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
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
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
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
Frantz Fanon
Toward a Revolutionary Humanism
By Christopher J. Lee
A timely and original short biography reintroducing Fanon for a new generation of readers. Written with clarity and passion, Christopher J. Lee’s account argues for the pragmatic idealism of Frantz Fanon and his continued importance today.
Biography, Activists · Colonialism and Decolonization · World and Comparative History · African Studies · African Literature
The Experiment Must Continue
Medical Research and Ethics in East Africa, 1940–2014
By Melissa Graboyes
The Experiment Must Continue is a beautifully articulated ethnographic history of medical experimentation in East Africa from 1940 through 2014. In it, Melissa Graboyes combines her training in public health and in history to treat her subject with the dual sensitivities of a medical ethicist and a fine historian.
History of Science · African Studies · Medical | Public Health · Social Science | Disease & Health Issues
Gendered Lives in the Western Indian Ocean
Islam, Marriage, and Sexuality on the Swahili Coast
Edited by Erin E. Stiles and Katrina Daly Thompson
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Afterword by Susan F. Hirsch
A breakthrough study of the underexamined lived experience of Islam, sexuality, and gender on the Swahili coast.
Gender Studies · Islam · Religion · Eastern Africa · Indian Ocean Studies · African Studies · Swahili
Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic
By Wendy Wilson-Fall
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Foreword by Michael Gomez
Bridges history and ethnography to explore stories of Malagasy ancestry and African American identity.
Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social · Slavery and Slave Trade · Madagascar · African Studies
Crossing the Color Line
Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana
By Carina E. Ray
Interracial sex mattered to the British colonial state in West Africa. In Crossing the Color Line, Carina E. Ray goes beyond this fact to reveal how Ghanaians shaped and defined these powerfully charged relations. The interplay between African and European perspectives and practices, argues Ray, transformed these relationships into key sites for consolidating colonial rule and for contesting its hierarchies of power.
African History · Women’s Studies · Race and Ethnicity · African Studies · Ghana · United Kingdom
The Historical Ecology of Malaria in Ethiopia
Deposing the Spirits
By James C. McCann
Malaria is an infectious disease like no other: it is a dynamic force of nature and Africa’s most deadly and debilitating malady. James C. McCann tells the story of malaria in human, narrative terms and explains the history and ecology of the disease through the science of landscape change. All malaria is local.
History | Historical Geography · Ethiopia · Environmental Studies · African Studies · Medical | Public Health · Social Science | Disease & Health Issues · History | Africa | East
The Story of Swahili
By John M. Mugane
Swahili was once an obscure dialect of an East African Bantu language. Today more than one hundred million people use it: Swahili is to eastern and central Africa what English is to the world. From its embrace in the 1960s by the black freedom movement in the United States to its adoption in 2004 as the African Union’s official language, Swahili has become a truly international language.
Foreign Language Study | Swahili · History | Africa | East · Africa · African Studies · Swahili
The Gender of Piety
Family, Faith, and Colonial Rule in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe
By Wendy Urban-Mead
The Gender of Piety is an intimate history of the Brethren in Christ Church in Zimbabwe, or BICC, as related through six individual life histories that extend from the early colonial years through the first decade after independence. Taken together, these six lives show how men and women of the BICC experienced and sequenced their piety in different ways. Women usually remained tied to the church throughout their lives, while men often had a more strained relationship with it.
African History · Gender Studies · Religion | Christianity · Zimbabwe · African Studies
Diamonds in the Rough
Corporate Paternalism and African Professionalism on the Mines of Colonial Angola, 1917–1975
By Todd Cleveland
Diamonds in the Rough explores the lives of African laborers on Angola’s diamond mines from the commencement of operations in 1917 to the colony’s independence from Portugal in 1975. The mines were owned and operated by the Diamond Company of Angola, or Diamang, which enjoyed exclusive mining and labor concessions granted by the colonial government. Through these monopolies, the company became the most profitable enterprise in Portugal’s African empire.
