Review by Booklist Review
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.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
