The African Revolution: A History of the Long Nineteenth Century by Richard Reid

Richard Reid’s new history of nineteenth-century Africa argues that the “scramble for Africa” stemmed from long-term developments rather than sudden events. While not a new claim, the book offers a fresh perspective by linking East and West African histories. The African Revolution is structured into five parts comprising seven chapters, in addition to a prologue and an epilogue. Each part is introduced by an “act” or vignette featuring one or more male nineteenth-century social actors. Reid aims to shed light on “political instability and reinvention, economic transformation, social aspiration, violence, and historical memory,” (p. xvi). The narrative provided in these vignettes is very compelling but unfortunately remains confined to these five short sections.

Part I “Parameters and Contexts,” and its Chapter 1 “Complicating the Conquest” introduce the book’s main goals. First, to show the connections between African transformations in the long nineteenth century and “the scramble” at the end of the century. Second, to illuminate how African dynamics and agencies contributed to European conquest. Reid argues that the long nineteenth century was an era of insurgency and innovation in Africa that started in the late eighteenth century.

In Part II, “Instability and Creativity,” Chapter 2, “Flux and Frontier,” uses these two concepts to explore African political cultures. Ignoring linear chronology, the chapter begins by discussing Oyo, then moves to Dahomey, and then to the Kingdom of Kongo. Chapter 3, “The Age of Insurgency,” examines the Oyo Empire, Solomonic Ethiopia, the Zulu state in southern Africa, the Kingdom of Dahomey, the Asante Empire, and the Buganda Kingdom. Reid attributes the transformations that fueled insurgency in these various states to the “shifting and intensifying global interactions (p. 72)” and increasing militarization. Again, the lack of engagement with recent historiography, particularly with Paul E. Lovejoy’s Jihad in West Africa During the Age of Revolutions (2016), leads to oversimplifications and inaccuracies. For example, Reid states that “. . . Hausa political and commercial elites were in the habit of enslaving other Muslims . . . some of whom were dispatched for sale southward into the nefarious Atlantic system . . . (p. 72).” But, as we know, Hausa Muslims were not the only Muslims in West Africa who enslaved other Muslims. Indeed, many of these war captives were sent into slavery to the Americas, especially Brazil. Regarding Dahomey, Reid also highlights Gezo’s rule and the coup that brought him to power in 1818 as a moment when “a vigorous debate had emerged within Dahomey over the direction of foreign policy and the nature of the state’s external engagement (p. 77).” Yet, internal contestation had been part of the Dahomey’s political landscape since the eighteenth century and always worsened during periods of succession. Likewise, the decline of the trade in enslaved Africans at Ouidah began decades before, on the eve of the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the end of the British slave trade, and the increased British pressure on Portugal and Brazil, to cease their slave trades. All these factors had already played a central role in the fall of Adandozan in 1818.

Part III, “Aspiration and Innovation,” contains Chapter 4, “Material Worlds.” Reid underscores that the transformations explored in Chapter 3 were partly fueled by “notions of material improvement (p. 117)” and how guns, textiles, and other luxury goods ultimately bestowed political prestige on West African and East African elites. However, as Reid acknowledges, this was not a new development, as the introduction of foreign commodities was in place since the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, well before the second half of the nineteenth century. The chapter also illustrates how material resources shaped new developments, movements, and identities. Reid briefly suggests that in these spheres, both in East and West Africa, violence was a central element that ultimately reinforced coercion, including slavery and other forms of forced labor.

Part IV “Liminality and Leverage” comprises two chapters. Chapter V “Being and Becoming mzungu” states that European presence in Africa at the end of the eighteenth century was limited to a number of trading posts along the coast of West Africa, the British territory of Sierra Leone, the Dutch settlement of Cape Town, and the Portuguese entrepôts on the lower Zambezi. (p. 169). Missing here and from the book as a whole is the region of present-day Angola, where the Portuguese established colonies in Luanda in 1575 and in Benguela in 1617. The chapter brings to light the importance of slavery in the West Indies and the rise of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 as important factors that altered the European landscape. Ultimately, parallel to the slow decline of the slave trade on the coasts of West Africa, the British and the French gradually increased their presence in West Africa, South Africa, and North Africa. In the 1870s European powers started establishing new trading companies in Africa, negotiating and imposing treaties African states and communities, and increasing the presence of religious missionary societies across the continent. Innovations in nautical and firearm technology facilitated these ventures.

Chapter VI “Interstice and Intermediacy” explores the role of in-between persons and groups in the “scramble.” Examples include African Americans in Sierra Leone, the Fante on the Gold Coast, the Swahili and Arabic-speaking communities in southeast Africa, and the Sotho in southern Africa. Intermediaries also included the West Africa soldiers who joined European armies in Africa. Underscoring African agency, Reid explains that with the rise of the “scramble” during the final three decades of the nineteenth century, some Africans took advantage of “partnerships with Europeans” (p. 234). The chapter also addresses liminal spaces as “breeding grounds for new forms of community and identity (p. 206).” Arguing for African agency, Reid underscores that African societies and their local actors contributed to shape the new colonial borders that divided the continent during the “scramble.” Finally, Chapter VII “Ways of Seeing, Being, and Remembering,” in Part VI “Time and Place,” explores how Africans engaged time and represented their own past, from the eve of European conquest in the late nineteenth century to the summer 2020, when Black Lives Matter demanded the end of racial violence and the fall of pro-slavery and pro-colonial monuments.

Drawing only on secondary literature and very well-known published primary sources in English, the main contribution of The African Revolution is its approach of the “scramble for Africa.” Through its specific themes, the book connects East, West, South, Central, and North Africa, regions that are usually examined separately. Reid makes a compelling case for viewing the scramble for Africa as a century-long process, even though he could have much better emphasized that the nineteenth-century developments largely derived from the era of the transatlantic slave trade and therefore were not new at all. Africa’s global interactions undoubtedly intensified in the late eighteenth century, but Reid fails to acknowledge earlier global African exchanges, which have been central to many recent works by Africanist historians such as Michael Gomez, François-Xavier Fauvelle, Verena Krebs, and Toby Green, as well as journalist Howard French. None of these authors are cited in the book’s endnotes and bibliography. The secondary literature is often outdated. In Chapter 2, for example, an entire section on Dahomey relies on a single article published in 1974. A broader dialogue with the historiography of the Atlantic slave trade and Atlantic Africa would also demonstrate that both liminal spaces and intermediaries emerged in regions like West Africa and West Central Africa over several centuries, starting with the rise of the slave trade. Except for brief, vague mentions of Dahomey women warriors, African women are also totally absent from this book, even though they were central social actors in all societies addressed in the book. Additionally, the book’s structure and the internal organization of each chapter are often confusing. For scholars, students, and general readers, the absence of chapter outlines in the prologue, the lack of proper introductions in each chapter, the very long paragraphs introducing some chapters, and the lack of a clear linear chronology in some chapters disrupt the flow and make the book very difficult to read. Although stories of violence and trauma are mentioned as a main framework of this book, they remain marginal and mostly confined to the five vignettes, which are likely the book’s richest component.

Ana Lucia Araujo

Howard University