In this short, but lively and well-written book, the historian and archaeologist Robin Derricourt analyses changing perceptions of the ‘biography’ of the African continent over the last 5,000 or so years. Attempting to do for Africa what Edward Said did for the ‘Orient’ in his landmark publication Orientalism, Derricourt presents a far more personal and accessible catalogue of heroes (and occasional rogues) who have helped bring African history and archaeology to western audiences. The creation of an idealized image of Africa, a wilderness, essentially primitive, it is argued, mirrors long-held and deep-rooted western prejudices similar to those which saw in the ‘Orient’ an ancient, romantic, sensuous yet ultimately flawed set of cultures.

In the first chapter a selective range of external perspectives are considered, and these range from Egyptian, Classical, Islamic and European sources on Africa. A theme that comes out strongly here is that Africa cannot be simply reduced to physical boundaries, but also embodies many metaphysical themes as well. This sense of exoticism is further developed in chapter two, from a logical starting point of Herodotus and then into the nineteenth century, with a consideration of external explanations for the Iron Age cultures of southern Africa, especially the ruins of Zimbabwe, for so long ascribed to Phoenicians, Arabs or Chinese. Characters such as J T Bent and Leo Frobenius, with differing motivations, push hyperdiffusionist theories; minority voices such as Gertrude Caton Thompson urge, correctly, more recent and African origins for these cultures, based entirely upon the internal consistency of archaeological evidence, rather than imagination.

These insights are important. For many years these historic certainties underpinned official thought in Apartheid South Africa and to some extent in Rhodesia (a shame, incidentally, that the work of the late Peter Garlake does not receive more prominence here). The work of Cyril Hromnik, which is mentioned within this chapter, ought to have been consigned to history, dangerous and outmoded as it is, but a look at what is available on the internet depressingly assures one that some of these ideas are still en vogue, and of course the work of Credo Mutwa (which is very hard to categorize in any case) only serves to muddy the waters further, combining as it does some strange and visionary Bantu world view with these outmoded perspectives on outside influences on the African past.

For much of the remainder of the book, the tack changes, and over the next three chapters a detailed consideration of the role of pioneering palaeoanthropological scholars in bringing the story of the African past to life is presented. Much of this overview is perhaps better dealt with in more detail in Roger Lewin's excellent Reference Lewin1987 book, Bones of Contention, but here we encounter such luminaries and egos as Raymond Dart, the Leakeys and Donald Johanson, all of whom have placed Africa at the centre of the study of the earliest human ancestors and then the emergence of Anatomically Modern Humans. The final two chapters move us further in terms of social evolution, considering debates on the African-ness of ancient Egypt, the spurious ‘Hamites’, the hyperdiffusionism of Grafton Elliot Smith and the reaction to this under such African scholars as Cheikh Anta Diop and non-African scholars as Martin Bernal (and from a different intellectual perspective in the Americas by Ivan van Sertima), whose trends towards a more extreme Afro-centric interpretation were hugely popular in the feverish atmosphere of post-colonial Africa, the cultural development of Negritude and, across the Atlantic, in the post-Civil Rights era of the 1960s and 1970s. A consideration of the work of the British historian Basil Davidson, a hugely underrated figure, completes the book, drawing attention to the failure of European political constructs translated into an African context.

Although relatively brief, and with little chance to develop more detailed nuances in the key arguments, this is a valuable addition to current African historical and archaeological literature, drawing upon a wide range of sources and methodologies and always entertaining and thought-provoking. For non-Africanists there is much of value as well, no more so than in thinking about how our own cultural baggage informs our perceptions of other places.