BOOK IV
African People
Rulers, scholars, revolutionaries, writers and musicians — presented with their achievements and their contradictions.
13 entries
Mansa Musa
The pilgrimage that put Mali on Europe's maps.
Mansa Musa ruled the Mali Empire at its territorial and commercial height, and his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 was the single most consequential act of African public diplomacy of the medieval period. The gold he distributed disrupted Cairo's markets for years; the scholars, architects and books he returned with reshaped Timbuktu; and within fifty years European cartographers were drawing him on their maps, enthroned with a nugget of gold in his hand.
MaliSundiata Keita
The founder remembered by griots for eight centuries.
Sundiata Keita founded the Mali Empire in the thirteenth century by assembling a coalition that broke Sosso power at Kirina. His life is known chiefly through the Sundiata epic, an oral work carried by trained jeli families for roughly eight hundred years — simultaneously a founding narrative, a work of literature and a statement of constitutional principle.
MaliAskia Muhammad
The administrator who out-organised his rivals.
Muhammad Ture seized the Songhai throne in 1493 and spent thirty-five years turning a conquest state into the most elaborately administered empire the western Sudan produced: appointed provincial governors, specialised ministries, a standing army, standardised weights and measures, and a deliberate alliance with the scholarly class his predecessor had brutalised.
SonghaiAhmad Baba al-Timbukti
A scholar who wrote against the enslavement of free Muslims.
Jurist, biographer and teacher, Ahmad Baba wrote dozens of works, was deported to Marrakesh after the Moroccan conquest of Songhai, and produced in exile a legal opinion arguing that religion rather than origin or colour determined who could lawfully be enslaved — one of the most significant African interventions in the ethics of slavery written from inside the period.
TimbuktuCheikh Anta Diop
The physicist-historian who forced a discipline to argue.
Trained in physics and chemistry in Paris and working in radiocarbon dating in Dakar, Cheikh Anta Diop argued that Ancient Egypt was a Black African civilisation culturally continuous with the rest of the continent, and that African history had to be written from African linguistic, cultural and archaeological evidence rather than from European assumptions. The Egypt thesis remains contested; the methodological demand reshaped African intellectual life.
SenegalJoseph Ki-Zerbo
'Without identity, we are an object of history.'
Historian, teacher and opposition politician from Burkina Faso, Ki-Zerbo helped conceive and direct UNESCO's eight-volume General History of Africa, wrote the first widely used African-authored general history of the continent, and argued through five decades that development imposed from outside is not development at all.
Burkina FasoKwame Nkrumah
Independence, and the argument for a united Africa.
Kwame Nkrumah took the Gold Coast to independence in 1957 as the first sub-Saharan colony to free itself, built a mass party that made that possible, and spent the rest of his life arguing that political independence without continental unity and economic control would prove hollow. He was overthrown in 1966; the argument he made has outlived every government that dismissed it.
GhanaThomas Sankara
Four years that are still being argued about.
In four years as head of state, Sankara renamed Upper Volta as Burkina Faso — land of upright people — vaccinated millions of children in weeks, planted millions of trees against the advancing desert, outlawed forced marriage and female genital cutting, cut his own government's privileges to the bone, and told a continental summit to refuse its debts. He was killed in the coup that installed Blaise Compaoré in 1987, and his reputation has grown steadily ever since.
Burkina FasoHaile Selassie I
The emperor who addressed the world and lost his own country.
Haile Selassie modernised the Ethiopian state, delivered one of the twentieth century's decisive moral speeches at the League of Nations after Italy invaded in 1936, helped found the Organisation of African Unity in his own capital, became a divine figure to Rastafari in Jamaica, and was deposed in 1974 by a revolution triggered in part by a famine his government concealed.
EthiopiaNelson Mandela
Lawyer, saboteur, prisoner, negotiator, president.
Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison for leading the armed wing of the African National Congress, walked out in 1990 to negotiate with the government that jailed him, and served a single term as South Africa's first democratically elected president. The settlement he brokered averted the civil war most observers expected and deferred the economic questions that dominate South African politics today.
South AfricaChinua Achebe
'Until the lions have their own historians…'
Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, put an Igbo society on the page as a complete world with its own logic, law, humour and cruelty, and in doing so changed what African literature could be. Achebe went on to write five more novels, essays that reframed the criticism of Conrad, and a memoir of the Biafran war, while building the publishing and editorial infrastructure that carried a generation of African writers into print.
NigeriaFela Anikulapo Kuti
Afrobeat as political weapon.
Fela Kuti fused highlife, jazz, funk and Yoruba percussion into Afrobeat, and used twenty-minute songs in pidgin English to attack military rule, corporate power, corruption and what he called the colonial mentality. The Nigerian state beat him, jailed him and burned his compound; he kept releasing records, and the form he invented underpins a large part of contemporary global popular music.
NigeriaKhoe and San Peoples
Among the deepest human lineages alive.
The Khoe herders and San hunter-gatherers of southern Africa carry some of the oldest genetic divergences in humanity, speak languages with the largest click inventories on Earth, produced one of the world's great art traditions, and are still fighting for land, language and recognition in the countries built on their dispossession.
Southern Africa