In the collection of essays Global Africa Into the Twenty-First Century, editors Dorothy Hodgson and Judith Byfield tackle the challenge V.Y. Mudimbe identified as “the idea of Africa.” Their aim is to push readers to think deeply about and grapple with the dynamic nature of Africa as a geographic space, situating Africa at the center of global processes by demonstrating the pivotal roles Africans have played in producing and circulating ideas and initiating “transformations throughout the world” (1). Hodgson and Byfield present alternatives to the manner in which Africa is typically perceived, employing the volume’s diverse chapters to reconstruct the continent and to restore a more holistic, invigorated, and rigorous view of Africa’s past, present, and future. While the text draws on scholarly expertise, it models praxis by also bringing in the voices, knowledge, and approaches of practitioners (such as journalists, artists, policy makers) and activists.

Global Africa’s immense geographic, temporal, thematic, and disciplinary scope is impressively covered in thirty-seven chapters elucidating both well-known and less familiar narratives of Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. Covering disciplines from history to biology, the text is divided into five sections: 1) Entangled Histories, 2) Power and its Challenges, 3) Circulation of Communities and Cultures, 4) Science, Technology, and Health, 5) Africa in the World Today. There is an overall introduction and conclusion, and each section of the book also has its own individual introduction. This organization allows the text to achieve the editors’ goals of raising questions, introducing themes, challenging readers to rethink paradigms, and sparking readers to consider dynamics of power and how they shape the stories we tell. The chapters collectively provide the novice with strong evidence of the many layers of human agency and social negotiation available to be explored in Africa, while, for the most part, maintaining at least a semblance of narrative cohesion. The essays illustrate the multiple ways in which people in Africa and the diasporas have driven economic, historical, political, and scientific activities that have in turn contributed to regional and trans-continental material needs and intellectual developments.

“Entangled Histories,” the first section of the text, models the historical depth, geographic scope, and topical breadth of each of the book’s five sections. This first part of the text demonstrates, using seven case studies, that far from remaining on the sidelines or at the margins, individual Africans have long initiated expeditions that brought them into contact with distant communities while forging networks linking them to people and resources both in Africa and beyond. Africans of varied social statuses and genders, represented by the examples of Ibn Khaldun (fourteenth century), Abû Abayd Abd Allâh al Bakrî (eleventh century), Fatma of Timbuktu and Goulimine (twentieth century), Odette du Puigaudeau (1894-1991), Sophie mint Ali ould Ali Wali (twentieth century), Diego Suárez (sixteenth century), and Charles Morris (nineteenth century), traversed the continent or its bordering waterways for economic, religious, and personal reasons. While some operated as free persons, several early chapters reveal the complexity of people’s lives with regard to opportunities, limitations, and social norms.

This approach is demonstrated well in E. Anne McDougall’s chapter “Three Saharan Women,” which challenges stereotypes about women and non-elites, foregrounding the experiences and the intellectual and material contributions of those typically invisible in the record. Generalizations about life in a given place and time leave us with flat narratives, while in fact the ways that social class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity in one sub-region shaped experiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries makes for a far more lively account. Through the frame of colonialism, McDougall analyzes how the interests of these three women produced differing reactions to the end of colonial rule and the formation of national borders, even though each woman clearly identified as Saharan.

Leo Garofolo’s chapter, “Afro-Iberians in the Early Spanish Empire 1550–1600,” which spans the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, along with Renu Modi’s chapter “Africans in India, Past and Present,” are interesting for their reflections on complex identities forged in diasporas. Diego Suárez—an Afro-Iberian—and the thousands of Siddis (Afro-Indians) held a number of professional and social roles that were integral to their identities and social networks, which stretched well beyond the boundaries of the African continent. What makes these two chapters particularly noteworthy is that they reflect the ways that persons of African descent in two very different eras and diasporic contexts asserted their agency and made claims to belonging in spaces that might easily have been denied to them. Suárez did so in a Catholic milieu, where “participation in a contrafraternity reinforced [his] identification with an artisan sector that placed him well above his father’s manual-labourer status (a market place porter) and his mother’s position selling sweets” (43). For the Siddis, hundreds of years in India have played into discussions of South-South linkages among post-colonial nations hoping to combat the negative effects of globalization, structural adjustment programs, proxy wars, and neo-colonialism (74).

