Toby Green, winner of the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2019, discusses his groundbreaking history, A Fistful of Shells, in conversation with Zeinab Badawi. Drawing on fieldwork in eight African countries and archival research in nine countries, on art, praise-singers, oral history, archaeology, letters and the author’s personal experience, the book creates a new perspective on one of the world’s most important regions. It also explores how what was once a trade of equals between Africa and Europe gradually revolved around the slave trade, damaging Africa’s relative power as the terms of monetary exchange shifted drastically in Europe’s favour; yet as it depicts this important and little-studied history, it also places the African past within a wider context of the achievements of art and politics, and the global connections that have always characterised the continent.
Speaker:
Dr Toby Green, Senior Lecturer in Lusophone African History and Culture, King’s College London
Chair:
Zeinab Badawi, Chair, Royal African Society
Booking required
£5, £3 concessions
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Image: © A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution by Toby Green, Penguin, 2020, £10.99
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