For an atlas, the maps are awful: a 2-color mess that uses the same crap outline of the continent, leaving a large portion of each map page to be taken up by water. The hatched patterns that are meant to represent different ethnic groups are confusing and often unlabeled. The Mbuti, called here pygmies, and the San, at least once referred to as "bushmen" get no hatched patterns and so after a brief mention these areas appear empty on the map, as if waiting for the European colonists. Throughout, a kind of map-painting-game imperialist outlook winds its way through the brief descriptions of each era, with the author seeming to cheer for each conqueror; most egregiously when he describes the second Italian invasion of Abyssinia as "better" "apart from the use of mustard gas." The reader would get the impression that slavery had no real effect on the continent and that when it was abolished worse forms of human sacrifice took its place. Thirty years old, we are due not only for a complete overhaul but also for some new maps as we have new states, name changes, and different alliances today, as well as hopefully better archaeological evidence and more respect for indigenous versions of history to better visualize the continent's past. I tried to find something like this book that would be more recent and less eurocentric, but the only books I could find were juvenile.