Luke Pepera’s debut Motherland: A Journey through 500,000 years of African Culture and Identity is a ground-breaking exploration of Africa’s uniquely long history and diverse cultures, interwoven with Luke’s experiences of growing up in a Ghanaian family. Luke talks to novelist Carolyn Kirby about the genesis of his remarkable book.
CK: Motherland is such a distinctive book, combining as it does history, anthropology and culture to create a hugely readable introduction to a continent. Just the list of illustrations alone gives a flavour of the wide range of topics that you cover, from the ancient mosque at Kilwa to the rapper Kool Moe Dee.
You mention in the introduction that the book’s origins lay in a sixth form extended essay which involved a museum visit in Ghana, so this project has clearly been close to your heart for a very long time.
LP: Indeed! My fascination with African history goes back to my schooldays and I can pinpoint that museum visit as an inspiration because, in fact, I found myself somewhat disappointed by the objects on display. Almost all of the artefacts on show dated from the eras of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade and I felt sure that there must be so much more to Ghanaian history than this.
Later, after leaving university, I began to write seriously about African subjects. And once I knew I was going to write this book, I decided on a thematic structure that would allow me to range widely over subjects that interested me. Some of the first things I wrote about, like medieval West African empires and the invention of racism, have made it into the book.
CK: I love the way you write about your personal experience of African identity. This really enlivens the anthropological subjects in the book. Particularly memorable is your description of your grandfather’s funeral and the rituals that accompanied his passing.
LP: Yes, I sensed that my grandpa’s funeral really captured the essence of an African way of looking at the world. I wanted to convey the richness of his belief system by showing both the Roman Catholic rites and the traditional African rituals that were part of his funeral ceremonies.
In the chapter called How the Dead Still Live, I explain the importance of ancestral relationships in Africa, and how death is not an ending but a transition from the physical to the spirit world, a world that is ever-present although invisible. My experiences of engaging with the rituals for my grandpa, help to illuminate the reality of the African values about death and life.
CK: And your description of a spiritual object, a stool, associated with your grandfather, is so fascinating. This is especially interesting for historians who might be studying past cultures where material objects were invested with spiritual or supernatural significance.
LP: Absolutely! Amongst the Akan people of Ghana, of whom my family are a part, small carved stools are very important cultural artefacts. They are everyday useful objects closely associated with individuals that can act as gifts and even be part of a chief’s regalia. But they are also believed to contain the souls of the departed and act as a sort of portal for the living into the spirit world. And when I touched the stool that had been my grandfather’s, I felt his presence.
CK: It’s so moving and interesting to hear this. And I think that the concept of a continuity of life and death is a challenge to the way that we in the West think about history. In some of what you write about Africa’s past, time seems collapsed and chronology unimportant compared to the message of the story.
LP: I think this is because Africa has been inhabited for longer than anywhere else and there is so much to be remembered. What becomes most important are the stories and what they mean rather than the facts and figures. And much of the content of the most powerful historical stories are understood to be mythological.
But the main thing is that these stories convey strong emotion in telling us about who we are and how we got here. One of the examples I give is from the storytellers of the Western Sahel whose stories use words that are literally unintelligible.
The storytellers themselves don’t know what they mean because the stories are so old that some of the words are no longer understood. But the message of the story as a whole remains consistent, and its unchanging nature shows a continuity of beliefs over a vast period of time.
Knowing about the exact length of that time is less important. If you come from the Western tradition, this can be a hard concept to grasp, but when studying Africa, you have to be really open minded in your approach to history.
CK: The transatlantic slave trade is a subject which you decidedly didn’t want to dominate your view of African history, and yet you write about it with great eloquence and insight. You have clearly thought long and deeply about the subject. Where did your earliest ideas about the slave trade come from?
LP: My father was a huge influence as he encouraged me never to see Africans solely as victims in these narratives of enslavement. If Africans are always presented as colonised and downtrodden it creates a historical prejudice that can obscure reality. The fact is that early modern African societies traded with Europeans on equal terms, even when it came to the triangular trade. The exchange between the two continents was long-standing, complex and nuanced.
I didn’t want to take for granted the idea that when these different cultures interacted it was always to the Europeans’ advantage and the Africans’ detriment. Some African kingdoms were very willing to sustain the trade in people for goods, but I also tell the story of the early 18th-century king Agaja who fought to stamp the trade out.
