UNESCO’s General History of Africa is one of the world’s best resources on African history as told primarily by African historians.
”In 1964, UNESCO launched the elaboration of the General History of Africa (GHA) with a view to remedy the general ignorance on Africa’s history. The challenge consisted of reconstructing Africa’s history, freeing it from racial prejudices ensuing from slave trade and colonization, and promoting an African perspective. UNESCO therefore called upon the then utmost African and non African experts. These experts’ work represented 35 years of cooperation between more than 230 historians and other specialists, and was overseen by an International Scientific Committee which comprised two-thirds of Africans.”
The project is ongoing with more volumes set to be produced in the near future.

The entire collection is available free for download here: UNESCO GHA

Uzoigwe, G. N. “Pre-Colonial Military Studies in Africa.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 13, no. 3 (1975): 469–81.

“The study of the military as an agent of societal change began to attract the serious attention of western social scientists after World War II. Since then the independence of the African states has given rise to many coups d'état, thereby awakening the concern of Africanist scholars in the rôle of the military in contemporary society. Predictably, this interest has largely been confined to recent military developments, including the liberation movements in Southern Africa and Guinea–Bissau.”

Law, Robin. “A West African Cavalry State: The Kingdom of Oyo.” The Journal of African History 16, no. 1 (1975): 1–15.

“Following an earlier article in this Journal, by Humphrey Fisher, dealing with the role of the horse in the Central Sudan, this article considers the role of cavalry in the kingdom of Oyo. It is suggested that the use of cavalry may have been adopted by Oyo during the sixteenth century. Oyo never became selfsufficient in horses, but remained dependent for its horses upon importation from the Central Sudan, while local mortality from trypanosomiasis was considerable. Evidence relating to the operations of Oyo armies supports the view that cavalry was of substantial military value, while at the same time illustrating the limitations of the military efficacy of cavalry. The acquisition and maintenance of large numbers of horses represented a considerable economic burden for Oyo, and the high cost of maintaining a large cavalry force may have inhibited the establishment of a royal autocracy in Oyo. The decline of the cavalry strength of Oyo in the early nineteenth century was due, it is suggested, to economic difficulties.”

Kaba, Lansine. “Archers, Musketeers, and Mosquitoes: The Moroccan Invasion of the Sudan and the Songhay Resistance (1591 – 1612).” The Journal of African History 22, no. 04 (1981): 457–75.

“This paper reinterprets the invasion of Songhay by the Sa'did Sultan Mulāy al-Mansūr's mercenaries led by the Pasha Judar. The battle of Tondibi in March 1591, and the subsequent defeat of the Askiya Isḥāq II, marked a turning point in both Moroccan and West African history. The paper assumes a strong relation between the invasion, the Mediterranean problems and the commercial needs of the Sa'did. Al-Mansūr wanted to regain control of the gold trade to stimulate the economy of his kingdom. However, his expeditionary forces got bogged down in the fly-infested southern swamps because of an unexpected protracted war of resistance led by the Askiya Nūḥu. Revolts in the cities and the countryside led to repression and the exile of a group of prominent ‘ulamā’ in 1594. The Moroccans also suffered from a lack of administrative coordination as demonstrated by the competition between the governor and the treasurer. All these problems culminated in a disaster. By 1612, unable to match the mobility of the resisters, the musketeers refused to do battle with the Songhay archers. Finally, the qā' id AH al-Talamsānī deposed the Pasha, and the Sultan began to lose control of his troops. As Songhay and Morocco experienced serious crises in the seventeenth century, Europe's domination of international trade became uncontested. The invasion swallowed up both the conqueror and the conquered.”

Berman, Bruce, and John Lonsdale. Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa. Oxford: James Currey, 1992.

“In the sister two volumes entitled Unhappy Valley 1 and Unhappy Valley 2, the authors investigate major themes including the conquest origins and subsequent development of the colonial state, the contradictory social forces that articulated African societies to European capitalism, and the creation of new political communities and changing meanings of ethnicity in Africa, in the context of social differentiation and class formation. There is substantial new work on the problems of Mau Mau and of wealth, poverty and civic virtue in Kikuyu political thought. The authors make a fresh contribution to a deeper historical understanding of contemporary Kenyan society and, in particular, of the British and Kikuyu origins of Mau Mau and the emergency of the 1950s. They also highlight some of the shortcomings of ideas about development, explore the limitations of narrowly structuralist Marxist theory of the state, and reflect on the role of history in the future of Africa.”

Taiwo, Olufemi. “Exorcising Hegel’s Ghost: Africa’s Challenge to Philosophy.” African Studies Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1998)

Saul, Mahir. “The War Houses of the Watara in West Africa.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 31, no. 3 (1998): 537.

Mamdani, M. “Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, no. 4 (2001): 651–64.

My starting point is the generation that inherited Africa's colonial legacy. Our generation followed on the heels of nationalists. We went to school in the colonial period and to university after independence. We were Africa's first generation of postcolonial intellectuals. Our political consciousness was shaped by a central assumption: we were convinced that the impact of colonialism on our societies was mainly economic. In the decade that followed African political independence, militant nationalist intellectuals focused on the expropriation of the native as the great crime of colonialism. Walter Rodney wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. 1 But no one wrote of how Europe ruled Africa.

Thornton, John K. Warfare in Atlantic Africa 1500-1800. EBook. Vol. 44. London: UCL Press, 2003.

