One of the classic critiques of scholarship on Africa (and conceptualizations thereof more broadly) was penned by the Congolese scholar (and Duke professor) V. Y. Mudimbe in his "The Invention of Africa" (1988), which was followed by this book, "The Idea of Africa" (1994). This book revolves around the idea of "Africa" as an idea, meaning how it has been employed historically, through cultural expressions and so forth. Landmark contributions, as these are, often appear less groundbreaking when read decades later, which is more a product of the mode of critique becoming much more integrated into our thinking than it does the uniqueness of the day. A few notes:

"As I read some critics of my books, my first reaction was to remain silent. To use a metaphor, why should I be forced to play chess with people who do not seem to know the rules of the game? In effect, beyond positivism, I have been trying to understand the powerful yet invisible epistemological order that seems to make possible, at a given period, a given type of discourse about Africa - or, for that matter, about any social group in Africa, Asia, or Europe." (p. xiv)

"A comprehensive study of the "terra nullius" politics by Keller, Lisitzyn, and Mann (1938) indicates that between 1400 and 1800 not one non-European nations was considered to have the right "to possess or to transfer any dominion in the international law sense."" (p. 33)

"The sequence of analyses in this book has focused on two main significant issues: first, the Greco-Roman thematization of otherness and its articulation in such concepts as 'barbarism' and 'savagery'; second, the complex process that has organized in Europe the idea of Africa. It is, in any case, troubling to note that since the fifteenth century the will to truth in Europe seems to espouse perfectly a will to power." (p. 212)

Taking its cue from another book, The Idea of Africa, this book presents the idea of the idea of development with a focus on Africa – its emergence, meanings, and connotations – and how its conceptualization is deeply rooted in colonialism. "The Idea of Development: A History" (2021) is written by Corrie Decker and Elisabeth McMahon, both historians, and is published by Cambridge University Press. This is a great introductory book, particularly for an undergraduate course on critical development studies or historical courses related to colonialism. Each chapter concludes with additional reading lists and each chapter is evenly suited to a weekly reading (with 12 chapters, the book might have been designed to align more-or-less with a semester length). Lots of notes:

"Rennel extrapolated from Mungo Park's declaration that the Niger River follow flowed from west to east. According to nineteenth-century European understanding of geography, a river the size of the Niger needed to have a significantly large geographic source such as a lake or a mountain range. James Rennel literally drew Park's speculation about the mountain and assertion about the directional flow of the river onto the map of West Africa. This was how the European "scientific" imagination gave birth to the nonexistent Kong Mountains in western Africa. Although Rennel had no firsthand knowledge of the mountains and no evidence they existed, his position as a leading cartographer, combined with Park's apparent expertise in geography, lent scientific legitimacy to the Kong Mountains, which the Europeans believed were real for almost 100 years." (p. 39-41)

"Linnaeus eventually refined his system of classification and organized humans into four "races" based on their skin tone and continental origins. These four "races" were European, American, Asian, and African. Linnaeus's secularization of knowledge classification built the foundation for scientific constructs of race." (p. 60)

"Most of Broca's peers in the scientific community, predominantly white men themselves, were easily convinced that women, people of colour, the elderly, and the poor were "naturally" less intelligent than wealthy and healthy white men. As long as he provided "scientific" arguments about racial and gender differences, Broca and his colleagues believed their work was without bias and based in sound evidence, they were convinced their work was "objective"." (p. 67-68)

"The underlying arguments of eugenics, that elite Europeans were racially superior to the rest of humanity, was used to justify settlers' claims over land and right to rule. Campbell explained, "as well as expressing the cultural fears of colonialism, eugenics also expressed the modernity of the colonial project in Africa, the newness of settler society and the perceived wrongness of African development presented an ideal opportunity to create a society modeled on eugenic insights." In colonial Africa eugenic development policies became cultural practices as much as scientific programs. As occurred with physical anthropological theories of race, eugenicists masked cultural assumptions as scientific evidence designed to make the case for European racial superiority." (p. 71-72)

