The Black Lives Matters protests that erupted in the hot summer months of 2020 following a policeman's ruthless killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis not only brought the long history of anti-Black policing to the fore, but also reinvigorated widespread interest in the history of the African diaspora. Olivette Otele positions her new book, African Europeans, as partly a response to these events and more particularly to ‘the need to expand knowledge about histories of people of African descent’ and the urgency to ‘revise the teaching of colonial history in the Global North’ (12). In lively prose, with vivid examples, the book explores the history of the African diaspora in Europe, focusing on African people's presence, social mobility, and struggles for equality within a predominantly white, European world. The subtitle of the book, An Untold History, would seem a curious choice, given that Otele's monograph is firmly in conversation with other scholarly works that have explored this topic, such as Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 2004), Black Lives in the English Archives (Routledge, 2008), and Africa's Discovery of Europe: 1450–1850 (Oxford, 2009). The untold history that Otele presents focuses on two broad questions: first, what does a history of Africans in Europe look like without centering enslavement in this narrative, which can obfuscate people or events that represent a panoply of experiences in Europe? Second, what does a history of African Europeans tell us about their experiences over the course of thousands of years – as a distinct community integrated into the larger history of Europe, which evolved from premodern empires and kingdoms to a collection of modern nation-states? The attempt to answer these and other questions places African Europeans, written for both academic and popular audiences, as a work quite separate from those that came before it. It is a historiographical response to a need for histories of this scope, that grapple meaningfully with the long continuities and changes in African peoples’ lives over millennia.

The African presence in Europe, of course, predated European colonisation and imperialism by thousands of years. One could point to the long history of trade in the Mediterranean world, which firmly placed North Africa within the broader European ambit. But this was also the case with places such as Ethiopia and the Nubian kingdom of Kush – places also known by and in contact with Europeans. In her chapters covering histories of African Europeans prior to the early modern slave trade, Otele relies on premodern histories and works of literature to uncover the nature of these early encounters and the complexities that characterised European attitudes about Africans and Blackness – overlapping categories, but distinct in their meanings. In this sense, the book is a narrative of Africans, people of a variety of ethnicities and cultures, and Blackness, rooted in bodies and denoting a set of values and physical characteristics, within European societies. Otele is quick to credit the work of Geraldine Heng, arguing that race-based taxonomies of ‘Black’ and ‘white’ were fundamentally premodern phenomena that predated the European involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and that, depending on context, perceptions about Blackness could and did change over time. One compelling example is the history of St Maurice, a Roman-African martyr of the third century whose Blackness and distinct African heritage became more refined as his popularity increased over the course of the Middle Ages. But as Otele demonstrates, European attitudes about Blackness tended to be characterised by a certain ambivalence about African peoples that was not necessarily resolved by ‘exceptional’ Africans such as St Maurice and the Queen of Sheba.

In fact, one of the many strengths of African Europeans is Otele's delicate balancing act between a history full of ‘exceptional’ personae, the African people known to us because their lives stood out in some way, and a social history of ordinary Africans in Europe, in a continent where they laboured, built communities, had families, and negotiated competing identities in societies that did not always acknowledge their full humanity. As Otele shows deftly in her chapters that deal with colonialism and imperialism – destructive practices rooted in African enslavement and dehumanisation – this negotiation of identity allowed some African Europeans to realise various degrees of personal agency, whether through intermarriage or using European paternalism to their advantage. Important to this historical reckoning with injustice and oppression is how it has been memorialised – or conveniently forgotten – in national histories. Otele's chapter ‘Fleeting Memories: Colonial Amnesia and Forgotten Figures’ does double duty in this regard, being a historical account of the Afro-German experience while also representing a broader exploration of German colonialism, often overlooked in favour of Portuguese, Spanish, French, British, and Dutch encounters. In this vein, Otele's account of Brandenburg-Prussia's relatively modest colonial incursions provide valuable insight into a relatively unexamined – albeit still dark and violent – facet of European colonialism and its seemingly infinite reach.

For a monograph covering a topic of such great magnitude – African communities in a variety of European countries and their colonies, with special consideration of how the intersections of gender, status, and race affected African people's lives across many centuries – the relatively short length could have produced an introductory work full of generalities. But the story that Otele follows is anything but. She humanises her subjects in a series of vignettes meant to draw out larger histories that inform and complicate our understanding of the heterogenous identities that African people embraced, rejected, or carefully negotiated within Europe.