EP #79: Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War with Howard French

Lisa is hosting solo today and is joined by Howard French to talk
about his latest book, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and
the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World
War.  Howard French is a professor at the Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism. Prior to joining the
Columbia faculty, in 2008, he was a reporter and senior writer
for The New York Times, where he worked as a foreign
correspondent for more than two decades. During this time, French
served as the paper's bureau chief in Shanghai, Tokyo, Abidjan
and Miami (covering Central America and the Caribbean).


French's documentary photography has featured in solo and group
exhibitions on four continents, and collected by the Mildred Lane
Kemper Museum in St. Louis.


For more information about his work, please visit his website:
howardwfrench.com or follow him on twitter: @hofrench.


Book Description:

Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of
Africa in the creation of modernity, Born in Blackness
vitally reframes our understanding of world history.


Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a
place of primacy to European history. Some credit the
fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it
established between West and East; others the accidental
unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the
development of the scientific method, or the spread of
Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of
Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote
outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa
and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins
of modernity?


In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard
W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes
the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the
economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the
West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all
grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark”
continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age
of Discovery was not―as we are so often told, even today―Europe’s
yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire
to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies
sequestered away in the heart of West Africa.


Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement
of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the
fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born
in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant,
personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the
lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably
rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond,
to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled
seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who
liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course
of American history.


While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to
the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the
same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a
long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision
in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred
years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African
nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been
etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the
West ascended, their stories―siloed and piecemeal―were swept into
secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic
“rise of the West” theories that have endured to this day.