I have spent most of my working life trying to understand two things: how the modern world was actually made, and why some of the people most deeply responsible for making it have been so systematically written out of the story.
That question took me to West and Central Africa, first as a young freelance reporter, and then as a New York Times bureau chief across Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa again, and Asia. This motivation drove me as I left daily journalism to pursue the writing of history at book length. At bottom, though, the reporting and the history have felt like elements of the same project to me, pursued through different means.
Over five decades of work that has brought me to every continent, I have covered wars, revolutions, the aftermath of apartheid and the travails of political and economic democracy in Africa, the most rapid phase of China’s rise, and the long, unfinished reckoning with the legacy of European expansion in the world. That work produced six books, which have been translated into numerous languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and German.
Born in Blackness argues that Africa and its peoples, trafficked across the Atlantic, were the hidden engines of modernity. The Second Emancipation recovers the world-historical significance of Kwame Nkrumah and the moment of African independence. Everything Under the Heavens is an exploration of China’s deep past which seeks to help us understand that country better by exploring how it has understood and exercised its power over the ages. China’s Second Continent is a book of deep reportage about the rapidly growing numbers of Chinese migrants to Africa in this century, as China began to embrace a continent the West had turned its back to. My first book, A Continent for the Taking, is a work of reportage and memoir of my years covering Africa in the 1990s for The New York Times. A sixth book, Disappearing Shanghai, is something different: a documentary photographer’s record of a city caught between two worlds, portrayed with a camera as the wrecking balls for an older Shanghai arrived.
My first book about the United States, The Jungles — forthcoming from Liveright (W. W. Norton) in February 2027 — asks the same questions, only closer to home: what was destroyed when Robert Moses oversaw the erasure of the Black neighborhood that made Thelonious Monk, and what does this erasure tell us about America’s cultural values and the way it writes its own history?
I write a weekly column on global affairs for Foreign Policy and contribute frequently to the New York Review of Books. I am a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where I try to pass on what five decades of experience have taught me about reporting and writing.
— Howard W. French
