Accessible Africa

Todd Cleveland is a professor of African history at the University of Arkansas. He has also taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Minnesota, James Madison University, the University of Ghana, and Augustana College (Illinois). He has written seven books (including two that were subsequently translated and published in Portuguese), all of which revolve around various aspects of Africa’s past, and present, and has also published scholarly articles on pedagogical strategies and approaches related to teaching African history. At the University of Arkansas, Todd received the Master Teacher award and was inducted into the institution’s Teaching Academy, the two most significant teaching honors that the university bestows.Michael G. Panzer is an adjunct professor of history at Marist College and a full-time high school teacher at Roy C. Ketcham High School. He has been teaching for 26 years. He has also worked part-time at Mount Saint Mary College (History Department) and at the University at Albany – SUNY (Africana Studies Department). His research focuses on Mozambican history, nationalism, refugee history, and state-formation during the 1960s in southern Africa. His previous work has appeared in the Journal of Southern African Studies (2009), Social Dynamics (2013), and the Portuguese Journal of Social Science (2015).

As a teacher of African history since 1995, and a teacher of teachers, I can attest to the need for this book. The vast majority of people who teach secondary school history have had little or no formal instruction on the history of Africa. Thus, if such a teacher wished to deepen their engagement with African history in their own classes, they would be facing a daunting challenge trying to manage their crowded instructional schedule and their lack of knowledge about the continent, to get up to speed. This book is invaluable for helping the time-pressed instructor know where to start. Each of the short chapters gives a clear, accessible narrative overview of the key elements of the history for that theme and time, and offers valuable starting points for discussion topics, essential questions around which to structure lessons, and go-to internet and book sources for further reading.

• List of figuresList of maps IntroductionChapter 1: Ancient and Medieval Africa, c. 3000 BCE-1500 CEChapter 2: The Slave Trades in African HistoryChapter 3: The Gradual, then Rapid, European “Scramble” for AfricaChapter 4: Consolidating and Maintaining Control in African TerritoriesChapter 5: Decolonizing AfricaChapter 6: Africa in the late Twentieth Century, 1960’s-1990sEpilogue: Africa in the 21st Century: Which Way Forward