The scale of the west’s exploitation of Africa and Africans in the pursuit of economic power is laid bare in this painful, passionate retelling of Eurocentric history
The way we think about history is entirely wrong, says Howard W French at the start of this magnificent, powerful and absorbing book. The problem is not just that the people and cultures of Africa have been ignored and left to one side; rather, that they have been so miscast that the story of the global past has become part of a profound “mistelling”.
That process starts, argues French, with the age of discovery. The impetus for what turned into the creation of multiple European empires stretching across continents did not come from the “yearning for ties with Asia”, but from a “centuries-old desire to forge trading ties with legendarily rich Black societies” in Africa that were home to huge quantities of gold and an “inexhaustible source” of labour. It was along Africa’s western coast that Europeans “perfected techniques of map-making and navigation”, where ship designs were tested and improved and where sailors learned to understand the winds of the Atlantic Ocean.