Afrika ist die Wiege der Menschheit. Doch eine Geschichte Afrikas von den Anfängen der Menschheit bis zum Ende der Apartheid war bislang nicht zu finden. John Iliffe, Afrikanist in Cambridge, England, hat sie geschrieben: umfassend, informationsreich und mit bestechendem Scharfsinn.
In a vast and all-embracing study of Africa, from the origins of mankind to the South African general election of 1994, John Iliffe refocuses African history on the peopling of an environmentally hostile continent. Africans have been pioneers struggling against disease and nature, and their social, economic and political institutions have been designed to ensure survival and maximise numbers. These institutions enabled them to survive the slave trade and colonial invasion, but in the context of medical progress and other twentieth-century innovations the same institutions have bred the most rapid population growth the world has ever seen. This demographic growth has lain behind the collapse of colonial rule, the disintegration of Apartheid, and the instability of contemporary nations. The history of the continent is thus a single story binding living Africans to their earliest human ancestors.
Syntetická práce o dějinách Afriky od pravěku, přes koloniální období až po vznik samostatných národních států a současnou tvář kontinentu.