An African history of Africa with Zeinab Badawi

Everybody’s heard about Ancient Egypt.

But just downriver, the kingdom of Kush was one of the most powerful states in the Nile valley.

Sudanese-British journalist Zeinab Badawi gives us a lesser-known history of one of Africa’s great historical triumphs.

Zeinab Badawi, Sudanese-British journalist. President of SOAS at the University of London. Her new book is "An African history of Africa: From the dawn of humanity to independence."

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: The history of the continent of Africa often centers on colonialism, conquest and conflict. Zeinab Badawi wants to change that. Her new book is An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence. And in it, she highlights Africa's lesser-known historical triumphs and powerful figures.

It is also an ambitious history from the origins of the human race through the end of apartheid in South Africa. Badawi herself was born in Sudan and raised in England. She went on to become one of the UK 's most distinguished broadcast journalists. She hosted flagship news programs at Britain's ITV and Channel 4.

And for decades, she was also a reporter and host across the BBC's most prominent domestic and global radio and television programs. She's currently president of SOAS at the University of London, and she joins us from London now. Zeinab Badawi, welcome to On Point.

ZEINAB BADAWI: Meghna, it is simply terrific to be with you. Hello to you and all your listeners.

CHAKRABARTI: I actually wanted to start with understanding a little bit more about, you know, your thinking and motivation into writing this book. Because this morning I was wondering, in your long career as a journalist for UK outlets, I wonder if there was ever a time where you felt like your own work, having to be done for a basically UK audience, was in a sense inadvertently contributing to this kind of myopic view of Africa and African history.

BADAWI: It is precisely because I didn't want to fall into that trap of simply serving a UK audience that I shifted, relatively early in my career, midpoint, to the BBC's international division.

Where my audience was a global one, precisely to avoid that myopia, that kind of knee-jerk stereotypical approach to covering Africa, which was expected by UK audiences. They really had to be fed in a way, a diet of Africa seen in either a coup or a war or a famine situation. Or in a humanitarian way, you know, as we saw with the Live Aid and Band Aid events.

So, I felt that I wanted to pursue a more multidimensional approach to covering Africa, and that is why I did shift to the Global Division of the BBC.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, I promise you I will talk, hear from you in detail about the book, but these motivations are very important, because I think they also inform. You know, as you're saying, the historical understanding that people in the UK and the United States, of course, have of Africa.

Because it's predicated by these expectations, as you said. Can you just tell me a little bit more about in the early part of your journalistic career how you came up against those expectations and how you reacted to them?

BADAWI: Yeah, well, I started my career in the '80s, in the early '80s. And, of course, we had the Live Aid/ Band Aid launch in the mid '80s, '84, '85, when there was that famine in Ethiopia. And I was sent to cover the story from the Sudanese side of the border. And I went around all over the country to Darfur, and in the west of Sudan and talked to people who were in a fairly desperate situation.

However, they rightly, I thought, identified the government in the capital Khartoum as being the people responsible for their plight and who could put the, you know, matter straight. I then went back to Britain and it was all the, you know, the hype around Live Aid, Band Aid. And It was all about let's help Africa. And I saw that there was a dissonance there between the people themselves who saw that their governments were responsible for them, and did not think about their situation in terms of aid, but actually wanting responsible governments.

Good governance was what mattered to them. And so I saw very quickly that one of the easiest ways for international audiences to engage with Africa was through the humanitarian appeal. And that gave rise to, you know, the pictures of the distended bellies and the emaciated arms and so on. And that really persisted for a very long time.

And, you know, although, and I really don't want to sound churlish about this, you know, what humanitarian organizations do is very, very important, and there's a place for that. Having said that, it does exaggerate the role of humanitarian aid in the toolbox of development, and no country has been developed by outsiders.

And also, it casts the Africans as the junior partner, as sort of passive spectators to their own destinies, waiting for outsiders in the guise of whoever, you know, be it Bob Geldof or whoever, to try and sort out their, you know, to put them out of their misery. And that robs the Africans of agency. So even though it's done with the best of motives, and I've met Bob Geldof over the years, and he's a man I greatly admire.

And you know, if you're starving and somebody is helping you, you don't care what the color of their skin is. I get all that. I'm just talking about the kind of collateral damage that the images give rise to. And of course, working in television, we dealt a great deal with images. And I think that this casting of Africans as the junior partner is something which has persisted, and people think it's only got to do with far flung distant countries.

