Toby Green

The author says this is the first history telling of West African circumstances from 1300 to 1750. That is true. No other history attempts to put together communities, countries and activities along the 1200 miles of coast from Sierra Leone to Nigeria, and tell of the slave trade. No one has a complete picture of West Africa for those centuries. Documents are scattered everywhere; letters and diaries are in more diverse places. Within West Africa it seems oral traditions of conveying history can be reliable – stories and incidences passed down from generation to generation.

And readers of A Fistful of Shells still have no idea what was going on during those centuries along that coast.

1. Maps of West Africa should be specific as to time and to each place mentioned in the text. The book and its maps are not helpful because the names of locations changed in those four hundred years. And remember, tell of one place at a time because it is 1200 miles of coast, plus villages, communities, and towns inland. I suspect communications along that coast were irregular.
2. Next write the history chronologically, as to one place and then the next. The reader goes wary: Good stopping pages were 48 and 49: Fifteenth Century – seven lines later Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries – carried over to page 49 the year 1200 – next paragraphs 2015 London Lecture; 2017 Lecture.

This history should be reorganized to convey all the events of that coast. Or take an area and write a history of it over those 400 years. Or, have some other organization which readers, completely unfamiliar with the subject matter, can follow.