As of early 2015, I am engaged in a longterm project to read one good history of every country in Africa. In a perfect (for me) world, there would exist a comprehensive, recent history of every country in Africa, written by an African scholar and available in English. Since the world is not perfect, I’ll be looking for those four things in my books (recent, in English, African-authored, comprehensive), while recognizing that I won’t always (or even often) get all four.
Thus far:
Angola: Nzinga of Angola, Linda Heywood
Benin: Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey, Edna G. Bay
Comoros: The Comoro Islands: Struggle against Dependency in the Indian Ocean, M. D. D. Newitt
Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire): Congo: The Epic History of a People, David van Reybrouck
Equatorial Guinea but then not really: Paths in the Rainforest, Jan Vansina
Equatorial Guinea for real: Equatorial Guinea: Colonialism, State Terror, and the Search for Stability, Ibrahim Sundiata
Eritrea: I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation, Michela Wrong
Ethiopia: A History of Ethiopia, 1855-1974, Bahru Zewde
The Gambia: The World and a Very Small Place in Africa: A History of Globalization in Niumi, the Gambia, Donald R. Wright
Lesotho: Power in Colonial Africa, Elizabeth Eldredge
Liberia: Another America, James Ciment
Namibia: A History of Namibia, Marion Wallace
South Africa: A History of South Africa, Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat
Zimbabwe: Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from the Pre-Colonial Period to 2008, edited by Alois Mlambo and Brian Raftopoulos (but I am going to have to read another Zimbabwe book or else read this one again because I swear, I read this book and no information went into my brain from it (somehow))