African Affairs
The Journal of the Royal African Society
Notes for Reviewers
Thank you for agreeing to review for African Affairs. Our conventions are as follows:
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The word limit for a review is usually 800 words, 1200 for a joint review, and
3000 words for a review article (which usually discusses four titles).
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Please do not use references or footnotes in a review, though they are allowed in
a review article.
When quoting from the book under review please ALWAYS include a page
number, in brackets after the quote, e.g. (p.12). It is not necessary to give page
numbers if not quoting directly.
Please head the review as follows, note lower case sub-title after first word:
Chocolate islands: Cocoa, slavery, and colonial Africa, by Catherine Higgs. Athens,
OH: Ohio University Press, 2012. xv + 230 pp. $22.95 (paperback). ISBN 978 0 82142
074 4. $26.95 (hardback). ISBN 978 0 82142 006 5.
If applicable please also give e-book price and ISBN.
Please end the review in this way:
The University of Leeds
ALEXANDER BERESFORD
a.beresford@leeds.ac.uk
It is now our policy to print your email address, unless you specifically ask us not to.
We don’t want to patronize you, but if you are unfamiliar with writing reviews here are
some hints (courtesy of Terry Barringer), followed by an example of an excellent review.
DO
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start the review with a concise summary of the book’s contents and any
overarching argument. Try to summarize edited collections (don’t simply list the
contents of each chapter) by looking for themes.
place the book in the context of other work on the same subject.
give an overall assessment of the book.
temper criticism with commendation (except in rare cases where a book has no
redeeming features at all, in which case it is perhaps your duty to warn an
unsuspecting public not to waste their money).
DON’T
 use the review to score points, make personal attacks on an author, show off, ride
your own hobby horses, or promote your own latest work.
 be bland.
EXAMPLE OF A WELL-WRITTEN REVIEW (albeit a little too long)
Warfare in African history, by Richard Reid. Cambridge, New York, et al.: Cambridge University Press,
2012. xxi + 188 pp. $27.99 (paperback). ISBN 978 0 521 12397 6. $85.00 (hardback). ISBN 978 0 521
19510 2.
This ambitious book is one of the first attempts to survey the entire sweep of African military history.
Remarkably broad in spatial and chronological scope, thoughtful in its synthesis of an impressive collection
of data, and provocative in analysis, it is also eminently readable. While intended largely for novices (p.
iii), the book will also be of interest to African and military historians. In many respects, the work is a
resounding success, although it also suffers from important deficiencies.
The volume consists of a Preface and six chapters. The first chapter establishes the geographical,
demographic, and socio-cultural contours of Africa while the remaining five, arranged chronologically,
examine the evolution of conflict from antiquity to the present. There is much that is commendable here.
In the Preface Reid lays out the admirable goals of seeking to counter misleading images of ‘savage’
African warfare and of understanding it as a force of both destruction and construction. He then proceeds
to fashion a remarkably comprehensive survey of African conflict. One marvels at the vast array of polities
presented, although there are important omissions, too, such as Ancient Egypt and Madagascar. Among
other things, Reid demonstrates how integral warfare was to state formation, economic life, and responses
to outside intrusion. Treatments of complex topics such as slave-horse cycles, Fulani jihads, Bantu
migrations, and contemporary warfare are masterful. He conscientiously tries to avoid over-generalization,
to establish historical context, and to consider often-neglected aspects such as gender. Penetrating insights
abound. Especially important is the discussion of the intertwining of politics and the military which
provides an essential key to understanding African warfare. The author contends that inherent processes of
fission and mobility created ‘armed frontiers’ dominated by entrepreneurial adventurers in ongoing cycles.
Thus, today's military dictators can be seen as continuations of traditional warlords. Often, he suggests,
political reform lagged behind military creativity, however, so that chronic instability undercut military
professionalism.
Seeking to stimulate debate, the author offers bold assertions: European conquest was facilitated more
through ongoing conflicts between indigenous societies than by any supposed lack of African unity; a
dramatic nineteenth century military revolution was not stifled by the pax colonia, but was vigorously
reborn as the colonial era waned; and African victimhood at the hands of competing superpowers during
the Cold War has been exaggerated.
But despite the book's great strengths, there are weaknesses. There is, first, a problem with documentation.
Such key ideas as Africa's military revolution, the distinction between raiding war and campaigning war
(with the former typifying much of African conflict), and the armed frontier were all borrowed from the
works of others. As the book lacks footnotes, however, readers will be hard pressed to determine the
sources from which these and other concepts are derived, even though short ‘further reading’ sections
follow each chapter. Indeed, some of the relevant works are not listed at all. In addition, there is a
significant problem of balance. Although acknowledging that most Africans did not live in centralized
states (p.26), it is on those polities that virtually all the book's attention is focused; decentralized societies
are largely ignored. Similarly, many will find some of Reid's bold assertions not just provocative, but
downright controversial. Some will find it hard to discern any ‘internal logic’ (p. 170 ) in atrocity-filled
contemporary wars, to comprehend that intervention is ‘invariably not the answer’ to ending violence, to
agree that the best course for resolution lies in ‘giving war a chance’ (p. 181), or to accept that the horrific
spectacle of child soldiers (prevalent not only in contemporary African wars, but also in conflicts
throughout the globe) is not dissimilar from traditional age-class systems (p.176). And some statements,
e.g., that Eastern Nilotic peoples ‘eschewed amalgamation with Bantu-speakers’ (p. 67), are simply
incorrect.
One is also troubled by an underlying tone of the book. Although he promises not to project an image of
‘merrie Africa’ (p. xii), and acknowledges that Africa has been at times a very violent place, Reid is clearly
even more concerned to combat racist depictions of ‘savage’ African violence and to demonstrate that it
has been generally more constructive than destructive. Especially in the first five chapters, we encounter
notions such as ‘righteous civilising war’ (p. 17), the ‘remarkable creativity’ of war (p. 133), war as ‘a
profoundly moral dynamic’ (p. 67), and war as ‘violent creativity’ (p. 103). There are warnings against
misunderstanding war’s ‘remarkable achievements’ by ‘overemphasizing’ its ‘destruction and suffering’
(p.142), and assertions such as ‘the awful human tragedy notwithstanding, the slave trade compiled a
remarkable political energy and dynamism’ (p. 102). The reader is thus left with the worrying impression
that African conflict was somehow imbued with a benignity one hardly associates with the nasty reality of
war. Except for a reference to ‘ferocious’ Nilotic invaders (p. 67) devastating centralized kingdoms (one of
the rare mentions of a decentralized people), there are very few depictions of actual African combat or
violence in those chapters. It is only in the final chapter that the tone shifts somewhat and we catch a
glimpse of the vicious brutality that defines all human warfare.
In the Preface, Reid reasonably states that ‘Africa has been no more violent than anywhere else’ (p. xii), but
surely it is wrong to leave the impression that it has been any less violent either.
The University of Texas at Austin
JOHN LAMPHEAR