Africa Archives - Page 2 of 2

Mapping The Slave Trade: The New Archive (No. 10)

Roughly 12 million Africans were forcibly transported to Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Americas. It’s hard to conceptualize so many men and women being uprooted from their homes. But Emory University’s Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database helps users understand the vast proportions of this perverse exodus. The site pieces together historical data from 35,000 slave voyages between 1500 and 1900 and arranges them onto graphs and maps, offering readers a geographic, demographic, and even environmental context for the slave trade.

Screenshot of “Overview of the slave trade out of Africa, 1500-1900” (Emory University)

While people may assume that one singular “slave trade” took place, the database maps demonstrate that many existed. And not just across the Atlantic, but around the globe. Overview of the slave trade out of Africa, 1500-1900 charts the routes slave traders followed from Africa to various international ports. But you might be surprised at some of their destinations—traders ventured from East Africa to Arabia, Yemen, the Persian Gulf, and even various ports in India. Although the largest number of slaving ships do land in Brazil or the Caribbean, this map demonstrates that Africa’s slave trade was very much feeding a world market. The variety of international ports participating in the trade is also striking. This was not a black market undertaken by a depraved few, but rather a thriving worldwide industry that brought ships, employment and wealth to numerous communities on both sides of the Atlantic. The maps make this point visually with striking impact.

Screenshot of “Wind and ocean currents of the Atlantic basins” (Emory University)

The site also reminds readers that the process of moving enslaved Africans across the ocean was as much an environmental process as an economic one. The map, Wind and ocean currents of the Atlantic basins reveals how oceanic forces played a role in determining the travel routes for slave ships. Red and blue lines respectively denote winds and currents swirling between Africa and the Americas, facilitating particular geographic courses better suited for crossing the ocean. These natural forces effectively created two separate “slave-trading systems,” as the site identifies them: one originating in Europe and North America and the other originating in Brazil. Historians have certainly detailed the racism and greed motivating the slave trade, but comparatively little time examining the environmental processes that made it possible. Particular centers of trade emerged along the coasts of Brazil, the Caribbean and West Africa to meet an economic need, but also to harness the currents and winds essential to moving so many men and women such vast distances. And here too, the visual character of the map makes it easy to see how natural forces worked to shape the historical events.

Numerical timeline graphing the number of African captives in the trans-Atlantic slave trade between 1500 to 1866 (Emory University)

In addition to these visual aids, the site also includes a more quantitative rendering of this nefarious business. A timeline graphs the number of captives who embarked and disembarked between 1500 and 1867. Users can make the information even more precise by expanding or contracting the time frame or manipulating different variables, including sites of disembarkation, embarkation, and nationality of the slave ship. This visual tool reveals a steadily growing trade, with the number of embarked Africans peaking at around 115,000 in 1792. You will also find a chilling disparity between the number of “Embarked” and “Disembarked” Africans in the statistics—a powerful indication of the deadly voyages these individuals were forced to endure.

A white slave trader inspecting an African male up for sale, ca. 1854 (Wikimedia Commons)

The sheer numbers documented in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database are astonishing. With much of the globe participating, an elaborate network of ports, ships and trade routes uprooted millions of African souls with ruthless efficiency. Some users might find the site’s emphasis on graphs and maps to be sanitizing or dehumanizing to the enslaved individuals—too many numbers and figures, not enough people. But the story this site wants to tell is a big and highly important one. The African slave trade had a global reach; it was an environmental force as well as an economic one; and it displaced millions upon millions of men and women from their homes. Visualizing the statistics makes the global reach of their human toll palpable in new ways.

Earlier editions of the New Archive:

Charley Binkow reads through declassified CIA documents relating to the creation of Radio Free Europe

And Henry Wiencek explores a new, more visual, way of understanding emancipation in America

The Cross-Cultural Exchange of Atlantic Slavery

by Samantha Rubino

An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World by Mariana Candido (2013)

Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade by Roquinaldo Ferriera (2012)

The Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the Americas connected merchants, Portuguese colonists, convicts, and slaves in cultural and economic relationships, reconfiguring the space of the southern Atlantic. The work of Mariana Candido and Roquinaldo Ferriera shows how creolization and the economic prosperity created by the slave trade was a two-way street.

