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WORK TITLE: Motherland
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PERSONAL
Born in Ghana.
EDUCATION:Has a degree from St. Peter’s College, Oxford.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, broadcaster, historian, and anthropologist. Has worked for the Pitt Rivers Musuem, the Times newspaper, and the Tatler.
WRITINGS
Wrote and presented Africa: Written Out of History, a documentary for Dan Snow’s History Hit.
SIDELIGHTS
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Luke Pepera was born in Ghana and earned his degree from St. Peter’s College, Oxford. There he studied archaeology and anthropology with a particular focus on ancient and medieval African history. He has worked for both museums and publications, and he wrote and presented Africa: Written Out of History, a documentary for Dan Snow’s History Hit. He has a passion for African history and culture, particularly in correcting people’s assumptions and revealing the complexity of African cultures.
Motherland: A Journey through 500,000 Years of African Culture and Identity is Pepera’s book debut. It is inspired by his own experiences of being part of a Ghanian family, as he combines family experiences with the history of African people since well before history was written. This includes discussions of nomadic cultures and traditional funeral rites, oral storytelling and matriarchal societies. Pepera also ponders what these and many other aspects reveal about African identity. In an interview with Historia, Pepera talked about his father’s influence: “[He] encouraged me never to see Africans solely as victims,” even in accounts of the slave trade. “If Africans are always presented as colonised and downtrodden it creates a historical prejudice that can obscure reality.”
In the Spectator, Michela Wrong lauded the book for how it “leaps nimbly between past and present.” Wrong was particularly taken with the chapter on oral storytelling, calling its juxtaposition of modern and ancient “bracing and fun.” While admitting that not all of the book is compelling, she called it “idiosyncratic, surprising . . . [and] full of thought-provoking comparisons and provocative claims.” A contributor in Publishers Weekly wrote that the book “edifies” with its “charming, conversational prose.”
A writer in Kirkus Reviews called it a “stirring, optimistic portrait of African identities and meaning making, past and present.” They predicted it would “inspire those who seek to understand Africa and its peoples everywhere.” Jenny Hamilton, in Booklist, echoed those thoughts, describing the book as a “sprawling, eclectic, sometimes messy celebration of Africa’s vast and varied history.” She praised Pepera for his “accessible” and “straightforward” writing style.
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May, 2025, Jenny Hamilton, review of Motherland: A Journey through 500,000 Years of African Culture and Identity, p. 19.
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2025, review of Motherland.
Publishers Weekly, April 14, 2025, review of Motherland, p. 45.
Spectator, January 25, 2025, Michela Wrong, “Poets, Praise Singers and Storytellers,” review of Motherland, pp. 32+.
ONLINE
Historia, https://historiamag.com/ (January 27, 2025), Carolyn Kirby, author interview.
Luke Pepera is a writer, broadcaster, historian, and anthropologist dedicated to sharing his passion for African history and cultures. He was born in Ghana and has a degree from St. Peter's College, Oxford, where he read Archaeology & Anthropology and studied ancient and medieval African history. Since graduating he has worked at the Pitt Rivers Museum, The Times, and Tatler, and has written and presented Africa: Written Out of History, a documentary for Dan Snow's History Hit.
Historia interview: Luke Pepera
27 January 2025 By Carolyn Kirby
Luke Pepera’s debut Motherland: A Journey through 500,000 years of African Culture and Identity is a ground-breaking exploration of Africa’s uniquely long history and diverse cultures, interwoven with Luke’s experiences of growing up in a Ghanaian family. Luke talks to novelist Carolyn Kirby about the genesis of his remarkable book.
CK: Motherland is such a distinctive book, combining as it does history, anthropology and culture to create a hugely readable introduction to a continent. Just the list of illustrations alone gives a flavour of the wide range of topics that you cover, from the ancient mosque at Kilwa to the rapper Kool Moe Dee.
You mention in the introduction that the book’s origins lay in a sixth form extended essay which involved a museum visit in Ghana, so this project has clearly been close to your heart for a very long time.
LP: Indeed! My fascination with African history goes back to my schooldays and I can pinpoint that museum visit as an inspiration because, in fact, I found myself somewhat disappointed by the objects on display. Almost all of the artefacts on show dated from the eras of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade and I felt sure that there must be so much more to Ghanaian history than this.
