Alicia Campos Serrano —— Africa since 1940. The past of the present

Frederick Cooper, History of Africa since 1940. The past of the present, Rialp, Madrid, 2021 (Trans. José María Sánchez Galera)

«When a historian of the talent of Frederick Cooper reflects on contemporary realities, as in this book on Africa, we can find a contribution that goes beyond historiography, and that proposes to the social sciences fresh ways of contemplating the human relationships of our days, on the African continent and in other parts of the world.In just over 200 pages, our author successfully faces the age-old challenge of providing interpretive keys that address, on the one hand, the particular historicity of African populations, and on the other, to transnational connections and the insertion of Africans in broad processes that transcend local, state and continental borders.

«There are several constants and plot threads that are skillfully woven in this work. One of the debates that our author tacitly maintains is with a certain vision of African societies as watertight departments, whose cultural coherence and splendid isolation were brutally broken by the European expansion Cooper, for whom history, and not cultural essences, is what has defined what we understand today by Africa, insists on the broad connections and networks of mutual influences in which the continent has always been immersed. Recognizing the existence of permanent exchanges, material and cultural, does not prevent, however, to analyze the concrete forms of these links in recent decades, which are often concentrated in narrow channels and centers of intense relations with the world economy, surrounded by areas much more disconnected. And it does not oblige us to hide the inequalities that these relationships adopt. «When a historian of talent by Frederick Cooper reflects on contemporary realities, as in this book on Africa, we can find a contribution that goes beyond historiography, and that proposes to the social sciences fresh ways of contemplating human relationships of our days, on the African continent and in other parts of the world. In just over 200 pages, our author successfully faces the old challenge of providing interpretive keys that attend, on the one hand, to the particular historicity of African populations, and on the other, to transnational connections and the insertion of Africans. in broad processes that cut across local, state and continental borders.

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Finally, Cooper does not try to ignore the thorny question of responsibilities or even proposals. Warning of the structural constraints in which African populations and governments have to function, he insists on the capacity to act and the role of the latter in the configuration of the current situation in Africa: it is evident that the postcolonial elites have hardly been more willing than the colonizers to attend to the needs of the peasantry and the growing urban population. Regarding the author’s proposals, I encourage the reader to find them by itself at the end of a book full of methodological successes and new views and interpretations of a reality that too often assails us with images, barely explained, of the disaster.