Teaching & Learning Guide for: Teaching African History in an Era of Globalization
Authors: Davis R. Hunt 
Published: June 2007

Author’s Introduction

Davis notes at the outset that Africa is the most impoverished of the continents. This condition in turn has led scholars, development experts, and political leaders in a search for the causes of poverty in Africa in the hopes of finding successful means for addressing it.

Focus Questions

How can utilizing a historical perspective enhance our understanding of Africa’s widespread and deeply entrenched poverty beyond the explanations of academic disciplines such as anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology?

In the early twenty‐first century, what if any difference does it make in our perception of Africa to argue that ‘as of the middle second millennium CE . . . Africa’s role in the global community was one in which African were fully in charge of their own economic, social, and cultural affairs, and were capable of engaging with external forces on their own terms’?

Author Recommends

* Connah, G., African Civilizations: An Archaeological Perspective, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

This book, with its focus on the early development of social complexity in tropical Africa from about 2000 BCE onward, offers an excellent starting point for understanding the depth and breadth of human achievement in Africa. The author examines urbanism and state formation in their environmental setting in seven areas of Africa, chronologically arranged, beginning with the Nubian Nile and continuing with the Ethiopian highlands, the West African savanna, the West African forest, the East African coast and its island, the Zimbabwean plateau, and several areas of Central Africa. Trade serves as a main factor in developing urbanism and state formation, but even more important in Connah’s mind were the underlying favorable environmental circumstances that enabled higher than usual agricultural productivity and its attendant population growth.

* Vansina, J., How Societies are Born: Governance in West Central Africa Before 1600 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2005).

Jan Vansina has long pioneered the study of pre‐colonial African history through utilizing the available sources of evidence such as those that come from archaeology and historical linguistics to study pre‐literate African societies. In this, his most recent book, he first examines how relatively large societies emerged from the small foraging communities that characterized West Central Africa up until about 500 BCE. He then discusses the variety of developmental paths and governance structures that emerged among the different societies of the region.

* Wright, D. R., The World and a Very Small Place in Africa: A History of Globalization in Niumi, The Gambia, 2nd edn. (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004).

Wright takes a world systems approach to this study of Niumi, a minor African polity located near the mouth of the Gambia River. By so doing, he illustrates the effects of globalization on the small and impoverished present‐day state of The Gambia, and, by extrapolation, much of the rest of tropical Africa. The key initial date is Niumi’s encounter with the Portuguese in 1446. A fully viable entity that was already involved in the wider world economy and culture via the trans‐Saharan trade, the inhabitants of Niumi was open to the new trading and cultural opportunities that trade via the Atlantic offered them. The long‐term impact of Niumi’s involvement with the initially promising new trade routes was the loss of its autonomy and its relegation to economic and cultural dependency.

* Hochschild, A., King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

Throughout Africa and, indeed, the wider world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whites were ruling over indigenous populations as if it were their right and as if the suffering of the locals did not matter. But nowhere was there a more blatant example of the cruelest forms of exploitation and suffering than King Leopold’s Congo. At one level, this is a story of the individuals who played a key role in establishing the Congo Free State, conducting its affairs, and exposing the massive and systematic abuses of its population in the pursuit of profit on behalf of Leopold. This is far more than a story of personalities, however, for Hochschild places Leopold’s Congo in the wider historical context of the age of imperialism.

Online Materials

1. Fung, K., Africa South of the Sahara: Selected Internet Resourceshttp://www‐sul.stanford.edu/depts/ssrg/africa/guide.html, accessed on 28 August 2006.

Prepared by Karen Fung, Curator, Africa Collection, Stanford University Libraries, for the Information and Communication Technology Group (ICTG), African Studies Association, USA, this guide is an updated version (as of 2006) of the printed guide to Africa‐related internet resources that initially appeared in 1994. Users can browse the guide by country (lists 49 sub‐Saharan countries and island nations; and by region as well) or by general topic (53 in all, ranging from African Diaspora to Women), or they can search for specific information by entering one or more words. It also contains breaking Africa news, linking to the best sources for up‐to‐date African news.

2. University of Washington Libraries, Sub‐Saharan African History http://www.lib.washington.edu/subject/History/tm/africa.html, accessed on 28 August 2006.

This is a much more focused guide than Africa South of the Sahara: Selected Internet Resources, which it links under the heading of General African Studies Sites. A unique aspect of this guide is its focus on sight and sound. For example, it also links under the general sites ‘Africa Focus’, which is an online collection of over 3000 slides, 500 photographs and 50 hours of sound from 45 African countries with an emphasis on contemporary Africa. It has links to regional and country specific sites, including the valuable ‘Voyages en Afrique’ with its collection of 900 French texts, images and maps illustrating African exploration and colonial history, and the ‘Digitized Colonial Picture Archive’ with its searchable collection of more than 50,000 digitized photographs from the archives of the ‘Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft.’ Also listed are links to three research organizations, Africa Research Central: A Clearinghouse of African Primary Sources, the African Studies Centre at Leiden University, and the Harriet Tubman Resource Center.

Sample Syllabus

Rather than providing a sample syllabus, readers are referred to Volume 2, Number 1 (2004) of the e‐journal World History Connected (http://worldhistoryconnected.press.uiuc.edu/2.1/). The editorial for this issue begins by stating: ‘How should we teach about Africa in our world history courses? As the essays in this issue attest, there is no simple answer to this question.’ The core of this issue consists of a forum on teaching about Africa from a world history or global approach. In addition to the essays on teaching, there are helpful bibliographic suggestions:

Forum: Teaching Africa in World History: Issues and Approaches

Putting Africa in World History and Vice Versa

by Erik Gilbert

So Many Africas, So Little Time: Doing Justice to Africa in the World History Survey

by Jonathan Reynolds

Connecting African History to the Major Themes of World History

by Candice Goucher

Teaching about the African Past in the Context of World History

by R. Hunt Davis

Resources

Suggested Readings in African History for Non‐specialists: An Annotated List

by David Northrup

Resource Suggestions from the Experts