But actually, the way Black people are seen internationally has an impact on the domestic, social and political agendas of your countries, including in the UK.

Because then you'll see African people of African descent who are immigrants as needy outsiders, you know, coming to scrounge off your welfare system and so on.

And so it evokes dealings in the language of racism. It also, do you see what I mean? So, you know, there's a forced dichotomy between what happens out there and what happens in your country.

CHAKRABARTI: Yes, exactly. And, I mean, of course, two things can be true at the same time, right? I mean, humanitarian aid is most often given out of a sense of shared humanity.

I completely agree with you on that. But to put a sharper point here, it's also much easier for people to, you know, fall into that white savior complex, rather than asking their governments to do something to, you know, whatever diplomatic means they have, to encourage the governments of Africa to better serve their people. I mean, I think both those things are true at the same time.

BADAWI: Absolutely.

CHAKRABARTI: I appreciated that backdrop. Because we are talking about an entire continent, right? And thousands of different walks of life and cultures and languages and ethnicities and histories.

We're talking about the cradle of the human race. So to reduce it down to those images, as you said, I mean, I was a young person in the '80s. And those images of the African famines did a huge amount to cement, cement a particular view of Africa in an entire generation of Westerners, I would say.

So tell me more, then, about your own family's African story. Because it plays a role in the beginning of the book when you go to a camel market in Africa?

BADAWI: Well, I was born in the Sudan, in the north of Sudan, because of course there are two Sudans now, South Sudan and Sudan. So I was born in the capital, Khartoum.

My family originated from further north, going towards the border with Egypt. However, my father was involved in pre independence politics in the Sudan. And so he moved the family to the UK when I was about two years of age, going on three. So I have lived my entire life, as you can tell from my accent, in the UK.

So totally educated here, but I'm not deracinated. I have not, never been disconnected from my roots. I was brought up speaking Arabic. That was the lingua franca of Sudan. It's my mother tongue, because the Northern Sudanese, of course, speak Arabic and I've always maintained ties with the country of my birth.

My parents were very committed patriots, my father, in particular. And so we grew up with an understanding of what was going on in Sudan. Yet I was surprised that my parents, who are highly educated people, because just to roll back a little bit, my great grandfather in Sudan, Sheikh Babikr Bedri, was the pioneer of female education in Sudan.

Before him, at the turn of the 20th century, there were no schools for girls in Sudan. And he said, I don't know why, it's just my boys who are educated. I want my girls to also go to school and I want all girls in Sudan to be educated. So he set up in his courtyard a school and he stuck his daughters in there.

He had a lot of children. Because, as we say in the family, he was so pro women that he married four of them.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS)

BADAWI: And so he had a lot of children, including girls. And, you know, I grew up with great aunts and aunts who had, you know, postgraduate degrees from Western universities and so on. So education, I could say, was very much the family business.

Yet, despite that, my family knew very little about their ancient history. I remember asking my mother, saying to her, what do you know about the pyramids and the temples of ancient Sudan? And she said, well, we visited them once, but she couldn't give you a date. She couldn't really give you the names of the kings and the queens.

And so that troubled me, because I thought if an educated woman did not know much about her own ancient history, what does that tell me? And I found, to my astonishment, that subsequently my travels for the book and the TV series on Africa's history, that this was a very common phenomenon. Most people in Africa, let alone those outside of the continent, have just a kind of very piecemeal view or knowledge of the continent's history before the colonial era.

And that's why I wanted to put that right. And, you know, you asked me about the book. The book actually grew out of a TV series. I made 20, 45-minute films called The History of Africa with Zeinab Badawi, now available on BBC YouTube, free of charge, was broadcast on the BBC and out of that grew my book.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Let's talk about some of those great African empires that most of us know nothing about. I'd love for you to share with us the story of the ancient kingdom of Kush.

BADAWI: Well, if you were to ask me my favorite chapter in the book, you would forgive me if I were biased. It would be chapter three, the kingdom of Kush, because that's where my ancestors hail from. So the kingdom of Kush, in its earliest iteration, thousands of years BCE, before common era or BC, before Christ, as some people say, far predates ancient Greece or Rome.