The prayers room inside the extension of the great mosque of Kilwa at Kilwa Kisiwani
Later, after leaving university, I began to write seriously about African subjects. And once I knew I was going to write this book, I decided on a thematic structure that would allow me to range widely over subjects that interested me. Some of the first things I wrote about, like medieval West African empires and the invention of racism, have made it into the book.
CK: I love the way you write about your personal experience of African identity. This really enlivens the anthropological subjects in the book. Particularly memorable is your description of your grandfather’s funeral and the rituals that accompanied his passing.
LP: Yes, I sensed that my grandpa’s funeral really captured the essence of an African way of looking at the world. I wanted to convey the richness of his belief system by showing both the Roman Catholic rites and the traditional African rituals that were part of his funeral ceremonies.
In the chapter called How the Dead Still Live, I explain the importance of ancestral relationships in Africa, and how death is not an ending but a transition from the physical to the spirit world, a world that is ever-present although invisible. My experiences of engaging with the rituals for my grandpa, help to illuminate the reality of the African values about death and life.
CK: And your description of a spiritual object, a stool, associated with your grandfather, is so fascinating. This is especially interesting for historians who might be studying past cultures where material objects were invested with spiritual or supernatural significance.
Stool from Ghana
LP: Absolutely! Amongst the Akan people of Ghana, of whom my family are a part, small carved stools are very important cultural artefacts. They are everyday useful objects closely associated with individuals that can act as gifts and even be part of a chief’s regalia. But they are also believed to contain the souls of the departed and act as a sort of portal for the living into the spirit world. And when I touched the stool that had been my grandfather’s, I felt his presence.
CK: It’s so moving and interesting to hear this. And I think that the concept of a continuity of life and death is a challenge to the way that we in the West think about history. In some of what you write about Africa’s past, time seems collapsed and chronology unimportant compared to the message of the story.
LP: I think this is because Africa has been inhabited for longer than anywhere else and there is so much to be remembered. What becomes most important are the stories and what they mean rather than the facts and figures. And much of the content of the most powerful historical stories are understood to be mythological.
But the main thing is that these stories convey strong emotion in telling us about who we are and how we got here. One of the examples I give is from the storytellers of the Western Sahel whose stories use words that are literally unintelligible.
Mandinka Griot Al-Haji Papa Susso performing songs from the oral tradition of the Gambia on the kora
The storytellers themselves don’t know what they mean because the stories are so old that some of the words are no longer understood. But the message of the story as a whole remains consistent, and its unchanging nature shows a continuity of beliefs over a vast period of time.
Knowing about the exact length of that time is less important. If you come from the Western tradition, this can be a hard concept to grasp, but when studying Africa, you have to be really open minded in your approach to history.
CK: The transatlantic slave trade is a subject which you decidedly didn’t want to dominate your view of African history, and yet you write about it with great eloquence and insight. You have clearly thought long and deeply about the subject. Where did your earliest ideas about the slave trade come from?
LP: My father was a huge influence as he encouraged me never to see Africans solely as victims in these narratives of enslavement. If Africans are always presented as colonised and downtrodden it creates a historical prejudice that can obscure reality. The fact is that early modern African societies traded with Europeans on equal terms, even when it came to the triangular trade. The exchange between the two continents was long-standing, complex and nuanced.
I didn’t want to take for granted the idea that when these different cultures interacted it was always to the Europeans’ advantage and the Africans’ detriment. Some African kingdoms were very willing to sustain the trade in people for goods, but I also tell the story of the early 18th-century king Agaja who fought to stamp the trade out.
Mansa Musa sitting on a throne and holding a gold coin
I also wanted to make clear that the slave trade didn’t evolve from an assumption on the part of Europeans that Africans were inferior. I describe in my chapter, The Invention of racism, how this only came later once the system of plantation slavery was already established. And the transatlantic slave trade itself came about essentially by accident.
At one point, New World settlers tried to use captured native Americans as unpaid labourers on their farms. But it was found that indigenous peoples of the Americas were too vulnerable to new, imported diseases to be relied on as an enslaved workforce. Africans, being from the Old World, happened to have the same sort of disease immunity as Europeans. And so, the transatlantic trade grew.
CK: I’m really fascinated with this idea of immunology being at the root of the transatlantic slave trade. And it’s a revelation to read your explanation of the way that anti-African racism developed from an entirely economic foundation directly as a result of plantation slavery.
