Dorothy L. Hodgson and Judith A. Byfield's edited volume, Global Africa: Into the Twenty-First Century, is a valuable addition to the burgeoning literature on Africa's global interfaces. Indeed, few surveys of African engagements with transnational currents offer the breadth, depth, and nuance of Global Africa. This innovative volume is the second in the University of California Press’ Global Square series. Building on the concept of the series, Global Africa illuminates diverse, trans-regional linkages through reflections by artists, policy makers, journalists, and curators, as well as scholars. As an introduction to Africa's historical and contemporary global exchanges, the volume offers unusual geographical and temporal scope while emphasizing the great dynamism in Africa's global linkages. Thus, Global Africa is at once a conceptual triumph and an essential compendium for educators, students, and other interested readers.
Global Africa achieves its impressive breadth and depth through short and accessible essays, each of which condenses an important theme in African studies. More precisely, its nearly forty interdisciplinary and remarkably wide-ranging chapters include original research, syntheses of large bodies of scholarship, interviews with important thinkers, and photographic essays. In this way, Global Africa works across multiple scales, exploring the lived experiences of individuals, as well as the histories of movements, contemporary national circumstances, and diverse transnational circulations. Just as impressively, it masterfully balances these topics with attention to questions of gender, race, and class. The ease with which the volume works across geographical and thematic scales is exceptional, particularly as an introduction to African studies. Yet, the most important conceptual contribution of Global Africa is its clear illustration of Africa's multidirectional global relationships, or how Africans have simultaneously shaped and been affected by global currents over many centuries.
Global Africa consists of five sections that each address interrelated themes. The first section is largely historical, with an emphasis on mobility and multi-directionality within the Indian Ocean, Atlantic, and Saharan regions. The essays offer insights into the experiences of African travellers and traders of the Middle Ages, Africans in South Asia since the early modern era: twentieth century travellers across the Sahara; Central Africans and their descendants in colonial Mexico; Ibn Khaldun, the ‘father of the social sciences’; and Charles Morris, an African American missionary in turn-of-the-twentieth-century South Africa. The second part of the book considers questions of power, from imperialism to decolonization, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Committee, and the work of Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee. Additionally, this section offers critical reflection on the career and global influence of Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, while it also explores illicit outflows of wealth from the continent, environmental activism in South Africa, and the central question of labor in Africa-China relations.
The third section addresses the circulation of goods and ideas. Here the reader is presented with several other valuable essays, from Byfield's introduction to Marcus Samuelsson's famed restaurant in New York City, Red Rooster, to an essential interview of literary giant Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o by his son Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ, a dialogue that touches on major themes in both authors’ canons. In this section we also see how textiles, notably ‘wax print’ fabrics, represent entangled histories of consumer demand and production linking African consumers to Southeast Asia and Europe. Also explored is the influence of football (or soccer) on African societies and Africans’ influence on football as a global phenomenon. Other chapters on African migrants and Pentecostal missions in China suggest new ways for appreciating the historical dynamism of China-Africa relations. Finally, reflections on visual artists Senzeni Marasela and Lalla Essaydi, and Zakia Salime's concise introduction to the political trajectories of raï and hip-hop in North Africa, emphasize ways in which leading African artists interpret the world.
The fourth section, which addresses technology, science, and public health, includes reflections on biomedical research and gender, patterns in the history of response to epidemics, the global relevance of African ‘generative technologies’, and Kenya's innovative and influential M-Pesa money transfer service. Just as importantly, the section sheds light on the constitutive underside of contemporary technological and economic development, notably in James H. Smith's revealing essay on coltan mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Siad Darwish's highly original reflection on the social and political life of waste in Tunisia. The final section of Global Africa is one of its most compelling. This section considers many more African innovations, from social justice to the work of contemporary artist Meschac Gaba, the global impact of Nigeria's burgeoning film industry, the influence of West African Sufi leaders in the United States, and a photo essay on Awra Amba, an egalitarian community in Ethiopia. An interview with cellular mogul Mo Ibrahim offers a glimpse of his vision for Africa's business and political futures, and Obadias Ndaba reflects upon, and critiques, ‘Afropolitans’, that is, the young and successful who aim to ‘redefine Africanness’ (371).
Hodgson and Byfield's volume is an engaging and insightful introduction to Africa's global exchanges, past and present. It is an accessible and sophisticated meditation on Africa as a dynamic force in world history, and thus the book is useful both in the undergraduate classroom and as a reference for scholars. Ultimately, Global Africa’s combination of broad scope and considerable nuance make it a monumental achievement that deserves a wide audience.