In An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World, Mariana Candido traces development of Benguela (in today’s Angola) from the first Portuguese expedition in 15^th century until the mid-nineteenth century. She studies colonial documents, reports, official letters, censuses, export data, parish records, official chronicles, and oral traditions collected by missionaries and anthropologists. Candido stresses the role of the local population in the Atlantic slave trade. As the demand for slaves increased in Brazil, local interactions with Portuguese officials led to a constant reconfiguration of identity and community in the port city, based on political alliances and economic preservation. Political and social instability of the hinterlands in part led to the exponential growth of the slave trade, displaying the reverberating aspects of the slave trade within the Atlantic realm. Additionally, women played a major role in the development of the slave society within Africa. Mixed marriages became the rule, and African women seized on the chance to apprehend cultural practices and a space of power. These donas controlled a large number of dependents, widows or singles, and became involved in local business, investing in the slave trade after the deaths of foreign husbands. In this regard, Candido shows slavery as a process of negotiation, adaptation, invention, and transformation rather than complete annihilation of African communities.

Candido also argues that creolization was a social-cultural transformation rather merely than an incorporation and assimilation of Western values. Luso-Africans and colonial officials spread Portuguese customs and Catholicism beyond the littoral, accelerating creolization away from coast. Colonial outposts, such as Caconda, attracted people with cultural exchange and the elaboration of new codes transforming cultural diets and colonial institutions. African religion and cosmology remained strong in the hinterland and on the coast in Benguela because they offered explanations and solutions to everyday problems that Catholicism could not address. Additionally, local languages were extremely important to the construct of a slave society. Despite colonial laws against its use, the army, commerce transactions, and the church in the hinterlands used these languages.

Similarly, Roquinaldo Ferriera focuses on the bilateral connections between the Portuguese colonies of Brazil and Angola in Cross Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World. Through the lens of micro histories, Ferriera pushes back from the macro structural approach to the slave trade to examine the personal trials endured by Africans and their descendants. Throughout the text he suggests an argument similar to Candido’s, in which African institutions were transformed rather than unilaterally corrupted by the slave trade. For example, the use of the traditional African court systems (tribunal de mucano) displays the transformation of the court system and the fluid boundaries between freedom and enslavement in Angola. Additionally, the relationship between belief in the power of the supernatural and accusations of witchcraft as a form of entering into enslavement was employed by Luso-Africans and Portuguese officials alike. If an accused “witch” died, a number of the witch’s relatives were enslaved and sold. As Ferriera points out, the actual number of people enslaved through these accusations would be difficult to precisely enumerate, however, the connection between these accusations and commercial disputes was unmistakable. Moreover, such accusations provide insight into the commonalities between African and colonial officials’ worldviews. Thus, through the lens of micro history, Ferriera claims that Atlantic history is a pluralistic entity in which individuals created their own spaces without strict adherence to the Portuguese institutions.

These two historians transform the way we view the impact of the slave trade. By emphasizing the role of the African populace as well as the Portuguese in the flourishing slave trade, Mariana Candido and Roquinaldo Ferriera redistribute the economic and cultural burden of the Atlantic. Candido and Ferriera demonstrate the cultural exchange between the Portuguese and African, altering the way historians conceptualizes creolization and the formation of slave societies.

You may also like:

The story of Brazil’s most infamous slave rebellion

An environmental and labor history of Brazil’s sugar industry

Photo Credits:

Cross-section of a Brazilian slave ship, taken from “Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829” (1830) by Robert Walsh (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Portuguese officials meet with the Manikongo, who ruled the African Kongo Kingdom (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

A slave ship heading to Brazil, 1835 (Image courtesy of New York Public Library Digital Gallery)

Recently arrived slaves in Brazil on their way to the farms of the landowners who bought them, 1830 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

People Are Not the Same by Eric Silla (1998)

by Tosin Abiodun

This book follows an academic tradition that illuminates the historical experience of everyday people, particularly individuals and groups hidden from the limited vision of African nationalist historiography. Eric Silla, scholar and leading member of a think-tank on African Affairs in the US Department of State, brings his skill to an assessment of leprosy, otherwise known as Hansen disease, in Mali. His primary objective is to situate bodily transformations and the social identity of Malian lepers within a broad context of human experience, especially within a framework that accounts for historical changes marked by ‘big events’ such as migrations, technological innovations, bio-medicine, colonialism, political evolutions and economic innovations. The events described follow a detailed chronological order that covers much ground in the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial history of Mali.