LP: I found so many examples from earlier eras in which early modern societies paid no heed at all to skin colour when assessing an individual’s status in society. For instance, Alessandro de’ Medici, a 16th-century ruler of Florence, was the son of an African maidservant. But when his rivals tried to claim that he was unfit for office, their insults were to do only with his mother’s lowly status and not her skin colour.
Alessandro de Medici
CK: It’s incredible how widely Motherland ranges given its concise number of pages, yet the extensive footnotes and bibliography demonstrate the wealth of research that you have poured into the book. Out of all that research, what did you find out that most surprised you?
LP: If I have to pick one thing, I’d say finding out about the medieval university at Timbuktu in Mali. I’d heard of it before, but never realised how developed and extensive it was. At its height, the university hosted 25,000 scholars which was the biggest in the world at the time and equivalent to many major universities today. And there was a library of more than a million texts. It was basically a modern university thriving in Africa 700 years ago.
CK: And I was also astonished by the scene you paint of medieval Islamic Africa through a description of the pilgrimage of Mansa Musa, reputedly the wealthiest man who ever lived!
LP: Indeed, he was an extraordinary figure. When Musa went on pilgrimage from Mali to Mecca in the early 14th century, he took with him thousands of servants and a camel train carrying tons of gold. And Musa spent so much of it in Cairo that the price of gold was depressed for a decade afterwards!
It’s said that in every place on the route of the pilgrimage that Musa rested on a Friday, he decreed that a brand-new mosque should be built on that spot. The wealth at his disposal is astonishing.
CK: It’s just one vivid example from a book crammed with astonishing stories and ideas. Congratulations, Luke, on writing this exceptional debut.
Buy Motherland by Luke Pepera
Motherland: A Journey through 500,000 years of African Culture and Identity by Luke Pepera is published on 30 January, 2025.
Luke Pepera is a writer, broadcaster, historian and anthropologist specialising in Africa. He was born in Ghana and studied Archaeology & Anthropology at St Peter’s College, Oxford.
He has worked at the Pitt Rivers Museum, written for publications including the Financial Times, wrote and presented the documentary Africa: Written Out of History for History Hit and has been featured on numerous podcasts, including The Rest is History. Luke was one of the judges for the 2021 HWA Non-fiction Crown Award.
Carolyn Kirby is a novelist and HWA member. Her debut novel, The Conviction of Cora Burns was longlisted for the 2019 HWA Debut Crown Award. Her follow-up, When We Fall, is a thriller and dark love story set between Britain and Poland during the Second World War. Ravenglass will be published in September 2025.
Buy When We Fall by Carolyn Kirby
carolynkirby.com
Carolyn has interviewed other authors for Historia:
AD Bergin
Clare Mulley (about Agent Zo)
Clare Mulley (about Clare’s successful campaign for an English Heritage blue plaque to commemorate wartime SOE agent Krystyna Skarbek)
Read Carolyn’s features about the background to her novels:
‘Paedo Hunter Turns Prey!’ The ironic fate of the father of tabloid journalism
Fifty years of fake news; the cover-up of the Katyn Massacre
Images:
Mansa Musa sitting on a throne and holding a gold coin, detail from the Catalan Atlas, attrib Abraham Cresques, 1375: Bibliothèque nationale de France via Wikimedia (public domain)
The prayers room inside the extension of the great mosque of Kilwa at Kilwa Kisiwani: Robin Chew for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Stool from Ghana at the World Museum Liverpool: Rept0n1x for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Mandinka griot Al-Haji Papa Susso performing songs from the oral tradition of the Gambia on the kora, 1999: DavidOaks for Wikimedia (public domain)
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Portrait of Alessandro de Medici after Giorgio Vasari, between 1534 and 1574: Princeton University Art Museum (public domain)
Motherland: A Journey Through 500,000 Years of African Culture and Identity
by Luke Pepera Weidenfeld & Nicolson, [pounds sterling]22, pp. 272
What does it take to bury an outdated argument? The thought occurred while reading Motherland, one of a series of recent books seemingly haunted by the ghost of Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Back in 1964, Trevor-Roper, an expert on the English Civil War and the Third Reich, made the mistake of opining on African history. There was nothing much to teach, he said, other than the history of Europeans in Africa. 'The rest is largely darkness... And darkness is not a subject for history.' He then added insult to injury with a snitty reference to the 'unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes'. These were silly remarks; but Trevor-Roper was the man who later authenticated the Hitler diaries, so not above the odd clanger. They were also comments voiced more than 60 years ago, when far less was known in the West about the continent's rich and diverse past.
