Too many of our convictions about the fifty-four nations of Africa come from non-African sources. Western media often treat the continent as a simulacrum of Western anxieties. In contrast, Jeremy Harding focuses on specific historical episodes and cultural practices - cinema, art, ethnography and journalism - to steer us away from treacherous generalisations.

Analogue Africa celebrates the ingenuity with which African artists - and a handful of Europeans - have reimagined the colonial encounter and voiced their impatience with white minority rule. Among his illustrious cast of filmmakers, photographers, writers and painters are Seydou Ke ta, Sanl Sory, Ernest Cole, Sarah Maldoror, John Akomfrah, William Kentridge and Binyavanga Wainaina. Harding argues that Western museums with priceless African holdings - the British Museum, the Mus e du Quai Branly, the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Belgium - are now the sites of a struggle over the colonial past, adding the latest chapter to an unfinished history.

JEREMY HARDING is a Contributing Editor at the London Review of Books. His books include Border Vigils; Small Wars, Small Mercies; and Mother Country.