Finding Dr. Livingstone
A History in Documents from the Henry Morton Stanley Archives
Edited by Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi and James L. Newman
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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
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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
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
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
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
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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.
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
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
Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa
Edited by Felicitas Becker, Joel Cabrita, and Marie Rodet
In recent years, anthropologists, historians, and others have been drawn to study the profuse and creative usages of digital media by religious movements. At the same time, scholars of Christian Africa have long been concerned with the history of textual culture, the politics of Bible translation, and the status of the vernacular in Christianity.
Media Studies · Social Science | Sociology of Religion · African History · Islam · Religion | Christianity · Africa · African Studies
Reel Pleasures
Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth-Century Urban Tanzania
By Laura Fair
Reel Pleasures brings the world of African moviehouses and the publics they engendered to life, revealing how local fans creatively reworked global media—from Indian melodrama to Italian westerns, kung fu, and blaxploitation films—to speak to local dreams and desires.
Media Studies · African History · History | Modern | 20th Century · African Studies · Tanzania · African Film · African Literature
Dedan Kimathi on Trial
Colonial Justice and Popular Memory in Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion
Edited by Julie MacArthur
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Introduction by Julie MacArthur
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Foreword by Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Long thought lost, hidden, or destroyed, the transcript of Mau Mau anticolonial revolutionary Dedan Kimathi’s 1956 trial during British colonial rule unsettles an already controversial event in Kenya’s history and prompts fresh examinations of its reverberations in the postcolonial present.
African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · History | Modern | 20th Century · African Studies · Mau Mau · Kenya
Market Encounters
Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana
By Bianca Murillo
By emphasizing the centrality of human relationships to Ghana’s economic past, Murillo introduces a radical rethinking of consumption studies from an Africa-centered perspective. The result is a keen look at colonial capitalism in all of its intricacies, legacies, and contradictions, including its entanglement with gender and race.
African History · Popular Culture · History | Modern | 20th Century · Social History · African Studies · Ghana · Western Africa
Living with Nkrumahism
Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana
By Jeffrey S. Ahlman
In the 1950s, Ghana, under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party, drew the world’s attention as anticolonial activists, intellectuals, and politicians looked to it as a model for Africa’s postcolonial future. Nkrumah was a visionary, a statesman, and one of the key makers of contemporary Africa. In Living with Nkrumahism, Jeffrey S. Ahlman reexamines the infrastructure that organized and consolidated Nkrumah’s philosophy into a political program.Ahlman
African History · Nationalism · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · Cold War · Ghana
Making Money
Life, Death, and Early Modern Trade on Africa’s Guinea Coast
By Colleen E. Kriger
A new era in world history began when Atlantic maritime trade among Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas opened up in the fifteenth century, setting the stage for massive economic and cultural change. In Making Money, Colleen Kriger examines the influence of the global trade on the Upper Guinea Coast two hundred years later—a place and time whose study, in her hands, imparts profound insights into Anglo-African commerce and its wider milieu.A
African History · World and Comparative History · Social History · Atlantic Studies · African Studies · Western Africa · 17th century
Following the Ball
The Migration of African Soccer Players across the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1949–1975
By Todd Cleveland
With Following the Ball, Todd Cleveland incorporates labor, sport, diasporic, and imperial history to examine the extraordinary experiences of African football players from Portugal’s African colonies as they relocated to the metropole from 1949 until the conclusion of the colonial era in 1975. The backdrop was Portugal’s increasingly embattled Estado Novo regime, and its attendant use of the players as propaganda to communicate the supposed unity of the metropole and the colonies.Clev
African History · Emigration and Immigration · Soccer · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · Portugal
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission
By Mary Ingouville Burton
In 1995, South Africa’s new government set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a lynchpin of the country’s journey forward from apartheid. In contrast to the Nuremberg Trials and other retributive responses to atrocities, the TRC’s emphasis on reconciliation marked a restorative approach to addressing human rights violations and their legacies. The hearings, headed by Bishop Desmond Tutu, began in spring of 1996.The
African History · Political Science · Conflict Resolution (Business and Econ.) · Peace Studies · African Studies · Apartheid · South Africa
We Do Not Have Borders
Greater Somalia and the Predicaments of Belonging in Kenya
By Keren Weitzberg
Though often associated with foreigners and refugees, many Somalis have lived in Kenya for generations, in many cases since long before the founding of the country. Despite their long residency, foreign and state officials and Kenyan citizens often perceive the Somali population to be a dangerous and alien presence in the country, and charges of civil and human rights abuses have mounted against them in recent years.In
African History · Anthropology · Nationalism · Somalia · Eastern Africa · Kenya · African Studies
Football and Colonialism
Body and Popular Culture in Urban Mozambique
By Nuno Domingos
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Foreword by Harry G. West
In articles for the newspaper O Brado Africano in the mid-1950s, poet and journalist José Craveirinha described the ways in which the Mozambican football players in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) adapted the European sport to their own expressive ends. Through gesture, footwork, and patois, they used what Craveirinha termed “malice”—or cunning—to negotiate their places in the colonial state.