But that lofty dismissal seems to enjoy extraordinary staying power, for hard on the heels of the Sudanese-British television presenter Zeinab Badawi's An African History of Africa comes Motherland, by Luke Pepera, a young British historian and broadcaster with Ghanaian roots. Both seem preoccupied with demolishing the Trevor-Roper canard.
Like Badawi's book, which kicked off with 'Lucy', the skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis on display in an Addis Ababa museum, Motherland reaches back into the mists of time. To drive home the depth and breadth of African history, Pepera focuses on the Mandingo emperor Kanku Musa Keita's 60,000-man, 100-camel pilgrimage to Mecca in 1323, which first brought Mali to international attention. We also hear the Moroccan diplomat Al-Wazzan's dazzled account of life in
Timbuktu, the jewel of the Songhay empire, captured back in 1512.
But the book really comes alive when Pepera abandons the plod of chronological storytelling and leaps nimbly between past and present. A chapter on ancestor worship explains Akan and Yoruba reincarnation beliefs, illustrating that in Africa the barrier between the living and the dead is always permeable. That triggers a rabbit-hole dive into the career of the American actor Chadwick Boseman, who played T'Challa in the Black Panther superhero film when dying of cancer. If Ghanaians live on in the Asante nation's royal stool, Boseman lives on in that iconic performance, in which--poignantly--the plot has T'Challa repeatedly conversing with ancestors in the spirit world, a realm the actor himself was about to enter.
In one of his strongest chapters, Pepera explores oral storytelling--of primordial importance in many African cultures. He traces the modern rap battle (born in 1981 at the Harlem World Club in New York) back to Ikocha Nkocha insult games played by Nigeria's Igbo and riddling contests popular across the continent. From there he skips to proverbs, the linchpins of any African conversation, before examining the role of griots, west African praise singers, poets and genealogists. The juxtaposition of modern and ancient is bracing and fun.
There are times when Pepera's appreciation of alternative value systems falls into Rousseau's 'noble savage' trap, in which whatever is neither western nor modern is presumed benign. I raised an eyebrow reading his enthusiastic account of the role of oracles and divination in healing damaged community relationships. I still recall the Congolese orphanage I once wrote about, full of children whose poverty-stricken parents had thrown them onto the streets after a witchdoctor declared that one child had 'bewitched' a family member. Such practices aren't always 'healing'.
Pepera also wastes his energies dismantling what I suspect are straw-man arguments. Take his final chapter, which challenges what he claims is the misunderstanding that 'in the 17th and 18th centuries, like European merchants, every African ruler sought to profit from the transatlantic slave trade'. Perhaps I spend too much time reading the Guardian, but my impression is that much of the British public these days lays the blame for the slave trade on its own white ancestors. It's the notion that African rulers played any role that often comes as a surprise.
My main criticism, though, is that too often Pepera does what I have been frequently warned against doing: extrapolating from one region he knows very well--west Africa--to a continent whose 54 nations boast a multitude of ethnic roots, religions, customs, languages and colonial experiences. You can never be too wary of African generalisations.
Overall, this is a curate's egg of a book --idiosyncratic, surprising, brilliant in parts, stodgy in others, full of thought-provoking comparisons and provocative claims not all of which bear scrutiny. I look forward to Pepera's next book, in which, having driven a stake through Trevor-Roper's heart in this work, he will no doubt beat his own intriguing path.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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Wrong, Michela. "Poets, praise singers and storytellers." Spectator, vol. 357, no. 10248, 25 Jan. 2025, pp. 32+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828301835/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3c3cd03c. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.
Luke Pepera. Pegasus, $35 (272p)
ISBN 978-1-63936-883-9
Historian Pepera debuts with a sprawling account of African cultures.
