Motherland: 500,000 Years of African History, Cultures, and Identity

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 cross-cultural 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)