Kevin Shillington – Encyclopedia of African History (3 Volume set)

Автор: Kevin Shillington
Название книги: Encyclopedia of African History
Формат: PDF
Жанр: История Азии и Африки
Страницы: 1864
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Covering the entire continent from Morocco, Libya, and Egypt in the north to the Cape of Good Hope in the south, and the surrounding islands from Cape Verde in the west to Madagascar, Mauritius, and Seychelles in the east, the Encyclopedia of African History is a new A-Z reference resource on the history of the entire African continent. With entries ranging from the earliest evolution of human beings in Africa to the beginning of the twenty-first century, this comprehensive three volume Encyclopedia is the first reference of this scale and scope. Also includes 99 maps.

African history as a modern academic discipline came of age in the 1950s, the decade
of African nationalism that saw the parallel emergence of African institutions of higher
education on the continent. The true origins of African higher education can be traced
back many centuries to the Islamic universities of North Africa, Timbuktu, and Cairo,
while the origins of recorded history itself are to be found in the scrolls of ancient
Egypt, probably the oldest recorded history in the world. Beyond the reaches of the
Roman Empire in North Africa, the tradition of keeping written records of events, ideas,
and dynasties was followed, almost continuously, by the priests and scholars of ancient,
medieval, and modern Ethiopia. Meanwhile, preliterate African societies recorded their
histories in the oral memories and ancestral traditions that were faithfully handed down
from generation to generation. Sometimes these were adapted to suit the political imperatives
of current ruling elites, but as the modern academic historian knows only too
well, the written record is similarly vulnerable to the interpretation of the recorder.
Before the European incursion at the end of the nineteenth century, literate Africans
in western and southern Africa had appreciated the importance of recording oral traditions
and writing the history of their own people. Following the colonial intrusion,
however, Europeans took over the writing of African history, and interpreted it
primarily as a timeless backdrop to their own appearance on the scene. They brought
with them not only the social Darwinism of the imperial project, but also the perspective
of their own historical traditions. Thus, early colonial historians saw an Africa of
warring “tribes” peopled by waves of migration, such as Roman imperialists had seen
and conquered in Western Europe some 2000 years earlier. To these historians, African
peoples had no history of significance and were distinguished only by a variety of custom
and tradition. Any contrary evidence of indigenous sophistication and development
was interpreted as the work of outside (by implication, northern Eurasian) immigration
or influence. The origins of Great Zimbabwe (a Shona kingdom founded
between 1100 and 1450), originally believed by European colonial historians to be
non-African despite much evidence to the contrary, proved to be the most notorious
and persistent of these myths. Despite early academic challenges, these Europeanconstructed
myths about Africa’s past exerted a dominant influence on approaches to
African history until well into the second half of the twentieth century.
Encouraged and supported by a handful of European and North American academics,
pioneering Africans seized the opportunities offered by the newly open academic
world that emerged after World War II. So began the mature study of African history,
which established the subject as a modern, respected, academic discipline. The fruits
of this discipline were summarized in two major collective works, written and published
primarily in the 1970s and 1980s, the Cambridge History of Africa (8 volumes,
1975–1986) and the UNESCO General History of Africa (8 volumes, 1981–1993). The present Encyclopedia of African History builds upon this tradition, and in doing
so provides a new reference resource on the history of the African continent and an
up-to-date survey of the current state of scholarship at the turn of the new millennium.
Unlike other reference works that do not treat North Africa together with Sub-Saharan
Africa, the coverage of this encyclopedia is that of the whole continent, from Morocco,
Libya, and Egypt in the north to the Cape of Good Hope in the south, and includes
the surrounding islands, from Cape Verde in the west to Madagascar, Mauritius, and
Seychelles in the east. Covering the history of the continent as a diverse whole—with
complementary and competing cultural forces from north to south and east to west—
reflects the direction toward which contemporary scholarship of African history has
moved in recent years. It is an indispensable feature of this work that students can find
African history presented with a view to the continent in its entirety.
