CANR

• An African History of Africa - 2024 Mariner Books, New York, NY

• School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London website - https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/governance/president

  Appointed as President of SOAS in October 2021, Zeinab Badawi is an award-winning broadcaster, journalist and SOAS alumna.

  She is one of the best-known broadcast journalists working in the field today. Her work includes interviewing some of the world’s most notable personalities and politicians on BBC Hardtalk and hosting Global Questions on BBC World TV and the BBC News Channel - a programme which invites audiences from around the world to question their leaders on global issues. She is also the founder of the production company, Kush Communications, which creates thought provoking programmes and films including the groundbreaking 20-part series ‘The History of Africa with Zeinab Badawi’.

  Zeinab is previously Chair of the Royal African Society, and amongst other posts she is a Queen’s appointment to the Board of Historic Royal Palaces, a founding and current trustee of the charitable arm of the BBC - BBC Media Action, a Patron of the United Nations Association UK, and a member of the high level group of the Africa-Europe Foundation. She serves on the international advisory boards of Afro Barometer and the Mandela Institute for Development Studies and is on the council of the UK Arts, Humanities and Research Council.

  Zeinab studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University and took a Masters degree (awarded with a distinction) on Middle East History and Anthropology at SOAS London University. In 2011 Zeinab was awarded an honorary doctorate by SOAS for her services to international broadcasting. In August 2018, she was awarded the President's Medal of the British Academy for her contributions to international political journalism and advocacy work for female education. And in 2020 she received the Sir Brian Urquhart Award from the United Nations Association UK for distinguished service to the UN.

• UNESCO Courier - https://courier.unesco.org/en/articles/zeinab-badawi-my-hyphenated-identity-advantage

  Zeinab Badawi : “My hyphenated identity is an advantage”
  The British-Sudanese television personality – who transformed UNESCO’s General History of Africa into a nine-part series for the BBC, making this treasure-trove accessible to thousands – terms it her “most valuable project” yet. This broadcasting project is unique because it systematically explores Africa’s history from prehistoric times to the modern era – specifically targeting young people and Africans.

  Zeinab Badawi in Harare, Zimbabwe, during the shooting of the BBC’s History of Africa series, broadcast in July and August 2017. She is talking to the sculptor, Alan Adam.
  By杰伊纳布·巴达维杰伊纳布·巴达维
  24 January 2018
  Last update:6 November 2024
  Besides elaborating on what it took to make this ground-breaking series, Badawi also discusses the continuing gender hierarchies in the media, and the difficulties professional women encounter when aiming for a work-life balance.

  Interview by Jasmina Šopova

  Your nine-part series on the History of Africa has been broadcast on BBC World News TV in July and August 2017. What inspired you to do it?

  Africa has a long, rich and complex history. Yet that history is neglected and overlooked, and what we are presented with often projects a distorted and partial picture. This has always troubled me. When I discovered, several years ago, the General History of Africa (GHA) published by UNESCO, I was delighted. Thousands and thousands of pages on Africa’s history from the beginning of time to the modern era, written mainly by African scholars. And yet I'd only vaguely heard of it.

  The thought struck me that surely the General History of Africa is one of UNESCO's best-kept secrets! This was the starting point of the project.

  I have been in the media for more than twenty-five years and I have done all sorts of things, but I can honestly say – hand on my heart – that this project is by far the most exciting, the most interesting and the most valuable project I have ever been involved in.

  It is a legacy project and a unique project, because never before in the history of broadcasting, have we had a systematic look from prehistory to the modern era of Africa’s history – told, I hope, in a compelling way – particularly targeting young people and particularly targeting Africans. I really hope that after they see this, they will have a very clear idea of how wonderful their continent is, regardless of which part of it they come from.

  How do you plan to make the series accessible to as many people as possible? Is it available on the web?

  The series will be made available to all African and Caribbean state television stations and in Brazil – hopefully in several languages – as soon as we have managed to translate and put subtitles on the episodes. There is a big cost implication to doing this and it will also take time. The series is not available on the web, but it may be in future. It will be shown again in 2018, on BBC World TV. We are also exploring other options for its dissemination.

  General History of Africa is an academic publication. How did you make it appealing for a wide, general audience?

  I am a television personality. I have been in television for a long time, and I am very keen to make sure that this series is grounded in proper scholarship. Which it is, but it also has to be visually enticing. So it is not an illustrated lecture. I am very keen on making sure that young people watch it. It is no use making programmes which tick the right boxes if nobody watches them.

  I tried to make it fun and accessible and visually very colourful. For example, if I am talking about the trans-Sahara trade, I'll find a camel market, I'll jump on the camel, I'll fall off the camel – yes, I did! And I’m not very proud of that… when I think that my great-grandfather was a camel trader.

  The key thing that I am very sure about is that this project is the history of the African people – and not about stones and bones and monuments.

  Of course, we show monuments where it is relevant, but we want to tell the history of the people. Everywhere we went, I was trying to find characters who are mentioned in the GHA and to put them at the front of the narrative. It might be the Aksumite King Ashama; it might be the Berber king Juba II, who married the daughter of Mark Antony and Cleopatra; it might be the Sudanese King Piye of Kush, who ruled Egypt in the eighth century BC. So this is my approach: to always start with a narrative that involves the people.

  How were the local communities involved in this project?

  I used local camera crews in each country. It is extremely hard work, and they were exhausted, but they were all thankful, because they were listening to the interviews, they were looking at the places, and they were learning about their country. Some of them said, at the end of it: “I had no idea there was so much in my country”.

  What were the major difficulties you encountered during the shooting?

  One of the problems was to get archival material from the national TV stations. They were all willing to collaborate, but in the end, you never get anything. Also, there was a question of language. I work in English, but most people in Western Africa speak French. In Northern Africa, they speak mostly Arabic. Fortunately, my Arabic is better than my French.

  I would say the main problem was the lack of female interviewees. The vast majority of the experts are men. So, where possible, I tried to speak to women, in order to address the imbalance.

  How do you see the gender issue in the media landscape today?

  There are several aspects to the gender issue in the media. The female on-screen presence – the kind of role that I have, for example; female expert opinion that is also sought, when the women are interviewees; women in positions of real power in media organizations, behind the scenes; and the way gender issues are covered in the media.

  In terms of women’s presence in the field, and on the screen, I think that it has improved, but the senior roles are still predominantly male.

  All over the world, including in the United Kingdom, the number of professors who are women is small compared to men. It means that when you want to go and seek experts' opinions, they are more likely to be male.

  In terms of women in positions of power, regardless if it is a Western, African or Asian nation, the picture is not particularly optimistic. Major Western organizations remain very much controlled by men. The BBC, certainly. You find women in middle and lower levels of management, but the high level is still very male-dominated.

  When it comes to gender issues, and how these are covered, that is sometimes done in a slightly superficial way – especially in countries where the assumptions, the prejudices on gender issues, are deeply rooted.

  You moderated a Leader's Forum at UNESCO in 2011, where you said that girls' education was your "family business". Could you explain why?

  In a sense, yes, it is. I was referring to my great-grandfather Sheikh Babiker, who pioneered girls’ education in Sudan at the turn of the twentieth century, when the country was under British rule. At that time, girls were not educated but my great-grandfather wanted to change this, and he started with his own daughters. Despite the hostility from the British authorities and the Sudanese community, he established a school for his children in his own house.

  He had many children actually. We make jokes about him in the family: we say that he was so pro-women that he married four of them!

  More seriously, he was indeed a great visionary. He set an example by making sure that his own daughters were educated, and then they developed schools. I grew up with aunts, who are now in their eighties, with Ph.D.s from Western universities. Presently, one of my uncles runs the Al-Ahfad University for Women in Khartoum, where girls from Sudan, but also from other parts of Africa and the Arab world, are educated.

  So, when people say that Muslim girls cannot be educated because it is inconsistent with the values of that religion, I am simply astonished!

  Your work is time-consuming. How do you balance work and family?

  It is hard for women as mothers to have careers. We are the ones who give birth to children, and whatever our profession is, that means that there are some interruptions to our work. So you have got to do what works best for you. But if you opt for a longer interruption to your career – maybe three, four, five, ten years – in order to look after the children, you do pay the consequences for that. It could mean you are out of the frame and you have to reclimb the ladder, while others have gone beyond.

  Have you experienced this?

  Probably. I was lucky because my work is studio-based, but I had some interruptions to my work, because I have four children. It is a lot! Had I been childless, I would have probably had two or three more years to add to my career – who knows.

  You often say that you have a hyphenated identity. Could you elaborate on this?

  Today, everybody is a bit of something in Europe, but when you have a badge of colour, your multiple identity is more evident than if you don’t. I was born in Sudan, and moved to the UK when I was 2 years old. At that time, there were fewer people from Africa or Asia living in Europe. There are many more now. I think that it is really less of an issue than it was.

  Obviously, I am of a Muslim background, but Muslims are a part of the European landscape. And I do think that when we refer to Muslims in Europe, we should say "Muslim Britons", for example, instead of saying "British Muslims". I would switch the name and the adjective, like the Americans do. They say "Muslim Americans". The difference looks slight, but actually it speaks a lot more. It is quite profound and it is important to the mindset.

  I see my hyphenated identity as an advantage that gives me a first-hand experience of both non-Western and European culture. I don’t see any inherent conflict. I just have the feeling that I have the best of both worlds!