Silla’s central argument is that from a historical point of view, lepers in Mali have been accorded a “stigmatized social identity.” This identity, rooted in human fear and lack of medical understanding, reduces the social power and humanity of carriers of the disease. Silla explains, for instance, that during the pre-colonial era, some agrarian communities in Mali restricted lepers from participating in ritual activities and getting married. French colonial administrators and health officials took the stigmatization of lepers a step further during the colonial period, especially when they labeled lepers who moved too close to European settlements or urban areas as “vagabonds and criminals,” instituted penal codes to restrict the migration of lepers, called for the physical confinement and segregation of lepers to agricultural leper villages and segregation camps, and created medical institutions such as the Institut Central de la Lepre, in which health directors and medical doctors fostered a martial atmosphere which made the surveillance and social control of lepers possible. The stigmatization of leprosy patients did not end with the termination of colonial rule. In Mali today, most lepers have been reduced to a beggarly status, becoming easy targets for police ‘round-ups’ and victims of unlawful incarceration.

Silla’s analysis is elevating and satisfying mainly because it gives credence to the historical agency of Malian lepers. He argues that in spite of social and political constraints, lepers in Mali found creative ways to negotiate their identity and make their demands and discontents known. For instance, during the colonial period, segregationist policy backed by French administrators failed as a result of the resistance put up by lepers. Lepers who chose to remain within medical institutions fostered a sense of communal identity and organized revolts to protest against oppressive medical administrative policies. In the post-colonial context, a number of informal associations were created by former leprosy patients to lobby for medical assistance and welfare services. The Association des Malades Lepreux du Mali instituted by leprosy sufferers in Dijkoroni quarter of Bamako serves as a clear example.

Two significant attributes make this study stand out in historiography on leprosy in Africa. First, the author delivers great scholarship with the use of a wide variety of historical materials. Archival sources consulted include French missionary documents, letters, and diaries located in Bamako, Dakar, Aix-en Provence and Rome. Other non-conventional sources used in the study include Arabic texts, linguistic evidence, and oral testimonies. Silla provides a multi-voiced narrative by conducting interviews with leprosy patients and health practitioners at Bamako’s leprosarium known as the Institut Marchoux. Second, the book offers a remarkable comparative perspective that links the experience of lepers in Mali to that of lepers in China, Brazil, Hawaii, Europe, India, West Africa and the United States.

Overall, this study is an important and consequential piece of scholarship that students of history would be advised to read. Its impressive innovative ideas set an agenda strong enough to engage the attention of social historians, medical practitioners, international organizations and policy makers for a long time.

Zimbabwe’s Hanging Tree

by Ruramisai Charumbira

On December 8, 2011, newspapers in Zimbabwe – and Zimbabwe’s diasporas – reported that an unmarked tree in the middle of a busy street in the capital, Harare, had been accidentally knocked down by a city council van. The tree made headline news because urban lore has it that it was the tree upon which “Mbuya Nehanda” (Charwe wokwa Hwata), the late nineteenth-century spirit medium, was hanged by British colonial authorities. Historical evidence holds otherwise, but scholarly and popular debates on Nehanda-Charwe attest to the vigor of her connection with this tree and her larger place in history.

Sekuru Kaguvi and Mbuya Nehanda after capture, 1897.

Charwe wokwa Hwata was born in about 1862, and was medium to a revered female spirit of rain and land fertility, the spirit of Nehanda. She is called Nehanda or Mbuya Nehanda for much the same reasons Tenzin Gyatso is called the Dalai Lama. Charwe participated in the 1896-97 uprising against British colonialism in central Zimbabwe, and became a British symbol for the need to “civilize” the Africans. The memory of Nehanda-Charwe in the history of Zimbabwe dates back to 1898 when she was executed. In the 1950s, Charwe (as Nehanda) became a symbol for African Nationalists of the “uncolonized” past that had been destroyed by colonialism. During the anticolonial, liberationist wars of the 1960s-70s, her image was recruited as spiritual guide and nationalist symbol as evidenced by this song from that period.

The song begins:

Mbuya Nehanda died truly wondering

‘How shall we take [back] this land?’

The one word she told us was

‘Seize the gun and liberate yourselves.’

The song is itself fascinating for its blend of history (1896-97) and memory (1960s-70s), as Nehanda became at once an old ancestor, and a current guerrilla fighter, a theme I explore more fully in my book.

