African History

The Great Upheaval
Women and Nation in Postwar Nigeria
By Judith A. Byfield

In this finely textured social and intellectual history of gender and nation-making, Byfield captures the dynamism of women’s political activism in postwar Nigeria. She illuminates the centrality of gender to the study of nationalism, thus offering new lines of inquiry into the late colonial era and its consequences for the future Nigerian state.

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

Ambivalent makes photography into 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.

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.

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.

Finding Dr. Livingstone
A History in Documents from the Henry Morton Stanley Archives
Edited by Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi and James L. Newman
· Foreword by Guido Gryseels and Dominique Allard

In 1871, journalist Henry M. Stanley embarked on a search for the famous explorer Dr. David Livingstone. In 1872, Stanley returned with the story of how he had found Livingstone near Lake Tanganyika, restored his health, and resupplied his expedition. This collection of unpublished documents reveals how Stanley shaped the account of his journey.

Emergent Masculinities
Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age
By Ndubueze L. Mbah

Atlanticization—or interaction between regional processes and Atlantic forces such as the slave trade and Christianization—from 1750 to 1920 transformed gender into a primary mode of social differentiation in the Bight of Biafra. Mbah examines this process to fill a major gap in our understanding of gender’s role in precolonial Africa.

Powerful Frequencies
Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931–2002
By Marissa J. Moorman

Radio technology and broadcasting played a central role in the formation of colonial Portuguese Southern Africa and the postcolonial nation-state, Angola. Moorman details how settlers, the colonial state, African nationalists, and the postcolonial state all used radio to project power, while the latter employed it to challenge empire.

Age of Concrete
Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique
By David Morton

Age of Concrete is about people building homes on tenuous ground in the outer neighborhoods of Maputo, Mozambique, places thought of simply as slums. But up close, they are an archive: houses of reeds, wood, zinc, and concrete embodying the ambitions of people who built their own largest investment and greatest bequest to the future.

Converging on Cannibals
Terrors of Slaving in Atlantic Africa, 1509–1670
By Jared Staller

In Converging on Cannibals, Jared Staller demonstrates that one of the most terrifying discourses used during the era of transatlantic slaving—cannibalism—was coproduced by Europeans and Africans. When these people from vastly different cultures first came into contact, they shared a fear of potential cannibals. Some Africans and European slavers allowed these rumors of themselves as man-eaters to stand unchallenged.

Children of Hope
The Odyssey of the Oromo Slaves from Ethiopia to South Africa
By Sandra Rowoldt Shell

In Children of Hope, Sandra Rowoldt Shell details the life histories of sixty-four Oromo children who were enslaved in Ethiopia in the late nineteenth century, liberated by the British navy, and ultimately sent to a Free Church of Scotland mission in South Africa, where their stories were recorded through a series of interviews.