For too long scholars and editors with an ethnocentric bias published problematic books on African history associating the continent with negative stereotypes. Their publications perpetuated the view that Africans had made no contributions to the world and will only progress from darkness and ignorance with the arrival of European and North American saviors. The dominant interpretation of the African slave trade had disseminated the notion that those forcibly taken from the continent to the Americas gained enlightenment and a better life in subsequent generations