Zeinab Badawi talks to Danny Bird about her ambitious new book, which tells the story of the African continent and the civilisations that have shaped it
Danny Bird: You’ve written a rich and fascinating history of Africa spanning a vast sweep of cultures, regions, personalities and centuries. Did you seek out any particular stories or narratives in preparation for this book?
Zeinab Badawi: When I set about writing this book, it wasn’t so much that I was looking for an angle – the angle found me. Back in 2017, I was travelling around Africa making a television series called The History of Africa for BBC World News, and I spoke to dozens and dozens of historians, archaeologists and anthropologists right across the continent. Without exception, every single one of those academics was so generous with their time that I had to tear myself away from them on every occasion.
I thought to myself, “these people are really hungry for a stage” – a global stage, even. They wanted to relate their history to outsiders, and I therefore decided to write a history book about Africa, written from the African perspective. And that really is the key angle.
Although the book is An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi, I see myself more as an intercessor between the reader and these marvellous African scholars and intellectuals. And I say ‘marvellous’ because every one of them would be at home in any of the world’s finest academic institutions. In fact, many of them have studied at the world’s top universities overseas, but have returned to Africa to ply their trade there.
Your book aspires to centre African voices in the telling of their own history. Do you think this yields a more authentic understanding of a place?
I do think it’s absolutely important that when you look at Africa’s history, you observe it through the lens of Africans themselves and from specific regions, because Africa is made up of 54 countries. If you consider the history of the people of central Africa, for example, then it makes sense to talk to people from the Congo today – from the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well as Congo Brazzaville. If you look at Africa through a western lens all the time, you will find some things quite baffling and beyond comprehension. But that’s because the value systems, the traditional beliefs, are quite different.
I do believe that African historians and archaeologists bring something different to the table than Africanists who don’t hail from the continent themselves. There are many great Africanists and they’ve written some marvellous books, but the indigenous academic scholar brings just that little extra bit of quality. Plus, they will have grown up with oral tradition, from which so much of Africa’s history is derived.
Could you tell me about some of the long-overlooked individuals you spotlight in your book, and their achievements?
If you ask most people, “what do you know about Africa’s history before the 19th century?” or ask them to name a king or a queen, they’d be hard pressed. They might come up with Tutankhamun, they might come up with Shaka, king of the Zulus, but probably not much more than that. So, I decided I wanted to tell the story of Africa through personalities insofar as I could, and to focus on women where I could as well.
There are some marvellous characters that I encountered on the way, such as King Taharqo, who was the king of Kush in ancient Sudan during the seventh century BC and is named in the Bible. He was a great tactician and soldier and a very effective ruler. Under him, the kingdom of Kush became a regional superpower.
I also loved researching Queen Njinga, ruler of the Ndongo and Matamba kingdoms in what is now Angola. She was born in the late 1500s and was marked out for greatness, having been born feet first – apparently a sign that she would go far. There are some fantastic stories about her: once, while being chased by Portuguese soldiers, she came to a rocky precipice and managed to abseil to safety using a vine, whereas the men pursuing her fell to their deaths.
What are the benefits and the disadvantages of tackling an entire continent’s history?
Is it possible to regard Africa in such comprehensive terms? Obviously, I only skimmed the surface, and I was selective; you have to be. But I think that I have tried, and largely succeeded, in trying to ensure that north, south, east, west and central Africa are covered at some stage in the book.
I personally don’t like the division that has often existed between north Africa and the rest of the continent, which has led to people viewing north Africa as being solely part of the Arab world. Of course, it is part of the Arab world, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t also part of Africa. As I mentioned above, I have also tried to focus on personalities from each of these regions because I think history is better understood when it’s seared into the imagination – and it’s best to do this through characters.
I believe you will emerge from reading this book with a deeper understanding of Africa than you would have had before. More importantly, I hope that it will excite curiosity and encourage readers to go and learn more about the aspects they find especially interesting.
Africa is the cradle of humanity, and you begin your book millions of years ago at the dawn of our species. What was it like to visit the National Museum of Ethiopia and come face-to-face with one of our earliest ancestors?
I was full of nervous excitement because I was about to meet a superstar, albeit one that had been dead for millions of years. And that was, of course, Lucy – or to use her name in the Amharic language of Ethiopia, ‘Dinkenesh’, which means ‘you are marvellous’. This really was a standout moment for me. Discovered in 1974, she was a member of the extinct Australopithecus afarensis species that stood upright and lived about 3 million years ago. I was very privileged to be taken into a climatically controlled room at the museum, and the attendant, with great reverence, opened the drawers to show me her bones.
Lucy’s line didn’t exactly lead to the lineage that we humans are descended from, but she’s part of this ever-evolving story of the origins of humankind. I wanted to start the book with her story because everyone is originally ‘from’ Africa; the science is settled, and everyone agrees that is where humanity evolved. In a world where we talk so much about racial differences, it’s useful to remind our selves that we all share the same origin.
Has the process of researching and writing this book changed your view of your own heritage?
I was born in the Sudan, but I’ve lived in the UK since I was two. I didn’t have any preconceptions when I began writing this book, but I was surprised by the richness of the continent’s history – and especially by the history of the country where I was born. Sudan, for example, has a thousand pyramids (with about a quarter preserving their superstructure), whereas Egypt only has around a hundred. I was also blown away by the statues of the ancient kings of Sudan and some of the artefacts associated with them. It may be because I have a greater attachment to Sudan that that was the one area of research that really surprised me in a pleasant way.
Why has archaeological research been so difficult in some parts of Africa? Have these difficulties hindered a deeper understanding of the continent’s past?