The Boy Is Gone
Conversations with a Mau Mau General
By Laura Lee P. Huttenbach
A story with the power to change how people view the last years of colonialism in East Africa, The Boy Is Gone portrays the struggle for Kenyan independence in the words of a freedom fighter whose life spanned the twentieth century’s most dramatic transformations. Born into an impoverished farm family in the Meru Highlands, Japhlet Thambu grew up wearing goatskins and lived to stand before his community dressed for business in a pressed suit, crisp tie, and freshly polished shoes.
Biography & Autobiography | General · Colonialism and Decolonization · African History · African Studies · Mau Mau · Kenya
African Asylum at a Crossroads
Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights
Edited by Iris Berger, Tricia Redeker Hepner, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Joanna T. Tague, and Meredith Terretta
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Foreword by Penelope Andrews
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Afterword by Fallou Ngom
African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights examines the emerging trend of requests for expert opinions in asylum hearings or refugee status determinations. This is the first book to explore the role of court-based expertise in relation to African asylum cases and the first to establish a rigorous analytical framework for interpreting the effects of this new reliance on expert testimony.Over
States of Marriage
Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali
By Emily S. Burrill
States of Marriage shows how throughout the colonial period in French Sudan (present-day Mali) the institution of marriage played a central role in how the empire defined its colonial subjects as gendered persons with certain attendant rights and privileges. The book is a modern history of the ideological debates surrounding the meaning of marriage, as well as the associated legal and sociopolitical practices in colonial and postcolonial Mali.
Gender Studies · African History · History · Mali · African Studies
African Leaders of the Twentieth Century
Biko, Selassie, Lumumba, Sankara
By Lindy Wilson, Bereket Habte Selassie, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, and Ernest Harsch
This omnibus edition brings together concise and up-to-date biographies of Steve Biko, Emperor Haile Selassie, Patrice Lumumba, and Thomas Sankara. African Leaders of the Twentieth Century will complement courses in history and political science and serve as a useful collection for the general reader.
Biography, Heads of State · African History · Africa · African Studies
The ANC Women’s League
Sex, Gender and Politics
By Shireen Hassim
First formed in the early twentieth century, the ANC Women’s League has grown into a leading organization in the women’s movement in South Africa. The league has been at the forefront of the nation’s century-long transition from an authoritarian state to a democracy that espouses gender equality as a core constitutional value.
African History · Women’s Studies · Politics · Women’s History · African Studies · South Africa · Africa
The Soweto Uprising
By Noor Nieftagodien
The Soweto uprising was a true turning point in South Africa’s history. Even to contemporaries, it seemed to mark the beginning of the end of apartheid. This compelling book examines both the underlying causes and the immediate factors that led to this watershed event. It looks at the crucial roles of Black Consciousness ideology and nascent school-based organizations in shaping the character and form of the revolt.
African History · African Studies · History · Politics · South Africa · Southern Africa · Africa
Short-Changed?
South Africa since Apartheid
By Colin Bundy
What have been the most significant developments—political, social, economic—in South Africa since 1994? How much has changed since the demise of apartheid, and how much remains stubbornly the same? Should one celebrate a robust democracy now two decades old, or lament the corrosive effects of factionalism, greed, and corruption on political life? Colin Bundy tries to answer such questions, while avoiding simplistic or one-sided assessments of life under Mandela, Mbeki, and Zuma.
African History · African Studies · History · South Africa · Southern Africa · Africa · Politics
Making Modern Girls
A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos
By Abosede A. George
In Making Modern Girls, Abosede A. George examines the influence of African social reformers and the developmentalist colonial state on the practice and ideology of girlhood as well as its intersection with child labor in Lagos, Nigeria. It draws from gender studies, generational studies, labor history, and urban history to shed new light on the complex workings of African cities from the turn of the twentieth century through the nationalist era of the 1950s.
