100 books like How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

A landmark work by virtue of being the first book by a black woman to be published in Britain, this is a powerfully harrowing account of Mary’s own life as a slave in the Caribbean. Though only short, it supplies valuable testimony on the gruesome British exploitation of enslaved people over the centuries, and the many cruelties inflicted upon Mary personally by her brutal ‘owners’. Should be required reading for all those who think of the British Empire with nostalgia.

Audre Lorde was known primarily as a poet, but her essays were more engaging for me. She was fearless in confronting male dominance and white supremacy—and every other hierarchy that structures modern life—always with an awareness of the centrality of love and beauty in our lives.

Two of those essays that became classics in feminism—“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” and “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”—were particularly influential for me and are as relevant today as when they were published in 1984.

She also died too young (at age 58 in 1992), and I have always wished I could have had a chance to see her speak.

This is the kind of book that all British historians should be trying to write: an honest, factual, detailed account of what British officials actually did in the service of the Empire. There is no scope for imperial nostalgia over this horrifying story of the brutal violence employed by Britain in the 1950s in an effort to hang onto its colony of Kenya in the face of the Mau Mau Rebellion. With concentration camps, collective punishments, and multiple judicial murders, British methods were among the worst. The ideal Christmas present for any Empire supporters among your friends & family.

For those who study or teach about Africa, it is essential to know the pioneers of struggles for justice on the continent. African intellectuals eloquent in European languages began calling out injustices as early as the 18th century. To my mind, however, Nkabinde is a particularly impressive pioneer from the early 21st. It’s not just that African women have been routinely overlooked by historians. The very existence of African lesbians and transwomen was until very recently completely denied. Here, then, for the very first time, an African woman tells of her coming to sexual self-awareness, first as a spirit medium for a powerful male ancestor and then through modern sexual identity discourses. It is a poignant appeal to the humanistic potential of African traditional cultures when married to a universal human rights framework.

A big mistake in much radical analysis is to characterize problems in dualistic terms that externalize responsibility from Africa (Rodney, of course, is wide open to that critique). Thus, colonialism is not just irredeemably bad but simple to identify and directly related to white skin. The end of formal colonialism provided new targets in sometimes caricature form: black-skin-white-mask neocolonialism and neoliberalism, notably. Such things undoubtedly exist. However, Kenworthy’s brilliant, gob-smacking analysis of the unintended consequences of life-saving technologies reveals levels of complexity and complicity that belie easy dualisms. How does something that promises liberation from mass suffering and death (anti-retroviral drugs) become a machine to entrench corrupt elites and opportunistic NGOs, to sell cheap textiles in America, and to exploit poor women’s unremunerated care work? Read, weep, and lose your illusions about corporate social responsibility.

This is no less than Kasril’s fourth memoir, and the one that resonates most with my own existential worries as a privileged white man. Why did a nice, working-class, Jewish boy from Johannesburg take up armed struggle against institutionalized racism? Become a cabinet minister in the country’s first democratic government devoted to expanding social welfare for Africans? Become a trenchant critic of the rot that subsequently set into the party he helped bring to power?

With profound humility and wit, Kasrils takes us through his boyhood years to reflect upon the often-humiliating process of acquiring political consciousness. He speaks to anyone with a leg up in a rigged system: it’s good to have existential doubts about your privileges. But you should still, and more importantly, you can still do the right thing.

Having lived in poverty and forced to grow up fast due to the hardship of life, what makes this book tragic is that when Darling the child protagonist arrives in the US, the land she dreamed of, she misses ‘home’ and her dreams don’t come true. Recommended for the author's narrative verve and its general overview of Zimbabwe through the lens of the less privileged. The lesson for me was that material comfort does not guarantee happiness. 

How better to understand the motivations of decolonizing peoples than to go to one of the most influential sources of anticolonial philosophy?

Frantz Fanon’s Marxist critiques of nationalism and imperialism, his psychoanalytic discussion of the dehumanizing effects of colonization on individuals and societies, and his framing of decolonization as an inherently violent process all pull the reader into the perspective of a liberation seeker, forcing them to question narratives of anticolonial violence that have emerged from Western archives.

Fanon’s writing is essential reading for today’s students of decolonization.

This extraordinary book forces anyone who attempts at studying African politics during the post-colonial period (‘on the postcolony’ in Achile Mbembe’s term) as well as in the late Cold War to (re)consider the role of Africans in the shaping of post-colonial Africa. The author uses various examples to nuance the dilemma of the African state-building process. The notion of ‘the politics of the belly’ derived from a Cameroonian saying, not a Bayart’s creation, as many in the West would think of it.

Reading how world demand for things such as consumer electronics helps drive conflict in Central Africa as people scramble for the mineral resources required to make such electronics changed the way I think about the world. Ever since reading The Looting Machine, I felt a responsibility to at the very least pay attention to current events in countries such as Nigeria or Angola, to see how my own demand for commodities might be affecting people I will never meet all over the world. I still remember at the end of the book when Burgis quoted a Nigerian rapper when she said, “Don’t think you’re not a part of it.”