I recently received an advance copy of Howard French’s latest book, scheduled for publication in August. It has led me to make the bold pronouncement that Howard’s status as a leading historian of the African world is now inarguable. I reviewed for the Financial Times his last great work, Born In Blackness, which persuasively made the argument that Africa’s encounter with Europe provided the decisive spark that created the modern world in which we now more or less happily reside.
The Second Emancipation is an account of the simultaneous struggles of Africans to cast aside colonialism, and of African Americans to escape Jim Crow and birth the great civil rights era. The story is not a biography of Kwame Nkrumah, the father of Ghana’s independence and pan-Africanism, but his restless spirit hovers over this magnificent tale as a tragic hero whose fall tracked the post-colonial disappointments of the Mother Continent.
Howard’s previous books have tracked China’s empire building in Africa (China’s Second Continent), as well as his own journeys across the continent over decades (A Continent For the Taking), having first followed his parents there as a youngster, then as a correspondent for the New York Times. It is a continent where a curious and talented African American man found a wife as well as a calling. He may have made his name as a journalist, but he is a historian now.