African History · Labor History · Women’s History · Women’s Studies · Children's Studies · Childhood · African Studies · Nigeria
In Idi Amin’s Shadow
Women, Gender, and Militarism in Uganda
By Alicia C. Decker
In Idi Amin’s Shadow is a rich social history examining Ugandan women’s complex and sometimes paradoxical relationship to Amin’s military state. Based on more than one hundred interviews with women who survived the regime, as well as a wide range of primary sources, this book reveals how the violence of Amin’s militarism resulted in both opportunities and challenges for women.
African History · Gender Studies · Colonialism and Decolonization · Uganda · African Studies
Patrice Lumumba
By Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja
Patrice Lumumba was a leader of the independence struggle in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as the country’s first democratically elected prime minister. After a meteoric rise in the colonial civil service and the African political elite, he became a major figure in the decolonization movement of the 1950s.
Biography, Heads of State · African History · African Studies · Democratic Republic of the Congo
Thomas Sankara
An African Revolutionary
By Ernest Harsch
Thomas Sankara, often called the African Che Guevara, was president of Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa, until his assassination during the military coup that brought down his government. Although his tenure in office was relatively short, Sankara left an indelible mark on his country’s history and development.
African History · Biography, Heads of State · Burkina Faso · African Studies
Emperor Haile Selassie
By Bereket Habte Selassie
Emperor Haile Selassie was an iconic figure of the twentieth century, a progressive monarch who ruled Ethiopia from 1916 to 1974. This book, written by a former state official who served in a number of important positions in Selassie’s government, tells both the story of the emperor’s life and the story of modern Ethiopia.After a struggle for the throne in 1916, the young Selassie emerged first as regent and then as supreme leader of Ethiopia.
Biography, Heads of State · African History · Ethiopia · African Studies
Who Shall Enter Paradise?
Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c. 1890–1975
By Shobana Shankar
Who Shall Enter Paradise? recounts in detail the history of Christian-Muslim engagement in a core area of sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous nation, home to roughly equal numbers of Christians and Muslims. It is a region today beset by religious violence, in the course of which history has often been told in overly simplified or highly partisan terms.
African History · Islam · Nigeria · African Studies · Religion | Christianity
Slavery, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa
By Wayne Dooling
Slavery, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa examines the rural Cape Colony from the earliest days of Dutch colonial rule in the mid-seventeenth century to the outbreak of the South African War in 1899.For slaves and slave owners alike, incorporation into the British Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century brought fruits that were bittersweet.
African History · Slavery and Slave Trade · 17th century · 18th century · 19th century · South Africa · Khoisan · African Studies
A Burning Hunger
One Family’s Struggle Against Apartheid
By Lynda Schuster
A Burning Hunger shows the human catastrophe that plagued generations of black Africans in the powerful story of one religious and law-abiding Soweto family. Basing her narrative on extensive research and interviews, Lynda Schuster richly portrays this remarkable family and in so doing reveals black South Africa during a time of momentous change.
African History · South Africa · African Studies · Childhood · Apartheid
Making Modern Girls
A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos
By Abosede A. George
In Making Modern Girls, Abosede A. George examines the influence of African social reformers and the developmentalist colonial state on the practice and ideology of girlhood as well as its intersection with child labor in Lagos, Nigeria. It draws from gender studies, generational studies, labor history, and urban history to shed new light on the complex workings of African cities from the turn of the twentieth century through the nationalist era of the 1950s.
African History · Labor History · Women’s History · Women’s Studies · Children's Studies · Childhood · African Studies · Nigeria
In Idi Amin’s Shadow
Women, Gender, and Militarism in Uganda
By Alicia C. Decker
In Idi Amin’s Shadow is a rich social history examining Ugandan women’s complex and sometimes paradoxical relationship to Amin’s military state. Based on more than one hundred interviews with women who survived the regime, as well as a wide range of primary sources, this book reveals how the violence of Amin’s militarism resulted in both opportunities and challenges for women.
