We have a bunch of the “For Beginners” books published by Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative (WRP) at home somewhere, almost all of them from when they came in fairly plain if stylish brown covers. Someone should write a book about the history of the WRP someday (I’m guessing maybe somebody already has? Here I’m doing the LazyWeb thing and hoping somebody will chime in with the appropriate citation).
The early books in the series were, I thought, not just informative but reasonably humorous and relatively non-dogmatic despite the strong radical bent of the WRP. That is, the books were clearly politically committed, but they didn’t mind poking gentle fun at the various Marxist, radical or other intellectual figures they set out to explain to their readers. In some ways, the early ones remind me of Action Philosophers, except that Action Philosophers is better.
But somewhere along the way, the books really started to suck. They became much more shrill, dogmatic, confusing, and they also started to lose the relatively disciplined sort of Western Marxism that provided a consistent argumentative perspective for most of the early books. In some ways, you could read the arc of the series as paralleling the fragmentation of the post-New Left Left, as the series became increasingly open to an identarian, multicultural perspective. That’s pretty much the “For Beginners” book on Africa: it’s narrated by a “griot” character who is your basic Afrocentric mishmash, offering a tour of Merrie Olde Africa before 1600. It’s not even so much the basic stance that bugs me, it’s that even as an illustrated, accessible tour of African history of this type, the book is confusing. I could see passing “Gramsci for Beginners” to a student and having that be useful, but I don’t know what anyone would get out of this one except for “Africans had big kingdoms and fabulous artwork and stuff like that”.
Anybody know more than I do about the intellectual and institutional history of this series or the Writers and Readers Cooperative?
Someone should write a book about the history of the WRP someday (I’m guessing maybe somebody already has? Here I’m doing the LazyWeb thing and hoping somebody will chime in with the appropriate citation).
Sorry, Tim. However, I can tell you that their web site really, really sucks.
Yes. Blows big chunks. Like most of the later books in the series.
I’m curious what the best book on Africa for beginners is — particularly as I’m a beginner. I read through Wallerstein’s Africa: The Politics of Independence and The Politics of Unity, but would like to know what you’d recommend.
-Becket
I hate to say it, but there really is not a good one-volume introduction to African history, either the whole history or even specific periods of it. There are some very good introductions to regional histories in particular time periods, for example, 20th Century South African history, or colonial West Africa, or Africa in the Atlantic world during the era of the slave trade. But very little that is satisfying to read that gives a continental overview across a wide span of time. Frederick Cooper’s Africa Since 1940 is the best continental-scale book at the moment, but that’s quite recent. Martin Meredith’s The Fate of Africa is ultimately very repetitious but provides a good narrative description of postcolonial African political history. John Reader and John Iliffe both have written similarly titled overviews of African history with a strongly environmental or ecological perspective (arguing that African societies have mostly been shaped by a uniquely difficult or challenging material environment). Those all might be decent starting places.