African Studies

African Studies Book List

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Forthcoming

Written Out
The Silencing of Regina Gelana Twala
By Joel Cabrita

This biography of Twala, an unjustly neglected Black African literary figure in apartheid South Africa and colonial Swaziland (now Eswatini), shows that her posthumous obscurity has been no accident. The book charts how White scholars and politicians used racial and gendered prejudices to erase Twala’s work and claim her uncompensated intellectual labor for themselves.

Cover of 'African Activists of the Twentieth Century'

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.

Biography, Activists · History | Modern | 20th Century · African History · Kenya · Nigeria · South Africa · African Studies

Convening Black Intimacy
Christianity, Gender, and Tradition in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa
By Natasha Erlank

This social history of twentieth-century Black intimacy and family life in South Africa is the first book to demonstrate the singular role of Christianity in reshaping sexual and marital traditions. It is a must-read for scholars interested in the politics of gender, sexuality, and family in South Africa, as well as for historians of Christianity.

A Language for the World
The Standardization of Swahili
By Morgan J. Robinson

Based on extensive archival research, this intellectual history of Standard Swahili—a dialect of the Swahili language written in the Latin alphabet—argues that attention to the intertwined processes of codification from 1864 to 1964 lends new perspectives on history, colonialism, time, and cultural representation in East Africa and beyond.

Foreign Language Study | Swahili · Social History · Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social · Eastern Africa · African Studies · Swahili

Cover of 'Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia'

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 History · African Studies · Ethiopia

Cover of 'African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900–1950'

African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900–1950
By Tabitha Kanogo

This book explores the history of African womanhood in colonial Kenya. By focussing on key sociocultural institutions and practices around which the lives of women were organized, and on the protracted debates that surrounded these institutions and practices during the colonial period, it investigates the nature of indigenous, mission, and colonial control of African women.The

Women’s Studies · History | Africa | East · Colonialism and Decolonization · Customs, Traditions, and Everyday Life · Kenya · Eastern Africa · Africa · African Studies

Africa Writes Back
The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature
By James Currey

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart provided the impetus for the foundation of Heinemann’s African Writers Series in 1962 with Achebe as the editorial adviser. Africa Writes Back presents portraits of the leading characters and the many consultants and readers providing reports and advice to new and established writers.

Literary Criticism, Africa · Africa · African Studies · African Literature

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

Never-before-published documents from Henry Stanley’s historic 1871 expedition to what is now Tanzania in search of David Livingstone recasts Stanley’s sensationalized narrative with new details about the people involved, their systems of knowledge, commerce, and labor, the natural environment, and the spread of modern colonial powers in Africa.

History | Expeditions & Discoveries · Literary Collections | Diaries & Journals · History | Africa | East · Eastern Africa · Tanzania · African Studies

Cover of 'West African Challenge to Empire'

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.

African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · Military History · African Studies · Burkina Faso · Mali

Africanizing Oncology
Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda
By Marissa Mika

Combining methods from African studies, science and technology studies, and medical anthropology, Marissa Mika considers the Uganda Cancer Institute as a microcosm of the Ugandan state and as a lens through which to trace the political, technological, moral, and intellectual aspirations and actions of health care providers and patients.

Cover of 'War and Society in Colonial Zambia, 1939–1953'

War and Society in Colonial Zambia, 1939–1953
By Alfred Tembo

The first major study of its kind, this book shows—from a Zambian perspective—how Northern Rhodesia, then a British colony, organized and deployed human, military, and natural resources during the Second World War. New research and oral histories further demonstrate the war’s social and industrial impact on Zambia in the immediate postwar period.

History | Africa | South | General · Political Science | Imperialism · World War II · Zambia · Eastern Africa · South Asia · Middle East · African Studies

Apartheid’s Black Soldiers
Un-national Wars and Militaries in Southern Africa
By Lennart Bolliger

Thousands of Black troops served in South Africa’s security forces in Namibia and Angola during apartheid. Bolliger’s new research leads him to reject their common depiction as “collaborators,” challenge the portrayal of the wars in which they fought as struggles for national liberation, and reveal the complexity of South Africa’s military culture.

History | Africa | South | General · Military History · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · South Africa

To Speak and Be Heard
Seeking Good Government in Uganda, ca. 1500–2015
By Holly Elisabeth Hanson

Through detailed archival research, Hanson reveals the origins of Uganda’s strategies for good government—assembly, assent, and powerful gifts—and explains why East African party politics often fail.

