Africa is a place of stunning size and diversity: the continent includes over a billion people, living in 54 countries, speaking some 2,000 languages. Yet most Americans know very little about it. News comes to us in bits and pieces, and the news is often bad: Ebola, Boko Haram, Cecil the Lion. More occasionally, the news is good: crowds at South Africa’s World Cup trumpet their vuvuzelas; The Economist exults that “Africa is rising”; President Obama receives a warm welcome in his father’s homeland of Kenya. Always, this news is confusing. Because even the most diligent students of history have seen little about Africa’s past in American school textbooks, it seems impossible to make sense of the problems and opportunities facing Africans in the present.

Why do most Americans know so little about Africa? How did modern Africa come to be? And how has Africa shaped the modern world? To address these questions, this course focuses on the history of sub-Saharan Africa in the period from 1800 through the 1990s. It provides both a survey of key themes and the conceptual tools to enable you to take your study of modern Africa further.

Key themes include:

Slavery and abolition

European colonialism

Anti-colonial resistance, nationalism, and pan-Africanism

Postcolonial development and state crises 

Through examination of these themes, you will gain an understanding of these core concepts:

Connections between people, land, and power

Spirituality

Gender and generational relationships

Racial, ethnic, and class conflict

By thinking critically about the making of modern Africa, you will be a better historian. Historians of Africa must be creative in locating and interpreting primary sources—evidence about the past, produced by people with personal knowledge of the events they describe. Because many topics in African history do not have a large corpus of written documents by participants, Africanist scholars often use oral historical, visual, musical, and other kinds of non-textual evidence. We combine this evidence with critical readings of written documents from people like officials, missionaries, and journalists. To understand the experiences of everyday people rather than only the views of people in power, we learn to read texts “against the grain” or between the lines.