• Wikipedia -

  Zeinab Badawi

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Zeinab Badawi

  Badawi at Nobel Week Dialogue in Stockholm, 2016
  Born October 1959 (age 65)
  Khartoum, Sudan
  Nationality British and Sudanese - dual citizenship
  Education St Hilda's College, Oxford
  SOAS, University of London
  Occupations
  JournalistPresenterNewsreader
  Employer BBC
  Notable credit(s) World News Today with Zeinab Badawi
  HARDtalk
  GMT
  BBC News at Five
  Children 4
  Zeinab Badawi (Arabic: زينب بدوي; born October 1959)[1] is a Sudanese-British television and radio journalist, educator, civic activist, and writer. She was the first presenter of the ITV Morning News (later known as ITV News at 5:30),[2] and co-presented Channel 4 News with Jon Snow from 1989 to 1998 before joining BBC News. Badawi was the presenter of World News Today broadcast on both BBC Four and BBC World News, and Reporters, a weekly showcase of reports from the BBC.[3] In 2021, Badawi was appointed as president of SOAS University of London.[4] Badawi serves on several civic boards and published her first book, An African History of Africa, in 2024.

  Early life and education
  Badawi was born in October 1959 in Khartoum,[5] Sudan,[6] and has lived in Britain since the age of two.[7][8] Her great-grandfather, Sheikh Babiker Badri, fought against Kitchener's British forces at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 and pioneered women's education in Sudan. Badawi's father, Mohammed-Khair El Badawi,[9] was a newspaper editor in Sudan committed to social reform who, when the family moved to the UK, joined the BBC's Arabic Service.[10] Badawi speaks both Arabic and English fluently.

  She was educated at Hornsey High School for Girls in North London, before studying Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at St Hilda's College, Oxford. At Oxford, Badawi was a member of the Oxford University Broadcasting Society.[11] In 1988, she moved back to London to pursue a full-time one-year MA degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in Politics and Anthropology of the Middle East (her professors were P. J. Vatikiotis for politics, Malcolm Yapp for history and Richard Tapper and Nancy Tapper for anthropology),[12] graduating with distinction in 1989.[10]

  Journalism and awards
  After graduating from Oxford University, Badawi was a researcher[13] and broadcast journalist for Yorkshire TV from 1982 to 1986, during which time she also presented the weekly regional consumer advice show Help Yourself.[14] After a period at BBC Manchester, she joined Channel 4 News in 1988.[14] Badawi co-presented Channel 4 News from 1989 until 1998 when she joined the BBC.[6]

  At the BBC, Badawi worked as presenter and reporter for Westminster live political programmes for five years. She also worked on BBC Radio as a regular presenter of The World Tonight on Radio 4 and BBC World Service's Newshour.

  In 2005, Badawi became the new presenter of The World on BBC Four, the UK's first daily news bulletin devoted principally to international news. In May 2007, the programme was rebranded as World News Today and is also shown on the BBC World News channel.

  Badawi in 2009
  She is a regular presenter of the BBC interview programme HARDtalk. In an exclusive interview in May 2009, Badawi interviewed Sudan's President Omar Al-Bashir, the first serving head of state to be charged with war crimes.[10]

  Since 2010, in addition to her presenting role on BBC World News, Badawi has presented on the BBC News Channel and the BBC News at Five.[15]

  Badawi was awarded an honorary doctorate by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in July 2011.[16][4]

  In May 2014, she was based in Johannesburg, presenting coverage of the South African elections on BBC World News and BBC News Channel.

  Since 2013,[17] Badawi has led an annual Nobel laureate discussion in connection with the Nobel festivities in Stockholm, Sweden. The programme is shown on Swedish television.[18][19]

  In 2017, Badawi hosted a nine-part series, The History of Africa, based on UNESCO's General History of Africa.[20] The documentary series was broadcast in July and August 2017 on BBC World News.

  Her first book, An African History of Africa, was published in April 2024.[21][22] It was reviewed in The Guardian by Simukai Chigudu, who wrote: "Ambitious in scope and refreshing in perspective, the book stretches from the origins of Homo sapiens in east Africa through to the end of apartheid in South Africa. It is informed by interviews Badawi conducted with African scholars and cultural custodians, whose expertise, observations and wisdom are threaded through the book."[23] It was shortlisted for the Nero Book Award.[24]

  Other activities
  International Crisis Group (ICG), Board of Trustees (since 2023)[25]
  New College of the Humanities, Member of the Advisory Board (since 2011)[26]
  National Portrait Gallery, Member of the Board of Trustees (since 2004)[13][27]
  British Council, Member of the Board of Trustees[14]
  Foreign Policy Centre, Adviser[28]
  Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Member of the Council[29]
  Royal Opera House, Member of the Board of Trustees[30]
  Royal African Society (RAS), Chair (2014–2021)[31][32][33]
  Badawi is founder and chair of the Africa Medical Partnership Fund (AfriMed), a charity that aims to help local medical professionals in Africa.[10]

  In October 2021, Badawi was appointed as the new President of SOAS University of London.[4][9]

  Recognition
  In November 2009, Badawi was named International TV Personality of the Year in the Annual Media Awards, the international media excellence awards organised by the Association for International Broadcasting.[34]

  In August 2018, she was awarded the President's Medal of the British Academy "for her contributions to international political journalism".[35]

  Personal life
  Badawi has four children.[8] She lives in Belsize Park, north London.[36]

  Works
  Badawi, Zeinab (18 April 2024). An African History of Africa. Mariner Books. ISBN 978-0-06-333541-7.

• AFREADA - https://www.afreada.com/interviews/zeinab-badawi

  Zeinab Badawi
  In Conversation

  This week we spoke to Zeinab Badawi about telling stories from the past, advocating for pan Africanism and finding history close to home.
  Interviewed by Nancy Adimora.

  NA: I first came across you and your interest in African history because I was a part of the TEDxEuston team. I was in the audience when you were giving your talk and it was fantastic. There were a lot of different parts of that talk that really struck me. I love how you set the scene, starting with your great-grandfather, then talking about your parents and all the educated women in your family. When you think about your decision to become a storyteller, through journalism, do you think it had to do with the family and specifically the women you were surrounded by?

  ZB: Yes, I grew up with very strong women around me. My grandmother could read and write in a time when there would have been around 99% illiteracy for women. My great aunts and then my aunts had degrees and so on. I can't say that they were massive storytellers, but it certainly made me aware, as the lovely late Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo once said to me, that this idea of African women being “downtrodden wretches” is just completely not true.

  She didn't need to tell me that because I had grown up with very strong women around me.

  NA: So where do you think your storytelling gene came from?

  ZB: Probably my father. He wrote books in Arabic and he was a great storyteller. He was the one who would tell us stories when we were children and he was also a man who was given to anecdotes. He loved anecdotes.

  I think that's what I brought to my book. Where I could, I focused on micro-history, trying to convey the history of a particular period in a particular region through a character or characters. I always say, history is best understood when it's seared into the imagination and I think personalities and stories about people help you grasp the history in a much more ready fashion.

  NA: Absolutely. I completely agree. That's why I feel like history needs a rebrand. When we hear that word, we immediately think of school and heavy textbooks, but actually it is just a collection of stories. History is just a collection of stories that we have taken to be true.

  ZB: Could you give me that as my quote?

  NA: Haha I’d be more than happy to because, I’m on the same wavelength as you. When I was reading your book, I kept looking out for the stories and my favourite by far is Mansa Musa's story.

  ZB: That lovely, lovely guy. I like him too, especially the fact that he was so generous. I think generosity is such a nice virtue to have, isn't it? He gave away so much gold - he must have been a man who was generous of spirit as well. He set up these schools and built these mosques. What a great guy he was.

  I also like the story of Mansa Musa because, as I said, it tells you more than just his own story. It tells you how Africa, even in the so-called medieval period in the 1200s and the 1300s was plugged into the global economy. He was born in 1280, he did this pilgrimage in 1325, and he died in 1334 so it was a very long time ago.

  Africa was so plugged into the global economy that the actions of this one man had a huge impact on the price of gold.

  NA: That was really refreshing to read, and this book is full of similarly fascinating stories. Were there any other stories that stood out to you?

  ZB: There are so many. I think the women of Nder in 1819 in what is modern day Senegal. It’s in chapter nine, I believe. That’s the chapter about the Eastern slave trade that was perpetrated by the Arabs and their partners across the Indian Ocean for the most part. People often talk about the Transatlantic slave trade but it was predated and outlived by the Eastern slave trade. By that time, 14 million enslaved Africans fell victim to that; 10 million across the Indian Ocean and the other 4 million across the Red Sea to Arabia or from south of the Sahara to Arab families in the north.

  In 1819, the women of Nder in a Wollof village in what is today Senegal had an encounter with some of the Arabs and their partners. There were a small group of them, and they fought the Arabs off because they knew they came to take the women. But the slave traders came back.

  The men were out in the field. The women were in the village. One woman ran back and said, “Look, I can see them coming back, and there are lots of them. There's no way we'll be able to fight them off.”

  So one older woman said to the other women in the village, and I quote, “All of you, do you want us to go and become slaves to these Arab families in the north of Africa? Or do you want our descendants to know that we died as free women with our pride and our dignity?”

  They all agreed, so they went into the biggest hut and enclosed it. They were singing and they set fire to the hut so that they would all die before the Arabs could capture them.

