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| quote: | Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
lol - I scanned your post quickly and hit reply to write "fantastic choices!" and then as I was writing that, saw your comment.

Herbst's book is an interesting perspective, but Martin Meredith is simply the man when it comes to African history.
edit: did you mean "The Fate of Africa"? If so, that was like my bible for grad school. It provided basic historical context for nearly every course I took. |
its quite a fatty, but he goes into great detail state by state from the period right before independance onwards. Ive only burned about 80 pages so far, but I have already learned a great deal about Nkrumah, Humphrey Bouguet, Ben Bella, leopold senghor, Nasser, and Bourguiba. It has focused more on french west africa so far, but it gave a detailed analysis of the gold coast independence as well. Right now Im reading about Ben Bella's adventures, with shit about to hit the fan in French Algeria. That ******s still alive!
I really like the gunsgermssteelesque approach of herbst, and it seems great so far. One issue I had was that although he would disclude the North African state structure in his theory, He would use the entire african land mass(including the north african sahara) to prove his points of arid lands, sparsely populated peoples, fluctuations in environment and geography...but Im probably just splitting hairs.
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