African History for Beginners by Herb Boyd

There are no notes to see where the sources have come from. It touches very briefly on racist assumptions made by Europeans that indigenous Africans couldn't build structures and this might have been why Jebel Barkal, (was used preceding the Nubian Kings, but was also re-used by them) and the Nubian Kings don't feature. Lots of various events have taken place within each region, but I'm not sure that this has been very well conveyed. Africa as a continent has a mixture of different peoples. Herodotus and Cassius Dio wrote about Africa, yet they don't feature.

Some of the earliest churches and Christian writings would have been made by Egyptian and Ethiopian scholars and practitioners. There are some interesting facts about some of the tribes, some myths, important people, some events, but not enough. It doesn't cover anything over the last few centuries, avoiding colonial and post colonial history, which is of interest too. The title is 'African History', but looks at mainly ancient African history from 40,000 BCE and early humans - 1695 CE when the Ashanti Nation is founded. Also, this was first published back in 1994, so there is more up to date information, which could have been included, for example, there is very little information in the book about the Nubian Kings (25th Dynasty), yet they were known about before the 1990s, despite Nubian sculptures being found of late. This is an interesting book in parts, yet a very disappointing and patronising one too. Boyd, a graduate of Wayne State University in Detroit, teaches African and African-American History at the College of New Rochelle in the Bronx, and is an adjunct instructor at City College in the Black Studies Department.

Boyd has been inducted into both the Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent and the Madison Square Garden Hall of Fame as a journalist.Īlong with his writing, Boyd is also the Managing Editor of The Black World Today, one of the leading online publications on the Internet.

In 2008, he published Baldwin's Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin, and is working with filmmaker Keith Beauchamp on several projects.

In 2006, Boyd worked with world music composer Yusef Lateef on his autobiography The Gentle Giant, which was published by Morton Books of New Jersey. In 1999, Boyd won three first place awards from the New York Association of Black Journalists for his articles published in the Amsterdam News. Brotherman:The Odyssey of Black Men in America: An Anthology (One World/Ballantine, 1995), co-edited with Robert Allen of the Black Scholar journal, won the American Book Award for nonfiction. Herb Boyd is an awarding-winning American author and journalist who has published 17 books and countless articles for national magazines and newspapers.

African History for Beginners by Herb Boyd