African Europeans: An Untold History

This is a book that all must read now. This story has been lived not just for centuries but for millennia, all the while being consistently suppressed, denied or untold. Searing scholarship and heightened humanity combine to illuminate, appal, explore and ultimately inspireFascinating . . . One of the book's great pleasures is its cast of memorable characters [and] though this is a work of synthesis, it's an unusually generous and densely layered onePeople of African heritage have contributed greatly to Europe's music, literature and more. But their achievements have long been overlooked . . . African Europeans works to bring more of this past to public attentionFascinating. Otele reconnects us with the men and women who came from Africa to shape European history: rulers, diplomats, slaves and soldiers-above all, our ancestorsSuperbly researched . . . This richly layered history brims with stories of how African Europeans contributed to the culture, politics and language in the countries they lived in . . . This book is more than just the stories of interesting lives; it is also a careful study of the scholarship on these individualsA thrilling, informative readA brilliant, important and beautifully written book that forces us to think about the past differentlyYoking together the ''African'' and the ''European'', too often treated as entirely separate categories, Otele skilfully invites her reader to navigate the multiple intersecting worlds inhabited by her characters. This is fundamentally reparative writing that undoes the cultivated ignorance around race and blackness in Europe and shows us what is irrefutably true that black history is European history, indeed, world history