African History · Gender Studies · Colonialism and Decolonization · Uganda · African Studies
Wielding the Ax
State Forestry and Social Conflict in Tanzania, 1820–2000
By Thaddeus Sunseri
Forests have been at the fault lines of contact between African peasant communities in the Tanzanian coastal hinterland and outsiders for almost two centuries. In recent decades, a global call for biodiversity preservation has been the main challenge to Tanzanians and their forests.Thaddeus Sunseri uses the lens of forest history to explore some of the most profound transformations in Tanzania from the nineteenth century to the present.
African History · Environmental Policy · History | Historical Geography · African Studies · Eastern Africa · Tanzania
Conjugal Rights
Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon
By Rachel Jean-Baptiste
Conjugal Rights is a history of the role of marriage and other arrangements between men and women in Libreville, Gabon, during the French colonial era, from the mid–nineteenth century through 1960. Conventional historiography has depicted women as few in number and of limited influence in African colonial towns, but this book demonstrates that a sexual economy of emotional, social, legal, and physical relationships between men and women indelibly shaped urban life.Bridewealth
Violent Intermediaries
African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa
By Michelle R. Moyd
The askari, African soldiers recruited in the 1890s to fill the ranks of the German East African colonial army, occupy a unique space at the intersection of East African history, German colonial history, and military history.Lauded by Germans for their loyalty during the East Africa campaign of World War I, but reviled by Tanzanians for the violence they committed during the making of the colonial state between 1890 and 1918, the askari have been poorly understood as historical agents.
African History · African Studies · History · Military History · Germany · Western Europe · Europe · Africa
Stones of Contention
A History of Africa’s Diamonds
By Todd Cleveland
Stones of Contention explores the major developments in the remarkable history of Africa’s diamonds, from the earliest stirrings of international interest in the continent’s mineral wealth in the first millennium A.D. to the present day.
Cultivating the Colonies
Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies
Edited by Christina Folke Ax, Niels Brimnes, Niklas Thode Jensen, and Karen Oslund
The essays collected in Cultivating the Colonies demonstrate how the relationship between colonial power and nature revealsthe nature of power. Each essay explores how colonial governments translated ideas about the management of exoticnature and foreign people into practice, and how they literally “got their hands dirty” in the business of empire.The eleven essays include studies of animal husbandry in the Philippines, farming in Indochina, and indigenous medicine in India.
History | Historical Geography · World and Comparative History · Colonialism and Decolonization · Environmental Policy · Global Issues · African Studies
In Step with the Times
Mapiko Masquerades of Mozambique
By Paolo Israel
The helmet-shaped mapiko masks of Mozamxadbique have garnered admiration from African art scholars and collectors alike, due to their striking aesthetics and their grotesque allure. This book restores to mapiko its historic and artistic context, charting in detail the transformations of this masquerading tradition throughout the twentieth century.Based
African History · Anthropology · African Studies · Mozambique
Stones of Contention
A History of Africa’s Diamonds
By Todd Cleveland
Stones of Contention explores the major developments in the remarkable history of Africa’s diamonds, from the earliest stirrings of international interest in the continent’s mineral wealth in the first millennium A.D. to the present day.
Paths toward the Nation
Islam, Community, and Early Nationalist Mobilization in Eritrea, 1941–1961
By Joseph L. Venosa
In the early and mid-1940s, during the period of British wartime occupation, community and religious leaders in the former Italian colony of Eritrea engaged in a course of intellectual and political debate that marked the beginnings of a genuine national consciousness across the region.
African History · Nationalism · Islam · Religion · Eritrea · African Studies
Barack Obama and African Diasporas
Dialogues and Dissensions
By Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
An active blogger on The Zeleza Post, from which these essays are drawn, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza provides a genuinely critical engagement with Africa’s multiple worlds. With a blend of erudition and lively style, Zeleza writes about the role ofAfrica and Africans in the world and the interaction of the world with Africa.In the title essay, Zeleza analyzes the significance of the election of a member of the African diaspora to the presidency of the United States.
