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
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
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
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
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.
History | Africa | West · Technology & Engineering | Agriculture | Sustainable Agriculture · Business & Economics | Labor · Women’s Studies · Mali · Western Africa · African Studies
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.
Sports & Recreation | Sociology of Sports · African History · Africa · African Studies · Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social
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
Ubuntu
George M. Houser and the Struggle for Peace and Freedom on Two Continents
By Sheila D. Collins
George M. Houser’s moral integrity and influential advocacy for nonviolent protest helped shape the American Civil Rights Movement, anticolonial independence victories across Africa, and the overthrow of the South African apartheid regime.
Biography, Activists · History | Modern | 20th Century · Political Science | Civil Rights · Colonialism and Decolonization · South Africa · Southern Africa · African Studies
Militarizing Marriage
West African Soldiers’ Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire
By Sarah J. Zimmerman
By prioritizing women and conjugality in the historiography of African colonial soldiers, Militarizing Marriage historicizes how the subjugation of women was indispensable to military conquest and colonial rule across French Empire.
History | Africa | West · Women’s Studies · Colonialism and Decolonization · Military History · Western Africa · Senegal · Algeria · Middle East · Syria · Madagascar · Vietnam · 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
Kwame Nkrumah
Visions of Liberation
By Jeffrey S. Ahlman
This new biography of Kwame Nkrumah (1909–72), Ghana’s first president, demonstrates how his accomplishments extend well beyond his role in Ghanaian decolonization, state-building, and the promotion of pan-Africanism to include his broader anticolonialist work toward an independent, unified Africa.
Biography, Heads of State · Africa · History | Africa | West · African Studies · Western Africa · Ghana · Colonialism and Decolonization · Political Science, Africa
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
Pursuing Justice in Africa
Competing Imaginaries and Contested Practices
Edited by Jessica Johnson and George Hamandishe Karekwaivanane
·
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.
Human Rights · Africa · African Studies · Social Science | African Studies
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.
Business & Economics | Industries | Hospitality, Travel & Tourism · African History · Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social · African Studies · Africa
Chris Hani was one of the most highly respected leaders of the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party, and uMkhonto we Sizwe. His assassination in 1993 threatened to upset the transition to democracy but also prompted an intervention by Nelson Mandela, which accelerated the process. This biography provides a concise presentation of this iconic political leader’s life.
Biography & Autobiography | Political · History | Africa | South | Republic of South Africa · Political Science, Africa · South Africa · Southern Africa · Africa · African Studies
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
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.
Psychology | Ethnopsychology · Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social · African History · African Studies
Ubuntu
George M. Houser and the Struggle for Peace and Freedom on Two Continents
By Sheila D. Collins
George M. Houser’s moral integrity and influential advocacy for nonviolent protest helped shape the American Civil Rights Movement, anticolonial independence victories across Africa, and the overthrow of the South African apartheid regime.
Biography, Activists · History | Modern | 20th Century · Political Science | Civil Rights · Colonialism and Decolonization · South Africa · Southern Africa · African Studies
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.
Sports & Recreation | Sociology of Sports · African History · Africa · African Studies · Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social
Mozambique’s Samora Machel
A Life Cut Short
By Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman
·
Foreword by Albie Sachs
From his anti-colonial military leadership to the presidency of independent Mozambique, Samora Machel held a reputation as a revolutionary hero to the oppressed. Although killed in a 1987 plane crash, for many Mozambicans his memory lives on as a beacon of hope for the future.
Biography, Heads of State · History | Africa | South | General · Political Science, Africa · Africa · Mozambique · African Studies
Militarizing Marriage
West African Soldiers’ Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire
By Sarah J. Zimmerman
By prioritizing women and conjugality in the historiography of African colonial soldiers, Militarizing Marriage historicizes how the subjugation of women was indispensable to military conquest and colonial rule across French Empire.
History | Africa | West · Women’s Studies · Colonialism and Decolonization · Military History · Western Africa · Senegal · Algeria · Middle East · Syria · Madagascar · Vietnam · African Studies
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.
History | Women · African History · Religion | Sexuality & Gender Studies · Women’s Studies · Africa · African Studies
Radical Utu
Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai
By Besi Brillian Muhonja
In Radical Utu: Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai, Wangari Maathai is presented as a scholar whose contributions to gender equality, democratic spaces, economic equity and global governance, and indigenous African languages and knowledges paralleled her renowned environmental activism.
