Why Africa's history is more than just the slave trade
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio
Welcome. To the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. Recent years have seen a renewed focus on On the impact that the transatlantic slave trade had on Africa's cultures and peoples. Yet as Luke Pepper's new book, Motherland, highlights,
The continent story is much more diverse and multifaceted than that. Matt Elton caught up with Luke to hear more about these stories. From female led societies. to the long history of the rap battle.
Luke, thank you so much for being with us today. We're here to talk about your new book, Motherland. Before we go any further, I want to talk about the subtitle, which is A Journey Through Five Hundred Thousand Years of African History and Identity. Was that prospect not enormously daunting when you started? Hey, Matt. Uh thank you so much for having me on the podcast. It's such a pleasure to be here. It is a big span, isn't it? I mean when I pitched the book, I was a naive mid twenty year old, so that probably explains partly why you know I've gone for something so massive. But actually, in in all seriousness, the reason I'd such a large span and why I went for that is because I really wanted to get across to readers and to history lovers the huge breadth. and depth of African history, the fact that it is where our species originated, and from that time five hundred thousand odd years ago to now There have been people inhabiting what we know as Africa who have just been doing things, who've been making tools, making art, developing languages, traveling, migrating, hunting, farming, fighting, et cetera, and have been doing it for
We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (34 minutes, 6,636 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.
No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.