10 Books That Shaped Black History Over the Last Century

To that effect, below is an attempt to map some of the most influential literary interventions made in Black history during the twentieth century. The books on this list not only shaped Black history over the last century, but also reflect the diversity yet unity with which Africans on the continent and in the diaspora saw themselves, their history, and thus, their purpose. From a book about the Haitian Revolution to one about the rise and fall of the Wolof Empire, these books exemplify the dynamism in the application of Black thought and history.

Read the recommendations below.

Perhaps a man and a book who need no introduction, Chinua Achebe and his Things Fall Apart remain one of the foremost contributions of modern African literature. Born in Ogidi, Anambra State in Nigeria, Achebe was a prolific writer who drew on his Igbo heritage and oral tradition, Christian influence, and the colonial imprint of Nigeria, contributing to a canon of literature which established serious African perspectives about Africa and Africans.

Achebe’s prize-winning first novel, Things Fall Apart, follows the life of Okonkwo, a leader of a village who must navigate his own transgressions against his clan’s belief systems, while also defending the belief system from encroaching Christian missionaries. In the end, he realizes he alone cannot sustain his culture, nor repel its annihilation, but that its durability must come through collective action, or else his efforts are futile.

Critically outspoken, John Henrik Clarke was one of the most popular scholarly mouthpieces of the twentieth century. He was born and raised in Alabama but left for New York as a young man, where he began his education and activism, especially under the tutelage of Dr Arturo Schomburg, the great historian for whom the Harlem public library and research centre, the Schomburg Center, is named. Understood to be an ‘autodidact’, he nevertheless contributed works whose impact is undeniable, shaping the Black and Puerto Rican Studies department at the Hunter College in Manhattan, consulting for exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and holding several other professorships.

Like Cheikh Anta Diop, Clarke was heavily criticized for his ‘Afrocentricity’ as he continuously published works such as African People in World History. While Diop’s work typically squarely explores continental African history, Clarke’s book looks at the large, centralized states of medieval West Africa and examines the legacies to be found in the Americas through and beyond the transatlantic slave trade. While there are numerous newer, and more updated texts that (Black) scholars of Africa and the diaspora are implored to and should read, Clarke remains an indelible mark in the canon that cannot and should not be avoided.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama and one of the most influential political leaders to emerge from the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in the United States, Angela Davis famously spoke out internationally against political imprisonment, and enjoined people of all races to unify under class solidarity. Twice losing her professorship, she also survived assassination attempts and famously defended herself in a trial in which she was implicated in an attempted courtroom jail-break of fellow Black Panther, George Jackson, which resulted in several injured, the death of a judge and, finally, the death of Jackson’s brother who initiated the attempt.

In retrospect, the Black Panther Party—like many other movements of the twentieth century—is often criticized as male-dominated and almost severely misogynistic. Davis adds a shade of complexity to the history of the Party and of Black history in general with her seminal text, Women, Race, and Class. In it, she discusses several items, including, the dual legacy of manual and domestic labour of Black women enslaved in United States and their contributions to abolition; sexual violence and control against Black women; and the Eurocentrism present in feminist and women’s suffrage movements. The text remains one of the most important interventions to the subject of Black history, highlighting the critical role Black women play in the economic, social, and cultural atmosphere of slavery and liberation.

Born in Diourbel Region, Senegal, the same region which houses the famous city of Touba, Cheikh Anta Diop has left behind a formidable legacy as a historian of Africa. During his career, Diop was one of the fiercest scholars and advocators for ancient Egypt being a fundamentally Black African civilization, in turn influencing other parts of Africa, including West Africa. This latter point especially remains critical, as today historians, archaeologists, and linguists are increasingly confirming the Holocene Era contact between ancient Egypt, Kush (Sudan, South Sudan), and as far as present-day Chad and the Democratic Republic of Congo. While his perhaps most seminal work, The African Origins of Civilization (1974), especially emphasizes this history, his 1988 book Pre-Colonial Black Africa: A Comparative Study of the Political and Social Systems of Europe and Black Africa, from Antiquity to the Formation of Modern States is one of the most in depth discussions of African history by an African.

Covering a wide temporal range, Diop, in a sense, decentres Egypt as the pinnacle of African civilization, giving attention to multiple African states who reached apexes at different times, especially in West Africa where large centralized states notably proliferated beginning in the Common Era. Often criticized for his ‘Afrocentricity’, Diop nevertheless contributed to the publishing of UNESCO’s General history of Africa, II: Ancient civilizations of Africa (1981), a multi-volume project to which notable African scholars and writers contributed, including Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Djibril Tamsir Niane, and J. F. Ade Ajayi. As a result, Diop remains consequential for any Black scholar who wishes to engage with the history of Africa.

Emerging just before the turn of the century, Sylviane Diouf’s Servants of Allah constituted a breakthrough in African and Afro-diasporic history. Considering her Senegalese heritage, a nation which has bound up with Islam since the eight century, Diouf’s work examines how the first enslaved Africans were brought to the ‘New World’ from this Senegambian region, bringing Islam with them. In the context of a European Christian landscape which was hostile to Islam in both the Old and New World, Diouf talks about how African Muslims endured in the Americas, destroying the myth that Islam only came to the western hemisphere through twentieth century movements like the Ahmadiyya or Nation of Islam.

Moreover, her book also hints to another critical point: if it was not for the Muslim ‘Moor’ occupation of the Iberian Peninsula, and the Muslim Ottoman occupation Constantinople (Istanbul) which constituted the overland route to the lucrative trade with Asia, Europeans may have never chosen to set sail around the coasts of Africa. Such a tension with the Muslims in the Old World certainly factored in the political configurations of the New World. Diouf’s work has influenced more scholarship and literature to the legacy of Black Muslims in Africa and the diaspora, influencing significant scholars such as Michael A. Gomez, Butch Ware, and Mustafa Briggs.

