This volume runs from roughly the mid-first millennium BC to the opening of the second millennium AD. Its editor concedes an awkwardness at the outset: the sources for northern Africa are far richer than for anywhere else, so the north can be handled in detail while the rest requires hypothesis, which risks making outsiders look more consequential than Africans.

Against that, Fage argues for a unity of subject on a continental scale. This is the stretch in which something recognisable as history begins almost everywhere in Africa, with only two exceptions: Egypt, long since part of an older written tradition, and the arid, thinly peopled south-west, which was still barely inside history as late as the nineteenth century. The volume opens with a long archaeological essay on the legacy of prehistory, reaching back through the Plio-Pleistocene toolmakers and Homo erectus, as the ground on which particular African cultures later took shape.