African Civilization Revisited: From Antiquity to Modern Times

by Basil Davidson

This Book Is Concerned With the story of Africa from antiquity to modern times, as told in the chronicles and records of chiefs and kings, travellers and merchant-adventures, poets and pirates and priests, soldiers and persons of learning. Framed and introduced as a continuous narrative based on what was thought and written at the time, African Civilization Revisited is designed to illustrate the drama and variety, challenge and achievement of humankind in Africa's long history. It is offered as a contribution to the fuller understanding of Africa today, as well as a guide to the Africa of yesterday and of long ago.

Genres: History, Africa, Nonfiction

459 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1990

About the author

Basil Risbridger Davidson was an acclaimed British historian, writer and Africanist, particularly knowledgeable on the subject of Portuguese Africa prior to the 1974 Carnation Revolution .

He has written several books on the current plight of Africa. Colonialism and the rise of African emancipation movements have been central themes of his work.

He is an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

From 1939, Davidson was a reporter for the London "Economist" in Paris, France. From December 1939, he was a Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)/MI-6 D Section (sabotage) officer sent to Budapest (see Special Operations Europe, chapter 3) to establish a news service as cover. In April 1941, with the Nazi invasion, he fled to Belgrade, Yugoslavia. In May, he was captured by Italian forces and was later released as part of a prisoner exchange. From late 1942 to mid-1943, he was chief of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) Yugoslav Section in Cairo, Egypt, where he was James Klugmann's supervisor. From January 1945 he was liaison officer with partisans in Liguria, Italy.

After the war, he was Paris correspondent for "The Times," "Daily Herald" ,"New Statesman", and the "Daily Mirror."

Since 1951, he became a well known authority on African history, an unfashionable subject in the 1950s. His writings have emphasised the pre-colonial achievements of Africans, the disastrous effects of the Atlantic Slave Trade, the further damage inflicted on Africa by European colonialism and the baleful effects of the Nation State in Africa.

Davidson's works are required reading in many British universities. He is globally recognized as an expert on African History.

He currently lives in Staffordshire.

Reviews

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an excellent collection of primary sources from mostly pre-independence African history. There's a great selection of sources available here for students trying to get into African history from a global perspective. The introduction and literature review sections are also very accessibly written. I recommend it.

[Lgordo · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the second "reader" I'm giving up on this week. Maybe it's me, or maybe it's the format. By definition, when someone gives you an excerpt they are deciding what is important and what you need to know from a larger work. I do not think that the author and I had the same idea of what I wanted to know.

I picked up this book because another book referred to it as a source of info on African civilizations. But after reading a few chapters, flipping around, and reading some more, I had impressions of hugeness and glory but not many details on how people lived or what they did all day.

There is one short chapter that describes a people as living in great misery and poverty extracting and refining steel. And that is all. What did 'poor' and 'miserable' mean? If they were providing a much-needed service to the world why didn't it pay? How did they purify the ore and turn it into steel? Nada.

This chaoter is not uninformative. We now know that forging steel was a known wisdom and we know where many got their weaponry from and we know that this was not highly respected or remunerated work. If your interest is economics, this is a. informative chapter. If you're interested in human development, it's like drawing water with a seive.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basil Davidson greatly popularized the history of Subsaharan Africa. But his dominance of the field for so long is perhaps a troubling indication of the lack of attention this region has received from academia.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a decent enough book for what it attempts to do, which is provide source material about the first pieces of textual references to African civilization. However, when I started reading it I was hoping to get an actual narrative and history, which is not here in any very significant way. So I was a bit disappointed that I wasn't going to get something like that.