Africa: A Biography of the Continent.

###ROBERT B. EDGERTON

Mr. Edgerton is a professor of anthropology at UCLA. Among his books on Africa are Like Lions They Fought, Mau Mau, and The End of the Asante Empire.

MENTION "the Dark Continent" to an educated American audience, and the chances are that they will know you are referring to Africa. But ask questions about Africa, and the chances are that few in that audience will have very many cor- rect answers. Is Rio Muni (also known as Mbini) a river or a country? What is Burkina? Both are countries, but few Americans seem to know that and few could place them on a map. Fewer still could name the major kingdoms of West Africa before the European conquest, explain the reasons for the years of fighting and starvation in Sudan, or explain the history of the ethnic hatred that led to the recent genocide in Rwanda. Those of us who sometimes try to teach uni- versity students about the Dark Continent have come to realize that even the best students seldom have much prior knowledge of Africa.

John Reader's almost encyclopedic introduction to Africa is most welcome, but if I had been an acquiring editor for a major trade publishing house when his original proposal arrived, I might well have fainted dead away. To the actual editor's credit, he apparently did not, and many readers will be grateful; but consider your reaction if an author proposed to write -- in a single popular book -- a serious treatment of Africa's geology, its mineral wealth, the evolution of many of its life forms including the primates that were ancestral to man, the plant diversity of tropical rainforests, the fertility of Africa's soils, the evolution of mankind including such matters as bipedalism, thermo-regulation, and the origins of language, how climatic changes limited food supply, how elephants and farmers warred with each other, and how disease limited population. Be assured that this is but a partial list of topics. Reader's book also looks seriously at long-distance trade, the origins of agriculture (perhaps 70,000 years ago in southern Africa, not 12,000 to 15,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent), the impact of the slave trade (20 million guns were shipped to Africa during the trade, with predictably violent con- sequences), the era of European settlement, African resistance to colonialism, and, finally, the turmoil surrounding African independence.

Reader's treatment of this cornucopia of topics is anything but superficial. For every topic that I have familiarity with, he bases his presentation on the most authoritative sources, often quite recent and obscure ones. From ecologi- cal considerations that shaped human evolution, to the importance of bananas in African history, to Chinese exploration in East Africa (the voyagers brought a giraffe back to Peking in 1415), to the failure of democracy throughout the continent (there were more than seventy coups during the first thirty years of independence; the small country of Benin -- formerly Dahomey -- had six coups, five constitutions, and twelve heads of state during its first ten years of independence), he displays a virtuosity that cannot fail to impress.

Anyone who buys this book can expect not only a biography of Africa, as its subtitle promises, but a bibliography as well, and a remarkably comprehensive one at that. In addition to the attention Reader pays to the great array of topics mentioned earlier, he goes into depth on several matters. First, he devotes considerable space to the evidence that strongly suggests -- but does not quite definitively prove, as he seems to imply -- that humankind evolved in Africa alone and then spread over the world beginning some 100,000 years ago. His treatment of the topic is well informed and likely to be of strong interest to lay readers. He similarly looks closely at the opening up of Africa to trade across the Sahara and from overseas. He quotes awestruck Arabs and Europeans as they discovered the astonishing abundance of gold in Ghana and elsewhere along West Africa's "Gold Coast." He describes their wonder at the masses of gold ornaments displayed by the Asante, for example, but does not mention the singular fact that each year they melted almost all of them down and created new works of art. He is effective in evoking the pathos of the slave trade and provides a balanced appraisal of its impact on African societies. He is especially good with the pivotal events surrounding Africa's independence, particularly the events in the Congo that eventually brought Mobutu to power. And finally, as a longtime resident of Africa, he deals sensitively but candidly with the corruption and autocracy that have strangled democracy in all but a handful of nations. In all of this, he manages to give voice to a wide range of opinion, and yet he is rarely opinionated himself, a notable achievement in a book of this length and complexity.

Still, he does not cover everything about Africa, and, strangely, what he most neglects are the ways of life of ordinary Africans, now and in the past. To his credit, he does note correctly that the idea that Africans lived in bountiful happiness before the European presence changed their lives is a myth. Even for peoples who lived in small societies by hunting and gathering, life was seldom easy and could be arduous and short. But he does not describe the impressive kingdoms of West Africa in any depth, nor does he tell us how Africans lived in villages or pastoral camps over much of the continent. We do not even learn a great deal about the lives of modern Africans as they try to cope with today's world. Perhaps this is my anthropological bias showing, but I would have praised this book even more effusively if Reader had given more space to African people and their lives. This may have been a choice born of necessity, because the book is long without such information, and it is obvious that Reader cares deeply about Africa, its past and its future. In Nelson Mandela, he sees hope for all humanity, and he quotes the words of a Nobel Prize - winning novelist, the Nigerian Wole Soyinka: "Rwanda is our nightmare, South Africa is our dream." For the people of Africa, I can only hope that this is one dream that comes true. Anyone who peruses John Reader's masterly book will understand why.