Africans: The History of a Continent

This is a good overall comprehensive history of Sub-Saharan Africa. I wouldn't use it for getting a better understanding of Northern Africa as his focus on demography paints a laconic picture of this region. For a more contemporary historical overview, I would suggest Fred Cooper's, Africa Since 1940.

There isnt much more for me to add to the previous reviews, but I will say that this is an excellently written book that is amazingly wide in its breadth.

Iliffe's 'Africans' is the most distinguished and intelligent brief history of Africa yet written. Dry, and at times dense with information, it nonetheless succintly and brilliantly outlines the history of this complex and fascinating continent from earliest man to the democratic movements of the 1990s. Centred around a thesis that the key to Africa's history is population change, Iliffe weaves his tale with masterly skill. Underpopulated until the middle of the 20th century, the central feature of African history till the modern period has been a struggle for the control of scarce labour - land, by contrast, being abundant. Only with the massive population increases and urbanisation of the last fifty years have parts of the continent become over-populated, where a struggle for natural resources among an abundance of competitors has become the defining feature of African society (anyone who has spent time in the dog-eat-dog societies of Kenya or Nigeria can happily testify to this truth). This simple, somewhat tendentious but nonetheless thought-provoking thesis is the thread on which the book hangs, and is a relief from the dry, tedious and abstracted ideological and political theories which other historians have tried to apply to African history. This is a much richer book than such a summary might imply - Iliffe seems to have read every book and article ever written on African history (his Stakhanovite work methods are renowned), and politics, great men, religion, social movements all play a part in the narrative: and, as one has come to expect from Iliffe, African proverbs are studded in the text like diamonds in a tiara, illuminating and making real the events and processes on which he dwells. This is perhaps too dry a book to celebrate completely - Iliffe's Jesuitical approach to historical research lacks passion, and his powerful historian's mind perhaps takes for granted in the reader a too-deep understanding of that subject and its conventions. But ANYONE who wishs to understand more about the African continent cannot do without the learning, wisdom and intelligence that this book offers. Africa has been done a great service.