An African History of Africa
From the Dawn of Civilisation to Independence
by Zeinab Badawi (WH Allen, ISBN 9780753560129) penguin.co.uk
The 1974 discovery of a 3.2 million-year old fossil skeleton in Ethiopia’s Afar region was global news. Nicknamed ‘the grandmother of humanity’, the discovery was vital to our understanding of early humanity.
It’s somewhat predictable that this ‘superstar’ of palaeontology is known around the world as Lucy, the Western name given to her by anthropologists – inspired by the Beatles’ song ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, which played at their campsite, and not by her Ethiopian name Dinkenesh. As author Zeinab Badawi notes in An African History, the continent’s past has too often been in the hands of non-Africans.