What has been fascinating about the recent story of the “Nehanda tree” is not so much the felling of an old tree in the city, but the interpretations of reporters, bloggers, eyewitnesses, and anyone who can access the internet to comment on those news stories and blogs. On my most recent trip to Zimbabwe, in December 2011, friends and family told me about the “tragedy” of Nehanda’s tree in whispers, lamentation, argumentation, and the gamut of expressions much like those found online. The response to the story of Nehanda’s tree knocked over by a mere city council van, are most fascinating because of what they say about the animation of personal and social memories in particular moments in history. This incident has brought to the surface memories of colonialism, conflicts over religion, and especially angst about the present as people graft meaning onto the knocked down tree as representing a turning point (for better and/or worse) for Zimbabwe from here on out. News about this tree and memories of the woman associated with it have raised tensions today because she is seen as a symbol of the hopeful, anti-colonialist guerilla movement of the 1960s-1970s, whose elites have turned into ruthless rulers blinded by the corrupting nature of political power.

The story of the “Nehanda tree” shows that the socio-cultural and political meaning of the symbol of Charwe as “Mbuya Nehanda” vigorously rubs history and memory against each other in Zimbabwe to produce doubts about her place in history, faith that she (her spirit, that is) is still very present and is trying to say something to the country, especially its leadership, Christian inflected attacks on what she stood for (African forms of religious power and spirituality), as well as the need to honor a woman who made it into the history books when so many African women of the past have gone the way of seeds in the wind that land in the desert never to be remembered.

The meaning of this song today – much like the reports and comments on the dead tree – is connected to the ways that the past is grafted onto the present. The “tree of Nehanda,” reveals some of the ways people exercise their citizenship, protesting (and/or supporting) the current state of affairs that are incongruent with “Mbuya Nehanda” the symbol of anti-colonialism turned matron saint of a now unacceptable regime that has reneged on what she died for: the promise of full independence made in 1980 when the country’s black majority gained civil rights in the country of their birth. The reports and comments on “the tree of Nehanda” speak to the ways societies shake the tree of history in order to find meaning in the past.

Translation of the song about Mbuya Nehanda can be found in Songs that Won the Liberation War by Alec J.C. Pongweni

The debates on Zimbabwe are ongoing, see among others:

Ruramisai Charumbira “Nehanda and Gender Victimhood in the Central Mashonaland 1896-97 Rebellions: Revisiting the Evidence” History in Africa,35 (2008)

Mahmood Mamdami, “Lessons of Zimbabwe,” London Review of Books

Scholars discuss Mamdami’s “Lessons,” Concerned Africa Scholars

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (1979)

by Joseph Parrott

Much like its eponymous waterway, V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River meanders steadily through the dark reality of postcolonial Africa, alternately depicting minimalist beauty and frightening tension. Like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, subtle prose reveals the timelessness of the continent’s remote corners alongside human corruptibility. Yet, Naipaul moves his narrative closer in time to contemporary Africa, demonstrating that the horrifying legacies of colonialism did not end with Europe’s retreat. In A Bend in the River, the struggle to establish national identities in the wake of Western imperialism takes center stage, with “black men assuming the lies of white men” in order to govern.

The work follows Salim, an ethnically Indian trader who moves to the newly independent hinterland of an anonymous Francophone state modeled on the former Belgian Congo. The rise and fall of African modernity occurs slowly under the disembodied image of the dictatorial “Big Man” – a depiction eerily similar to Mobutu Sese Seko – who introduces relative security through the constant threat of violence. While building his mercantile business and conducting an affair with a married woman, Salim witnesses the nation devolve into a state of xenophobia, corruption, and general malaise. The character’s growing feelings of alienation and the struggle to maintain his livelihood provide the novel with narrative momentum. They also demonstrate the divisions that often emerged during the creation of postcolonial national identities and the problems common to the despotic state. Thus, Naipaul’s insular setting serves as a symbol of the transitory nature and uncertain future of the continent as a whole: “This piece of earth – how many changes had come to it! Forest at a bend in the river, meeting place, an Arab settlement, a European outpost, a European suburb, a ruin like the ruin of a dead civilization, the glittering Domain of new Africa, and now this.”

