I’ve been really trying to learn more about the History of Africa recently as living in the Uk it’s not often spoke about, and I found Howard French was an amazing introduction into some modern history of Africa that isn’t from a European perspective.
Overall this book was informative and the style of writing was very readable which helped when covering some of the less exciting topics

I’ve been trying to read more history that isn’t European/Allied/US centric. I know I can always count on Howard French for that. The Second Emancipation is about Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), the Ghanaian leader who spearheaded Ghana's independence movement. Surprising no one who has read about pan-African liberation politics, the national military and police forces, aided by the CIA (of course), overthrew him in 1966.

You should read and learn more about African history, and I would start with French,


Thank you NetGalley & Liveright for an advanced reader copy. #TheSecondEmancipation #NetGalley

This substantial read (500-odd pages, read at the same time as another 500-page nonfiction book!) is second in the author's projected trilogy centred on the continent of Africa's major contribution to world affairs - more major than is thought or written about. Here he takes pan-Africanism and the quest for civil rights in America as being inextricably linked, mainly due to the post-war years in which African countries sought and gained independence from their colonisers, through the lens of the first country to do this, Ghana, and its leader, Kwame Nkrumah. So his biography is placed in a worldwide context, and we do open out into neighbouring countries as he tried, and failed, to implement an African union like the American one.

It's a fascinating, in-depth read, taking in the thinkers and activists who influenced Nkrumah and were influenced by him and the weird Cold War vibes that led America to be deeply suspicious of a supposed USSR alignment among many countries that was more expedient politicking to try to get money for capital projects. And the seemingly inevitable descent into almost dictatorship with fractured oppositions is revealed to be down to the habit of Western colonisers to divide up the map according to lines of latitude and longitude rather than groupings of people, leading not to the "tribalism" which is blamed on Africa but to a lack of adherence to the idea of a country that had been imposed almost nonsensically upon those groupings of people. Although Nkrumah himself was deeply private and difficult to research and write about, French does a good job of showing us issues, friendships and chains of consequences; he also visits a lot of the places mentioned which gives a modern aspect to things.

Blog review 24 August https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2025/08/24/anti-colonialism-and-pan-africanism-books-by-ngugi-wa-thiongo-and-about-kwame-nkrumah/