jethrien

Title: A Traveller's History of North Africa
Author: Barnaby Rogerson
Genre: History (North African)
Thingummies: 5

Synopsis: A concise but strategically detailed history of Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria from prehistoric times to 1997.

Thoughts: I've read two other books in this series (Italy and Venice), which has several different authors, and been consistently impressed. Broad histories are very difficult to do well (I'm looking at you, Samurai Warriors.) The Traveller's History books are exceptionally well organized. They cover sweeps of history, giving just enough detail for you get a feel for the various people and events without getting bogged down in an endless parade of names, each of whom get a paragraph. Do I remember most of the names thrown at me? No, of course not. But what these books do well is map out the trends and the reasons for those trends and then dart in here and there to add an embellishing detail--an amusing anecdote, an architectural note, a paragraph about the kind of food eaten by the common people at this time--that brings the history to life.

I particularly liked this one because the author had both a sense of humor and of sympathy for his subjects. He writes from their point of view, which reverses many of our ideas of the "good" and "bad" people of history. (This is particularly fascinating having read the series book on Italy. The Punic Wars are a very different thing from the Carthaginian perspective versus the Roman perspective, and Italy's attack on Libya is a strange repeat of history.) Germany's Afrikacorps in WWII, for example, arguably led to a decrease in human rights violations in the French colonies and the liberation of France was a disaster that led directly to a massive upswing in oppression and slaughter of innocents.

That's not to say that this is a white-washed noble savage narrative, though. The native Africans are portrayed as individuals--wise, foolish, bloodthirsty, betrayed, cruel, humane, ignorant, and cultured, as waves of civilization wash and retreat, just as in Europe. What's fascinating to remember is that, while Europe and Africa are seen somewhat as two monolithic entities right now, they have each conquered and colonized and intermixed with each other all the way down through the ages. The Moors ruled Spain for generations, while St. Augustine and Albert Camus both hail from Algeria. Today's North Africa is mostly a mess, largely because the countries unluckily lacked the particular correct natural resources (gold, iron, and coal) during the age of colonization and so fell to countries better naturally equipped for the Industrial Revolution. When the next technological revolution came around, requiring the phosphates and oil North Africa had in abundance, the Europeans were in position to exploit them. But North Africa has been subject to European exploitation before, such as in Roman times. It has suffered internal convulsions before as well. And ages of cultured, enlightened leadership and prosperity have arisen before from those times and hopefully will again.