This small book is a smart and stimulating essay exploring issues of history in Africa and Africa in history, sources and methods, Africa in the world, colonialism and postcolonialism, and the past in the present as a means of introducing students and others to academic thinking about African history.

It starts by probing the changing ways in which Africa and the African past have been imagined and represented from ancient times, through the spread of Islam, European imperialism and colonization, and independence, to the present. In so doing, the authors carefully deconstruct such thorny issues as ‘race’ to show how the image of Africa – in truth a diverse array of languages, peoples and cultures – always reflected both internal and external views, including those of Africans both at home and in the diaspora. At the same time, the authors delineate how Africa was long engaged in world history, exploring both internal and external factors, local and global forces, in ongoing processes of interpretation and appropriation.

The emphasis then shifts to the development of academic African history in conjunction with that of nationalism in the 1950s and ’60s as Africans and others sought to counter the crude racism and denigration of African achievements underpinning colonial rule by focusing on the achievements of precolonial African states. To do so, the early nationalist historians had also to overcome the general lack of written sources by exploring oral, ethnographic, linguistic, archaeological and artistic sources to reconstruct that history. Unfortunately, however, we learn little of the enduring historical lessons acquired from such explorations of precolonial statecraft or the ways that the new sources of data influenced our developing thinking about, and writing of, African history.

Subsequent developments of post-nationalist African history are given rather less attention and treated more as a series of passing fads than as lasting influences. Thus, the turn to political economy in the late 1960s and ’70s is rightly attributed to the political and economic crises of the time, but is largely dismissed as having been irrelevant to rural economies with little industrialization or class formation. Yet it was the neo-Marxist anthropology of the time that laid the basis for our understanding of the moral economy of pre-capitalist African societies and enabled subsequent developments in social and intellectual history noted by the authors. Political economy thus forms one of the critical lineaments of modern African history alongside the understandings of precolonial African political and social organization gained earlier.

There is a welcome focus on new colonial historiography that moves beyond simplistic oppositions to probe the contradictions of colonialism and the ways different European and African interests acquired complex understandings, and beyond simplistic accounts of colonial intervention to probe the ways African chiefs, educated intermediaries and peasants negotiated terms of accommodation with European officials, missionaries, concessionaries and settlers.

In tracing these developments, the authors pay their respects to the earlier pan-Africanists, but focus largely on the early schools of African history pioneered in British West Africa (largely Ibadan, and, to a lesser degree, Legon and Zaria) and London (School of African and Oriental Studies), while paying less attention to the different schools of African history that developed in East Africa (Makerere, Dar es Salaam and Nairobi), France and Francophone Africa, the United States (Wisconsin, Northwestern, Indiana, UCLA and Boston, among others) and South Africa.

For those torn between relying on a generally inadequate text and seeing their students become lost among assorted readings, African History: A Very Short Introduction provides an exciting alternative, outlining the major interpretative issues of African history and historiography while freeing students and teachers to probe selected issues in more detailed supplementary readings, a judicious selection of which are included here.