African Military History, edited by John Lamphear

Abstract

This volume is part of Ashgate’s ‘International Library of Essays on Military History’, an ambitious series edited by Jeremy Black. This book offers an excellent collection of classic journal articles on aspects of pre-colonial African warfare. Its real benefit lies in its ability to offer non-Africanists a comprehensive survey of accessible works on African military affairs from across the continent. As Richard Reid claims in his 2007 book Warfare in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa, ‘the history of African warfare is perhaps the last bastion of the kind of distorted Eurocentric scholarship that characterized African studies before the 1960s’. Many of the essays contained in John Lamphear’s volume are a product of the attempts of Africanists to overcome this illogical and damaging misperception about the nature of African conflict and violence. It is a struggle still worth engaging in, because Western misunderstandings about African warfare and violence continue to inform the decisions made by politicians as they contemplate intra-state conflicts in Congo, Somalia, or Sudan.