Social Science | Black Studies (Global) · African American Studies · African Studies
491 Days
Prisoner Number 1323/69
By Winnie Madikizela-Mandela
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Foreword by Ahmed Kathrada
On a freezing winter’s night, a few hours before dawn on May 12, 1969, South African security police stormed the Soweto home of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, activist and wife of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, and arrested her in the presence of her two young daughters, then aged nine and ten.Rounded up in a group of other antiapartheid activists under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act, designed for the security police to hold and interrogate people for as long as they wanted, she was taken away.
Literary Collections | Diaries & Journals · Literary Collections | African · Letters · African History · South Africa · African Studies · African Literature
Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America
Edited by David M. Gordon and Shepard Krech III
Indigenous knowledge has become a catchphrase in global struggles for environmental justice. Yet indigenous knowledges are often viewed, incorrectly, as pure and primordial cultural artifacts. This collection draws from African and North American cases to argue that the forms of knowledge identified as “indigenous” resulted from strategies to control environmental resources during and after colonial encounters.At
History | Historical Geography · History · Environmental Policy · Race and Ethnicity · Nature · African Studies
Global Health in Africa
Historical Perspectives on Disease Control
Edited by Tamara Giles-Vernick and James L. A. Webb Jr.
Global Health in Africa is a first exploration of selected histories of global health initiatives in Africa. The collection addresses some of the most important interventions in disease control, including mass vaccination, large-scale treatment and/or prophylaxis campaigns, harm reduction efforts, and nutritional and virological research.The chapters in this collection are organized in three sections that evaluate linkages between past, present, and emergent.
Medical | Health Policy · African History · Anthropology · Global Issues · African Studies · Africa
Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa
Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives
Edited by Ruth J. Prince and Rebecca Marsland
Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa explores how medical professionals and patients, government officials, and ordinary citizens approach questions of public health as they navigate contemporary landscapes of NGOs and transnational projects, faltering state services, and expanding privatization.
African History · African Studies · Africa · Anthropology · Medical | Health Policy
Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence
Nationalism, Grassfields Tradition, and State Building in Cameroon
By Meredith Terretta
Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence is the first extensive history of Cameroonian nationalism to consider the global and local influences that shaped the movement within the French and British Cameroons and beyond.
African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · Politics · Violence in Society · Cameroon · African Studies
Black Skin, White Coats
Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry
By Matthew M. Heaton
Black Skin, White Coats is a history of psychiatry in Nigeria from the 1950s to the 1980s. Working in the contexts of decolonization and anticolonial nationalism, Nigerian psychiatrists sought to replace racist colonial psychiatric theories about the psychological inferiority of Africans with a universal and egalitarian model focusing on broad psychological similarities across cultural and racial boundaries. Particular emphasis is placed on Dr.
History of Psychiatry · African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · Nigeria · Western Africa · Africa
The Krio of West Africa
Islam, Culture, Creolization, and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century
By Gibril R. Cole
Sierra Leone’s unique history, especially in the development and consolidation of British colonialism in West Africa, has made it an important site of historical investigation since the 1950s. Much of the scholarship produced in subsequent decades has focused on the “Krio,” descendants of freed slaves from the West Indies, North America, England, and other areas of West Africa, who settled Freetown, beginning in the late eighteenth century.
African History · History of Islam · Slavery and Slave Trade · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · Atlantic Studies · Krio
Chocolate Islands
Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa
By Catherine Higgs
In Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, Catherine Higgs traces the early-twentieth-century journey of the Englishman Joseph Burtt to the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe—the chocolate islands—through Angola and Mozambique, and finally to British Southern Africa.
African History · World and Comparative History · Slavery and Slave Trade · Angola · São Tomé and Príncipe · African Studies
Marikana
Voices from South Africa’s Mining Massacre
By Peter Alexander, Thapelo Lekgowa, Botsang Mmope, Luke Sinwell, and Bongani Xezwi
The Marikana Massacre of August 16, 2012, was the single most lethal use of force by South African security forces against civilians since the end of apartheid. Those killed were mineworkers in support of a pay raise.