Before writing The Black Jacobins, Trinidadian-born C. L. R. James wrote a play about the legacy of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian revolution. Yet, it would be his historical work, The Black Jacobins, that played a major role in James’ rise as a thought leader in pan-Africanism.

Written through James’ Marxist lens, The Black Jacobins implores readers to see the Haitian revolution at the intersection of race and class. He highlights the shifting and conflicting aims and methods of the various classes of the Island of Santo Domingo: royalist and non-royalist, white planters, mulattos, free coloureds, and the enslaved, suggesting that one must not take race at face value, but must also take into account how economic and political status informs the ‘side’ one takes.

In the end, it was the enslaved class who was perceptive enough to realize that their freedom was only a pawn that the other classes and France used in their efforts to win the war. In other words, all skinfolk ain’t kinfolk, a proverb which rings especially true for most of Africa’s history since European arrival.

There is perhaps no part of African culture and history that is more sought after yet more misunderstood than religion. The variety of cosmologies on the continent seems infinite, and Islam and Christianity, far from erasing these traditions, only proliferated and expanded the practices they came into contact with. In African Religions and Philosophy, Kenyan theologian, philosopher, and Anglican priest John S. Mbiti delivered one of the first major works in African religion from an African perspective which sought to destroy the idea that African religions are demonic and chaotic. Instead, Mbiti argues that African religions and thus Africans are systematic, complex, and harbour beautiful world-views, which are compatible with Christianity if one deeply meditated on the principles of each.

Mbiti was part of a school of thought which sought to disrupt the perception of Abrahamic religions as invasive to Africa, and instead to contemplate the deep historical roots Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has with the continent from their very inception. Inspiring later scholars like Jacob Kehinde Olupona and Mercy Amba Ewudziwa Oduyoye, he fervently highlighted the dynamism of ‘traditional African religions’, and implored people to see them with the same legitimacy afforded to great world religions from Christianity to Buddhism.

One of the most accomplished authors of both the twentieth and twenty-first century, Toni Morrison began her career as a fiction editor for Random House. Growing up in Lorain, Ohio, a town which brought an amalgamation of races and ethnicities together to work in the motor and steel industries, Morrison used her career to explore the experiences of racism that she was not personally familiar with, but understood existed. It is perhaps this ability, she often discussed, to suspend her own reality, to imagine not what she would do in a situation, but what the character would do, which made her such a spectacular writer.

Though many of her works are prize-winning and widely circulated, Beloved remains one of the most critical. It was adapted into a movie of the same name in 1998. Set in the United States’ slavery era, Beloved follows the life of Sethe, an escaped woman who must deal with the trauma of having murdered one of her daughters while attempting to resist being recaptured into slavery. Heavily researched, the story draws on the real life of Margaret Garner, who was enslaved in Kentucky and escaped to the free state of Ohio in 1856, and attempted to kill her children—succeeding in killing one daughter—rather than have herself and them be recaptured when the slaveowner came calling. The book is a solemn but captivating call-back into the desperate yet noble bravery of the millions of Black women and men who made hard decisions including suicide, infanticide, and fatalistic rebellion in a paradoxical bid for survival.

Born in Guyana in 1942, Walter Rodney became one of the most critical mouthpieces of African history in the twentieth century. Like C. L. R. James, Rodney was a Marxist and encouraged people to see race and class as equally important in pursuing liberation. He often made his historical analyses through the lens of labour, manufacturing and production, and this is evident in his seminal work How Europe Undeveloped Africa.

After introducing the reader to a brief history of Africa before European and Arab arrival, he then examines the longue durée of European imperialism and its implications for African labour in agriculture, metallurgy, and other industries. He laments the labour-drain from the continent to the plantations of the new world and Indian ocean, the importation of items that had significant social value but limited economic value (cloth, weapons, alcohol), and finally, the proto-bourgeoisie African merchant classes which facilitated the trade in slaves, often to the benefit and sanction of the African ruling classes. However, this was not to remove or shift the weight of blame from European slave-traders, but for readers to consider the fuller picture of the political, cultural, and economic destabilization of the continent.

Like Rodney, Ivan Van Sertima was born in Guyana. He attended school there as a youth before earning his undergraduate degree in African languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and his Masters’ degree at Rutgers University, in New Jersey. It is in this latter location that he began to write his seminal work, They Came Before Columbus.

Highly controversial and widely contested during its heyday and certainly still today, They Came Before Columbus argues that Africans had sailed to the Americas more than once, as early as 2000 BCE, at the height of Nubian culture, and as late as the thirteenth century CE, through the supposed voyage of a Malian king.

The book received heavy criticism and accusations of academic malpractice and dishonesty, as well as erasing indigenous American history through the process of Afrocentrism. Nevertheless, despite perpetually being on the fringes of Black thought, the book made an indelible mark which endures until today, especially among African Americans. Indeed, in recent years, there are several ostensible African Americans who assert that their ancestors were not brought in during the slave-trade, or that they are the real ‘native Americans,’ and some have gone as far as to deny the slave-trade altogether. There are also those from the Caribbean who similarly maintain that they were already there—indeed, Burning Spear’s hit record ‘Columbus’ tells us just that.

As a historian, I have learned that nothing is impossible and that the historical record is, ironically, constantly changing. Nevertheless, despite the severity and, frankly, ridiculousness of some of the claims I have personally encountered, Van Sertima’s work is less significant for its historical accuracy than it is for demonstrating the balance required between courage and caution as a Black academic studying Black history⎈