Spanning more than two thousand years of African history, from the African Iron
Age to the collapse of colonialism and the beginnings of independence, Hosea
Jaffe's magisterial work remains one of the only books to fully capture the
continent's complex and diverse past.
The great strength of Jaffe's work lies in its unique theoretical perspective,
which stresses the distinctive character of Africa's social structures and
historical development. Crucially, Jaffe rejects all efforts to impose
Eurocentric models of history onto Africa, whether it be liberal notions of
progress or Marxist theories of class struggle, and he argues instead that the
key dynamics underpinning African history are unique to the