"Julian Huxley, the first director general of UNESCO, took the reins in 1946 determined to bring his ideas of evolutionary humanism to this new international organization. Huxley had been a well-known eugenicist before the Second World War... Huxley gradually abandoned references to "race" and "tribe" in favor of "culture," but he maintained a strong belief in social evolutionary theory. Before World War II Huxley was both an avowed eugenicist and anti-Nazi. Huxley renounced the overtly racialist ideas of many eugenicists of his time and argued that the improvement of humanity was an issue of culture rather than skin tone Huxley promoted evolutionary humanism, which was the theory that "more evolved" societies in the West could and should facilitate the development of "less evolved" societies through a combination of cultural, economic, and social interventions." (p. 74)

"For far too long, forced and coercive sterilization has been used to control population growth among "undesirable" groups in Africa and elsewhere, most recently among HIV-positive women in South Africa during the height of the HIV crisis in the 1990s. Many women around the world find access to birth control liberating, but the "right" to birth control also includes the "right" to have children. Awareness of these rights and of reproductive justice debates generally is crucial for understanding the family planning policies that continue to be foundational in contemporary International Development discourses." (p. 77)

"The organization of Africans into "tribes" was also part of the divide-and-rule approach of indirect rule. Colonial officials often privileged some ethnic groups over others. In British colonial Kenya, educated Kikuyu men (and some women) had greater access to colonial education and thus occupied many of the intermediary positions, or government jobs, in greater proportion than other Kenyans, the effect of which is still perceptible in Kenya today. Similarly, Belgian colonial discourses about the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis helped to fuel the conflict that led to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The Belgians incorporated Tutsis into the colonial administration based on their claim that the racial stock of Tutsis was more evolved than that of neighboring Hutus." (p. 89)

"Many European and American women came to Africa in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to work in anthropology, nutrition, hygiene, child and maternal health, and education. In the Belgian Congo, for example, this work began when the Ligue pour la Protection de l'Enfance Noire (League for the Protection of Black Children) took up the issues of breastfeeding and birth spacing. However, metropolitan development funding was only available for such endeavors when direct economic benefits were evident. Investment in the health of wives and mothers, for instance, flowed only after officials recognized that this would increase the productivity of laborers, generate wealth for colonial industries, and reinforce the racialized colonial economy. In one way or another, the science of development always served interests in profit." (p. 111-112) 

From his doctoral work, Yahia Baiza wrote "Education in Afghanistan: Development, Influences and Legacies since 1901" (2013), published by Routledge. The book covers more than a century (1901-2012), structured around the political eras of the period. As much as this book is about education, it is equally about the context of each time period. This partly to help us as readers have context and probably also partly due to the scarcity of available research specific to education during the period of study. In that sense, a parts readers are left wanting more about the actual education systems. This is a niche book of which there are few comparable options, so for anyone interested in this specific area of study this is worth picking up. A few quotes:

"There has often been a misconception about the nature of modern as well as madrasa education in Afghanistan. Since the latter is understood to be an exclusively or predominantly religious-oriented form of education, it has been often described as 'Islamic school' or 'religious school', although madrasas do also teach non-religious subjects. By contrast, as modern education has been adopted from the European model of education and many of its subjects are different from the traditional madrasa education, modern education has too often been mistakenly described as 'secular' education. As shall be discussed in this book, the modern education system not only includes both religious and non-religious subjects, but religious subjects for a very long time occupied an important position. In addition, the so-called 'secular' education had to rely on teachers from the madrasa system, who would teach language, literature, religion, Arabic language and grammar, mathematical sciences, etc. Furthermore, the modern education system has been borrowing terms and concepts from the traditional madrasa system. For instance, terms such as maktab (an elementary level of education), talib (seeker) or talibul Ilm (the seeker of knowledge) for student, mudaris (teacher), talim (education) and tarbiyah (upbringing for education) etc are rooted in the so-called 'Islamic' education system. Equally, the madrasa, maktab, and makatib-e asri for a long time were used interchangeably, and meant 'modern school'." (p. 44-45)

"The curriculum, which was an important characteristic of the 'modernness' of the schools, was a combination of aspects of religious education and aspects of western education. In civil schools, the curriculum for primary level education consisted of religious education (reading and reciting the Quran), Persian, mathematics, geography, and calligraphy. The lower secondary level curriculum included religious education, history, geography, painting, health care, Persian, Afghani or Pashto, and foreign languages, specifically English, Urdu, or Turkish. The curriculum at the upper secondary level consisted of subjects such as religious education (recitation of the Quran, Tradition (hadiths), Arabic language and grammar, Persian, history, geography, algebra, geometry, analytical geometry, natural sciences, alchemy, and English." (p. 51-52)

