During the 1960s and 1970s the research and scholarship of Jean Suret-Canale helped to educate a generation of activists and African intellectuals. But this author and militant, with an impressive output of books on African history, has become largely forgotten in the French-speaking world and remains largely unknown in the English-speaking one. Yet Suret-Canale was the founding father of African history in France. Even if he is rarely cited or read by historians and Africanists inside or outside France, Suret-Canale remains a figure of vital importance. Pascal Bianchini's excellent book Suret-Canale de la résistance à l'anticolonialisme gives us a unique insight into the man's life and work.

Comprising interviews conducted with Suret-Canale before the historian's death in 2007, the book tells the story of his extraordinary life through his own words and recollections. Bianchini's thorough introduction provides the context to the interviews, revisiting Suret-Canale's trajectory from student to partisan in the resistance during the Second World War and ardent member of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF).

Moving to Dakar after the war to teach, Suret-Canale became involved in the burgeoning nationalist movements. For three years he lived in the capital of French colonialism in West Africa, the Afrique-Occidentale Française (AOF), and witnessed and participated in the development of the first mass parties of African nationalism. Suret-Canale was in Bamako for the creation of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) in 1946, and knew (and distrusted) Houphouët-Boigny who once visited Suret-Canale in hospital where the young teacher was recovering from an attack of malaria. As a communist he was involved in the growing workers' movement, witnessing the extraordinary strike of railway workers on the Dakar–Bamako line in 1947. In the chapter dealing with his involvement in the anti-colonial struggle in Dakar, Suret-Canale describes his involvement with the Groupes d’Études Communistes (GEC) which helped to train a generation of activists, at all levels, in political ideas and organisation.

Over the next two decades, with prolonged periods spent in France and then Guinea, Suret-Canale wrote prodigiously on Africa's tragic encounter with Europe. Responding to Sékou Touré's appeal for foreign volunteers following the exodus of the French after independence, Suret-Canale was one of only two French teachers to settle in Guinea. He explains his eventual disenchantment with the regime in one of the interviews in the book.

From the late 1950s to the end of the 1970s Suret-Canale wrote a number of important history books, publishing in 1962 his celebrated volume Afrique noire: l’ère coloniale, 1900–1945, which, Bianchini writes, ‘made him known to a generation of African intellectuals and activists’ (11). Letters from early leaders of West African nationalist movements, reproduced in the book, testify to this influence.

Even if his brand of ‘committed history’ was denounced at the time, his work clearly defined a new era in African historiography. His volumes were translated into English, with one English reviewer remarking ‘Suret-Canale's Histoire de l'Afrique occidentale … is deeply imbued by an African nationalist ideology and is widely used in Guinea and Mali’ (11).

Returning to France in 1963, he became a leading intellectual in the PCF, spending a period on the Central Committee. But despite his influence and work, Suret-Canale remained ostracised by the French academy. Without the proper accreditation, it was not until the age of 57 that Suret-Canale secured a position at a university in Paris. Even this position was given grudgingly and he was appointed as a junior lecturer (maître-assistant) which meant that he was not allowed to supervise research, or – even more absurdly – teach African history.

Bianchini correctly identifies Suret-Canale as one of the pioneers in African studies, a group that includes Basil Davidson (with whom Suret-Canale was often in communication) and the American Melville Herskovits. One of the many pleasures of Bianchini's book is the collection of documents reproduced from Suret-Canale's personal archive. One letter from Davidson asks humbly for Suret-Canale's ‘frank opinions’ of his recently published book on slavery, Black mother (1961), expressing delight that his own conclusions ‘echo yours’ (217).

With some force Bianchini argues that even though Suret-Canale was, at intervals, a leading member of the PCF his work was not marked by dogmatic party formulas. On the contrary, Bianchini describes his approach as a ‘defence of a type of “idealism” always based on the discovery of empirical elements, opposed to a strictly materialist conception, where historical facts are inscribed on pre-established formulas’ (24). Bianchini's book is an important contribution to the necessary rediscovery and celebration of Suret-Canale and his work.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2013.852715