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MOTHERLAND by Luke Pepera

MOTHERLAND

A Journey Through 500,000 Years of African Culture and Identity

by Luke Pepera

Pub Date: June 3rd, 2025
ISBN: 9781639368839
Publisher: Pegasus

African pasts and cultural understandings are vital to the present.

“We have a warped understanding of Africa’s past,” writes Pepera at the outset of his capacious history. To unlearn misconceptions, he invites readers on a sweeping, eclectic trip across time and space. Refusing to center histories of victimization, such as the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, he instead emphasizes their creativity and achievement. Construing “Africa” broadly, Pepera’s thematic chapters show African and African diasporic identities as interwoven and persistent. His descriptive skill brings research from historical and ethnographic sources into conversation with contemporary examples, vividly showing that for Africans, the past and their ancestors’ past achievements infuse the quotidian present. Pepera narrates familiar African histories, such as the marvelous story of Malian emperor Mansa Musa’s 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca. Musa’s wealth in gold, and his generosity in distributing it during his three-month stop in Cairo, famously disrupted the Egyptian economy, bringing him and Mali into wider renown. He also explores the fascinating histories of African royal women, including Njinga Mbande, a 17th-century queen of Ndongo, in what is today Angola. In other chapters, Pepera’s purpose is quite different. In “How the Dead Still Live,” he moves from African understandings of ancestors’ efficacy in their descendants’ lives to a moving discussion of the legacy of the actor Chadwick Boseman. The latter’s “exemplary life” was reflected in his acting choices, in which his portrayals of figures like Jackie Robinson, James Brown, and T’Challa/Black Panther modeled an African spirit of ancestral veneration. Pepera similarly connects African forms of wordsmithing—praise singing, proverbs, epics—to diasporic forms of verbal battles such as rap or playing “the Dozens.” The book’s presentation of how racism developed over the centuries will disappoint some readers, since it largely eschews structural explanations of how anti-Blackness came to be a global phenomenon. But it will undoubtedly inspire those who seek to understand Africa and its peoples everywhere as shapers of human history.

A stirring, optimistic portrait of African identities and meaning making, past and present.