  There was one woman who was heavily pregnant, and she was coughing and coughing from the smoke. She obviously had a maternal instinct so decided she didn't want to die and wanted to save her child. She made a dash to exit, and at first they thought, “Well, let's stop her.” Then one of the women said “No, let her go so that she can tell our story about the brave women of Nder and how we preferred death and dignity to being enslaved.”

  The pregnant women did survive. She hid. The slave traders came, found the village all burnt and they went away.

  To this day in this Wollof region of Senegal, the villagers pick one Tuesday in November where they all stop what they're doing. They don't hunt, they don't farm. They don't do any activity in honour of the memory of these women. One woman who survived handed the story down, so that story was told to me several times, mostly by women. I like it because pride and dignity is very much part of the psyche of the African and it is something which people have tried to steal from the African over the centuries by dehumanising them through the the slave trades and seeing them as subhuman, and obviously also to this day through the existence of racism and so on.

  I mean, I'm not in any way encouraging self-immolation, but I like that story because it shows that even in adversity, those women were not robbed of agency.

  NA: Absolutely. It’s amazing that the present-day community are still honouring the memory of their ancestors and the sacrifice they made in such a deep way.

  ZB: Exactly. I’ve just found the story, It’s on page 226. Here is the portion where the older woman rallies the other women.

  “Answer me instead of standing and crying. What would we say later to our grandchildren and their children? Do you want people to say that their grandmother left the village as a slave, or that she was brave until death?

  Yes, my sisters. We need to die as free women and not live as slaves. Whoever agrees with me, follow me into the Great Hut where the council of the wise people takes place. We will all go in there and set fire to it, so it will be ash that meets the enemy. Let us live as the proud women of Wollof.”

  NA: Wow. I can almost see the scene playing out in front of me, which brings me on to my next question. In the past, you explored African history through an extended documentary. I am so used to the pipeline of ideas starting from books and then moving into TV and film - but you went in the opposite direction. Once you had told the story in one form, what drew you to the idea of also writing a book - beyond getting an email from Tom (literary agent) one day, saying “Have you ever thought about writing a book?”

  ZB: Even before Tom got in touch with me, I had thought of writing a book mainly because I hadn't done justice to the fine African scholars I had met on my journeys. I felt that I hadn't told the stories and the history that they told me sufficiently. In a TV series where the picture dominates, somebody might give me an interview for a couple of hours and I could only use clips of it. That’s why I felt I needed to do them justice and that’s why I decided to embark on the book.

  Obviously, transcripts from interviews are not enough research but what I hope I've encapsulated is the vision, perspective and inspiration of the people I talk to in each particular part where they're quoted.

  I also put in more names of African scholars. The final book had maybe half a dozen taken out. Some remained. I suppose you can't keep them all, but they're all in the index and it’s a very extensive index.

  NA: A very extensive index. When I picked up this book, felt its weight, and saw all the different areas you were covering, my first question was, how the hell did you do that? So that’s what I want to ask you next. When you sat down to actually write this book, what was the process like? Did you have a clear vision of the stories you wanted to tell? What was it like in a practical sense?

  ZB: The TV series took me the best part of seven years to make. I started it in very late 2014 and the last episode was broadcast on the BBC World Channel in mid-2020. Therefore, in terms of looking at it as a body of work for a book, I had the luxury, which probably a lot of writers don't have, of a protracted process of thinking.

  Before I set off on a journey to any country, I would be surrounded by books because I did all the research myself. I wanted it to stay in my head, so I would be staying up until one or two in the morning before I set off to Zimbabwe or wherever, reading everything I could.

  That process of sifting through the material that appeared in those books helped me to have a very protracted writing process. When it came to actually writing An African History of Africa, I only had to put flesh on the bones of ideas and places and histories that I had already researched for the TV series, which, as I said, was done over a very long period.

  I think if you went to a publisher and said to them, “I want 10 years to write a book and I want a budget to go to 34 African countries to talk to dozens and dozens of people and I want to take my time and think about it,” they'd say no. That is why in this case, it worked much better to have the TV series first and then the book.

  It meant that I could focus. I did all that sifting there. Of course, I can't do justice to a whole continent in one book but I feel that I prioritized history that was not so well known. Ethiopia and Eritrea, for example, get two chapters; four and five. I don't really do any more Ethiopia after that, yet Ethiopia's story is still very interesting in the 1800s with Emperor Tewodros and his battle at Magdala with the Brits and so on and so forth. I had to omit that because I couldn't do yet another chapter on Ethiopia but I also kind of felt people might know a bit about the Emperor Tewodros, because it's a bit more recent. It's 19th century history. We know that his shield and his sword were returned to Ethiopia from Britain a few years ago. We know that his son, the prince, came to England and became Queen Victoria's godson. These are not as hidden as the story of King Azana of Axum or Lali Bella or Ahmed the left handed. People often say to me, “Oh, but you didn't talk about this. You didn't cover that.” and it’s because I really wanted to go more for the hidden histories.

  NA: You did such an exceptional job and as we’ve been speaking, one thing that I've been struck by is the fact that everything is in your head. I was talking about Mansa Musa, and you were giving me dates - “he was born on this date and this is when this and that happened.” it’s all in your head, do you feel like the information needs somewhere else to go? What else do you feel like you can do with all this information beyond a book?

  ZB: I'm being an advocate. I have been doing so many interviews and book festivals for this book that I really see myself in an advocacy/ambassadorial role for Africa. Really, that's how I see it, and it is not only in Britain. I'm going to Italy as well as Holland later this year. You can see how the Far Right have done relatively well and increased their vote in countries like France. That encourages me to want to embark on this advocacy role, to give visibility to a people who are seen only in a certain way, as sometimes a nuisance factor or not really wanted or, as I said, as underdeveloped Europeans who need to get their act together and do this or that.

  I feel that in telling a history of the people of Africa, I'm not only narrating stories but also giving a history of hope and saying to people, “Look, you may not think this is the case, but the whole of the continent of Africa- North, South, East, West and Central-has a history, traditions customs and institutions that are worthy of respect and study.”

  I would hope that in some small way, it might just try to shift mindsets. That's how I see my role today.

  NA: When I think about your book, the thing that I love more than the cover (which is stunning!), is the fact that your book was a Sunday Times bestseller. Having worked in publishing, I’ve seen incredible books sell less than 100 copies. Your book was not only published, it was published so well that it became a bestseller for two consecutive weeks. A lot of people who have read this book may be reading about the continent for the first time - how have you found the reception to this book so far?

  ZB: I've been to a lot of festivals now where the audience is practically uniformly white. I have to say that I am very, very encouraged. The turnout is always huge, and the interest is huge and the questions just keep on coming. There is a lack of knowledge and the lines of people who want to buy the book when I finish is also very, very encouraging.

  It has hit a nerve, which is exactly what I wanted it to do because it's not easy to write a simple book. I mean, I hope it's simple. It's as complex as it needs to be because it's a complex continent, but it's very readable. I hope it's readable, and it's not easy to write a readable book because it can seem quite simple but I've been very heartened by the reception.

  As you say, when it actually hit the Sunday Times bestseller list, I was really pleased. Not so much for myself, but just to see a book about African history being on top of the list. I was so happy about that. There has also been a lot of interest from the foreign publishers, it's been translated into eight languages, so I'm very pleased about that.

  I am very encouraged, and I think that it's building on the interest in the whole debate about reparations, restitution of art objects, statues and decolonizing curriculums. I think that people want to get an idea so it's tapped in. I hope the zeitgeist is with it.

  NA: Amazing, final question. I feel like there might be a few people who are starting to discover parts of their family history, and they feel like they might want to capture it in a book. What would be your one piece of advice to someone who is thinking about getting started?

  ZB: A family is obviously large. You have great grandparents who you may have never heard of or seen, then grandparents and parents. I would say, pick a generation in your family who were active at a very interesting time or the most interesting time in that country or region's history. A bit like Abdullah Gurnah, the Tanzanian Nobel Prize winner who wrote about the story of a young man in Zanzibar against the backdrop of the Germans. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is the typical one. He obviously was of an age where he would have remembered what his grandparents said about the arrival of the Europeans and how it just completely created mayhem within their traditions and so on.

  My advice would be, look to your family. Find the most interesting part of your family’s history, find out what was going on in that particular time, and then tell that story through their eyes or through their experiences.

  Zeinab Badawi is an award-winning broadcaster, journalist, and filmmaker. She is President of SOAS University of London and is an honorary fellow of her alma mater St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Born in Sudan, she has worked in the British media for several decades. Zeinab is a recipient of the President’s Medal of the British Academy, a Patron of the United Nations Association UK, and is on the boards of the Arts, Humanities and Research Council, MINDS (the Mandela Institute for Development Studies), the International Crisis Group and Afrobarometer. She was previously Chair of the Royal African Society. An African History of Africa is her first book.

• wbur - https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/01/22/african-history-zeinab-badawi

  An African history of Africa with Zeinab Badawi
  47:15
  January 22, 2025
  Claire DonnellyMeghna Chakrabarti
  Asante King Otumfuo Osei Tutu II greets delegates from the Fowler museum at the Manhyia Palace in Kumasi, Ghana, Thursday, Feb. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
  Asante King Otumfuo Osei Tutu II greets delegates from the Fowler museum at the Manhyia Palace in Kumasi, Ghana, Thursday, Feb. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
  Everybody’s heard about Ancient Egypt.

  But just downriver, the kingdom of Kush was one of the most powerful states in the Nile valley.

  Sudanese-British journalist Zeinab Badawi gives us a lesser-known history of one of Africa’s great historical triumphs.