Anthropology · Social History · Soccer · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · Race and Ethnicity · Mozambique
The Riddle of Malnutrition
The Long Arc of Biomedical and Public Health Interventions in Uganda
By Jennifer Tappan
More than ten million children suffer from severe acute malnutrition globally each year. In Uganda, longstanding efforts to understand, treat, and then prevent the condition initially served to medicalize it, in the eyes of both biomedical personnel and Ugandans who brought their children to the hospital for treatment and care. Medicalization meant malnutrition came to be seen as a disease—as a medical emergency—not a preventable condition, further compromising nutritional health in Uganda.Rath
African History · Medical | Health Policy · History of Science · African Studies · Global Issues · Uganda
With vision, hard-nosed judgment, and biting humor, Julius Nyerere confronted the challenges of nation building in modern Africa. Constructing Tanzania out of a controversial Cold War union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar, Nyerere emerged as one of independent Africa’s most influential leaders. He pursued his own brand of African socialism, called Ujamaa, with unquestioned integrity, and saw it profoundly influence movements to end white minority rule in Southern Africa.
Biography, Heads of State · African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · Cold War · Tanzania · Eastern Africa
Feeding Globalization
Madagascar and the Provisioning Trade, 1600–1800
By Jane Hooper
Between 1600 and 1800, the promise of fresh food attracted more than seven hundred English, French, and Dutch vessels to Madagascar. Throughout this period, European ships spent months at sea in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, but until now scholars have not fully examined how crews were fed during these long voyages. Without sustenance from Madagascar, European traders would have struggled to transport silver to Asia and spices back to Europe.
World and Comparative History · African History · Slavery and Slave Trade · Economic History · African Studies · Madagascar · Indian Ocean Studies
An Uncertain Age
The Politics of Manhood in Kenya
By Paul Ocobock
In twentieth-century Kenya, age and gender were powerful cultural and political forces that animated household and generational relationships. They also shaped East Africans’ contact with and influence on emergent colonial and global ideas about age and masculinity. Kenyan men and boys came of age achieving their manhood through changing rites of passage and access to new outlets such as town life, crime, anticolonial violence, and nationalism.
African History · Gender Studies · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · Eastern Africa · Kenya
Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions
By Paul E. Lovejoy
In Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions, a preeminent historian of Africa argues that scholars of the Americas and the Atlantic world have not given Africa its due consideration as part of either the Atlantic world or the age of revolutions.
African History · Slavery and Slave Trade · Islam · World and Comparative History · African Studies · Atlantic Studies
African Miracle, African Mirage
Transnational Politics and the Paradox of Modernization in Ivory Coast
By Abou B. Bamba
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Ivory Coast was touted as an African miracle, a poster child for modernization and the ways that Western aid and multinational corporations would develop the continent. At the same time, Marxist scholars—most notably Samir Amin—described the capitalist activity in Ivory Coast as empty, unsustainable, and incapable of bringing real change to the lives of ordinary people.
African History · Economic Policy · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · Cote d'Ivoire
The Art of Life in South Africa
By Daniel Magaziner
From 1952 to 1981, South Africa’s apartheid government ran an art school for the training of African art teachers at Indaleni, in what is today KwaZulu-Natal. The Art of Life in South Africa is the story of the students, teachers, art, and politics that circulated through a small school, housed in a remote former mission station.
