One of the paradoxes of history is that it took Africa's contact with the Arab world to make the Black people of Africa realize that they were black in description, but not necessarily in status … On the other hand, it took European conceptualization and cartography to turn Africa into a continent.

Historians of Africa can no longer overlook race. To scholars of African-diaspora studies (who often work under the rubric of Africana studies, black studies, and African American studies), the recognition of this fact is long overdue. With the rise of the area-studies paradigm in the 1950s, North American scholars of Africa became preoccupied with the rise of nationalism and the writing or critique of national histories. The future was defined by national development, while the study of the past was centered on the search for a pristine precolonial identity. Consequently, a world of nations took precedence in scholarly writing over concerns about the management of empires, colonies and, strikingly, races. Even as Africanist scholars came to reevaluate the successes and failures of the postcolonial experience across Africa in the 1970s, they frequently lamented the persistence of ethnic conflict, but not of ongoing forms of racial hierarchy. Race, insofar as it was treated at all, tended to be confined to the “colonial episode” and to settler states, like South Africa.

历史的一个悖论是，非洲与阿拉伯世界的接触使非洲黑人意识到他们在描述上是黑人，但在地位上不一定是黑人……另一方面，是欧洲的概念化和制图学转向非洲变成大陆。

非洲历史学家不能再忽视种族。对于非洲侨民研究的学者（他们经常在非洲研究、黑人研究和非裔美国人研究的标题下工作），早就应该认识到这一事实。随着 1950 年代地区研究范式的兴起，北美的非洲学者开始全神贯注于民族主义的兴起以及对民族历史的写作或批判。未来由国家发展决定，而对过去的研究则集中在寻找原始的前殖民身份。因此，在学术写作中，国家世界优先于对帝国、殖民地和种族管理的关注。即使非洲学者开始重新评估 1970 年代整个非洲的后殖民经历的成败，他们经常感叹种族冲突的持续存在，而不是持续存在的种族等级制度。种族，就它所得到的处理而言，往往仅限于“殖民时期”和定居国，如南非。