Political Science, Africa · History | Africa | East · Colonialism and Decolonization · Uganda · Eastern Africa · African Studies

Cover of 'African Leaders of the Twentieth Century, Volume 2'

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.

Biography & Autobiography | Political · African History · Political Science, Africa · Africa · African Studies

Cover of 'Everyday State and Democracy in Africa'

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.

Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social · Political Science | Public Affairs & Administration · Africa · African Studies · African History

Available

Rewriting Modernity
Studies in Black South African Literary History
By David Attwell

Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History connects the black literary archive in South Africa to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz.

Literary Criticism, Africa · South Africa · Literature · African Studies

Spear
Mandela and the Revolutionaries
By Paul S. Landau

Spanning the years just before (and just after) Nelson Mandela’s 1962 arrest, this entirely fresh history of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), or Spear of the Nation, and its revolutionary milieu brings to life the period in which Mandela and his comrades fought South Africa’s apartheid regime not only with words and protests, but also with bombs and fire.

History | Revolutionary · Political Science, Africa · History | Africa | South | Republic of South Africa · Violence in Society · South Africa · African Studies

Spear
Mandela and the Revolutionaries
By Paul S. Landau

History | Revolutionary · Political Science, Africa · History | Africa | South | Republic of South Africa · Violence in Society · South Africa · African Studies

Cover of 'Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa'

Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa
The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria
By Saheed Aderinto

From debates over the aesthetics of birds in the urban landscape to how horse racing enhanced imperial power to the ways in which water navigation impacted aquatic creatures, Saheed Aderinto argues that it is impossible to comprehend the full extent of imperial domination without considering the colonial subjecthood of animals.

The Histories of HIVs
The Emergence of the Multiple Viruses That Caused the AIDS Epidemics
Edited by William H. Schneider

In this interdisciplinary collection, experts provide the most complete description to date of the often ignored and underappreciated features of the history of the multiple human immunodeficiency viruses (HIVs) responsible for the global AIDS pandemic.

Medical | Epidemiology · HIV-AIDS · Medical | Public Health · Africa · African Studies

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 engagement in postwar Nigeria. She illuminates the centrality of gender to the study of nationalism, offering new lines of inquiry into the late colonial era and its consequences for the future Nigerian state.

History | Africa | West · Women’s Studies · Colonialism and Decolonization · Social History · Nigeria · African Studies

Africanizing Oncology
Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda
By Marissa Mika

Embodied Engineering
Gendered Labor, Food Security, and Taste in Twentieth-Century Mali
By Laura Ann Twagira

Common narratives about development in Africa miss the critical technological work of women. Twagira’s study instead positions Malian women as rural engineers whose strategic planning and labor over the course of the twentieth century assured their food security.

The Muridiyya on the Move
Islam, Migration, and Place Making
By Cheikh Anta Babou

Representations of diasporic Murid disciples often depict them as passive recipients of change wrought by powerful clerics left behind in Senegal. In this study, Cheikh Anta Babou examines the construction of their transnational collective identity and its influence on cultural practices, identities, and aspirations.

Emigration and Immigration · History | Africa | West · Sufism · Senegal · Cote d'Ivoire · Gabon · France · United States · African Studies

War and Society in Colonial Zambia, 1939–1953
By Alfred Tembo

History | Africa | South | General · Political Science | Imperialism · World War II · Zambia · Eastern Africa · South Asia · Middle East · African Studies

Village Work
Development and Rural Statecraft in Twentieth-Century Ghana
By Alice Wiemers

This detailed and groundbreaking history of rural Ghanaian statecraft details the crucial importance that local village development systems have on regional and national scales.

Business & Economics | Development Studies · History | Africa | West · Developing & Emerging Countries · Colonialism and Decolonization · Ghana · Western Africa · African Studies

Apartheid’s Black Soldiers
Un-national Wars and Militaries in Southern Africa
By Lennart Bolliger

History | Africa | South | General · Military History · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · South Africa

Fine Boys
A Novel
By Eghosa Imasuen

Set in Nigeria during the pro-democracy movement and told from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old Gen-Xer, Ewaen, this coming-of-age novel examines the violent university confraternities during the mid-1990s.

Fiction | World Literature | Africa | Nigeria · Literary Fiction · Nigeria · Literature · African Studies · Fiction

The Histories of HIVs
The Emergence of the Multiple Viruses That Caused the AIDS Epidemics
Edited by William H. Schneider

Medical | Epidemiology · HIV-AIDS · Medical | Public Health · Africa · African Studies

Embodied Engineering
Gendered Labor, Food Security, and Taste in Twentieth-Century Mali
By Laura Ann Twagira