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.
African History · Human Geography · Urban Planning · Mozambique · African Studies
Finding Dr. Livingstone
A History in Documents from the Henry Morton Stanley Archive
Edited by Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi and James L. Newman
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Foreword by Guido Gryseels and Dominique Allard
In 1870, 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 This collection of unpublished documents reveals how Stanley shaped the account of his journey.
Diaries and Journals · African History · Africa · African Studies · Biography, Explorers
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.
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.
Staging the Amistad
Three Sierra Leonean Plays
By Charlie Haffner, Yulisa Amadu Maddy, and Raymond E. D. de’Souza George
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Edited by Matthew J. Christensen
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Introduction by Matthew J. Christensen
Staging the Amistad collects for the first time plays about the Amistad slave revolt by three of Sierra Leone’s most influential playwrights of the latter decades of the 20th century. Written and staged before and after the start of Sierra Leone’s decade-long conflict, they brought the Amistad rebellion to public consciousness.
African Theater · Sierra Leone · African Studies · African Authors
Modernist Art in Ethiopia
By Elizabeth W. Giorgis
If modernism initially came to Africa through colonial contact, what does Ethiopia’s inimitable historical condition—its independence save for five years under Italian occupation—mean for its own modernist tradition?
A Short History of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
By Terri Ochiagha
In the accessible and concise A Short History of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Terri Ochiagha asks new questions and brings wider attention to unfamiliar but crucial elements of the story, including new insights into questions of canonicity, and into literary, historiographical, and precolonial aesthetic influences.
African History · Literary Criticism, Africa · African Studies
Pursuing Justice in Africa
Competing Imaginaries and Contested Practices
Edited by Jessica Johnson and George Hamandishe Karekwaivanane
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Afterword by Kamari Maxine Clarke
Pursuing Justice in Africa focuses on visions of justice across the African continent, featuring essays that engage with topics at the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship across a wide range of disciplines including activism, land tenure, international legal institutions, and post-conflict reconciliation.
Anthropology · Human Rights · Gender Studies · Religion, Politics, and the State · Ethics · Africa · African Studies · Law
Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War
Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the War on Terror
By Elizabeth Schmidt
Many challenges facing the African continent today are rooted in colonial practices, Cold War alliances, and outsiders’ attempts to influence its political and economic systems. Interdisciplinary and intended for nonspecialists, this book provides a new framework for thinking about foreign political and military intervention in Africa.
African History · Security · Terrorism · Violence in Society · Africa · African Studies · Colonialism and Decolonization
Prelude to Genocide
Arusha, Rwanda, and the Failure of Diplomacy
By David Rawson
David Rawson draws on declassified documents and his own experiences as the initial US observer of the 1993 Rwandan peace talks at Arusha to seek out what led to the Rwandan genocide. The result is a commanding blend of diplomatic history and analysis of the crisis and of what happens generally when conflict resolution and diplomacy fall short.
Political Science, Genocide · Peace Studies · Diplomacy · International Studies · Rwanda · African Studies
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.
African History · African Studies · Eastern Africa · Slavery and Slave Trade · Childhood · Children's Studies
Amy Biehl’s Last Home
A Bright Life, a Tragic Death, and a Journey of Reconciliation in South Africa
By Steven D. Gish
Granted unrestricted access to the Biehl family’s papers, Steven Gish brings Amy and the Foundation to life in ways that have eluded previous authors. He is the first to place Biehl’s story in its full historical context, while also presenting a gripping portrait of this remarkable young woman and the aftermath of her death across two continents.
Biography, Women · African History · South Africa · African Studies
Buying Time
Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean
By Thomas F. McDow
Thomas F. McDow synthesizes Indian Ocean, Middle Eastern, and East African studies to explain how in the nineteenth century, credit, mobility, and kinship knit together a vast interconnected Indian Ocean region. McDow's new historical analysis of the Indian Ocean reveals roles of previously invisible people.
African History · African Studies · Legal and Constitutional History · Social History · 19th century · World History · Middle East
Hip-Hop in Africa
Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers
By Msia Kibona Clark
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Foreword by Quentin Williams
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Afterword by Akosua Adomako Ampofo
Msia Kibona Clark examines some of Africa’s biggest hip-hop scenes and shows how hip-hop helps us understand specifically African realities. A tribute to a genre and its artists, Hip-Hop in Africa details the spread of hip-hop culture in Africa and pushes the study of music and diaspora in critical new directions.
Hip Hop · African History · Women’s Studies · African Studies · Africa
Robert Mugabe
By Sue Onslow and Martin Plaut
For some, Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe is a liberation hero who confronted white rule and oversaw the radical redistribution of land. For others, he is a murderous dictator who drove his country to poverty. This concise biography, in a highly successful series, reveals the complexity of the man who led Zimbabwe for its first decades of independence.
Biography, Heads of State · African History · Zimbabwe · African Studies
