bantu words muntu (person), kintu (thing), hantu (place and time) and kuntu (modality); “ntu,” Jahn wrote with the gravitas of revelation, “is the universal force as such.

Reading this, I found myself drawn into a fantasy in which an African scholar returns to her home in Lagos or Nairobi, with the important news that she has uncovered the key to Western culture. Soon to be published: THING: Western Culture and the African World, a work that exposes the philosophy of ing, written so clearly on the face of the English language. For ing, in the Euro-American view, is manifestly the inner dynamic essence of the world. In the structure of the terms doing and making and meaning, the English (and thus, by extension all Westerners) express their deep commitment to this conception. But the secret heart of the matter is captured in their primary ontological category of thing: every th-ing (or be-ing as their sages express the matter in the more specialized vocabulary of one of their secret societies) is not stable but ceaselessly changing. Here we see the fundamental explanation for the extraordinary neophilia of Western culture, its sense that reality is change.

The notion that there is something unitary called African culture that could thus be summarized has been subjected to devastating critique by a generation of African intellectuals. But little sign of these African accounts of African culture appears in the writings of Afrocentrism. Molefi Asante has written whole books about Akan culture without referring to the major works of such Akan philosophers as J. H. Danquah, William Abrahams, Kwasi Wiredu, and Kwame Gyekye. And I am reliably informed that, on one occasion not so long ago, a distinguished Zairian [Congolese] intellectual was told by an African-American interlocutor that “We do not need you educated Africans coming here to tell us about African culture.”

What is so fascinating/frustrating about the Afrocentric vision of African history—and which is made annoyingly clear in Boyd’s African History for Beginners (even if it is, thankfully, perhaps the tamest version of Afrocentric historical writing)—is how it erases the very real histories of African civilizations and cultures that brought about major world-historical changes and in which Africans took part as agents of local, regional, continental, and, indeed, global histories.

TL;DR

The story of Africa has to be understood as complex for there to be any history of Africa at all.

Herb Boyd’s African History for Beginners is not interested in that complexity, but in Africa as a cipher for the political projects of Afrocentrism and the, indeed right and just, search for Black pride, heritage, and meaning in the American diaspora by drawing, understandably and rightly, on African pasts. But the relationship between past and present in this project turns quickly to an imagined Africa that is hardly real and that flattens the vibrant realities of a continent, its hundreds of thousands of years of history, and its billion plus inhabitants today. The book stands as an absolutely fascinating and engaging attempt to excite new readers with the history of Africa and, by proxy, the accomplishments of a generation of Black studies scholars and Afrocentric thinkers who were, in the 1990s, being challenged by non-Afrocentric scholars of African and African American history (as well as, no doubt, the usual racists).

Boyd’s African History for Beginners may not be an African history worth reading for African history, but it is an important example of an attempt to create a popular history textbook in the Afrocentric mold for a mass audience in a book series that was regarded as truly exciting and cutting edge, while also holding its own as a work of Afrocentric thought.