Noting that historical literature tends to perceive Africa through the lens of the Transatlantic slave trade at the "expense of everything that came before," and that as a result "historical chronologies are not how many African peoples" relate to their past, Pepera endeavors to bridge the gap. He surveys the "immensity" of the "varied peoples" whose histories stretch back millennia before the arrival of European slavers, beginning with the great empires like Mali, a West African empire that in the 14th century accumulated incredible wealth under the leadership of the great Musa, which he lavished on cultural projects like the construction of a university--one of the world's first--that could house 250,000 students and held up to 700,000 books. Pepera also surveys crosscultural commonalities on the continent, like the widespread persistence of ancestral veneration in the present day. At the same time, he astutely cautions against the flattening into a single monolithic identity of "the most genetically, ethnically, culturally, and skin-color diverse peoples in the world," from the cosmopolitan Swahili, who spoke Arabic and ate "off Ming Dynasty porcelain," to the enslaved Asante diaspora in Jamaica, whose folk stories changed the spider god Anansi into a symbol of resistance and revenge. Rendered in charming, conversational prose, this edifies. (June)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Motherland: 500,000 Years of African History, Cultures, and Identity." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 15, 14 Apr. 2025, p. 45. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A836572501/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5d8abce4. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.
Pepera, Luke MOTHERLAND Pegasus (NonFiction None) $35.00 6, 3 ISBN: 9781639368839
African pasts and cultural understandings are vital to the present.
"We have a warped understanding of Africa's past," writes Pepera at the outset of his capacious history. To unlearn misconceptions, he invites readers on a sweeping, eclectic trip across time and space. Refusing to center histories of victimization, such as the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, he instead emphasizes their creativity and achievement. Construing "Africa" broadly, Pepera's thematic chapters show African and African diasporic identities as interwoven and persistent. His descriptive skill brings research from historical and ethnographic sources into conversation with contemporary examples, vividly showing that for Africans, the past and their ancestors' past achievements infuse the quotidian present. Pepera narrates familiar African histories, such as the marvelous story of Malian emperor Mansa Musa's 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca. Musa's wealth in gold, and his generosity in distributing it during his three-month stop in Cairo, famously disrupted the Egyptian economy, bringing him and Mali into wider renown. He also explores the fascinating histories of African royal women, including Njinga Mbande, a 17th-century queen of Ndongo, in what is today Angola. In other chapters, Pepera's purpose is quite different. In "How the Dead Still Live," he moves from African understandings of ancestors' efficacy in their descendants' lives to a moving discussion of the legacy of the actor Chadwick Boseman. The latter's "exemplary life" was reflected in his acting choices, in which his portrayals of figures like Jackie Robinson, James Brown, and T'Challa/Black Panther modeled an African spirit of ancestral veneration. Pepera similarly connects African forms of wordsmithing--praise singing, proverbs, epics--to diasporic forms of verbal battles such as rap or playing "the Dozens." The book's presentation of how racism developed over the centuries will disappoint some readers, since it largely eschews structural explanations of how anti-Blackness came to be a global phenomenon. But it will undoubtedly inspire those who seek to understand Africa and its peoples everywhere as shapers of human history.
A stirring, optimistic portrait of African identities and meaning making, past and present.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Pepera, Luke: MOTHERLAND." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837325456/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e85bcf38. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.
Motherland: 500,000 Years of African History, Cultures, and Identity. By Luke Pepera. June 2025. 432p. illus. Pegasus, $35 (9781639368839); e-book (9781639368846). 960.
Africa is often read and understood through the twin lenses of colonization and the transatlantic slave trade. While these painful stories are crucial for understanding Africa's history, as well as the world's, Motherland reminds readers that these account for only a few hundred years out of the millennia-long history of the African continent. In this engaging book, Ghanaian historian and anthropologist Pepera highlights a few of the incalculably many histories and cultures that have risen, fallen, and survived throughout Africa. Organized into chapters that highlight themes such as ancestor worship, trickster folklore, and matriarchy, the book spans a wide chronological and geographic range, traveling from medieval Mali to twentieth-century Brooklyn to Pepera's own grandfather's funeral in Ghana. Perhaps inevitably, the book's scope sometimes leads to generalization and oversimplification of the huge array of cultures, nations, and ethnic groups considered here. But Pepera's accessible recounting of history and straightforward writing style offer space for readers new to African history to find avenues for further exploration. A sprawling, eclectic, sometimes messy celebration of Africa's vast and varied history.--Jenny Hamilton
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Hamilton, Jenny. "Motherland: 500,000 Years of African History, Cultures, and Identity." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 17-18, May 2025, p. 19. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A852211543/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=14f2674a. Accessed 18 Oct. 2025.