The historical periods covered are also unique for a reference work. This encyclopedia
does not chop African history into discrete and seemingly unrelated periods. To
allow students to find the interlinking histories of continuity and change, the periods
included in this encyclopedia range from the earliest evolution of human beings on the
continent to the new millennium. Approximately one-third of the encyclopedia covers
the history of Africa to the end of the eighteenth century, a fascinating period of rich
cultural achievements and profound historical developments that occur in the time
before the Roman Empire through the European Middle Ages and beyond. Students
can find information about the emergence of foraging and food-producing societies,
the flowering of the great Egyptian civilization, and the development of other, less
obviously dramatic, civilizations in the savannas and forests in all regions of Africa.
Attention is paid both to indigenous developments and to the impact of outside influences
and intrusions, including the spread of Islam and the slave trade in all its forms,
to provide students with the dynamic cultural context of the continent within the many
forces shaping human history. Most of the remaining two-thirds of this encyclopedia
details the history of each region from the precolonial nineteenth century, through the
twentieth-century colonial period that defined the modern states, and takes the user
into the postcolonial contemporary period, and the dawn of the new millennium.
How to Use this Book
The Encyclopedia of African History is organized into a series of free-standing essays,
most of them approximately 1,000 words in length. They range from factual narrative
entries to thematic and analytical discussions, and combinations of all these. There are,
in addition, a number of longer essays of about 3,000–5,000 words, which analyze
broader topics: regional general surveys, historiographical essays, and wide historical
themes, such as the African Diaspora, African Political Systems, and Africa in World
History. The encyclopedia takes a broadly African viewpoint of the history of the continent,
where this is appropriate, and as far as possible provides the reader with a reliable,
up-to-date view of the current state of scholarship on the full range of African history.
Where debates and controversies occur, these are indicated and discussed. As far as possible,
this book takes the history of Africa up to the present, at least to the opening years
of the twenty-first century. Thus topics such as Nigeria’s Fourth Republic or the civil
war and demise of Charles Taylor as president of Liberia are put into their historical
context, as are themes such as the disease pandemics of malaria and HIV/AIDS.
Perhaps the most significant feature of the encyclopedia is the easily accessible
A-to-Z format. The titles of the essays are organized for easy reference into composite
articles on the major regions, states, themes, societies, and individuals of African history.
Within these multiple-entry composites, the essays are organized in a broadly chronological
order: thus Egypt under the Ottomans precedes Egypt under Muhammad Ali.
Cross-referencing in the form of See also’s at the end of most entries refers the reader to
other related essays. Blind entries direct readers to essays listed under another title; for example, the blind entry “Gold Coast” refers the reader to the entry on Ghana’s colonial
period. In addition, a full index is provided for reference to those items and individuals
that are mentioned within essays but do not appear as head words in their own right. A
list for Further Reading at the end of each entry refers the reader to some of the most
recent work on the subject.
Other special features include 100 specially commissioned maps, one for each of the
55 modern states, and a further 45 specially designed historical maps, indicating such
important features as the Languages of Africa, the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt,
the Songhay Empire, and the Peoples of the East African Savanna in the Eighteenth
Century. I researched widely in other people’s work for the material for these historical
maps, in particular Ajayi and Crowder’s Historical Atlas of Africa (1985), the various
works of the late David Beach for the Zimbabwe Plateau of the fifteenth to eighteenth
centuries, and the work of Jan Vansina for the peoples of the Congolese forest of Equatorial
Africa by the early nineteenth century. I should like to take this opportunity to
thank Catherine Lawrence for drawing the maps and for her patience with my notinfrequent
editorial interventions. Any errors of interpretation, however, particularly in
the historical maps, must remain mine alone. In addition, 103 illustrations are dispersed
throughout, many of them not previously published in a work of this nature.
The encyclopedia consists of nearly 1,100 entries. The original list of entry topics
was devised by the editor with the advice of a panel of 30 advisers, all of them established
specialists in a particular field of African history, and some with decades of experience,
not only in the teaching, researching, and writing of African history, but also
in the editing and publication of large collaborative volumes. The final decision on the
selection or omission of topics remained, however, my own.
A total of 330 authors have contributed the entries to this encyclopedia, and
approximately 130 of them are African. About half of the latter are currently working
in African universities, and the remainder overseas, mostly in North American universities,
but also in Europe, India, and Australia. A number of entries from Francophone
West Africa, Madagascar, France, and Belgium have been translated from their original
French.