I focus on the 7th and 8th centuries BC, BCE. And that's when the Kings of Kush reach the zenith of their power. They conquered Egypt and governed it for the best part of a century, building temples. And, you know, marvelous monuments. And they are very little known about. Most people have heard of ancient Egypt, but they don't know about this, you know, neighbor to Egypt's South.

Now, Sudan, northern Sudan, actually has more pyramids than any other place on earth. The Kushites built a thousand pyramids. About 250 of them preserve their superstructure. You can see some part of them and some are fully standing. There are about a hundred pyramids in Egypt, by way of reference. Of course, the ones at Giza are much bigger than the ones in Sudan.

And there are temples, there are beautiful, you know, exquisite jewelry, that the Kushites wore. And the Kushites were very significant because not only were they a great African civilization, they were also a regional superpower. The princes of Byblos ... in what would be modern day Lebanon, appealed to them to help protect them against the marauding Assyrians, who were the most warlike, fierce armies of the ancient world at that time, King Hezekiah of Judah.

And the Kushites are really skilled archers and very good horsemen. And they had a particular knack of firing their bows and arrows into the eyes of their enemies. And so they were actually a regional superpower. And, you know, I love the story of the kings of Kush. And also, the queens, I should add, because Kushite women also had a very powerful role to play in society.

They were known as kandakes, which means queen mother. And later on, the ancient Greeks mistook that for a woman's name. And it's where we actually get the woman's name Candace from. And, you know, when the revolution in Sudan happened in April 2019 that brought down President Omar al-Bashir, women were very much in the vanguard of those protests, and they styled themselves as kandakes, reaching back to their ancient past in order to assert themselves, you know, in the modern era.

Famous queen Queen Amanirenas, known as the one-eyed Queen, she led her people into battle against the Romans in 30 BCE. By then, the Romans had conquered Egypt. Cleopatra was the last of those rulers, you know, in Egypt. And they looked towards northern Sudan, but they were having none of it.

And Queen Amanirenas signed a peace treaty with the Romans in 22 BCE. So it's just a splendid history, you know, Meghna, and I just wish people knew more about it. It's often mistakenly, I think, referred to as the Nubian civilization. And, you know, the word Nubia wasn't even in existence at that time.

And I avoid using that word, because today there are Nubians in both Sudan and Egypt. And these people only ever emerged from what is modern day Sudan. And if you call them Nubians, you know, it can muddy the waters a bit. People might think they came from Egypt, but that wasn't the case. They came from what was territorially Sudan.

So, you know, if you could just bear with me one second, very quickly to say what I like about the story of the Kushites is it shows you how in history, empires rise and fall.

Today, Sudan is in this ghastly state that breaks my heart, this conflict. And yet, you know, at a time when much of Europe was just languishing in, you know, people were sort of, you know, living very basic lives, there was this amazing civilization in Africa.

And also, it shows you how history can't be consigned to the past. The Kushites never ate fish. They considered it an abomination to eat fish. To this day, the northern Sudanese have one of the lowest consumption of fish in the whole world, about one kilogram on average per person per year, compared to 25 kilograms in Egypt.

Even though they've got the abundance of fish in the River Nile, they don't eat it. And it just shows you how history explains the past, but it also informs the present and actually can help shape the future, too.

CHAKRABARTI: One kilo a year, 2.2 pounds per year. That's nothing. Amazing.

BADAWI: I know. Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: So, the juxtaposition with Egypt was very fascinating to me, right?

Because of course, you went to Cairo for the TV series and the book as well, and you had just mentioned that in terms of the, the kingdom of Kush, almost nobody who isn't already familiar with that history even knows that it existed, whereas to your point, just about everybody worldwide knows about ancient Egypt.

How did that global knowledge of Egypt's ancient past. How did you discover how that plays in terms of modern-day Egyptians mindset about their relationship to the rest of the African continent?

BADAWI: Very interesting. I mean, I tried with my book at the beginning of each chapter to touch on a contemporary issue, to try to engage the reader, to say to them, Hey, look, this is why you should be interested in the history of this particular part of Africa.

And in the ancient Egyptian chapter number, which is chapter two, I looked at the controversies, which we saw erupt in early 2023 with the comedian Kevin Hart, who wanted to embark on his tour in Cairo, but had to cancel it because he was accused of promoting an Afro centric view of Egypt. Adele James, the actress who was cast in the series by Jada Pinkett Smith, the African American producer, as Cleopatra.

