Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This is a history of Africa from the origins of mankind right up to the South African general election of 1994. Africans have been pioneers struggling against disease and nature in an overwhelmingly hostile environment, and their social, economic and political institutions have been designed to ensure survival and maximise numbers. These institutions enabled them to survive the slave trade and colonial invasion, but in the context of medical progress and other twentieth-century innovations the same institutions have bred the most rapid population growth the world has ever seen. This demographic growth has lain behind the collapse of colonial rule, the disintegration of apartheid, and the instability of contemporary nations. Thus Iliffe depicts the history of the continent as a single story, binding today's Africans to the earliest human ancestors.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of maps (p. xi)
• Preface to the second edition (p. xiii)
• 1 The frontiersmen of mankind (p. 1)
• 2 The emergence of food-producing communities (p. 6)
• 3 The impact of metals (p. 17)
• 4 Christianity and Islam (p. 37)
• 5 Colonising society in western Africa (p. 63)
• 6 Colonising society in eastern and southern Africa (p. 100)
• 7 The Atlantic slave trade (p. 131)
• 8 Regional diversity in the nineteenth century (p. 164)
• 9 Colonial invasion (p. 193)
• 10 Colonial change, 1918-1950 (p. 219)
• 11 Independent Africa, 1950-1980 (p. 251)
• 12 Industrialisation and race in South Africa, 1886-1994 (p. 273)
• 13 In the time of AIDS (p. 288)
• Notes (p. 317)
• Further reading (p. 329)
• Index (p. 345)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Iliffe, an eminent African historian at Cambridge, offers a far-ranging survey of Africa from the development of the human species to the South African elections of 1994. He writes in a thematic rather than strictly chronological fashion. What sets his book apart from other such surveys (e.g., Basil Davidson's African Civilization Revisited, LJ 6/1/91. 2d ed.) is his treatment of the environment and population as factors in the development of Africa, including North Africa. Iliffe examines human coexistence with nature, the building up of enduring societies, and African reactions to outside forces; yet he always keeps the contemporary world in mind, focusing on the answers to such basic questions as why Africa remained relatively underdeveloped compared with Eurasian societies or why African states have experienced so many problems over the past couple of decades. Iliffe's excellent, well-written introductory text belongs in all collections of Africana.‘Paul H. Thomas, Hoover Inst. Lib., Stanford, Cal. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Iliffe, former professor of African history at Cambridge, regurgitates several discredited statements about Africa and attempts to perpetuate old Conradian myths about a hapless, isolationist continent in an exceptionally hostile, diseased environment. His unambiguous recognition of Egypt as an African civilization may be comforting to some, but even so, his thesis of an "isolated" Egypt contradicts recent scholarship--as well as his own statement that Egyptian civilization "displayed many cultural and political patterns later to appear elsewhere in the continent." Iliffe's mission, generally, is to revive old Eurocentric theories, deploy terminologies such as "negroid," prioritize Greek supremacy, and make concepts like "colonisation" palatable by applying them out of context. In the end, Iliffe appears to exonerate Europe's role in human trafficking and justify British colonization. The last two chapters are the redeeming segments of this book. Populous Africa is no longer the wretched, hostile, diseased environment of poor soils and infertile lands of the previous chapters, and its inhabitants are no longer caricatures of humanity, but this is much too late for redemption. Summing Up: Not recommended --Gloria Emeagwali, Central Connecticut State University