More than just a piece of fiction, Naipaul’s work offers an introspective reflection on the practices of western modernity and the meaning of life in a period of upheaval. Essentially likeable, Salim becomes the vehicle for trenchant observations on morality, passion, and progress. A cast of supporting characters represents the failures of contemporary society: Metty, the naive servant clinging to abandoned social conventions; Mahesh, the superficial franchiser of the first western fast food chain in the bush town; Ferdinand, a malleable and ultimately disenchanted youth who becomes an African nationalist; and Raymond, the satirical former colonial who desperately seeks to portray the mercurial Big Man as the savior of Africa. Relatively uneventful and filled with intentionally unresolved subplots, the novel moves from one life experience to another as the protagonists seek only to survive under trying circumstances. Yet, the author’s eye for detail and crisp writing adeptly create a sense of tension and drama that pervades even the quietest corners of the book, culminating in an ambiguous ending reminiscent of Marlowe’s journey on an older river. Meditative, challenging, yet wholly engrossing, Naipaul’s novel deserves its fame as a monument of postcolonial literature.

Sankofa (1993)

By Daina Ramey Berry and Jermaine Thibodeaux

In this 1993 film by Ethiopian-born filmmaker Haile Gerima, a modern-day, fashion model is transported to the past to experience the traumas of American chattel slavery. It is only through her return to the past that she can move forward, hence the name of the film, Sankofa, an Akan word meaning “go back and take” or “go back to move forward.” The film opens with a photo shoot on the coast of Ghana on the grounds of a fortification (read castle/dungeon) used to house African captives prior to being forcibly transported to new world plantations. Zola, the main character, is forced back in time to an isolated sugar plantation. There she learns the power of family, community, and even rebellion as she and other members of the enslaved community seek their freedom through solidarity and decisive action. This is the closest film rendition of slavery since the 1977 television mini-series Roots. Gerima, a Howard University professor, did much to ensure that his portrayal of the institution of slavery and the presentation of African cultural traditions were as close to reality as possible.

Teza, another film directed by Haile Gerima

The bookstore, gallery and cafe, Sankofa, established by Gerima

Toyin Falola on Africa and the United States

By Toyin Falola

Often wrongly considered to be on the periphery of the history of the United States, Africa has played an important role politically, economically, and culturally from before American independence until the present day. The importance of slavery to early U.S. history was paramount, with lasting effects into the twentieth century and the contributions of African-Americans to life in the United States has often been celebrated, but Africa’s relevancy for the United States has been most appreciated and discussed in terms of the African roots of a broad spectrum of American culture. Following decolonization in Africa, the newly independent nations took on a new relevancy and significance for the United States, one that should be re-examined for the twenty-first century.

The entire history of the United States is deeply intertwined with the history of Africa. Slavery was practiced in America even prior to independence from Great Britain and was an integral part of its economy, particularly in the South. Agriculture depended on the labor of slaves sent from the West African coast, and was one of the key reasons the Southern states fought in the Civil War. When the fight against slavery as a moral issue gained momentum, slave owners in the South feared it would be outlawed on the national level. And it was outlawed at the conclusion of the Civil War, with the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. However, despite the Thirteenth Amendment, and the citizenship and voting rights that came with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, racial discrimination was still a critical issue in American social life. Jim Crow laws in the South kept both public and private life in the southern United States segregated until the climax of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The Civil Rights Movement was fostered in part by international developments. Following the Second World War, the Cold War and its numerous manifestations were the primary concern of the United States government. With the Civil Rights Movement, however, foreign and domestic policy concerns were directly connected. Contemporaneous with the ideological battle between the United States and the Soviet Union was the decolonization of much of Africa and Asia. As nations became independent from their former colonial powers, most often Great Britain and France, they faced a bipolar political situation in which they had to decide whether they wanted democratic or communist governance. The United States, in an attempt to ensure democracy for these sometimes geopolitically strategic nations, offered itself up as an ally to African nations. In such a situation, treatment of African Americans was an especially ugly scar on the face of the U.S., and America’s support for newly independent African nations proved to be an important impetus in accelerating Civil Rights legislation, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Decolonization in Africa affected both United States domestic policy towards Civil Rights legislation, as well as foreign policy toward Africa. Previously, American foreign policy toward Africa did not exist, and any concerns over Africa were instead directed towards its European colonizers. The combination of the Cold War and decolonization quickly made the African continent relevant to the U.S. in a new way. The overextension of the United States’ foreign policy during this period, including the rebuilding of post-War Europe, wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, meant that many African leaders of newly independent nations felt they were not given the audience that they deserved from the United States government. Yet it is clear that the U.S. involved itself where it felt Cold War concerns were most relevant, as when it supported Mobutu Sese Seko, the brutal dictator of the Democratic Republic of Congo, then Zaire.