She's a Black actress, dual heritage, actually, and that also sparked an outcry in Egypt, that somebody of color should be depicting Cleopatra. I mean, it is true Cleopatra was of Greek origin from Macedonia and that's the Ptolemies, they were the last dynasty to rule ancient Egypt. And so strictly speaking, they're correct that she would not have been, you know, she would have been, as I said, Greek origin from Macedonia.

But It's interesting why that fury, you know, erupted in such a way, and it goes back to the fact that even in the 1920s and '30s, in what came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, you had African intellectuals and artists such as Meta Vaux Fuller with her, you know, mummified statue picture of somebody awakening. You know, they reached back to ancient Egypt and said that the rulers of ancient Egypt were African, were Black Africans, and they wanted to claim that in order to, really, you know, fight the discrimination that they were encountering at that time.

But that annoyed the Egyptians. I look into why that was the case. And I don't want to paint the Egyptians as racist in any way. They just say, look, we don't want the appropriation of our civilization. But I think that what we need to do is not to say that somebody who is African has to look a certain way or dress a certain way.

We need to redefine what we mean by being African. And Africa has a Mediterranean coast. You know, across to Southern Europe, across to Western Asia. So, of course, migration has happened over the centuries. And, of course, the pharaohs of Egypt would have had different ethnicities over the centuries, as I just said, you know, you had the Kushites, who were the 25th dynasty. And they would have been, you know, Black African.

So I think we shouldn't get hung up on what an African should look like. And for me, I say very firmly that the ancient Egyptian civilization was, is and always will be African.

CHAKRABARTI: I mean not only should we not get hung up on what an African should look like, I mean, the entire idea is completely ridiculous.

If you ask me, it's a continent.

BADAWI: Exactly. Exactly. And it's been, you know, I mean, Africa, North Africa was conquered by the Arabs by 711. They had pretty much conquered all of North Africa. Egypt was the first to fall to the Arabs in 640. So, of course, they've mixed, they settled with the Arabs. They are seen as an Arab nation in Africa.

It's the most populous, the most populous Arab country, Egypt, is in Africa. And so of course they are mixed and perhaps some of them have adopted that Arab ideology and say, look, we are Arabs and not Africans. But I just think that these kinds of discussions lead you into a dead end.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, so, but it's very interesting, because you're mentioning members of the Harlem Renaissance reaching back to ancient Egypt as a way to symbolize their sort of modern day, not just validity, but power and vibrance. In a sense, I mean, that actually makes a lot of sense. Let's put the racial controversy aside, right?

Because of how well-known ancient Egypt is around the world. Of course, in order to provide a sense of empowerment in modern day, the United States, they would want to say, look at this equally, if not, actually more powerful ancient culture of which we have a connection to.

BADAWI: Of course.

CHAKRABARTI:  But it relies on the knowledge, the popular knowledge of ancient Egypt, whereas, you make this point in the book.

There is not that popular knowledge of the other equally powerful empires that were flourishing at the time, as you said. Well, you know, the people in Europe are still painting themselves blue and suffering from the Black Death.

BADAWI: Yes. (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: But why is it that those other empires faded away, not just in the Western imagination, but in the global imagination?

Because is it more than, it must be more than, there's the Rosetta Stone, so therefore we have a knowledge of ancient Egypt.

BADAWI: You know, actually, I think it has got a lot to do with the fact that there was a great deal of Egypt mania and archaeology, you know, Napoleon Bonaparte in the late 18th century when he went into Egypt, I mean, pretty much started the discipline of Egyptology.

It became a very Western owned, you know, phenomenon. Howard Carter in the 1920s, when he discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun. And I think Egypt mania did mean that people just love this kind of, you know, the stories of the mummies and the golden mask of Tutankhamun. And so I think it did rather eclipse anything else that was going on in Africa.

And hence the African Americans wanted to claim ancient Egypt as part of their heritage and their right to do that, just as people in northern Europe claim ancient Greece and Rome as part of their heritage. You know, the Greco-Roman civilization and so on. I don't see why people in Africa can't do the same.

So I think it is the fact that there was just this emphasis on ancient Egypt and people just not interested and felt that there was no other history in Africa. Which is, of course, totally untrue. I mean, I think it's because the Europeans really started looking at Africa, with their arrival, which wasn't until the 15th century.