Labor History · African History · Southern Africa · African Studies
The Idea of the ANC
By Anthony Butler
The African National Congress (ANC) is Africa’s most famous liberation movement. It has recently celebrated its centenary, a milestone that has prompted partisans to detail a century of unparalleled achievement in the struggle against colonialism and racial discrimination. Critics paint a less flattering portrait of the historical ANC as a communist puppet, a moribund dinosaur, or an elitist political parasite.
The Power to Name
A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa
By Stephanie Newell
Between the 1880s and the 1940s, the region known as British West Africa became a dynamic zone of literary creativity and textual experimentation. African-owned newspapers offered local writers numerous opportunities to contribute material for publication, and editors repeatedly defined the press as a vehicle to host public debates rather than simply as an organ to disseminate news or editorial ideology.
Media Studies · Literary Criticism, Africa · Book and Periodical Studies · African History · Western Africa · African Studies · African Literature
The History of Blood Transfusion in Sub-Saharan Africa
By William H. Schneider
This first extensive study of the practice of blood transfusion in Africa traces the history of one of the most important therapies in modern medicine from the period of colonial rule to independence and the AIDS epidemic. The introduction of transfusion held great promise for improving health, but like most new medical practices, transfusion needed to be adapted to the needs of sub-Saharan Africa, for which there was no analogous treatment in traditional African medicine.This
African History · Medical | Health Policy · HIV-AIDS · History of Science · History of Technology · African Studies
The ANC Youth League
By Clive Glaser
This brilliant little book tells the story of the African National Congress (ANC) Youth League from its origins in the 1940s to the present and the controversies over Julius Malema and his influence in contemporary youth politics. Glaser analyzes the ideology and tactics of its founders, some of whom (notably Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo) later became iconic figures in South African history as well as inspirational figures such as A. P. Mda (father of author Zakes Mda) and Anton Lembede.
African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · African National Congress · Apartheid · South Africa · Southern Africa · Africa
Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development
Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965–2007
By Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman
This in-depth study of the Zambezi River Valley examines the dominant developmentalist narrative that has surrounded the Cahora Bassa Dam, chronicles the continual violence that has accompanied its existence, and gives voice to previously unheard narratives of forced labor, displacement, and historical and contemporary life in the dam’s shadow.
African History · Environmental Policy · Colonialism and Decolonization · Social History · History | Historical Geography · African Studies · Mozambique
Govan Mbeki (1910–2001) was a core leader of the African National Congress, the Communist Party, and the armed wing of the ANC during the struggle against apartheid. Known as a hard-liner, Mbeki was a prolific writer and combined in a rare way the attributes of intellectual and activist, political theorist and practitioner.
African History · African Studies · Apartheid · Biography, Activists · South Africa · Southern Africa · Africa · African National Congress
Ingrid Jonker
Poet under Apartheid
By Louise Viljoen
Nelson Mandela brought the poetry of Ingrid Jonker to the attention of South Africa and the wider world when he read her poem “Die kind” (The Child) at the opening of South Africa’s first democratic parliament on May 24, 1994. Though Jonker was already a significant figure in South African literary circles, Mandela’s reference contributed to a revival of interest in Jonker and her work that continues to this day.Viljoen’s
Biography, Literary Figures · Biography & Autobiography | Women · South Africa · African Studies
Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa
Edited by Diana K. Davis and Edmund Burke III
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Afterword by Timothy Mitchell
The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of misuse.
World and Comparative History · African History · Environmental Policy · History | Historical Geography · Global Issues · African Studies · Middle East · Northern Africa
African Video Movies and Global Desires
A Ghanaian History
By Carmela Garritano
African Video Movies and Global Desires is the first full-length scholarly study of Ghana’s commercial video industry, an industry that has produced thousands of movies over the last twenty years and has grown into an influential source of cultural production. Produced and consumed under circumstances of dire shortage and scarcity, African video movies narrate the desires and anxieties created by Africa’s incorporation into the global cultural economy.Drawing
Media Studies · Film and Video - History and Criticism · African Film · Media History · African Studies · Ghana · African Literature
Invisible Agents
Spirits in a Central African History
By David M. Gordon
Invisible Agents shows how personal and deeply felt spiritual beliefs can inspire social movements and influence historical change. Conventional historiography concentrates on the secular, materialist, or moral sources of political agency. Instead, David M. Gordon argues, when people perceive spirits as exerting power in the visible world, these beliefs form the basis for individual and collective actions.
