African History

Making Martial Races
Gender, Society, and Warfare in Africa
Edited by Myles Osborne

Featuring contributions by new and established Africanist scholars, this volume is the first book-length treatment of “martial race” in Africa. A key organizing principle of colonialism, the category of martial race was contested by African men and women as they sought to negotiate against the colonial state as well as within their home communities.

African Activists of the Twentieth Century
Hani, Maathai, Mpama/Palmer, Saro-Wiwa
By Hugh Macmillan, Tabitha Kanogo, Robert R. Edgar, Roy Doron, and Toyin Falola

This omnibus edition brings together concise and up-to-date biographies of Chris Hani, Wangari Maathai, Josie Mpama/Palmer, and Ken Saro-Wiwa. The volume complements history, social justice, and political science courses and is a useful collection for general readers interested in learning about Africa’s most influential historical figures.

West African Challenge to Empire
Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War
By Mahir Şaul and Patrick Royer

West African Challenge to Empire examines the anticolonial war in the Volta and Bani region in 1915–16. It was the largest challenge that the French ever faced in their West African colonial empire, and one of the largest armed oppositions to colonialism anywhere in Africa. How such a movement could be organized in the face of European technological superiority despite the fact that this region is generally described as having consisted of rival villages and descent groups is a puzzle.

Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia
The Reformist Intellectuals of the Early Twentieth Century
By Bahru Zewde

In this exciting new study, Bahru Zewde, one of the foremost historians of modern Ethiopia, has constructed a collective biography of a remarkable group of men and women in a formative period of their country’s history. Ethiopia’s political independence at the end of the nineteenth century put this new African state in a position to determine its own levels of engagement with the West. Ethiopians went to study in universities around the world.

African Leaders of the Twentieth Century, Volume 2
Cabral, Machel, Mugabe, Sirleaf
By Allen F. Isaacman, Barbara S. Isaacman, Peter Karibe Mendy, Sue Onslow, Martin Plaut, and Pamela Scully

This omnibus edition brings together concise and up-to-date biographies of Amílcar Cabral, Samora Machel, Robert Mugabe, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. African Leaders of the Twentieth Century, Volume 2 complements courses in history and political science and serves as a useful collection for general readers.

African Leaders of the Twentieth Century, Volume 2
Cabral, Machel, Mugabe, Sirleaf
By Allen F. Isaacman, Barbara S. Isaacman, Peter Karibe Mendy, Sue Onslow, Martin Plaut, and Pamela Scully

This omnibus edition brings together concise and up-to-date biographies of Amílcar Cabral, Samora Machel, Robert Mugabe, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. African Leaders of the Twentieth Century, Volume 2 complements courses in history and political science and serves as a useful collection for general readers.

Everyday State and Democracy in Africa
Ethnographic Encounters
Edited by Wale Adebanwi

Through ethnographic case studies of Africans’ quotidian encounters with state bureaucracy, infrastructure, discipline, citizenship, democracy, political economy, education, and health, this book demonstrates how the state not only enables but also constrains and complicates ordinary Africans’ daily struggles to live and live well.

Sports in Africa, Past and Present
Edited by Todd Cleveland, Tarminder Kaur, and Gerard Akindes

Through the prism of sports and from a range of scholarly perspectives, this anthology offers insight into the varied and shifting experiences of African athletes, fans, communities, and postcolonial states.

A History of Tourism in Africa
Exoticization, Exploitation, and Enrichment
By Todd Cleveland

This book—ideal for African and world history classes, as well as for potential travelers to the continent—takes readers on a journey through the dynamics of Africa’s tourist history from the nineteenth century to the present to illuminate and challenge deeply ingrained (mis)perceptions about the continent and its peoples.

Anxiety in and about Africa
Multidisciplinary Perspectives and Approaches
Edited by Andrea Mariko Grant and Yolana Pringle

This addition to the Cambridge Centre of African Studies Series presents multidisciplinary essays that demonstrate how individual and collective anxieties can unsettle dominant historical narratives, shape contemporary discourse, and appear across material culture.

Sports in Africa, Past and Present
Edited by Todd Cleveland, Tarminder Kaur, and Gerard Akindes

Through the prism of sports and from a range of scholarly perspectives, this anthology offers insight into the varied and shifting experiences of African athletes, fans, communities, and postcolonial states.

Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa
By Nwando Achebe

Drawing from distinctly African source materials and methods, Achebe’s groundbreaking historical account examines the shared power, influence, and authority that uniquely African, female-gendered entities—people, diviners, and deities—exert across Africa’s interconnected physical and spiritual worlds.

Safari Nation
A Social History of the Kruger National Park
By Jacob S. T. Dlamini

Safari Nation tells the history of the Kruger National Park through a black perspective, helping explain why Africa’s national parks—often derided by scholars as colonial impositions—survived the end of white rule on the continent.

Ambivalent
Photography and Visibility in African History
Edited by Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley

Ambivalent makes photography an engaging and important subject of historical investigation. Contributors bring photography into conversation with orality, travel writing, ritual, psychoanalysis, and politics, with new approaches to questions of race, time, and postcolonial and decolonial histories.

Seeing Like a Citizen
Decolonization, Development, and the Making of Kenya, 1945–1980
By Kara Moskowitz

In focusing on rural Kenyans as they actively sought access to aid, Moskowitz offers new insights into the texture of political life in the decolonizing and early postcolonial world. Her account complicates our understanding of Kenyan experiences of independence, and the meaning and form of development.

The Politics of Disease Control
Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890–1920
By Mari K. Webel

Situating sleeping sickness control within African intellectual worlds and political dynamics, Webel prioritizes local histories to understand the successes and failures of a widely used colonial public health intervention—the sleeping sickness camp—in dialogue with African strategies to mitigate illness and death in the past.