Teaser Tuesdays will be a bit different for a couple of months: I have responsibilities on Tuesdays that prevent me from coming near a computer until the early evening. Thus the link to ShouldBeReading will be to the blog itself, and not the TT post — although on a Tuesday the most current post would be Teaser Tuesday, so the effect is the same.

The absence of the wheel and the plough from sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, is cited in a context suggesting inherent backwardness and ineptitude. A closer look shows that the wheel and plough were simply never an option for the indigenous sub-Saharan farmer — not simply because many African soils are difficult to plough and domesticated draught animals would be susceptible to endemic disease; a more pressing reason was that feeding the animals would place unsustainable demands on the food-production system.

254, Africa: A Biography of the Continent.  John Reader.