Hollywood’s Africa after 1994
Edited by MaryEllen Higgins
Hollywood’s Africa after 1994 investigates Hollywood’s colonial film legacy in the postapartheid era, and contemplates what has changed in the West’s representations of Africa.
Film and Video - History and Criticism · Media Studies · Africa · African Film · African Studies · African Literature
African Intellectuals and Decolonization
Edited by Nicholas M. Creary
Decades after independence for most African states, the struggle for decolonization is still incomplete, as demonstrated by the fact that Africa remains associated in many Western minds with chaos, illness, and disorder. African and non-African scholars alike still struggle to establish the idea of African humanity, in all its diversity, and to move Africa beyond its historical role as the foil to the West.As
African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · Social Science | Black Studies (Global)
Peacebuilding, Power, and Politics in Africa
Edited by Devon Curtis and Gwinyayi A. Dzinesa
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Foreword by Adekeye Adebajo
Peacebuilding, Power, and Politics in Africa is a critical reflection on peacebuilding efforts in Africa. The authors expose the tensions and contradictions in different clusters of peacebuilding activities, including peace negotiations; statebuilding; security sector governance; and disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration.
Political Science, Africa · Peace Studies · Africa · African Studies
Epidemics
The Story of South Africa’s Five Most Lethal Human Diseases
By Howard Phillips
This is the first history of epidemics in South Africa, lethal episodes that shaped this society over three centuries. Focusing on five devastating diseases between 1713 and today—smallpox, bubonic plague, “Spanish influenza,” polio, and HIV/AIDS—the book probes their origins, their catastrophic courses, and their consequences.
Medical | Health Policy · Medicine · African History · South Africa · Southern Africa · Africa · African Studies
South Africa’s Struggle for Human Rights
By Saul Dubow
The human rights movement in South Africa’s transition to a postapartheid democracy has been widely celebrated as a triumph for global human rights. It was a key aspect of the political transition, often referred to as a miracle, which brought majority rule and democracy to South Africa. The country’s new constitution, its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the moral authority of Nelson Mandela stand as exemplary proof of this achievement.
African History · Human Rights · African Studies · South Africa
Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake
Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa
Edited by Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts
Women and children have been bartered, pawned, bought, and sold within and beyond Africa for longer than records have existed. This important collection examines the ways trafficking in women and children has changed from the aftermath of the “end of slavery” in Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present.The formal abolition of the slave trade and slavery did not end the demand for servile women and children.
African History · Slavery and Slave Trade · Children's Studies · Women’s Studies · Legal and Constitutional History · Anthropology · African Studies · Childhood · Africa
Spear of the Nation: Umkhonto weSizwe
South Africa’s Liberation Army, 1960s–1990s
By Janet Cherry
Umkhonto weSizwe, Spear of the Nation, was arguably the last of the great liberation armies of the twentieth century—but it never got to “march triumphant into Pretoria.” MK—as it was known—was the armed wing of the African National Congress, South Africa’s liberation movement, that challenged the South African apartheid government.
African History · Violence in Society · African Studies · South Africa
Steve Biko inspired a generation of black South Africans to claim their true identity and refuse to be a part of their own oppression. Through his example, he demonstrated fearlessness and self-esteem, and he led a black student movement countrywide that challenged and thwarted the culture of fear perpetuated by the apartheid regime. He paid the highest price with his life. The brutal circumstances of his death shocked the world and helped isolate his oppressors.This
Biography, Activists · African History · African Studies · South Africa
