There are enumerable volumes entitled “Europe” or “Latin America”

Shouldn't that be 'innumerable'?

It's a a word meaning 'uncountable', not 'countable', he wants, methinks.

(Hey, I can't correct any student language flubs till Monday. Gotta get 'em where you find 'em.)

I lived in Kenya for a couple of years back in the 80s, and in my experience, people identify themselves first as a member of their tribe (Luo, Kikuyu, Kamba, etc.), then as African, and only then as a member of their country.

The national identity tends to be very weak, iow, while the tribal and African identities are strong.

Talking of "Africa" allows the so-called experts to disguise their real lack of knowledge about the continent.

Africa has 100s of separate cultures. East Africa is to all intents and purposes more like the Middle East than it is like Central Africa.

The countries have idfferent destinies. But when we talk about "Africa", especially a sad, backward one we prevent countries which are doing well from benefiting from such goodies as foreign investment.

I definitely agree that it is ridiculous to lump the entire continent of Africa together. It is infinitely larger than the United States, and we barely talk about people from California and Texas as the same nationality.

But, in some cases, there is some utility to drawing the connection between African countries. I spent about six months living outside of Accra, Ghana. While most people identified first as a member of their ethnic group = Akan, Ga, Ewe - there was also an incredibly strong connection to the shared experience of African countries.

Since the vast majority of the continent was colonized by Europeans, many African countries have forged a similar post colonial identity based on the difficulty of transcending the difficult history of colonization.

So we shouldn't say either that historians should refer to "Africa" or avoid doing it altogether. There are benefits and drawbacks to making the connection.

"When was the last time you read a book about Eurasia?"

Guns, Germs and Steel.

I wonder how much of an African identity comes from a reaction to Europe/USA's conflation of so many countries and cultures into a poorly-defined "Africa."

We see the same thing in the American south, where state identity was incredibly important, especially among southerners themselves, until they found common cause against the North.

The fact that after centuries of being categorized by the West as "Africa," people who come from the continent still identify primarily by tribal affiliation suggests that pan-Africanism isn't an indigenous idea.

If it gets more Americans thinking about Africa, why would this be an issue?

Yes, it is quite true that we are sadly lacking in terms of books that can provide a view across the Eurocentric boundaries of traditional European historiograph ... ReOrient by Andre Gunder Frank is one such, and as Ginger Yellow notes, Guns, Germs and Steel is another.

Typically, when people talk about "Africa", the reference is really to Sub-Saharan Africa. And while the idea that we need only study "Africa" sui generis is evidently flawed, so too is the idea that we can understand the development challenge facing individual African nations without understanding their geopolitical context.

And understanding that geopolitical context drives us toward not just comparing and contrasting events in different African nations, but also to looking beyond national boundaries ... themselves often relatively recent inventions ... into regional events.

And once we start looking at African regions, it turns out that there are not, in fact, hard and fast boundaries between the regions ... it is possible to talk about what is distinctive about Western and Central and Eastern and Southern Sub-Saharan Africa, but much harder to maintain that, for example, events in the Great Lakes that led to the Mouse Invading the Elephant situation of Rwanda invading the DRC does not have repercussions for Southern Africa ... not when you can go to neighborhoods in South Africa and here Lingala and Swahili and French as much as the languages expected in South Africa.

You have to talk about Africa. Countries the size of Namibia simply don't get many books written about them. Really when's the last time you saw a book about Latvia or Macedonia? Or even Moldova? The first two have almost the same population as Namibia, Moldova's much more populous, and both Moldova and Macedonia are involved in nasty diplomatic spats with larger, neighboring countries. It doesn't mater that much of Moldova has been de facto re-conquered by Russia, or that Greek whining prevents Macedonia from doing damn near everything.

Heck, if you can't talk about Africa because it distorts people's views of the continent too much you sure as hell can't talk about Namibia. Look at the map. That tiny little strip is called the "Caprivi strip," and it's not part of Namibia for any Nambian reason. It's part of Namibia because in 1890 the Germans wanted to sail down the Zambezi to another German colony. So they bought it from the British. Turns out you can't sail down that part of the Zambezi.

The rest of Africa's nations are just as bizarre.

So if you're gonna stop talking about Africa because it's so diverse you're also going to have to stop talking about almost every African country.

BTW, East Africa isn't as unique as it likes to think it is. They are all bizarre Imperial creations. Sudan is partly a standard Arab state, but mostly it's an attempt by ethnic Arabs to impose their culture on various non-Arab groups. Ethiopia is similar. It's got a real country at it's core, but there's an awful lot of people there who don't like being Ethiopian. In particular the ethnic Somalis of the Ogaden are convinced that they were part of British Somaliland until the 30s, and that the boundary treaty negotiated in '34 is illegal.

My only problem with refering to "Africa" is that too many Americans are so ignorant that they can't name more than four of five countries on the whole continent. (There are over 45.)

I actually know a woman who was going on a safari vacation "in Africa" a few years ago, and when I asked her which country, she couldn't tell me.

If more people would reference specific countries on the continent, maybe the overall geographic ignorance of the general public would decrease.

Daniel Davies (dsquared) decided to write about Africa, with a focus on Zambia, instead of the US election. His thoughts on Afrobollocks (this is just one example) are worth reading.