African History · African Art · Colonialism and Decolonization · Art History · South Africa · African Studies · Apartheid · Art Education
Modern Muslims
A Sudan Memoir
By Steve Howard
Steve Howard departed for the Sudan in the early 1980s as an American graduate student beginning a three-year journey in which he would join and live with the Republican Brotherhood, the Sufi Muslim group led by the visionary Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. Taha was a religious intellectual who participated in the early days of Sudan’s anticolonial struggle, but quickly turned his movement into a religious reform effort based on his radical reading of the Qur’an. He was executed in 1985 for apostasy.Deca
Memoir · African History · Sufism · History | Modern | 20th Century · Islam · African Studies · Sudan · Trade Nonfiction
Citizenship, Belonging, and Political Community in Africa
Dialogues between Past and Present
Edited by Emma Hunter
Africa, it is often said, is suffering from a crisis of citizenship. At the heart of the contemporary debates this apparent crisis has provoked lie dynamic relations between the present and the past, between political theory and political practice, and between legal categories and lived experience. Yet studies of citizenship in Africa have often tended to foreshorten historical time and privilege the present at the expense of the deeper past.Citizenship,
African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · Legal and Constitutional History · African Studies · Race and Ethnicity · South Africa · Cote d'Ivoire · Ethiopia · Sudan · Mauritius
Making the Mark
Gender, Identity, and Genital Cutting
By Miroslava Prazak
Why do female genital cutting practices persist? How does circumcision affect the rights of girls in a culture where initiation forms the lynchpin of the ritual cycle at the core of defining gender, identity, and social and political status? In Making the Mark, Miroslava Prazak follows the practice of female circumcision through the lives and activities of community members in a rural Kenyan farming society as they decide whether or not to participate in the tradition.In
Gender Studies · Anthropology · Women’s Studies · Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social · African Studies · Kenya
Obama and Kenya
Contested Histories and the Politics of Belonging
By Matthew Carotenuto and Katherine Luongo
Barack Obama’s political ascendancy has focused worldwide attention on Kenya. Carotenuto and Luongo argue that efforts to cast Obama as a “son of the soil” of the Lake Victoria basin invite insights into the politicized uses of Kenya’s past. Ideal for classroom use and directed at a general readership interested in global affairs, Obama and Kenya offers an important counterpoint to the many popular, but inaccurate texts about Kenya’s history and Obama’s place in it.
World and Comparative History · International Studies · African Studies · American Studies · Kenya
Cartography and the Political Imagination
Mapping Community in Colonial Kenya
By Julie MacArthur
Encompassing history, geography, and political science, MacArthur’s study evaluates the role of geographic imagination and the impact of cartography not only as means of expressing imperial power and constraining colonized populations, but as tools for the articulation of new political communities and resistance.
African History · Human Geography · Colonialism and Decolonization · Kenya · African Studies · Race and Ethnicity
Marriage by Force?
Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa
Edited by Annie Bunting, Benjamin N. Lawrance, and Richard L. Roberts
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Foreword by Doris Buss
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Afterword by Emily S. Burrill
Despite international human rights decrees condemning it, marriage by force persists to this day. In this volume, the editors bring together legal scholars, anthropologists, historians, and development workers to explore the range of forced marriage practices in sub-Saharan Africa. The result is a masterful presentation of new perspectives on the practice.
Women’s Studies · Gender Studies · African History · Legal and Constitutional History · Slavery and Slave Trade · African Studies · Africa
Ken Saro-Wiwa
By Roy Doron and Toyin Falola
A penetrating, accessible portrait of the activist whose execution galvanized the world. Hanged by the Nigerian government on November 10, 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa became a martyr for the Ogoni people and for human rights activists, as well as a symbol of modern Africans’ struggle against military dictatorship, corporate power, and environmental exploitation.
Biography, Activists · Environmental Studies · African History · African Studies · Nigeria · Western Africa · Africa
Nation on Board
Becoming Nigerian at Sea
By Lynn Schler
Schler’s study of Nigerian seamen during Nigeria’s transition to independence provides a fresh perspective on the meaning of decolonization for ordinary Africans. She traces the workers’ shift from optimism to disillusionment, providing a working-class perspective on nation building in Nigeria and illustrating the hopes for independence and subsequent disappointments.
History | Maritime History & Piracy · Labor History · Nigeria · African Studies · History | Africa | West
The Gun in Central Africa
A History of Technology and Politics
By Giacomo Macola
Examining the history of warfare and political development through a technological lens, Macola relates the study of military technology to the history of gender. A lively analysis of the social forms and political systems of central Africa, this work focuses on the question of why some societies embraced the gun while others didn’t, and how the technology shaped them in the precolonial years.
Social History · History of Technology · African History · African Studies · Central Africa
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
By Pamela Scully
In this concise biography, Scully shows us how the life of Nobel Peace Prize winner and two-time Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf speaks to many of the key themes of the twenty-first century. Among these are the growing power of women in the arenas of international politics and human rights; the ravaging civil wars of the post–Cold War era in which sexual violence is used as a weapon; and the challenges of transitional justice in building postconflict societies.
Biography, Heads of State · Biography & Autobiography | Women · African Studies · Africa · Liberia · Western Africa
Authentically African
Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture
By Sarah Van Beurden
Together, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, and the Institut des Musées Nationaux du Zaire (IMNZ) in the Congo have defined and marketed Congolese art and culture. In Authentically African, Sarah Van Beurden traces the relationship between the possession, definition, and display of art and the construction of cultural authenticity and political legitimacy from the late colonial until the postcolonial era.
African History · Museum Studies · African Art · African Studies · Democratic Republic of the Congo