Political Philosophy · Kenya · African Studies · Women’s Studies
Josie Mpama/Palmer
Get Up and Get Moving
By Robert R. Edgar
The latest in the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series, Josie Mpama/Palmer: Get Up and Get Moving tells the story of Josie Mpama/Palmer’s activism and political legacy in South Africa and around the world.
Biography, Activists · Women’s Studies · South Africa · African Studies
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.
History | Historical Geography · African History · Race and Ethnicity · South Africa · African Studies · Apartheid
Wangari Maathai
By Tabitha Kanogo
This concise biography tells the story of Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner who devoted her life to campaigning for environmental conservation, sustainable development, democracy, human rights, gender equality, and the eradication of poverty.
Biography, Activists · Women’s Studies · Biography & Autobiography | Women · Kenya · African Studies
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.
African History · History of Science · African Studies · Eastern Africa · Human Geography
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.
African History · Business & Economics | Development Studies · Colonialism and Decolonization · Kenya · African Studies
Africa Every Day
Fun, Leisure, and Expressive Culture on the Continent
Edited by Oluwakemi M. Balogun, Lisa Gilman, Melissa Graboyes, and Habib Iddrisu
Africa Every Day is a multidisciplinary and accessible counterpoint to the prevailing emphasis on war, poverty, corruption, and other challenges on the continent. Essays address creative and dynamic elements of daily life without romanticizing them, showing that African leisure and popular culture are the product of dynamism and adaptation.
Popular Culture · Africa · African Studies · Customs, Traditions, and Everyday Life · African Literature
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.
African History · Gender Studies · African Studies · Igbo · Slavery and Slave Trade · Western Africa · Atlantic Studies
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.
African History · Technology & Engineering | Telecommunications · Media Studies · Angola · African Studies
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.
Architecture | Urban & Land Use Planning · Social History · Human Geography · Mozambique · African Studies
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.
African History · African Studies · Atlantic Studies · Slavery and Slave Trade
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
Amílcar Cabral
A Nationalist and Pan-Africanist Revolutionary
By Peter Karibe Mendy
Amílcar Cabral’s charismatic and visionary leadership, his pan-Africanist solidarity and internationalist commitment to “every just cause in the world,” remain relevant to contemporary struggles for emancipation and self-determination. This concise biography is an ideal introduction to his life and legacy.
Biography, Activists · Guinea-Bissau · History | Africa | West · African Studies · Colonialism and Decolonization · Western Africa
Talkative Polity
Radio, Domination, and Citizenship in Uganda
By Florence Brisset-Foucault
Until they were banned in 2009, the radio debates called Ugandan People’s Parliaments gave common folk a forum to air their views. But how do people talk about politics in an authoritarian regime? The forms and parameters of such speech turn out to be more complex than a simple confrontation between an oppressive state and a liberal civil society.
Political Science · Media Studies · Uganda · African Studies
Modernist Art in Ethiopia
By Elizabeth W. Giorgis
In locating her arguments at the intersection of visual culture and literary and performance studies, Giorgis details how innovations in visual art intersected with shifts in narratives of modernity. The result is a bold intellectual, cultural, and political history of Ethiopia, with art as its centerpiece.
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 · Literary Collections | African · African Literature
Pursuing Justice in Africa
Competing Imaginaries and Contested Practices
Edited by Jessica Johnson and George Hamandishe Karekwaivanane
·
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.
Human Rights · Africa · African Studies · Social Science | African Studies
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 · National and International 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
Boko Haram
By Brandon Kendhammer and Carmen McCain
Going beyond the headlines, including the group’s 2014 abduction of 276 girls in Chibok and the ensuing international outrage, Boko Haram provides readers new to the conflict with a clearly written and comprehensive history of how the group came to be, the Nigerian government’s failed efforts to end it, and its impact on ordinary citizens.
African History · Terrorism · Religion | Religion, Politics & State · Nigeria · 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 & Autobiography | Women · African History · South Africa · African Studies · Biography, Activists
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.
Human Geography · Social History · 19th century · Eastern Africa · Middle East · Indian Ocean Studies · African Studies
