African Europeans

An Untold History

By: Olivette Otele

Narrated by: Olivette Otele

Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

A dazzling history of Africans in Europe, revealing their unacknowledged role in shaping the continent

One of the Best History Books of 2021 — Smithsonian

Conventional wisdom holds that Africans are only a recent presence in Europe. But in African Europeans, renowned historian Olivette Otele debunks this and uncovers a long history of Europeans of African descent. From the third century, when the Egyptian Saint Maurice became the leader of a Roman legion, all the way up to the present, Otele explores encounters between those defined as "Africans" and those called "Europeans." She gives equal attention to the most prominent figures — like Alessandro de Medici, the first duke of Florence thought to have been born to a free African woman in a Roman village — and the untold stories — like the lives of dual-heritage families in Europe's coastal trading towns. African Europeans is a landmark celebration of this integral, vibrantly complex slice of European history, and will redefine the field for years to come.

©2021 Olivette Otele (P)2021 Basic Books

Critic reviews

“Ms. Otele, a black scholar at Britain’s University of Bristol, takes a broad view of her subject. Sometimes, the African Europeans of the title are, as one might expect, people living in Europe, but on many other occasions, they are blacks or people of mixed-race who have lived elsewhere, in other far-flung quarters of the Atlantic world. Her book is equally sprawling in terms of time, moving back and forth across the centuries, from antiquity to the present.... Some of Ms. Otele’s most interesting material is future-looking, asking questions about the ambivalence experienced by blacks in contemporary Europe.” (Wall Street Journal)

"This brisk, nuanced synthesis reminds us that there have been Africans in Europe for millenia." (Stephen Carter, Bloomberg Opinion, The 15 Best Nonfiction Books of 2021)

“Magisterial.... A story of violence and exclusion but also extraordinary destinies and achievements. Particularly admirable is Otele’s command of the subtleties of identity formation and change over time, as well as her marvellous cast of women characters, such as Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s muse and lover.” (Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Guardian, The Best Books of 2020)

What an amazing history

I enjoyed listening to and learning more about Afro European history. The research done and painstaking attention to the several African lives that make up the histories of many European countries today, is so profound.
Great read👏👏

Great Book!

I really enjoyed this book! This book informs and intersects details about people of African descent, covering many areas from religion to slavery, and more.

Worth the read!

This work was extremely helpful in excavating my history and those who look like me.

A fascinating overview of overlooked history

The history of Africans and their descendents encountering and adapting to Europeans colonizing from the north and emigrating/being taken to far off lands which eventually became their homes over the centuries largely focuses on biographies of specific dual heritage people interacting with various white Europeans societies & governments. At times, as the author points out, the first hand information is scant or outright missing -- making clear the challenges of gathering a thorough history of a topic assumed by some to be nonexistent.

It has been unusual to hear an audiobook read by the author unless the writer is also a performer. That proved to be awkward at times in this case. Professor Otele has an interesting accent where the French roots are clear and many words are quite English, but sometimes the pronunciations are odd and the phrasing uncomfortable. It sounded like the recording was a chore -- with some sections clearly being recorded at a different time in a different place.

While I was ultimately glad to hear an accomplished academic presenting the fruit of her labor, at times I wondered what a more polished performance of the text by Idris Elba or Letitia Wright (both mentioned towards the end) would have added.

A good book

A good listen and good history. Author struggles a bit due to her French accent.

Eye-opening Narrative

I knew very little if our Afhro Europeans' struggles with racism and now know that there is NO safe haven for US. We have to continue to persevere and improve OUR situation by ANY and ALL means.

Granada 1st black professor

great experience illustrating you don't know what you don't know! We are really human race and have always been so!

Very informative

I really enjoy the history . It’s also very important to know and understand your history.

Terrible reader

1-Please have people who are fluent in English read in English
2-history is shallow. Should have gone back further than Roman Empire

Doesn’t live up to the promising title

Bought this book hoping for a thorough history of African presence in Europe from Roman times to the present, as told from an African-European perspective. Instead, this is a phoned-in catalogue of mythical figures, flat portrayals of what must have been truly fascinating historical actors, padded with long passages of academic theories and quotes from other writers that you would only read if you went back to grad school. It strings together pedantic sketches of obscure saints and scribes known (unfortunately) mostly to academics, and yet perplexingly ignores some of the most compelling examples of both the “white” view of African immigrants (like Othello) and well-documented individuals like General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, whose dramatic life and death from the Haitian Revolution to Napoleon was told by Tom Reiss in “The Black Count.”
This book is at its best when taking a deep dive into subjects like the complex social interactions between African women and their Danish marriage prospects in the author’s native Senegal. But then it bewilderingly careens into Danish-American political relations around the Danish centennial commemoration in 2012 (maybe it was 2012; the switch was so jarring I can’t quite recall).
This book got a lot of praise, and maybe it deserves some for being an early attempt to write a story that is difficult to capture, given the paucity of firsthand accounts from African immigrants and their dual heritage descendants prior to the 19th century.
But readers will have to wait for the kind of creative, confident, comprehensive account of what it was like to be an African European during the multicultural Roman Empire, the East/West merchant routes of the Middle Ages, the robust international scholarly exchange of the Renaissance, or the complex political dynamics of the global slave trade. I really hope some student of Dr. Otele is working on that book right now.