"Education became a key catalyst as well as victim on both sides of the war. The PDPA, under the Soviet Union's advisers, integrated socialist ideology in school textbooks, and teacher education programmes. Similarly, the resistance parties, under the United States' and other Western educational experts, used schools in refugee camps and in the areas outside the state's control in Afghanistan as recruitment and propaganda centres for the Islamist parties. They developed their textbooks for disseminating anti-Soviet and anti-PDPA messages of violence, aggression, killing, and use of firearms, etc. As a result, this period experienced two key parallel education streams: the state's education system under the control of the PDPA, and the refugees' education, under the control of resistance parties." (p. 131)

"When the University of Nebraska programme staff developed these textbooks, international organizations chose to ignore the images of Islamic militancy in them for the first five years of the programme (Davis 2002: 93). Later on, when the United Nations and various NGOs lobbied against such teaching and learning materials, some images and messages that promoted violence and killing were removed from the text- books, but the religious content remained unchanged (Pourzand 2004: 24–25). However, it is also worth noting that none of the NGOs or the UN agencies criticized these textbooks as long as the Soviet Union's army was present in Afghanistan." (p. 155) 

Written in 1997, following what sounds to be an extensive oral history data collection effort, Charles van Onselen wrote "The Seed is Mine". The book brings to life the experiences of one, and one who might otherwise not have any other record in the written historical documents (exception on legal note). This book is an exemplary of oral history. It is heavy and presents immense detail, which at times can be slightly overwhelming as a reader, but nonetheless an important contribution and a product of exceptional work and detail. What I enjoyed about the book was the detail, where the dominant narratives are made complex, complicated or turned around with the lived experiences of Kas. In so doing, the book provides many new windows into seeing, and vicariously experiencing, South Africa of another time. Some examples from the book:

"The foreman lured Kas within his reach, caught hold of him by the arm and then-while he and the stable hand danced his disciplinary jig-called for his wife to remove the leather strap that he had hidden in his back pocket. Before the lady could oblige Kas, inspired by the need for improvisation in a novel such setting, sank his teeth into a conveniently situated white finger, which promptly spurted enough blood to elect a chorus of shouting and swearing from a clearly impressed Mrs. van der Walt. A half-dozen blacks, suspecting that oaths and cries on such a scale could only be summons for their services, suddenly appeared from nowhere to witness some deeply concerned Maine kinsmen persuading Kas to release the hapless foremans finger." (p. 42)

"Kas had reason to feel proud. At a time when most white farmers-who had enjoyed privileged access to commercial banks and the state's services to organised agriculture-where producing maize harvests of around three hundred bags, his family, with far more limited financial resources at their disposal, has matched their efforts. Nevertheless. The price of maize was disappointing-something that the Triangle's deeply suspicious populists ascribed to the functioning of the state's newly introduced Maize Control Board. At eight shillings and sixpence per bag, nobody was going to get rich, but Kas was grateful to have exceeded his target." (p. 194)

"After a careful inspection and much discussion, Kas agreed to purchase plots thirty-one and thirty-four for seven hundred pounds. he put down two hundred pounds as a deposit and agreed to pay the balance in smaller installments over an unspecified period. Phitise, equally impressed, bought himself a plot on basically the same terms. These two open-ended transactions conducted beneath the summer sun on a stretch of stone-strewn veld outside Ventersdrop were the outcome of thirty years labour on the land and a lifetime's ambition to own property." (p. 344)

"The odyssey which had begun in hope at Kommissierust in 1921 and ended in resignation at Varkenskraal in 1956. It took thirty-five years and fifteen farms for the likes of Hendrik Verwoerd and his supporters to get to the Maines where the Nationalists wanted them. The trekpas did not show how a man who but six years earlier had possessed 8 horses, 12 donkeys, 60 cattle, and 220 sheep had now been reduced to owning less than 40 animals. The Mains, who had entered the Mooi river valley on a ford truck with the chance of acquiring freehold property of their own, were leaving on an ox-wagon for a residential stand on a communal farm in a 'black spot.' Kas was on his knees." (p. 387)