The United States’ foreign policy changed dramatically after the end of the Cold War and its policy towards Africa in the 1990s did as well. For the last decade of the twentieth century the main agenda for the United States seemed to be to ignore African nations, even in the face of severe crisis, such as the Rwandan genocide. Yet with the end of the twentieth century also came the beginning of a huge international public health battle against HIV/AIDS. Africa, and Southern Africa in particular, has been at the forefront of this struggle, one that quickly linked U.S. interests in Africa with both positive and negative effects. Many countries, such as Uganda, have seen AIDS deaths drop significantly because of American help, particularly during the administration of President George W. Bush. However, issues surrounding aid dependency, the cultural relevancy of some aid programs, and the often times controversial role of American pharmaceutical companies in Africa have complicated this relationship.

On September 11, 2001, Africa’s relevancy to the United States changed once again with the bombing of the World Trade Center by Islamic extremist terrorists. While originally the focus of the U.S. was on the Islamic countries of the Middle East, political instability in Africa and a high percentage of Muslims in many African nations, has brought the American War on Terror to countries such as Somalia and against extremists in countries like Nigeria. It has become clear to policymakers that the political and economic stability of Africa is in fact relevant to the United States. However, the increasingly global nature of every aspect of life ensures that policies will have to broaden beyond a focus on public health and terrorism. Stability in Africa would not only help to ensure the safety and well-being of Americans, but also open opportunities for American companies to invest and create new networks in the global economy. Africa’s relevancy for the United States has changed significantly over the past 300 years; however, the relationship between the U.S. and Africa is crucial to understanding American history, and will continue to be an important element in the twenty-first century.

The United States and West Africa, edited by Alusine Jalloh and Toyin Falola

Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 by Piero Gleijeses (2002)

by Yana Skorobogatov

Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976, takes readers beyond the familiar categories of the Soviet-American Cold War. In the wake of decolonization, as charismatic national leaders emerged across Africa – from Algeria to Zaire – statesmen in Washington and Moscow waited anxiously to see if the new governments would align with democracy or communism. Enter Cuba: a small, poor, underdeveloped island that saw the western hemisphere’s
first successful Marxist revolution just ninety miles away from U.S. shores. Driven by a sense of Third World, post-colonial comradery, Cuban guerrillas staged socialist interventions in Africa in the name of Marxism and anti-imperialism. This book’s depiction of their successes and failures, coupled with Soviet and American reactions to such brazen undertakings, makes for a refreshing literary adventure in Cold War international history.

Conflicting Missions distinguishes itself from traditional Cold War histories by challenging the assumption that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. monopolized ideological intervention in the post-war era. While many readers of twentieth century history are quick to recall Soviet revolts in Budapest and Prague, as well as American operations in Vietnam and Chile, few realize how independently and ardently Cuba took to its own project of global socialist indoctrination during the Cold War. Cuba, striving to fill the aid vacuum left behind by the Soviet government’s growing disinterest funding sub-Sahara African liberation movements, led a leftist movement in Angola against the U.S.’s covert backing of rival regimes. What makes this story so remarkable was the failure of U.S. intelligence to perceive Cuba’s presence in the country. As U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary Mulcahy recalled how ‘‘Cuba didn’t even enter into our calculations.” By successfully implementing its own revolutionary project and bypassing the world’s preeminent superpower in the process, Cuba proved itself to be a formidable communist actor on a stage where Russia’s diplomatic presence had already begun to wane.

The most enjoyable interludes in the book describe Cuban philanthropy in post-colonial African villages. Stories of Cuban medical workers aiding undeveloped, rural communities bring to the forefront the humanitarian side of Cuba’s brand of communism; frequently neglected in histories of the Cold War. With Cuban doctors around, villagers ‘‘knew that their wounds need not be fatal and that their injuries could be healed.” Comments such as these color a Cold War narrative all too often painted in broad, black and white strokes. That Conflicting Missions achieves this feat in an exceptionally readable, wanderlust-inducing form makes it a welcome addition to the widening circle of global Cold War scholarship.

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