Sadly, there hasn’t been a lot of investment in archaeology in Africa, and when there have been excavations, it has often been the domain of westerners. In some respects, that is starting to change: Egypt, for example, has well-known archaeologists like Dr Zahi Hawass, who was formerly the country’s minister of antiquities. Knowledge is universal, of course, but it’s wonderful to see locals now getting involved in the excavation of their ancestors’ heritage.
Nevertheless, governments in Africa have not really put a great deal of public funds into the study of archaeology or big digs because it can be expensive. It also involves weeks, months and years of painful excavation – often in harsh terrain. Instead, countries have devoted their funds to churning out doctors and engineers, which they feel will make them better equipped in their drive for industrialisation.
Dr Webber Ndoro, a fantastic Zimbabwean archaeologist, has spoken out about the issue, and revealed how there are just a handful of archaeologists trying to manage all the archaeological sites in his country. It’s the same with Sudan, where there are still treasures yet to be unearthed. The Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet has dedicated his life to Sudanology, and he says there will eventually come a time when Sudanology will be as well-known as Egyptology.
Egyptomania was – and still is – a global phenomenon. But why has the reality of ancient Egypt as an African civilisation sometimes provoked controversy?
There has been a tendency outside of Africa – and even inside Africa – to see the ancient Egyptians as somehow separate from the continent. That could be because, in the AD 640s, Egypt was conquered by the Arabs, and they perhaps influenced the way that the people there defined themselves.
But I do say in the book that ancient Egypt is an integral part of Africa’s story, and perhaps what one should do is question why we have a certain stereotype of what an African is or what an African looks like. And that does revolve to some extent around ethnicity. Egypt’s pharaohs, for instance, would have had a range of appearances over the centuries, ranging from the fairer to the darker, and so on.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that some of ancient Egypt’s greatest sites – the temple at Karnak, the Valley of the Kings in Luxor – are not located along the Mediterranean, but in southern Egypt, closer to Sudan. The major deity, Amun-Ra, was believed to reside in Jebel Barkal, which is in northern Sudan, and the Egyptians believed he lived there along with the ancient Sudanese. So, it is very much part of Africa’s story, and although there is a bit of a resistance to seeing Egypt like that, I hope it’s something that we will overcome.
How should we balance the history of the transatlantic slave trade and its impact on Africa with the multitude of other stories from the continent’s past?
I don’t think Africa’s history should be reduced to just talking about the transatlantic slave trade; in fact, I only get to the topic in chapter 14. There are, however, some diaspora Africans – particularly African-Americans – who have a tendency to pivot towards slavery as being the defining aspect of their history, without looking at events before that. I’d like to say to them that they do actually have a fine history that far predates the slave trade.
Having said that, slavery was of course very much a defining chapter in Africa’s history, because when you remove 12.5 million of the strongest, youngest people from a country or a region, then it is obviously going to have a huge impact on that place’s development. It not only severed social structures, but it set people against each other. Some communities collaborated with the slave traders by transporting people onto waiting ships in the Atlantic.
Crucially, it has also shaped racism: slavery was based on the idea that Africans were ‘inferior’, and it was therefore acceptable to pack them into slave ships cheek by jowl. And I think that when people discuss the issue of racism today, you can see its roots in the slave trade, when Africans were seen as ‘subhuman’.
How did the rise and fall of European colonialism across Africa contribute to a sense of ‘African-ness’ among the various nations and cultures on the continent?
Although Africa is made up of a multitude of different ethnicities, cultures and languages, it was – and still is – united by the fact that they each suffered from either foreign invasion or colonial occupation. By the end of the 19th century, only Ethiopia and Liberia were ‘sovereign’, and I say that in inverted commas because Liberia was still very much in hock to various corporate interests, and Ethiopia was subject to attack by the British and, later, the Italians.
This unity really has brought about a sense of ‘African-ness’, regardless of which part of the continent you’re from. For example, one of the first trips abroad that a newly liberated Nelson Mandela made in the early 1990s was to Algeria. There you had a South African anti-apartheid leader making a journey all the way to the north of Africa in a sign of gratitude. The Algerians had gone through their own huge, bloody war of independence, and they had given support to the South Africans. These were two countries at opposite ends of the continent, and yet there was this common experience and sense of unity.
On average, Africa is home to some of the youngest people on the planet. How are they engaging with their history today?
I think there is a real hunger among young people – especially Africans, but not only Africans – to have a more honest and rounded perspective of African history. For example, when students called for a statue of [British imperialist] Cecil Rhodes to be removed from the University of Cape Town in 2015, it inspired a movement calling for the decolonisation of history curriculums worldwide. When you are taught Africa’s history in a certain way – through the eyes of a conqueror – then you get a very different view of the past than if you were to listen to the accounts of the people on the receiving end of the brutality.
However, it’s not a case of “my history’s better than your history”, and it’s not about trying to supplant or replace; it’s just about adding to the accounts we have. That’s how I see it, at least. For example, when we heard the Rhodes Must Fall campaign saying: “We don’t want to see history only through the eyes of Rhodes,”
I think that was a legitimate request. I do mention Cecil Rhodes in my book, but I also look at the African kings who were in his orbit like Lobengula, the final ruler of the Ndebele people of Matabeleland, who resisted Rhodes’s designs. I think that’s what I admire so much about Africans. I know that their resilience is often acknowledged, but they have thrived in great adversity and continue to do so to this day.
Zeinab Badawi is an award-winning broadcaster, journalist, filmmaker, and author of An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence (WH Allen, 2024)