I also wanted to make clear that the slave trade didn’t evolve from an assumption on the part of Europeans that Africans were inferior. I describe in my chapter, The Invention of racism, how this only came later once the system of plantation slavery was already established. And the transatlantic slave trade itself came about essentially by accident.
At one point, New World settlers tried to use captured native Americans as unpaid labourers on their farms. But it was found that indigenous peoples of the Americas were too vulnerable to new, imported diseases to be relied on as an enslaved workforce. Africans, being from the Old World, happened to have the same sort of disease immunity as Europeans. And so, the transatlantic trade grew.
CK: I’m really fascinated with this idea of immunology being at the root of the transatlantic slave trade. And it’s a revelation to read your explanation of the way that anti-African racism developed from an entirely economic foundation directly as a result of plantation slavery.
LP: I found so many examples from earlier eras in which early modern societies paid no heed at all to skin colour when assessing an individual’s status in society. For instance, Alessandro de’ Medici, a 16th-century ruler of Florence, was the son of an African maidservant. But when his rivals tried to claim that he was unfit for office, their insults were to do only with his mother’s lowly status and not her skin colour.
CK: It’s incredible how widely Motherland ranges given its concise number of pages, yet the extensive footnotes and bibliography demonstrate the wealth of research that you have poured into the book. Out of all that research, what did you find out that most surprised you?
LP: If I have to pick one thing, I’d say finding out about the medieval university at Timbuktu in Mali. I’d heard of it before, but never realised how developed and extensive it was. At its height, the university hosted 25,000 scholars which was the biggest in the world at the time and equivalent to many major universities today. And there was a library of more than a million texts. It was basically a modern university thriving in Africa 700 years ago.
CK: And I was also astonished by the scene you paint of medieval Islamic Africa through a description of the pilgrimage of Mansa Musa, reputedly the wealthiest man who ever lived!
LP: Indeed, he was an extraordinary figure. When Musa went on pilgrimage from Mali to Mecca in the early 14th century, he took with him thousands of servants and a camel train carrying tons of gold. And Musa spent so much of it in Cairo that the price of gold was depressed for a decade afterwards!
It’s said that in every place on the route of the pilgrimage that Musa rested on a Friday, he decreed that a brand-new mosque should be built on that spot. The wealth at his disposal is astonishing.
CK: It’s just one vivid example from a book crammed with astonishing stories and ideas. Congratulations, Luke, on writing this exceptional debut.
Motherland: A Journey through 500,000 years of African Culture and Identity by Luke Pepera is published on 30 January, 2025.
Luke Pepera is a writer, broadcaster, historian and anthropologist specialising in Africa. He was born in Ghana and studied Archaeology & Anthropology at St Peter’s College, Oxford.
He has worked at the Pitt Rivers Museum, written for publications including the Financial Times, wrote and presented the documentary Africa: Written Out of History for History Hit and has been featured on numerous podcasts, including The Rest is History. Luke was one of the judges for the 2021 HWA Non-fiction Crown Award.
Carolyn Kirby is a novelist and HWA member. Her debut novel, The Conviction of Cora Burns was longlisted for the 2019 HWA Debut Crown Award. Her follow-up, When We Fall, is a thriller and dark love story set between Britain and Poland during the Second World War. Ravenglass will be published in September 2025.
Carolyn has interviewed other authors for Historia:
AD Bergin
Clare Mulley (about Agent Zo)
Clare Mulley (about Clare’s successful campaign for an English Heritage blue plaque to commemorate wartime SOE agent Krystyna Skarbek)
Read Carolyn’s features about the background to her novels:
‘Paedo Hunter Turns Prey!’ The ironic fate of the father of tabloid journalism
Fifty years of fake news; the cover-up of the Katyn Massacre
Images:
- Mansa Musa sitting on a throne and holding a gold coin, detail from the Catalan Atlas, attrib Abraham Cresques, 1375: Bibliothèque nationale de France via Wikimedia (public domain)
- The prayers room inside the extension of the great mosque of Kilwa at Kilwa Kisiwani: Robin Chew for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- Stool from Ghana at the World Museum Liverpool: Rept0n1x for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
- Mandinka griot Al-Haji Papa Susso performing songs from the oral tradition of the Gambia on the kora, 1999: DavidOaks for Wikimedia (public domain)
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- Portrait of Alessandro de Medici after Giorgio Vasari, between 1534 and 1574: Princeton University Art Museum (public domain)