So they're kind of saying, you know, not an awful lot happened before we arrived, because they valued their own documentation. They didn't look at sources, which were written in non-European languages. The Arabs had been in Africa since the seventh century and had written in Arabic, you know, the chroniclers, the travelers, you had, you know, Gujarati, South Asian languages.

So, they tended to overlook these, and I think that's the reason why Africa's history before the arrival of the Europeans was very much overlooked. They didn't set much credence on oral tradition and other sources of finding.

CHAKRABARTI: Tell me more about that, because how much of some of the histories of these groups and empires was mostly contained within an oral tradition?

BADAWI: So, the Africans didn't always write. Many did. I mean, the Ethiopians and Eritreans had their own script by the third or fourth century. And before that, they used the Sabaean script, which is something that derived from what we call Yemen today. The ancient Egyptians obviously had their own script. But sometimes when Africans didn't write, it didn't mean they didn't record their history.

You just have to get at it in a different way. And oral tradition is so important. Because in the West, we tend to think as knowledge is something which the individual possesses. But in Africa, knowledge is owned communally. You know, that's the basis of traditional, African life. It's much more communally driven than the more individualistic nuclear family structures that we have in the West.

And so you would find a man or a woman handing down stories of the valor, the deeds, the actions, the words of great leaders, and it would just be handed down over the generations. And so when I spoke to African historians, archaeologists, paleontologists, because I went to more than 30 countries over a period of seven years.

And so I spoke to dozens and dozens of cultural experts, and, you know, historians. And they use their scholarship, the written word, but they also augment it with the oral tradition. And because they are from those regions, they are aware of these traditions. So you get a more inclusive, more diverse, and I think in a way, better history from these local historians.

Some of them are not necessarily working in Africa now. There are many American universities and Western universities. But I think if you do not include their perspectives, you miss a great deal about Africa. You cannot understand Africa if you just rely on Western sources, which is why my book is called an African History of Africa, because I use the African vision perspective.

And I also believe it's important to accord the African the respect of telling their own story of allowing them to do that. So oral tradition is super significant. I just give you one example. In 1235, The Mali Empire was founded by a very interesting fellow called Sundiata Keita. He overcame disabilities as a child to lead and to establish this amazing empire.

In 1236, he established something called the Manden Charter, which is an oral charter. It's a kind of charter of civil rights. It decreed that everybody in the Mali Empire should enjoy liberty, dignity, and equality. And UNESCO, the United Nations cultural body, has designated it part of our intangible heritage.

So, although it's an oral charter, it's been, you know, it's been handed down over the years and we know that's when it was established. And it just tells you, doesn't it, how this man governed his empire. And I just want to add this as a parenthesis, which is the Mande people, sometimes known as the Malinky or the Mandingo or the Mandinka, formed great cohorts of enslaved people in the transatlantic slave trade, dehumanized.

And yet their founder had this charter of civil rights.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: In granting, not granting, in recognizing Africans' true autonomy, right, and humanity, through telling this African perspective of the continent's history, you also don't want to fall into the trap of sanitizing that history, right?

Because the fullness of humanity also demands that we look at, you know, the conflicts that have emerged from within Africa itself, between groups, between religions, that perhaps were inflamed by colonialism, but not exclusively so.

I wonder how you handled that.

BADAWI: So I felt that I really wanted to redress the balance a bit. And so I don't look too much at the, you know, the post-colonial conflicts at all. I just really deliver Africa to independence. And actually, really, if you use the long lens of history, Africa has been remarkably free of conflict compared to many other continents.

For example, there have never been any wars based on African religions. You know, there's not been one religious, indigenous religious group that's had fought a war against another indigenous religious group. And even the wars that people refer to, the tensions between Muslims and Christians on the continent, by and large, if you just dig a little bit deeper, you'll see that actually there's economics at their base. And, you know, a fight over resources, environmental factors.

I mean, broadly speaking, Africa is more or less half Muslim, half Christian, and about 15% are pursuant of traditional African beliefs. So, I don't look at things like, you know, human sacrifice or the incidence of cannibalism that may have existed or whatever, because I think there's plenty about that, if that's what you're interested in.

These are just, for me, really side issues. Having said that, I do, in the chapters about the transatlantic slave trade and also the Eastern trade, which was mostly across the Indian Ocean. I do say quite clearly that there were Africans who were facilitators, participants, colluders, whatever you want to call them, in these trades.

