slavery
A Tale of Two Omars
Western scholarly approaches tend to approach African and Islamic studies in separate lenses: “too Islamic” to be a legitimate subject of study for most anthropologists and Africanists, and “too African” to be of interest to Islamicists, thereby causing African-Muslim scholarly voices to fall through the cracks.
African Role in Western Prosperity
Howard French’s new book, “Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War”, serves as a kind of elegy for the cataclysmic effect that contact with Europeans had on African societies, many of whose monarchs were enthusiastic participants in the slave trade before the Europeans arrived but with considerable differences to how it later became known.