A FISTFUL OF SHELLS - TOBY GREEN

A doozy. This is one of the giant books about an enormous subject, complete with 100+ pages of notes and bibliography; it’s basically a textbook for a wonderful history class I never got to take (more on what I “learned” in classrooms about Afrika later). I got this at the library on a whim because the book I really wanted about Afrika, THE GOLDEN RHINOCEROS, was checked out. That book, GR, is about medieval Afrika so I suppose that makes it something of a prequel to this book, which begins with the Portegese exploratory voyages down the West Coast of Afrika and continues up until the early/mid 1800s and the dawn of colonialism. In every Western classroom I’ve ever taught or taken a history class this period is ignored totally. The basic story you get is that Europeans showed up and, because they were so much more advanced, immediately subjugated   classes did always point out that slavery existed in Afrika for thousands of years and it was enlightened Europeans who ended the trade) and colonialism, though all that is done now. This is the basic GUNS GERMS AND STEEL argument. Green reminds us of the famous Hegel quote, “Afrika has no history.” Obviously racist bullshit. So this book, in reveling what happened in Afrika from the mid-late 1500 until the early 1800, is really about the growth of globalization and the birth of capitalism. And, unlike GUNS GERMS AND STEEL, it offers a convincing and well-considered take on why Afrika ended up on the bottom when the dust cleared. I’m not going to get too into the details and whatnot, the book is almost 500 pages long and it’s too short to cover the topics it takes on, though I have pages and pages of notes and interesting facts I learned from the book. I will say this book makes a good companion to CALIBAN AND THE WITCH in that it also traces the decline in women’s power and positions during the rise of Capitalism, though this book traces these developments in Africa, not Europe and amongst new-world Whites. As an aside, there is a third book I’ve been meaning to read called MOON SUN AND WITCHES: GENDER IDEOLOGIES AND CLASS IN INCA AND COLONIAL PERU which I believed traces this devaluation amongst groups of indigenous peoples in America. Perhaps all 3 together would form some sort of depressing gyno-historical trilogy. Either way, this book really broke my brain in a good way. It’s one of those books that makes you upset they taugh you history so badly in school. There were 10,000+ things I learned that made me want to wikipedia figures or facts and dive deeper. It’s a wonderful overview, Green does a good job making sure to include facts about what life would have been like for regular African, not just those involved in geo-poltical games. He also quotes amply from non-written (ie griots and other oral historians) sources which rounds out the perspective, it’s not just the writings of white monsters on boats. Now I want to find a dozen smaller books on some of the specfic topics AFOS raised. I promise you that you don’t know enough about Afika, read this now. 1413 shells.