“Power and Its Challenges,” the second section of Global Africa, while acknowledging power from the top down through the undemocratic rule of colonial and post-colonial states, instead focuses on alternative power from the bottom up. Here the reader sees ways in which individuals and whole communities speak “truth to power” on the national and global stage (84) and forge intellectual and political movements such as Pan-Africanism to solidify global links between Africa and the diaspora. By examining some well-known political and ideological developments that emerged directly on the continent—such as Tanzania’s Ujamaa and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission—the authors reveal logics that were employed by various Africans in order to manage the challenges of the Cold War, Chinese expansion and investment, government corruption, and economic and environmental degradations.

Part three, “Circulation of Communities and Commodities,” picks up where section one left off to examine late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century networks encompassing popular culture, arts, literature, and sport. Though not entirely new in approach, this examination of popular forms in the twentieth century through both photo essay and written text provides insight through methods and forms that speak to students of the 2010s and, one would hope also, of the 2020s, while continuing key threads set out by the editors in the introduction. In essence, chapters on food (Byfield), textiles (Rovine), Christian evangelism (Haugen), photos (Pelcan and Dong), novels (Ngugi), soccer (Alegi), autobiography (Clarke), and raï and rap music (Salime) examine the mobility of people and ideas while also identifying sites of identity, be they in concepts explored in the chapters or communities forged in particular conceptual or geographic spaces. A particularly striking example of the challenge Hodgson and Byfield want readers to grapple with is presented in Haugen’s chapter on African missionaries in China, which states, “Africa is poised to become the heartland of global Christianity” (186). Haugen opens a new portal on missionary discourse and Africa, reflecting the paradigm shift from a focus on European or Chinese influence in Africa to the varied ways Africans continue to have influence globally.

While Africanists in several disciplines may employ this text in whole or part, non-Africanists in various fields should consider employing the text as well to inform their topical and regional subjects. Although each of the sections has contributions useful to scholar-teachers outside African Studies, sections four and five might be most conducive to studies in STEM fields, International Relations, Political Science, Economics, and Women and Gender Studies, to name a few. Delving into the contradictions that make African case studies useful for teaching students to think critically, these sections challenge readers to consider contributions Africans have made in producing knowledge. They also examine the human and material dimensions of life in tandem. Section five “Africa in the World Today” is the most eclectic and perhaps least cohesive of the sections. For the editors its cohesion is to introduce a new generation of “notable” Africans, those well known and recognized on the global stage for extraordinary achievement or impact (319).

This collection of case studies will be most useful for undergraduates, particularly in lower level courses examining historical, political, social, and economic developments in Africa. The essays are short yet contain a great deal of material for discussion and will certainly help students generate research questions about subjects not covered with such detailed case studies in typical textbooks. While there are no footnotes, students should be encouraged to consider the kinds of research sources and methods individual authors employed to gather and analyze the data presented in each chapter. All chapters have a short list of additional resources that students will find useful as a starting point for their own projects.

The text is extensive in its approach, yet the editors clearly state it is not exhaustive (6). This reminder should excite and inspire other scholars, old and new, to seek out additional surprising, important, intriguing, and informative narratives about Africans on the continent and in the diasporas. The continual process of research that spurs more inquiry that leads to more research will in time achieve the ultimate goals of Hodgson and Byfield: for readers to recognize the massive contributions Africa has made globally, they must be able to conceptualize Africa as a diverse place full of people with ideas, aspirations, and dynamic efforts, and not simply comprised of exotic tribes locked into recurring violence and unchanging traditions well beyond the realm of history and innovations.