Meredith says unlike China Africa does not draw strength from its history, and that China could help put the fragmented continent back together. [Photo by Nick J.B. Moore/ For China Daily]

Historian spent four years to write his 700-page book on the continent.

Martin Meredith believes Africa finds it difficult to draw strength from its ancient civilization the way China does.

The veteran journalist and writer has just produced a book, The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour, that traces the continent's history back to its earliest origins.

But despite going back to the Egyptian pharaohs and the origins of the Niger-Congo peoples of the fourth millennium BC, much of this early culture, he argues, now remains buried in the problems of the present.

"China has an ancient civilization and in a sense is able to draw upon it, but I think in Africa this does not really apply.

"If you look at tropical sub-Saharan Africa they had no method of writing really until Arabic was used in the north after the Arab invasions. They had very minimal engineering progress. They didn't even use the wheel, for example. Very different from China," he says.

Meredith, a long-time African journalist and biographer of Nelson Mandela and Robert Mugabe, was speaking at St Anthony's College, where he was a research fellow in the 1980s.

His latest 700-page book took him four years to write, including one of just research.

"I wondered whether it would be possible at the start to write a single volume on a continent over a period of 5,000 years. All similar books in existence on the whole tend to be written by academics.

"It took me a year to get to grips with a lot of the ancient history that I really didn't know about before. The theme of wealth came much later but there is a sense that Africans have failed to turn their wealth into a broader kind of benefit."

That resources were some form of curse is a theme that repeats itself throughout African history. South Africa's first president, Paul Kruger, spoke of the "curse" of gold that would bring "rivers of tears".

"He was an Old Testament patriarch really who thought worldly things like gold were just a menace and it turned out he was right but not really for the religious reasons that concerned him," he says.

The issue of whether Africa benefits from its natural resources has arisen again with China's new economic relationship with the continent over the past decade.