  Guests
  Zeinab Badawi, Sudanese-British journalist. President of SOAS at the University of London. Her new book is "An African history of Africa: From the dawn of humanity to independence."

  Transcript
  Part I

  MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: The history of the continent of Africa often centers on colonialism, conquest and conflict. Zeinab Badawi wants to change that. Her new book is An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence. And in it, she highlights Africa's lesser-known historical triumphs and powerful figures.

  It is also an ambitious history from the origins of the human race through the end of apartheid in South Africa. Badawi herself was born in Sudan and raised in England. She went on to become one of the UK 's most distinguished broadcast journalists. She hosted flagship news programs at Britain's ITV and Channel 4.

  And for decades, she was also a reporter and host across the BBC's most prominent domestic and global radio and television programs. She's currently president of SOAS at the University of London, and she joins us from London now. Zeinab Badawi, welcome to On Point.

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  ZEINAB BADAWI: Meghna, it is simply terrific to be with you. Hello to you and all your listeners.

  CHAKRABARTI: I actually wanted to start with understanding a little bit more about, you know, your thinking and motivation into writing this book. Because this morning I was wondering, in your long career as a journalist for UK outlets, I wonder if there was ever a time where you felt like your own work, having to be done for a basically UK audience, was in a sense inadvertently contributing to this kind of myopic view of Africa and African history.

  WBUR is a nonprofit news organization. Our coverage relies on your financial support. If you value articles like the one you're reading right now, give today.

  BADAWI: It is precisely because I didn't want to fall into that trap of simply serving a UK audience that I shifted, relatively early in my career, midpoint, to the BBC's international division.

  Where my audience was a global one, precisely to avoid that myopia, that kind of knee-jerk stereotypical approach to covering Africa, which was expected by UK audiences. They really had to be fed in a way, a diet of Africa seen in either a coup or a war or a famine situation. Or in a humanitarian way, you know, as we saw with the Live Aid and Band Aid events.

  So, I felt that I wanted to pursue a more multidimensional approach to covering Africa, and that is why I did shift to the Global Division of the BBC.

  CHAKRABARTI: Well, I promise you I will talk, hear from you in detail about the book, but these motivations are very important, because I think they also inform. You know, as you're saying, the historical understanding that people in the UK and the United States, of course, have of Africa.

  Because it's predicated by these expectations, as you said. Can you just tell me a little bit more about in the early part of your journalistic career how you came up against those expectations and how you reacted to them?

  BADAWI: Yeah, well, I started my career in the '80s, in the early '80s. And, of course, we had the Live Aid/ Band Aid launch in the mid '80s, '84, '85, when there was that famine in Ethiopia. And I was sent to cover the story from the Sudanese side of the border. And I went around all over the country to Darfur, and in the west of Sudan and talked to people who were in a fairly desperate situation.

  However, they rightly, I thought, identified the government in the capital Khartoum as being the people responsible for their plight and who could put the, you know, matter straight. I then went back to Britain and it was all the, you know, the hype around Live Aid, Band Aid. And It was all about let's help Africa. And I saw that there was a dissonance there between the people themselves who saw that their governments were responsible for them, and did not think about their situation in terms of aid, but actually wanting responsible governments.

  Good governance was what mattered to them. And so I saw very quickly that one of the easiest ways for international audiences to engage with Africa was through the humanitarian appeal. And that gave rise to, you know, the pictures of the distended bellies and the emaciated arms and so on. And that really persisted for a very long time.

  And, you know, although, and I really don't want to sound churlish about this, you know, what humanitarian organizations do is very, very important, and there's a place for that. Having said that, it does exaggerate the role of humanitarian aid in the toolbox of development, and no country has been developed by outsiders.

  And also, it casts the Africans as the junior partner, as sort of passive spectators to their own destinies, waiting for outsiders in the guise of whoever, you know, be it Bob Geldof or whoever, to try and sort out their, you know, to put them out of their misery. And that robs the Africans of agency. So even though it's done with the best of motives, and I've met Bob Geldof over the years, and he's a man I greatly admire.

  And you know, if you're starving and somebody is helping you, you don't care what the color of their skin is. I get all that. I'm just talking about the kind of collateral damage that the images give rise to. And of course, working in television, we dealt a great deal with images. And I think that this casting of Africans as the junior partner is something which has persisted, and people think it's only got to do with far flung distant countries.

  But actually, the way Black people are seen internationally has an impact on the domestic, social and political agendas of your countries, including in the UK.

  Because then you'll see African people of African descent who are immigrants as needy outsiders, you know, coming to scrounge off your welfare system and so on.

  And so it evokes dealings in the language of racism. It also, do you see what I mean? So, you know, there's a forced dichotomy between what happens out there and what happens in your country.

  CHAKRABARTI: Yes, exactly. And, I mean, of course, two things can be true at the same time, right? I mean, humanitarian aid is most often given out of a sense of shared humanity.

  I completely agree with you on that. But to put a sharper point here, it's also much easier for people to, you know, fall into that white savior complex, rather than asking their governments to do something to, you know, whatever diplomatic means they have, to encourage the governments of Africa to better serve their people. I mean, I think both those things are true at the same time.

  BADAWI: Absolutely.

  CHAKRABARTI: I appreciated that backdrop. Because we are talking about an entire continent, right? And thousands of different walks of life and cultures and languages and ethnicities and histories.

  We're talking about the cradle of the human race. So to reduce it down to those images, as you said, I mean, I was a young person in the '80s. And those images of the African famines did a huge amount to cement, cement a particular view of Africa in an entire generation of Westerners, I would say.

  So tell me more, then, about your own family's African story. Because it plays a role in the beginning of the book when you go to a camel market in Africa?

  BADAWI: Well, I was born in the Sudan, in the north of Sudan, because of course there are two Sudans now, South Sudan and Sudan. So I was born in the capital, Khartoum.

  My family originated from further north, going towards the border with Egypt. However, my father was involved in pre independence politics in the Sudan. And so he moved the family to the UK when I was about two years of age, going on three. So I have lived my entire life, as you can tell from my accent, in the UK.

  So totally educated here, but I'm not deracinated. I have not, never been disconnected from my roots. I was brought up speaking Arabic. That was the lingua franca of Sudan. It's my mother tongue, because the Northern Sudanese, of course, speak Arabic and I've always maintained ties with the country of my birth.

  My parents were very committed patriots, my father, in particular. And so we grew up with an understanding of what was going on in Sudan. Yet I was surprised that my parents, who are highly educated people, because just to roll back a little bit, my great grandfather in Sudan, Sheikh Babikr Bedri, was the pioneer of female education in Sudan.

  Before him, at the turn of the 20th century, there were no schools for girls in Sudan. And he said, I don't know why, it's just my boys who are educated. I want my girls to also go to school and I want all girls in Sudan to be educated. So he set up in his courtyard a school and he stuck his daughters in there.

  He had a lot of children. Because, as we say in the family, he was so pro women that he married four of them.

  CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS)

  BADAWI: And so he had a lot of children, including girls. And, you know, I grew up with great aunts and aunts who had, you know, postgraduate degrees from Western universities and so on. So education, I could say, was very much the family business.

  Yet, despite that, my family knew very little about their ancient history. I remember asking my mother, saying to her, what do you know about the pyramids and the temples of ancient Sudan? And she said, well, we visited them once, but she couldn't give you a date. She couldn't really give you the names of the kings and the queens.

  And so that troubled me, because I thought if an educated woman did not know much about her own ancient history, what does that tell me? And I found, to my astonishment, that subsequently my travels for the book and the TV series on Africa's history, that this was a very common phenomenon. Most people in Africa, let alone those outside of the continent, have just a kind of very piecemeal view or knowledge of the continent's history before the colonial era.

  And that's why I wanted to put that right. And, you know, you asked me about the book. The book actually grew out of a TV series. I made 20, 45-minute films called The History of Africa with Zeinab Badawi, now available on BBC YouTube, free of charge, was broadcast on the BBC and out of that grew my book.

  Part II

  CHAKRABARTI: Let's talk about some of those great African empires that most of us know nothing about. I'd love for you to share with us the story of the ancient kingdom of Kush.

  BADAWI: Well, if you were to ask me my favorite chapter in the book, you would forgive me if I were biased. It would be chapter three, the kingdom of Kush, because that's where my ancestors hail from. So the kingdom of Kush, in its earliest iteration, thousands of years BCE, before common era or BC, before Christ, as some people say, far predates ancient Greece or Rome.

  I focus on the 7th and 8th centuries BC, BCE. And that's when the Kings of Kush reach the zenith of their power. They conquered Egypt and governed it for the best part of a century, building temples. And, you know, marvelous monuments. And they are very little known about. Most people have heard of ancient Egypt, but they don't know about this, you know, neighbor to Egypt's South.

  Now, Sudan, northern Sudan, actually has more pyramids than any other place on earth. The Kushites built a thousand pyramids. About 250 of them preserve their superstructure. You can see some part of them and some are fully standing. There are about a hundred pyramids in Egypt, by way of reference. Of course, the ones at Giza are much bigger than the ones in Sudan.

  And there are temples, there are beautiful, you know, exquisite jewelry, that the Kushites wore. And the Kushites were very significant because not only were they a great African civilization, they were also a regional superpower. The princes of Byblos ... in what would be modern day Lebanon, appealed to them to help protect them against the marauding Assyrians, who were the most warlike, fierce armies of the ancient world at that time, King Hezekiah of Judah.

