Summary

Africa Is Not A Country is a bright portrait of modern Africa that pushes back against harmful stereotypes to tell a more comprehensive story.

Review

Wish I was still teaching world literature so I could use this book in a classroom. Super accessible, engaging, and informative.

What I learned

• Unilever started as a private company called the United African Company that was used by Britian to invade and take control over local empires in Africa. The British eventually bought these territorities and formed Nigeria.

• In 1984, Ethiopia took money from NGOs to help with famine, but a portion of the money was also used to systemically force innocent people to relocate. 100,000 Ethiopians died as a result of a policy that was partially funded by aid agencies.

• Somalia was a strategic ally to the U.S. during the Cold War and the Reagan administration offered Somalia $120 million in annual miliatary, econcomic, and refugee aid. The administration used this money to fund an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Isaaq ethnic group. An estimated 200,000 Somali civilians were killed.

• Muammar Gaddafi had a weird obsession with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. After his death, an entire photo album that featured only photos of her was found in his home.

• There were giant walls in the Kingdom of Benin that are believed to have been four times the length of the Great Wall of China.

"The lack of precision and the laziness of thought, language and solutions regarding depotism in Africa stops us from getting to the various root causes and coming up with sustainable fizes to ensure that the dynamics that maintain them are removed as nations continue to establish themselves."

• In the early 1900s, Germany conducted the first genocide of the century in Namibia, a country that didn't gain independence until 1990. Due to land theft and cultural destruction as a result of colonisation, the Herero and Nama people in Namibia revolted in order to reclaim their land. As a result, 80% of the Herero population and 50% of the Nama people were murdered by the German army. The estimated death toll is at around 100,000.

  • This is also when Germany first tested out the concept of a concentraion camp where they sent prisoners to die from starvation, slave labor, and racist scientific experiments that was later used to foster the Nazi ideology of race purity.

  • 4,000 skeletons of the victims of this genocide were sent to the American Museum of Natural History where they still remain.