And so I don't shirk from doing that. But I did want to celebrate Africa's history. I didn't want to just narrate the history and give a history of truth. I also wanted to give a history of hope, because I feel that that has been sorely lacking when it comes to telling Africa's history. It's been very dominated by the transatlantic slave trade.

And there's more to Africa than slavery. I mean, 18 chapters in this book, I don't get to the transatlantic slave trade until chapter 14. So it's more a celebratory book, actually. You know, I remember Wangarĩ Maathai,the wonderful Kenyan environmentalist, who said, you cannot enslave a mind that knows itself, that values itself, that understands itself.

And really, she was a remarkable woman, sadly passed away a decade ago. And I was very inspired by her words when I started writing my book. Because I'm sure people of African descent or who are living on the continent of Africa may read this in a different way from somebody who is not of African descent, although I do say this book is for everyone, I'm sure that there'll be, you know, slightly different reactions to it, depending on whether you do hail from the continent.

Although, as I say, there's nobody on earth today who can't say that Africa is not their mother continent. You know, if you're not African, you're an African export, even if you've got blonde hair and blue eyes.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, so let's talk about the mother of us all, if I can put it that way, because you got to interact with what the oldest known, our oldest human ancestor, Lucy.

BADAWI: Oh, yeah. You're talking about Lucy or Dinkinesh, as she's known in Ethiopia. That's her Amharic name, which means, you are marvelous. And that's how I refer to her in the book. Look, she lived 3.2 million years ago, and she's part of the lineage which kind of led to us, but she's not, we didn't descend directly from Lucy, but she's become a bit of a superstar, hasn't she?

In the field of paleontology, and that's because, you know, 40% of her skeleton was found pretty much intact. And yes, I was very privileged at the University of Addis Ababa, at the Museum of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, to actually see her real bones, which are kept under lock and key. But I mean, hominins, you know, people, that's us, humans, really, there were various lines that migrated out of Africa, but it is the one that came from Africa that really bred everybody else into extinction.

So, broadly speaking, we, Homo sapiens, were fully formed by 100,000 years ago. By about 90,000 years ago, we had populated the whole of the continent. We're about a million people then living in communities about 150. At around 60, 70,000 years ago, those first hardy pioneers, probably because of reasons of, you know, scant resources, left the continent first to Arabia and then Europe and Asia.

And they encountered other homonyms like Neanderthals and Denisovans. And over the millennia, they bred with them. And, you know, mated with them. And then they were finally bred into extinction. So only we survived. And as I say, my book, the interesting thing is that up until between eight to 12,000 years ago, there was no white race.

Humans began to adopt, adapt to their, you know, their environment. So I think that when you look at the whole history of human development, you know, between eight to 12,000 years ago, nobody white is actually pretty recent. And I know I'm being a bit idealistic, but I just think that if I emphasize our common origins, which I do in the first chapter, that hopefully it will help counter some of the polarizations over racial differences that we see today.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, Lucy actually makes me think of the fact that you go to really wonderful lengths to highlight a lot of outside of Africa, virtually unknown African women from the history of the continent, right? I mean, there's several from the Asante people. And then also, let's see if I remember this correctly.

Queen Kahina? Was she?

BADAWI: Queen Nzinga. Nzinga, I think you're meaning. Queen Nzinga of the Ndongo Kingdom, which was a vassal state of the Kingdom of Congo. Very famous queen. Perhaps you mean her.

CHAKRABARTI: I think I was thinking of a Berber leader.

BADAWI: Oh, the Berber leader, Queen Kahina. Yes, you're absolutely right, who lived in the late 1600s.

And she was the Berber queen in North Africa. She's seen as a great feminist icon in North Africa, in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. She fought the Arabs who were by now invading North Africa, and she was defeated by them in 701. And the Arabs offered her the chance of surviving if she converted to Islam, but she refused and was beheaded, but asked her two sons to accept Islam so that they could survive.

And, you know, she was an amazing woman, apparently absolutely very beautiful. Her name Kahina could mean priestess or sorceress. And she managed to convince the people in her part of the world, which would approximate to the Ore Mountains. In what is modern day Algeria, that despite the fact that she was a woman, she should lead them and, you know, loads of people.

Headed her call and came from, you know, the towns and the rural areas, and she absolutely managed to defeat the Arabs on a couple of occasions. And I think it's odd that, you know, we don't know about her yet. We know about Queen Boudica, for instance, the queen of the Iceni tribe in the UK in the first century and BCE.