  And the Kushites are really skilled archers and very good horsemen. And they had a particular knack of firing their bows and arrows into the eyes of their enemies. And so they were actually a regional superpower. And, you know, I love the story of the kings of Kush. And also, the queens, I should add, because Kushite women also had a very powerful role to play in society.

  They were known as kandakes, which means queen mother. And later on, the ancient Greeks mistook that for a woman's name. And it's where we actually get the woman's name Candace from. And, you know, when the revolution in Sudan happened in April 2019 that brought down President Omar al-Bashir, women were very much in the vanguard of those protests, and they styled themselves as kandakes, reaching back to their ancient past in order to assert themselves, you know, in the modern era.

  Famous queen Queen Amanirenas, known as the one-eyed Queen, she led her people into battle against the Romans in 30 BCE. By then, the Romans had conquered Egypt. Cleopatra was the last of those rulers, you know, in Egypt. And they looked towards northern Sudan, but they were having none of it.

  And Queen Amanirenas signed a peace treaty with the Romans in 22 BCE. So it's just a splendid history, you know, Meghna, and I just wish people knew more about it. It's often mistakenly, I think, referred to as the Nubian civilization. And, you know, the word Nubia wasn't even in existence at that time.

  And I avoid using that word, because today there are Nubians in both Sudan and Egypt. And these people only ever emerged from what is modern day Sudan. And if you call them Nubians, you know, it can muddy the waters a bit. People might think they came from Egypt, but that wasn't the case. They came from what was territorially Sudan.

  So, you know, if you could just bear with me one second, very quickly to say what I like about the story of the Kushites is it shows you how in history, empires rise and fall.

  Today, Sudan is in this ghastly state that breaks my heart, this conflict. And yet, you know, at a time when much of Europe was just languishing in, you know, people were sort of, you know, living very basic lives, there was this amazing civilization in Africa.

  And also, it shows you how history can't be consigned to the past. The Kushites never ate fish. They considered it an abomination to eat fish. To this day, the northern Sudanese have one of the lowest consumption of fish in the whole world, about one kilogram on average per person per year, compared to 25 kilograms in Egypt.

  Even though they've got the abundance of fish in the River Nile, they don't eat it. And it just shows you how history explains the past, but it also informs the present and actually can help shape the future, too.

  CHAKRABARTI: One kilo a year, 2.2 pounds per year. That's nothing. Amazing.

  BADAWI: I know. Yeah.

  CHAKRABARTI: So, the juxtaposition with Egypt was very fascinating to me, right?

  Because of course, you went to Cairo for the TV series and the book as well, and you had just mentioned that in terms of the, the kingdom of Kush, almost nobody who isn't already familiar with that history even knows that it existed, whereas to your point, just about everybody worldwide knows about ancient Egypt.

  How did that global knowledge of Egypt's ancient past. How did you discover how that plays in terms of modern-day Egyptians mindset about their relationship to the rest of the African continent?

  BADAWI: Very interesting. I mean, I tried with my book at the beginning of each chapter to touch on a contemporary issue, to try to engage the reader, to say to them, Hey, look, this is why you should be interested in the history of this particular part of Africa.

  And in the ancient Egyptian chapter number, which is chapter two, I looked at the controversies, which we saw erupt in early 2023 with the comedian Kevin Hart, who wanted to embark on his tour in Cairo, but had to cancel it because he was accused of promoting an Afro centric view of Egypt. Adele James, the actress who was cast in the series by Jada Pinkett Smith, the African American producer, as Cleopatra.

  She's a Black actress, dual heritage, actually, and that also sparked an outcry in Egypt, that somebody of color should be depicting Cleopatra. I mean, it is true Cleopatra was of Greek origin from Macedonia and that's the Ptolemies, they were the last dynasty to rule ancient Egypt. And so strictly speaking, they're correct that she would not have been, you know, she would have been, as I said, Greek origin from Macedonia.

  But It's interesting why that fury, you know, erupted in such a way, and it goes back to the fact that even in the 1920s and '30s, in what came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, you had African intellectuals and artists such as Meta Vaux Fuller with her, you know, mummified statue picture of somebody awakening. You know, they reached back to ancient Egypt and said that the rulers of ancient Egypt were African, were Black Africans, and they wanted to claim that in order to, really, you know, fight the discrimination that they were encountering at that time.

  But that annoyed the Egyptians. I look into why that was the case. And I don't want to paint the Egyptians as racist in any way. They just say, look, we don't want the appropriation of our civilization. But I think that what we need to do is not to say that somebody who is African has to look a certain way or dress a certain way.

  We need to redefine what we mean by being African. And Africa has a Mediterranean coast. You know, across to Southern Europe, across to Western Asia. So, of course, migration has happened over the centuries. And, of course, the pharaohs of Egypt would have had different ethnicities over the centuries, as I just said, you know, you had the Kushites, who were the 25th dynasty. And they would have been, you know, Black African.

  So I think we shouldn't get hung up on what an African should look like. And for me, I say very firmly that the ancient Egyptian civilization was, is and always will be African.

  CHAKRABARTI: I mean not only should we not get hung up on what an African should look like, I mean, the entire idea is completely ridiculous.

  If you ask me, it's a continent.

  BADAWI: Exactly. Exactly. And it's been, you know, I mean, Africa, North Africa was conquered by the Arabs by 711. They had pretty much conquered all of North Africa. Egypt was the first to fall to the Arabs in 640. So, of course, they've mixed, they settled with the Arabs. They are seen as an Arab nation in Africa.

  It's the most populous, the most populous Arab country, Egypt, is in Africa. And so of course they are mixed and perhaps some of them have adopted that Arab ideology and say, look, we are Arabs and not Africans. But I just think that these kinds of discussions lead you into a dead end.

  CHAKRABARTI: Well, so, but it's very interesting, because you're mentioning members of the Harlem Renaissance reaching back to ancient Egypt as a way to symbolize their sort of modern day, not just validity, but power and vibrance. In a sense, I mean, that actually makes a lot of sense. Let's put the racial controversy aside, right?

  Because of how well-known ancient Egypt is around the world. Of course, in order to provide a sense of empowerment in modern day, the United States, they would want to say, look at this equally, if not, actually more powerful ancient culture of which we have a connection to.

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  BADAWI: Of course.

  CHAKRABARTI:  But it relies on the knowledge, the popular knowledge of ancient Egypt, whereas, you make this point in the book.

  There is not that popular knowledge of the other equally powerful empires that were flourishing at the time, as you said. Well, you know, the people in Europe are still painting themselves blue and suffering from the Black Death.

  BADAWI: Yes. (LAUGHS)

  CHAKRABARTI: But why is it that those other empires faded away, not just in the Western imagination, but in the global imagination?

  Because is it more than, it must be more than, there's the Rosetta Stone, so therefore we have a knowledge of ancient Egypt.

  BADAWI: You know, actually, I think it has got a lot to do with the fact that there was a great deal of Egypt mania and archaeology, you know, Napoleon Bonaparte in the late 18th century when he went into Egypt, I mean, pretty much started the discipline of Egyptology.

  It became a very Western owned, you know, phenomenon. Howard Carter in the 1920s, when he discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun. And I think Egypt mania did mean that people just love this kind of, you know, the stories of the mummies and the golden mask of Tutankhamun. And so I think it did rather eclipse anything else that was going on in Africa.

  And hence the African Americans wanted to claim ancient Egypt as part of their heritage and their right to do that, just as people in northern Europe claim ancient Greece and Rome as part of their heritage. You know, the Greco-Roman civilization and so on. I don't see why people in Africa can't do the same.

  So I think it is the fact that there was just this emphasis on ancient Egypt and people just not interested and felt that there was no other history in Africa. Which is, of course, totally untrue. I mean, I think it's because the Europeans really started looking at Africa, with their arrival, which wasn't until the 15th century.

  So they're kind of saying, you know, not an awful lot happened before we arrived, because they valued their own documentation. They didn't look at sources, which were written in non-European languages. The Arabs had been in Africa since the seventh century and had written in Arabic, you know, the chroniclers, the travelers, you had, you know, Gujarati, South Asian languages.

  So, they tended to overlook these, and I think that's the reason why Africa's history before the arrival of the Europeans was very much overlooked. They didn't set much credence on oral tradition and other sources of finding.

  CHAKRABARTI: Tell me more about that, because how much of some of the histories of these groups and empires was mostly contained within an oral tradition?

  BADAWI: So, the Africans didn't always write. Many did. I mean, the Ethiopians and Eritreans had their own script by the third or fourth century. And before that, they used the Sabaean script, which is something that derived from what we call Yemen today. The ancient Egyptians obviously had their own script. But sometimes when Africans didn't write, it didn't mean they didn't record their history.

  You just have to get at it in a different way. And oral tradition is so important. Because in the West, we tend to think as knowledge is something which the individual possesses. But in Africa, knowledge is owned communally. You know, that's the basis of traditional, African life. It's much more communally driven than the more individualistic nuclear family structures that we have in the West.

  And so you would find a man or a woman handing down stories of the valor, the deeds, the actions, the words of great leaders, and it would just be handed down over the generations. And so when I spoke to African historians, archaeologists, paleontologists, because I went to more than 30 countries over a period of seven years.

  And so I spoke to dozens and dozens of cultural experts, and, you know, historians. And they use their scholarship, the written word, but they also augment it with the oral tradition. And because they are from those regions, they are aware of these traditions. So you get a more inclusive, more diverse, and I think in a way, better history from these local historians.

