Introduction To African Civilizations
Introduction To African Civilizations challenges all the standard approaches to the saga of African history, from the dawn of prehistory to the modern resurgent Africa of today.
Mr. Jackson does a riveting job at offering his point of view without judgment. he just provides the evidence and tells the story and lets the readers decide how to feel about his work. African Civilizations is a powerful art piece that will stir the emotions of anyone who reads it.
In his Introduction to this 1970 book, historian John Henrik Clarke wrote, “Mr. Jackson has not written this volume on African history to tell benevolent stories about so-called savages and how the Europeans came to civilize them. Quite the contrary, in many ways he has reversed the picture and proved his point.
Civilization did not start in European countries, and the rest of the world did not wait in darkness for the Europeans to bring the light… Most of the history books in the last five hundred years have been written to glorify Europeans at the expense of other peoples. The history of Asia has been as shamefully distorted as the history of Africa.
When the light of culture came for the first time to the people who would later call themselves Europeans, it came from Africa and Middle Eastern Asia… John G. Jackson has examined this fact and its dimensions with scholarly honesty. He has also examined the origins of racism and its effects on the writing of history.”
