African History

John Parker teaches African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He specializes in the history of Ghana and is the author of Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra (2000) and (with Jean Allman) Tongnaab: The History of a West African God (2005). He is currently researching a book on the history of death and burial in Ghana.Richard Rathbone is Honorary Professor of History in the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and Emeritus Professor in History at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He has written on south and west Africa and his books include Ghana (1992), Murder and politics in colonial Ghana (1993) and Nkrumah and the chiefs (2000). He is currently working on 19th century west African intellectuals.

A very well informed and sharply stated historiography... should be in every historiography student's kitbag. A tour de force... it made me think a great deal.

• 1. The idea of Africa ; 2. Africans: diversity and unity ; 3. Africa's past: historical sources ; 4. Africa in the world ; 5. Colonialism in Africa ; 6. Imagining the future, rebuilding the past ; 7. Memory and forgetting, past and present