I just think that it would be wonderful if people knew about Queen Kahina. You see statues to her in North Africa, you know, and pictures in a lot of places. So I do try to feminize the history. Because, you know, I always say, like that Meghna, that people take that H I S, his, in history a bit too seriously.

And I try to make it her story too because history was made by women. I think Queen  Njinga is one who Jada Pinkett Smith, the, you know, producer, made a drama documentary series of this great queen who was born in 1583 and died in 1663. She fought the Portuguese every which way and died with her crown, you know, intact on her head.

She outwitted them. And I think her story illustrates that actually, you know, when Africans were confronted with the Europeans coming in, it's not as though they just took it lying down. They resisted at every turn. And you know, that's very, very important to remember. In the end, they were defeated by the superior military power of the Europeans, but that does not mean they did not resist.

Yeah, you know, it suddenly occurs to me that much of our conversation has been using examples from North Africa, but just to make it clear to listeners, the book covers the entire continent. So I didn't want people to think that it was a mostly North African history.

It by no means just that.

BADAWI: No, no, no. Well, Inga. Inga is from what we would call modern day Angola. So that's certainly not north.

CHAKRABARTI: So we only have a few minutes left, Zeinab. And I'm wondering, you have asked this question that when thinking about the reasons to know this history better, actually, first of all, let me back up. Earlier in the conversation, you said that your own family knew very little about Sudanese ancient history.

I'm wondering if you found that to be true in other parts of Africa, even as you were speaking with African scholars and historians, how much, generally, amongst the people of Africa, is their own history known?

BADAWI: Not completely. You know, the level of knowledge was woefully inadequate. Even the brightest and the best going around University of Lagos in Nigeria, I said, what do you know about your history?

They said, well, the transatlantic slave trade, Nigeria was formed in 1914, but, you know, asked them much more than that. And they're quite baffled, one former Nigerian president said to me, you know, Zeinab, I can recite the name of English medieval kings much more than I can, you know, my own, you know, history of the continent, but I am a pan Africanist.

I do believe that Africans and people should not just know little bits of the continent. They should have a more holistic view of the whole continent. So if you're from Kenya, don't just content yourself with knowing Kenyan history. You should also know what's happened. You know, Great Zimbabwe, this amazing structure built in the 1100s.

In what is modern day Zimbabwe, you know, the largest stone structure outside the pyramids in Africa. People should know about these. They should know about the personalities. I mean, my book is very personality led, because I think history is best understood if it's seared into the imagination. And so if you tell history through the characters, then I think it leaves an indelible mark on people's, you know, minds.

But I want to say this, that I think that there is a feeling that there are those who make history and those who stand on the sidelines of history, with the Africans being very much relegated to the sidelines. And this is just not true. When you read my book, you find characters like Mansa Musa, you know, the king of the Empire of Mali, born in 1280, 1332 is when he died.

He was the richest individual to have ever lived in history. When he stopped in Cairo on the way to Mecca, where he was making a pilgrimage, he gave away and spent so much gold that the price of gold plummeted, lost its value by 25%, didn't recover for more than a decade, you know. And so there are the actions of this one medieval African king from West Africa.

Broadly, you know, corresponds to the Sahel region today, his actions had an impact on the international economy. The idea that Africa was dislocated, isolated from the rest of the world, is just not borne out by the story of Mansa Musa, for instance.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, we only have about a minute and a half left and there's a question I'd like to close with, because you asked this very interesting question.

You say, what does the preservation of identity, culture and traditions mean? If it does not result in making people's lives better. First of all, why do you ask that question and how do you, how would you answer it yourself?

BADAWI: I think that people need much more than just, you know, economics and so on. You need identity.

You need a sense of who you are. You need to have a sense of where you have come from. That's why so many African Americans, you know, want to go and get citizenship in Sierra Leone, which will give you, you know, citizenship if you have a DNA test, for instance, people want to know, they don't want to know that they are just the descendants of enslaved people, and that they didn't have a fine history.

If you can assert yourself, you know, on the domestic stage on the international stage, I think knowing who you are, where you came from, that you, as somebody of African descent, have a culture, tradition, a history, institutions that are worthy of respect and study. I think that helps you shape your future and makes you a much more confident citizen of the world.