Investigates the impact of warfare on the history of Africa in the period of the slave trade and the founding of empires. It includes the discussion of: * the relationship between war and the slave trade * the role of Europeans in promoting African wars and supplying African armies * the influence of climatic and ecological factors on warfare patterns and dynamics * the impact of social organization and military technology, including the gunpowder revolution * case studies of warfare in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Benin and West Central Africa.

Barkawi, Tarak. “Peoples, Homelands, and Wars? Ethnicity, the Military, and Battle among British Imperial Forces in the War against Japan.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, no. 1 (2004): 134–63.

Tarak Barkawi argues that nationalist essentialism, banished from most shperes of social inquiry by a constructionist sense of the object, nevertheless continues to prevail in the study of warfare. Thus the brutality of conflict is generally traced to preexisting racism and national stereotypes in the warring nations, this move being what he calls the domestication of wartime violence. He argues, contrary to this line of interpretation, that war itself generates race hate, through structural relations that are created by military organization and the hazards of the battlefield. In doing so war contributes to the making of the very identities which, after the fact, appear to have defined and instigated the combatants in the first place. His strategy for showing this is to examine British imperial forces fighting the Japanese in Burma, where combat was exceptionally cruel on both sides. Here the explanation cannot fall back upon British preconceptions of the Japanese, as the force was composite, British, Indian, and African, and the Indian component was divided up into companies each one of which was of a different class, Sikh, Dogra, Pathan, and Punjabi Muslim. The Indians in particular had little pre-war knowledge of or racial feeling toward the Japanese, yet developed strong, even exterminationist feelings toward the enemy in the course of war. The article explores the reasons why.

Barkawi, Tarak, and Mark Laffey. “The Postcolonial Moment in Security Studies.” Review of International Studies 32, no. 2 (2006): 329–52.

In this article, we critique the Eurocentric character of security studies as it has developed since World War II. The taken-for-granted historical geographies that underpin security studies systematically misrepresent the role of the global South in security relations and lead to a distorted view of Europe and the West in world politics. Understanding security relations, past, and present, requires acknowledging the mutual constitution of F.uropean and non-European worlds and their joint role in making history. The politics of Eurocentric security studies, those of the powerful, prevent adequate understanding of the nature or legitimacy of the armed resistance of the weak. Through analysis of the explanatory and political problems Eurocentrism generates, this article lays the groundwork for the development of a non Eurocentric security studies.

Reid, Richard J. “Past and Presentism: The ‘precolonial’ and the Foreshortening of African History.” Journal of African History 52, no. 2 (2011): 135–55.

This article considers the marginalization of precolonial history from mainstream Africanist scholarship in recent decades, and argues that this can be understood in the context of a scholarly culture that attributes an exaggerated significance to the history of the twentieth century. The article highlights some of the work that continues to be done on Africa's deeper past, with a view to demonstrating the enormous value of such research in elucidating present-day issues. It also argues, however, that work on the modern period is preponderant, and that there is a clear tendency toward historical foreshortening, evidenced in recent scholarship on such topics as conflict and ethnicity.

Wai, Zubairu. “Neo-Patrimonialism and the Discourse of State Failure in Africa.” Review of African Political Economy 39, no. 131 (2012): 27–43.

This paper is a critical interrogation of the dominant Africanist discourse on African state forms and its relationship with what is seen as pervasive state failure on the continent. Through an examination of the neo-patrimonialist literature on African states, this paper argues that what informs such problematic scholarship, inscribed on the conceptual and analytical landscape of the Weberian ideal-typical conception of state rationality is a vulgar universalism that tends to disregard specific historical experiences while subsuming them under the totalitarian grip of a Eurocentric unilinear evolutionist logic. The narrative that such scholarship produces not only constructs a mechanistic conception of state rationality based on the experience of the Western liberal state as the expression of the universal, but also denies the specificity of the continent's historical experience, by either denying its independent conceptual existence or vulgarising its social and political formations and realities, dismissing them as aberrant, deviant, deformed and of lesser quality. Immanent in this move is the ideological effacement and the rendering invisible, hence the normalisation of the relational and structural logic, of past histories of colonial domination and contemporary imperial power relations within which the states in Africa have been historically constituted and continue to be reconstituted and reimagined. When exactly does a state fail, the paper asks. Could what is defined as state failure actually be part of the processes of state formation or reconfiguration, which are misrecognised or misinterpreted because of the poverty of Africanist social science and ethnocentric biases of the particular lenses used to understand them?

Thornton, John K. “The Kingdom of Kongo and the Thirty Years’ War.” Journal of World History 27, no. 2 (2016): 189–213.

Gomez, Michael A. African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.

Souaré, Issaka K. “The African Union as a Norm Entrepreneur on Military Coups d’état in Africa (1952-2012): An Empirical Assessment.” Journal of Modern African Studies 52, no. 1 (2014): 69–94.

Between 1952 and 2012, there were a total of 88 successful military coups in Africa. Of those, 63 occurred prior to 1990, and 10 cases since the adoption, by the defunct Organization of African Unity (OAU), of the Lomé Declaration in July 2000, banning military coups and adopting sanctions against regimes born out of this. The article shows that the African Union (AU) has followed in the footsteps of the OAU in this regard. Assisted by some African regional organisations and international partners, the combined effect of this policy of the AU - assisted by other factors - has been a significant reduction in the occurrence of this phenomenon. While not constituting a funeral arrangement for military coups in the immediate future, these developments - if they were to continue - may indeed make this eventuality achievable in the long run. But the article also reveals some challenges the AU is facing in ensuring this.