  Some of them are not necessarily working in Africa now. There are many American universities and Western universities. But I think if you do not include their perspectives, you miss a great deal about Africa. You cannot understand Africa if you just rely on Western sources, which is why my book is called an African History of Africa, because I use the African vision perspective.

  And I also believe it's important to accord the African the respect of telling their own story of allowing them to do that. So oral tradition is super significant. I just give you one example. In 1235, The Mali Empire was founded by a very interesting fellow called Sundiata Keita. He overcame disabilities as a child to lead and to establish this amazing empire.

  In 1236, he established something called the Manden Charter, which is an oral charter. It's a kind of charter of civil rights. It decreed that everybody in the Mali Empire should enjoy liberty, dignity, and equality. And UNESCO, the United Nations cultural body, has designated it part of our intangible heritage.

  So, although it's an oral charter, it's been, you know, it's been handed down over the years and we know that's when it was established. And it just tells you, doesn't it, how this man governed his empire. And I just want to add this as a parenthesis, which is the Mande people, sometimes known as the Malinky or the Mandingo or the Mandinka, formed great cohorts of enslaved people in the transatlantic slave trade, dehumanized.

  And yet their founder had this charter of civil rights.

  Part III

  CHAKRABARTI: In granting, not granting, in recognizing Africans' true autonomy, right, and humanity, through telling this African perspective of the continent's history, you also don't want to fall into the trap of sanitizing that history, right?

  Because the fullness of humanity also demands that we look at, you know, the conflicts that have emerged from within Africa itself, between groups, between religions, that perhaps were inflamed by colonialism, but not exclusively so.

  I wonder how you handled that.

  BADAWI: So I felt that I really wanted to redress the balance a bit. And so I don't look too much at the, you know, the post-colonial conflicts at all. I just really deliver Africa to independence. And actually, really, if you use the long lens of history, Africa has been remarkably free of conflict compared to many other continents.

  For example, there have never been any wars based on African religions. You know, there's not been one religious, indigenous religious group that's had fought a war against another indigenous religious group. And even the wars that people refer to, the tensions between Muslims and Christians on the continent, by and large, if you just dig a little bit deeper, you'll see that actually there's economics at their base. And, you know, a fight over resources, environmental factors.

  I mean, broadly speaking, Africa is more or less half Muslim, half Christian, and about 15% are pursuant of traditional African beliefs. So, I don't look at things like, you know, human sacrifice or the incidence of cannibalism that may have existed or whatever, because I think there's plenty about that, if that's what you're interested in.

  These are just, for me, really side issues. Having said that, I do, in the chapters about the transatlantic slave trade and also the Eastern trade, which was mostly across the Indian Ocean. I do say quite clearly that there were Africans who were facilitators, participants, colluders, whatever you want to call them, in these trades.

  And so I don't shirk from doing that. But I did want to celebrate Africa's history. I didn't want to just narrate the history and give a history of truth. I also wanted to give a history of hope, because I feel that that has been sorely lacking when it comes to telling Africa's history. It's been very dominated by the transatlantic slave trade.

  And there's more to Africa than slavery. I mean, 18 chapters in this book, I don't get to the transatlantic slave trade until chapter 14. So it's more a celebratory book, actually. You know, I remember Wangarĩ Maathai,the wonderful Kenyan environmentalist, who said, you cannot enslave a mind that knows itself, that values itself, that understands itself.

  And really, she was a remarkable woman, sadly passed away a decade ago. And I was very inspired by her words when I started writing my book. Because I'm sure people of African descent or who are living on the continent of Africa may read this in a different way from somebody who is not of African descent, although I do say this book is for everyone, I'm sure that there'll be, you know, slightly different reactions to it, depending on whether you do hail from the continent.

  Although, as I say, there's nobody on earth today who can't say that Africa is not their mother continent. You know, if you're not African, you're an African export, even if you've got blonde hair and blue eyes.

  CHAKRABARTI: Well, so let's talk about the mother of us all, if I can put it that way, because you got to interact with what the oldest known, our oldest human ancestor, Lucy.

  BADAWI: Oh, yeah. You're talking about Lucy or Dinkinesh, as she's known in Ethiopia. That's her Amharic name, which means, you are marvelous. And that's how I refer to her in the book. Look, she lived 3.2 million years ago, and she's part of the lineage which kind of led to us, but she's not, we didn't descend directly from Lucy, but she's become a bit of a superstar, hasn't she?

  In the field of paleontology, and that's because, you know, 40% of her skeleton was found pretty much intact. And yes, I was very privileged at the University of Addis Ababa, at the Museum of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, to actually see her real bones, which are kept under lock and key. But I mean, hominins, you know, people, that's us, humans, really, there were various lines that migrated out of Africa, but it is the one that came from Africa that really bred everybody else into extinction.

  So, broadly speaking, we, Homo sapiens, were fully formed by 100,000 years ago. By about 90,000 years ago, we had populated the whole of the continent. We're about a million people then living in communities about 150. At around 60, 70,000 years ago, those first hardy pioneers, probably because of reasons of, you know, scant resources, left the continent first to Arabia and then Europe and Asia.

  And they encountered other homonyms like Neanderthals and Denisovans. And over the millennia, they bred with them. And, you know, mated with them. And then they were finally bred into extinction. So only we survived. And as I say, my book, the interesting thing is that up until between eight to 12,000 years ago, there was no white race.

  Humans began to adopt, adapt to their, you know, their environment. So I think that when you look at the whole history of human development, you know, between eight to 12,000 years ago, nobody white is actually pretty recent. And I know I'm being a bit idealistic, but I just think that if I emphasize our common origins, which I do in the first chapter, that hopefully it will help counter some of the polarizations over racial differences that we see today.

  CHAKRABARTI: Well, Lucy actually makes me think of the fact that you go to really wonderful lengths to highlight a lot of outside of Africa, virtually unknown African women from the history of the continent, right? I mean, there's several from the Asante people. And then also, let's see if I remember this correctly.

  Queen Kahina? Was she?

  BADAWI: Queen Nzinga. Nzinga, I think you're meaning. Queen Nzinga of the Ndongo Kingdom, which was a vassal state of the Kingdom of Congo. Very famous queen. Perhaps you mean her.

  CHAKRABARTI: I think I was thinking of a Berber leader.

  BADAWI: Oh, the Berber leader, Queen Kahina. Yes, you're absolutely right, who lived in the late 1600s.

  And she was the Berber queen in North Africa. She's seen as a great feminist icon in North Africa, in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. She fought the Arabs who were by now invading North Africa, and she was defeated by them in 701. And the Arabs offered her the chance of surviving if she converted to Islam, but she refused and was beheaded, but asked her two sons to accept Islam so that they could survive.

  And, you know, she was an amazing woman, apparently absolutely very beautiful. Her name Kahina could mean priestess or sorceress. And she managed to convince the people in her part of the world, which would approximate to the Ore Mountains. In what is modern day Algeria, that despite the fact that she was a woman, she should lead them and, you know, loads of people.

  Headed her call and came from, you know, the towns and the rural areas, and she absolutely managed to defeat the Arabs on a couple of occasions. And I think it's odd that, you know, we don't know about her yet. We know about Queen Boudica, for instance, the queen of the Iceni tribe in the UK in the first century and BCE.

  I just think that it would be wonderful if people knew about Queen Kahina. You see statues to her in North Africa, you know, and pictures in a lot of places. So I do try to feminize the history. Because, you know, I always say, like that Meghna, that people take that H I S, his, in history a bit too seriously.

  And I try to make it her story too because history was made by women. I think Queen Njinga is one who Jada Pinkett Smith, the, you know, producer, made a drama documentary series of this great queen who was born in 1583 and died in 1663. She fought the Portuguese every which way and died with her crown, you know, intact on her head.

  She outwitted them. And I think her story illustrates that actually, you know, when Africans were confronted with the Europeans coming in, it's not as though they just took it lying down. They resisted at every turn. And you know, that's very, very important to remember. In the end, they were defeated by the superior military power of the Europeans, but that does not mean they did not resist.

  Yeah, you know, it suddenly occurs to me that much of our conversation has been using examples from North Africa, but just to make it clear to listeners, the book covers the entire continent. So I didn't want people to think that it was a mostly North African history.

  It by no means just that.

  BADAWI: No, no, no. Well, Inga. Inga is from what we would call modern day Angola. So that's certainly not north.

  CHAKRABARTI: So we only have a few minutes left, Zeinab. And I'm wondering, you have asked this question that when thinking about the reasons to know this history better, actually, first of all, let me back up. Earlier in the conversation, you said that your own family knew very little about Sudanese ancient history.

  I'm wondering if you found that to be true in other parts of Africa, even as you were speaking with African scholars and historians, how much, generally, amongst the people of Africa, is their own history known?

  BADAWI: Not completely. You know, the level of knowledge was woefully inadequate. Even the brightest and the best going around University of Lagos in Nigeria, I said, what do you know about your history?

  They said, well, the transatlantic slave trade, Nigeria was formed in 1914, but, you know, asked them much more than that. And they're quite baffled, one former Nigerian president said to me, you know, Zeinab, I can recite the name of English medieval kings much more than I can, you know, my own, you know, history of the continent, but I am a pan Africanist.

