Olivette Otele, African Europeans: An Untold History (New York: Basic Books, 2021). Pages xi + 304. $30.00 hardback. $17.99 ebook.

Abstract

For a monograph covering a topic of such great magnitude – African communities in a variety of European countries and their colonies, with special consider-ation of how the intersections of gender, status, and race affected African people ’ s lives across many centuries – the relatively short length could have produced an intro-ductory work full of generalities. But the story that Otele follows is anything but. She humanises her subjects in a series of vignettes meant to draw out larger histories that inform and complicate our understanding of the heterogenous identities that African people embraced, rejected, or carefully negotiated within Europe. The cover of Lawyer, Scholar, Teacher and Activist depicts an image of Professor Roebuck ’ s books on the history of arbitration, from Ancient Greece to the eight-eenth century, positioning this Liber Amicorum as part of the series; a celebration of Derek Roebuck ’ s life, but also a transition from the work of an individual to the works of a collective of scholars (see 27, fn. 38). It offers vivid memories of friend-ships, relationships and shared experiences. At the same time, it is a triumph of original thinking and writing, and independent publishing; weaving a picture of Roebuck in four parts. Part One is a celebration of a life that reads like a novel. A husband, a friend, a mentor, a co-author, a teacher, a thinker, an activist, a cosmopolitan lawyer with a joy for life, and an arbitration legend. The reader is drawn into the world of a complex, attractive character; vignettes of marches, lunches, lectures, meetings, col-laborative projects, and writing sessions; pictures from around the world come together as fascinating narrative. Lucid, impassioned writing and skillful positioning turn sixty pages of text into what feels like a film rather than a compilation of abstract praises. A fascinating aspect of this Part is that it captures, without the sup-port of