# The new General History of Africa: an exponential growth  
The Volume IX of the General History of Africa project is the third phase, launched in 2013, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The impetus came from Brazil. The Brazilian parliament passed a law on the mandatory teaching of the history of Africans and of Afrodescendants at all levels of public education in the country. The Brazilian Government offered funding for an additional volume in the GHA series, a volume that would feature the history of African diasporas worldwide. The new project, anchored on the key concept of 'Global Africa', encourages literary and artistic approaches to gain better insight into certain aspects of the experiences of Africans and people of African descent. It advocates the use of concepts or notions in African languages, allowing people to think in African terms, realizes comparative studies in relation to South America and Asia, and offers a balanced and positive history of Africa and its diasporas.  
The contributors were asked to think about writing history differently and to invent another way of portraying history. They were particularly encouraged to take into account the literary and artistic productions concerning historic African experiences as essential materials in the writing of the endogenous history of Africa and Africans. The contexts and their specific implementation of the concept of race would be central to understanding how Africans and people of African descent refer to themselves. It would also involve critical observation of the dynamics of the relationship between Africa and its diasporas, African 'globality', movements back and forth and the ways in which Africa could connect to the rest of the world.