  I do believe that Africans and people should not just know little bits of the continent. They should have a more holistic view of the whole continent. So if you're from Kenya, don't just content yourself with knowing Kenyan history. You should also know what's happened. You know, Great Zimbabwe, this amazing structure built in the 1100s.

  In what is modern day Zimbabwe, you know, the largest stone structure outside the pyramids in Africa. People should know about these. They should know about the personalities. I mean, my book is very personality led, because I think history is best understood if it's seared into the imagination. And so if you tell history through the characters, then I think it leaves an indelible mark on people's, you know, minds.

  But I want to say this, that I think that there is a feeling that there are those who make history and those who stand on the sidelines of history, with the Africans being very much relegated to the sidelines. And this is just not true. When you read my book, you find characters like Mansa Musa, you know, the king of the Empire of Mali, born in 1280, 1332 is when he died.

  He was the richest individual to have ever lived in history. When he stopped in Cairo on the way to Mecca, where he was making a pilgrimage, he gave away and spent so much gold that the price of gold plummeted, lost its value by 25%, didn't recover for more than a decade, you know. And so there are the actions of this one medieval African king from West Africa.

  Broadly, you know, corresponds to the Sahel region today, his actions had an impact on the international economy. The idea that Africa was dislocated, isolated from the rest of the world, is just not borne out by the story of Mansa Musa, for instance.

  CHAKRABARTI: Well, we only have about a minute and a half left and there's a question I'd like to close with, because you asked this very interesting question.

  You say, what does the preservation of identity, culture and traditions mean? If it does not result in making people's lives better. First of all, why do you ask that question and how do you, how would you answer it yourself?

  BADAWI: I think that people need much more than just, you know, economics and so on. You need identity.

  You need a sense of who you are. You need to have a sense of where you have come from. That's why so many African Americans, you know, want to go and get citizenship in Sierra Leone, which will give you, you know, citizenship if you have a DNA test, for instance, people want to know, they don't want to know that they are just the descendants of enslaved people, and that they didn't have a fine history.

  If you can assert yourself, you know, on the domestic stage on the international stage, I think knowing who you are, where you came from, that you, as somebody of African descent, have a culture, tradition, a history, institutions that are worthy of respect and study. I think that helps you shape your future and makes you a much more confident citizen of the world.

An African History of Africa

From the Dawn of Civilisation to Independence

by Zeinab Badawi

(WH Allen, ISBN 9780753560129)

penguin.co.uk

The 1974 discovery of a 3.2 million-year old fossil skeleton in Ethiopia's Afar region was global news. Nicknamed 'the grandmother of humanity', the discovery was vital to our understanding of early humanity.

It's somewhat predictable that this 'superstar' of palaeontology is known around the world as Lucy, the Western name given to her by anthropologists--inspired by the Beatles' song 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds', which played at their campsite, and not by her Ethiopian name Dinkenesh. As author Zeinab Badawi notes in An African History of Africa, the continent's past has too often been in the hands of non-Africans.

Born in Sudan, Badawi has presented news programmes for ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC, and is President of SOAS London University. Written from seven years of research trips to 30 African countries and using predominantly African and non-European sources, her first book is hefty and ambitious, but engaging and fast-paced, with a focus on Africa's rulers, such as Mansa Musa I, 14th century king of the Mali Empire. He is perhaps the richest person ever to have lived: his wealth is estimated as the equivalent of US$400 billion today.

Along the way, Badawi interrogates ideas about early African spiritual beliefs, family and land ownership. She dislodges accepted wisdoms, instead arguing that economic reality, rather than morality, was the primary driver of abolition.

The book was written with the hope that young Africans who are creating the continent's future 'should do so with their heads held high and their hearts full of pride in their magnificent past'. But, as 'everyone today is either African or the descendent of an African migrant', there's plenty here for everyone to be fascinated by, learn from or rethink.

GRAEME GREEN

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 New Internationalist
http://www.newint.org
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Green, Graeme. "An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Civilisation to Independence." New Internationalist, no. 549, May-June 2024, p. 74. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A792407679/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=da809516. Accessed 26 Apr. 2025.

AN AFRICAN HISTORY OF AFRICA: FROM THE DAWN OF HUMANITY TO INDEPENDENCE

By Zeinab Badawi

25 [pounds sterling], W.H. Allen

ISBN: 978-075356012-9

This long-awaited book from celebrated broadcaster and journalist Zeinab Badawi sets out to introduce an alternative to a common narrative--what Badawi describes as the "myopia of a post-imperial education"--that holds that Africa's history begins after Europeans arrived. It focuses on the neglected pre-colonial history of the continent rather than well covered modern events.

Sudanese-born Badawi, who currently serves as president of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), came to the UK as a two-year old infant and grew up in North London.

A stellar career as a broadcast journalist--following studies in philosophy, politics and economics at St Hilda's College, Oxford--saw her become a familiar face to international audiences.

In recent years she has branched out from broadcast journalism, bringing a nine-part History of Africa to UK TV screens in 2017. This book continues her fascination with the history of the continent's peoples.

While "Africa is the birthplace of humankind itself," she laments that so little is known of its ancient and modern history.

"It has an extraordinary past: engrossing narratives of warrior queens, kings, chiefs, priests and priestesses; of mighty civilisations blooming on the banks of rivers or in the shade of sacred mountains; of lavish buildings hewn out of rock, exquisite libraries bursting with discoveries, bustling caravan routes and market squares thick with the voices of traders, travellers, farmers and entertainers."

Travelling to 30 of the continent's 54 countries, Badawi brings to the reader a refreshingly vibrant account of Africa's many and varied faces, places and cultures. She draws on the conversations she had with Africa's top academics as well as the ordinary people she encountered on her many travels crisscrossing the continent.

Her book, she says, is indebted to the pioneering work carried out by the UN's Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) which in the early 1960s coordinated the General History of Africa (GHA), assembling a committee of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and scientists of other disciplines, some 350 scholars in total, to compile 11 volumes of a tightly researched record of the continent's past. She describes the project as one of Africa's "best kept secrets".

Clearly, Badawi could not replicate the scope of the GHA in just one book, but she takes the reader on a broad sweep of the continent's civilisations, starting with humanity's very beginnings when about 7m years ago the evolutionary chain saw bipedalism emerge.

Although she speculates that there might well have been earlier African civilisations, it is the Egyptians who left the greatest imprint, creating a civilization now defined by temples, tombs, monuments and hieroglyphs.

The Greek historian Herodotus, the ancient Romans, European Renaissance artists and even the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte were all deeply impressed by the superb culture and mysteries of ancient Egypt. And Badawi is similarly entranced, as she takes the reader through the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms, from Narmer, the founder of the Old Kingdom about 5,000 years ago, to the Greek-origin Ptolemaic Dynasty which featured Queen Cleopatra.

The kingdom of Kush

It was not just the Egyptian civilisation, however, that took root along the mighty Nile. To the south, Badawi reminds us, the kingdom of Kush was arguably as remarkable.

This has a special resonance with Badawi, who traces her family roots to the region in present day Sudan. She writes that the kings of Kush are some of the most charismatic rulers of ancient Africa. They left behind more than a thousand pyramids, more than are found in Egypt.

Interactions between Kush and its northern neighbour Egypt swung between a cordial trading relationship along the Nile to outright armed warfare. This probably led Kush to move its capital city from Kerma southwards to Napata.

Less scholarly attention has been paid to Kush than to its more famous northern neighbour, but Badawi goes some way to putting the record straight, describing a colourful line of rulers and the conflicts that the Kush kings waged with the Assyrians.

Badawi makes an interesting point: that the Sudanese "have not been as diligent as the Egyptians in promoting their heroic ancient past". She calls for "more research into and accounts--accessible and easy to understand--of this splendid chapter of Africa's story".

Awesome Aksum

The author next takes us to a powerful kingdom in north-east Africa, describing the emergence of Aksum on the Red Sea coast, a kingdom that built strong trading relationships with the Romans and Arabia as well as with India and Asia. Based in what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, and spanning present-day Djibouti and Sudan, it extended at its height into much of South Arabia during the reign 01 Kaleb of Axum.

Badawi writes that, like Kush, Aksum has undeservedly been sidelined from history. Yet it has many aspects that make it important: it was probably only the second kingdom to adopt Christianity (after Armenia), and the first to adopt coinage in its trading customs, under King Endybis.

Aksum is perhaps most renowned internationally for its huge monolithic pre-Christian stelae, erected during the third and fourth centuries AD as funerary markers for the elite. Many of these are still standing.

Due to its ties with the Greco-Roman world, the Kingdom of Aksum later adopted Christianity as the state religion in the mid-4th century, under Ezana of Axum.

Badawi explains the significance of Aksum for the faithful of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Tradition has it that the Ark of the Covenant, containing the ten commandments, was brought to the kingdom by Menelik I, son of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon.

But no empire lasts forever, and so it was for Aksum. Perhaps due to environmental degradation, the impact of Islam, or Persian and Jewish pressure, the civilisation began to decline.

After the collapse of Aksum, King Lalibela took power from 1162 to 1221, and established the Zagwe dynasty. He was responsible for the hewing of churches out of solid basalt rock. These extraordinary structures attract many thousands of visitors and rank as some of Africa's most remarkable ancient monuments.

Not fairy tales but facts

Following Badawi's profile of northeastern Africa, she goes on to describe the history of north, west, central and southern Africa. She gives compelling accounts of their past, parts of which have previously been neglected by historians.

