Frederick Cooper, History of Africa since 1940. The past of the present, Rialp, Madrid, 2021 (Traduc. José María Sánchez Galera)
"When a historian of Frederick Cooper's talent reflects on contemporary realities, as in this book on Africa, we find a contribution that goes beyond historiography, proposing fresh ways for the social sciences to contemplate the human relations of our times, 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 interpretative keys that address, on the one hand, the particular historicity of African populations, and on the other, the transnational connections and the insertion of Africans in broad processes that transcend local, state and continental borders.
"Several constants and argumentative threads are skilfully woven into 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 was brutally broken by European expansion. Cooper, for whom history, not cultural essences, has defined what we understand Africa to be today, insists on the broad connections and networks of mutual influences in which the continent has always been immersed. Acknowledging the existence of ongoing exchanges, material and cultural, does not, however, preclude analysis of the specific forms of these links in recent decades, which are often concentrated in narrow channels and pockets of intense relations with the global economy, surrounded by much more disconnected areas. Nor does it force us to conceal the inequalities that these relations take on.
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"Finally, Cooper does not attempt to avoid the thorny question of responsibilities or even proposals. Warning of the structural constraints within which African populations and governments have to operate, he insists on the latter's capacity to act and their role in shaping the current situation in Africa: it is clear that the post-colonial elites have hardly been more willing than the colonisers to address the needs of the peasantry and the growing urban population. As for the author's proposals, I encourage the reader to find them for himself at the end of a book full of methodological successes and new perspectives and interpretations of a reality that all too often assails us with barely explained images of disaster.
Alicia Campos Serrano
Professor and researcher in African Studies, Anthropology and History of International Relations at the Autonomous University of Madrid.