Africa has seen some sad centuries in recent history, and her old glories are easily forgotten; some, indeed, are virtually unknown to Westerners. It was not all slave-trading or war; these old kingdoms and empires often reached a high level of culture, civil and artistic. The overgrown or crumbled monuments of vanished peoples and their cultures recur all over the huge continent. The twin authors have gone wide if rarely deep, mustering history, legend, anecdotes together and supplementing them with visual records where that is still possible. They do not gloss over the sometimes grim realities of the past, but they still throw a good deal of clear daylight over the Dark Continent.