In the House of Our Ancestors by Karl Maier"Two recent works dominated conversations about Africa in the late 1990s: Robert B. Kaplan's article The Coming Anarchy and Keith B. Richburg's book, Out of America - a surprising circumstance, perhaps, since neither work was, strictly speaking, about Africa," says Howard French, a New York Times writer. It was like this until, with Karl Maier's In the House of Our Ancestors, a somewhat optimistic vision of Africa emerged. Maier is the first person to write a book about what some call the African Renaissance. Maier quotes Nelson Mandela: “We are moving from an era of resistance, division, oppression, turmoil and conflict and beginning a new era of hope, reconciliation and nation-building.” Maier addresses some of the major problems Africa has faced in the past, but states: "However, blaming Africa's myriad problems on the outside world simply no longer serves, and it is very rare to hear Africans living in Africa offer such excuses,” and continues “Even without the constraints of the unbalanced economic relationship with the West, African countries have their own very urgent problems to solve, and only they can do it.” Maier's book is detrimental to understanding where Africa is today and in which direction the continent is going. Maier's unbiased opinion and the stories told about the individuals of Africa invite us to look at the continent in a completely different way. Many of the problems that Africans have faced in the past are covered in Maier's book. It's about colonization and black diaspora. Maier states that the Berlin Conference caused: "the struggle of African peoples to reclaim their birthright, to pursue their lives in relative safety and with the reasonable hope of providing a better future for their children, had only just begun, and would have suffered many reverses.” To break the curse, Africa must take back the good of the past and meet the needs of the future. Maier states: “Africans must reclaim the sense of history and purpose that colonialism has robbed them of.