In her foreword, Badawi cites her late friend, the Kenyan palaeoanthropologist Richard Leakey, who argued that it was imperative to break down prejudices about Africa.

"It will probably take time to break that down, but break it down we must, and we do so--not with fairy tales but with facts," he said.

In helping to achieve this goal for a broader, non-academic audience, An African History of Africa is both a timely and a highly readable addition to the bookshelf of the general reader.

Caption: Sudanese men ride camels past pyramids of the kingdom of Kush in the Meroe desert, north of Khartoum.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 IC Publications Ltd.
http://www.icpublications.com/
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Williams, Stephen. "Rewriting the record: Broadcaster Zeinab Badawi takes readers on an enthralling tour of Africa's ancient empires." African Business, no. 515, July 2024, pp. 88+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A803609992/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0c977f40. Accessed 26 Apr. 2025.

Imust have been about six or seven, and didn’t have a singing voice, when a teacher at primary school stuck a recorder in my mouth. I learnt how to read music and loved it, and I still bring out my recorder from time to time. Then at aged eight or nine the school invited in a violin teacher – he went behind his screen and played the violin and would ask you things like which note was higher, and I passed that test so took up the violin and played until I was 16. My father would often make me bring my violin out to play for his friends, and I was in the school orchestra, but I never got beyond second violins. I was obviously never going to be concert level, and was being asked to step up the practice too much, but I wanted to focus on my O levels, so unfortunately I abandoned it at 16.

But I love the violin and to this day it is still my favourite instrument to listen to in an orchestra. I’m always mesmerised by violinists, and my good friend is Nigel Kennedy – I went to see him play about a week or so ago at Ronnie Scott’s. It’s been a privilege to see such a great violinist up close – the violin is an extension of him, you don’t know where his neck and his chin end and where the violin takes over! I love his album of his own compositions called [I.My World] – it’s really, really lovely.

I had also taken up the piano at 11 but had said to my lovely piano teacher that I didn’t want to do grades, which in retrospect I now see was a big mistake. But I loved the piano and played until 18 – I was the kind of resident pianist at school among the pupils, so for example in the Christmas pantos I’d be the one playing. I would say that it was one of the greatest pleasures in my life, but when I went to university my parents sold the piano because it was taking up space. Until my late twenties I could still play reasonably well if I found a piano, and then when I started having children – I had four children in my thirties – I gave piano lessons to all of them. But I cannot play anymore. About eight or nine years ago I decided to take it up again, and I got a teacher, but I could hardly read music anymore and I couldn’t play two hands, and the teacher was taking me back to the basics – I was pulling out all my old music sheets and insisting ‘no, no you can’t take me back there!’ You know sometimes you read these things in magazines asking ‘what do you treasure most that you lost?’, and it might be a mother’s wedding ring or whatever, but for me it’s the ability to play the piano – it’s my biggest regret that I didn’t maintain it. I always think it will be my retirement project, to take up the piano again.

My love of opera started about 35 years ago and it was a case of love at first sight. I went to the Royal Opera House to see [I.Rigoletto] and when it finished I wanted it to start all over again. I honestly think that people often help you to engage with music, and for me the person who facilitated my love of opera was the Italian baritone Leo Nucci, who was performing Rigoletto that evening – I fell in love with him and I fell in love with the opera, and it’s still my favourite. But soon after that I began to have children, which unfortunately really curtailed my ability to go to any live music, so I took to listening to operas on CDs. I listened to a lot of opera when I was pregnant with my first child (I couldn’t listen to it when I was expecting the others because I always had an infant to look after, and so I’d be playing jolly little kids’ tunes in the car for them!) and he’s the only one of the four who loves it; I always wonder whether it’s because he listened to it incessantly in utero! I later became a board member of Royal Ballet and Opera, and I also made a TV series for the BBC called [I.Take me to the Opera,] which has allowed me to indulge my passion and meet lots of my heroes and heroines. My son was with me when I met Leo Nucci for the first time backstage in Italy, and he said ‘I’ve never seen you have such a groupie moment!’

THE RECORD I COULDN’T LIVE WITHOUT

Verdi Rigoletto

Nucci, Pavarotti, Anderson / Chailly (Decca)

‘If you told me that I can’t listen to this again, my life would be much depleted! Verdi is just a musical genius’ ■

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Mark Allen Business & Leisure
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"Zeinab Badawi." Gramophone Magazine, Nov. 2024, p. 130. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A814378787/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7208dddd. Accessed 26 Apr. 2025.

Badawi, Zeinab AN AFRICAN HISTORY OF AFRICA Mariner Books (NonFiction None) $32.50 1, 14 ISBN: 9780063335417

An immersive and passionate history of Africa from the earliest times to the present.

Africa's representation has long been riddled with stereotypes and errors indicative of widespread refusal to take its history seriously. Mainstream news coverage and cultural productions about the continent prioritize poverty, violence, and kleptocratic leaders. Badawi's dazzling book rejects these racist caricatures in favor of a "holistic" and "honest" history that treats African history and humanity in its fullness. "I aim," she writes, "to provide a counter-balance to the many negative perceptions of the continent and its people." Badawi weaves a lustrous tapestry of Africa's past that centers the African protagonists whose triumphs and defeats deserve more attention. She brings welcome attention to lesser-known figures, including women, who are difficult to locate in historical sources but who nonetheless shaped history. Famous African women leaders Hatshepsut, Cleopatra, Queen Kahina, Njinga, and Yaa Asantewaa all receive substantive treatment here. Yet Badawi also evokes less visible histories: for instance, her engrossing portrait of events in the Senegalese kingdom Nder in 1819, when women resisted an Arab slaving raid first by defending themselves with whatever weapons were on hand. When it became clear they could not defeat the slavers, they chose death, locking themselves in a village structure and setting it aflame. Badawi's account of this "heroic sacrifice" renders an indelible image of ordinary African women as historical actors. Relying on local African experts to disrupt misguided Western narratives and emphasizing Africa's history before European colonization, Badawi takes readers on a personal journey steeped in wonder and care for the continent and its peoples. Her crystalline, sometimes lighthearted writing propels the journey across every region of the continent, illuminating political, religious, and military histories and the personalities that enlivened them. This is not an academic text, as Badawi readily acknowledges. But it is a learned text, one that delivers on its promise of narrating an African history of Africa.

An elegant and vibrant African history that will appeal to novices and experts alike.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Badawi, Zeinab: AN AFRICAN HISTORY OF AFRICA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A819570103/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=88974705. Accessed 26 Apr. 2025.

By Zeinab Badawi

Award-winning Sudanese British broadcaster, filmmaker and journalist Zeinab Badawi begins her exhaustive An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence

(Mariner, $32.50, 9780063335417) with Dinkenesh, a hominin female whose remains were discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia. Called Lucy in the West, she lived more than 3 million years ago and is a definitive link to humanity's common beginnings in Africa. Dinkenesh draws the reader in from the start. Then, Badawi leads us on an epic march through time.

Badawi is an expert guide, visiting ancient, overlooked ruins and telling the stories, often carried on through oral traditions of long-ago kingdoms. She describes the mosques, tombs and monuments with a sense of awe that is palpable and contagious. Badawi was especially struck by the Koutoubia Mosque's "vast scale" and the "elegant simplicity of its arched interior" in Marrakesh, Morocco. Kings, queens, warriors and mystics come back to life, like Mansa Musa, a 14th-century king of the Mali Empire, whose wealth is still legendary. These stories are invigorated by the passionate voices of the many people Badawi interviews, including archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and local storytellers. At the same time, she shows the devastating impact of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade and the political unrest that have ruptured the continent for centuries. She recounts the tragic story of the women of Nder, a village that is now part of Senegal. In November 1819, Arab enslavers tried to capture the village women and enslave them for sex. The women sent their children into the fields and fought off the soldiers. When the enemy regrouped, the women gathered in a hut and set it ablaze, "so, it will be ash that meets the enemy," their leader proclaimed. One pregnant woman fled and later told their story of resistance. The village's annual festival of Talata Nder commemorates these valiant ancestors.

Badawi further illuminates how African countries have gained their hard-won independence, surviving genocides, apartheid and epidemics; she also shows how some governments continue to struggle with nation-building. As Badawi adroitly proves, Africa's story is far richer than the West chooses to believe, and historians and activists alike are working to reconstruct these many histories. An African History of Africa is a long overdue corrective that should be studied in every school and available in every library across the West.

--Priscilla Kipp

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 BookPage
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Kipp, Priscilla. "An African History of Africa." BookPage, Jan. 2025, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A819405890/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=85de5629. Accessed 26 Apr. 2025.

Green, Graeme. "An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Civilisation to Independence." New Internationalist, no. 549, May-June 2024, p. 74. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A792407679/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=da809516. Accessed 26 Apr. 2025. Williams, Stephen. "Rewriting the record: Broadcaster Zeinab Badawi takes readers on an enthralling tour of Africa's ancient empires." African Business, no. 515, July 2024, pp. 88+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A803609992/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0c977f40. Accessed 26 Apr. 2025. "Zeinab Badawi." Gramophone Magazine, Nov. 2024, p. 130. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A814378787/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7208dddd. Accessed 26 Apr. 2025. "Badawi, Zeinab: AN AFRICAN HISTORY OF AFRICA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A819570103/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=88974705. Accessed 26 Apr. 2025. Kipp, Priscilla. "An African History of Africa." BookPage, Jan. 2025, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A819405890/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=85de5629. Accessed 26 Apr. 2025.

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