Quote:
Originally Posted by B0rsuk
To anyone interested in the history of Africa I would like to recommend a book:
Black Mother by Basil Davidson. It's a curious book - it doesn't read like a history book. It's not a listing of kings, dates and battles. It describes processes, cause and effect. It focuses on effects of slave trade in Africa, as opposed to Europe and America as it's usually done. It's full of many interesting things, including ancient "black" kingdoms of Kongo, Kush which thrived centuries before colonialism. It took 5 hundred years of slave trading to corrupt Africa and bring it to its knees. Prior to that Europeans treaded Africa with respect, and were simply unable to establish any military bridgehead. One of points it makes is that blacks' inferiority is an effect of successful propaganda of slave traders.
Can anyone recommend me interesting books about Africa ? Including fantasy ? Conan is kind of nice, but in these books blacks are always slaves or servants and don't govern themselves.
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John Thornton's
Africa and Africans is a modern classic, and a bit of an "antidote" to the theory you suggested above. Thorton argues that Africans retained an enormous amount of "agency" in dealing with Europeans. He also argues that the slave trade did no more lasting damage to African society on the whole as an out break of plauge would have. Furthermore, there were winners and losers in the slave trade within Africa, and some nations arguably came out ahead in the transactions. Obviously, there is a lot in his book, for example he discusses slaves in New World colonies.
Hmmm... this has inspired me to suggest a Late Age nation, a colonial one based on Atlantic World theory. Probably a blend of Machaka, Marignon, and Mictlan. One of its capital sites is called the Grand Plantation, which provides resources, blood slaves, and wealth.
Can anyone else dig it?