Colonialism and Decolonization

Making Martial Races
Gender, Society, and Warfare in Africa
Edited by Myles Osborne

Featuring contributions by new and established Africanist scholars, this volume is the first book-length treatment of “martial race” in Africa. A key organizing principle of colonialism, the category of martial race was contested by African men and women as they sought to negotiate against the colonial state as well as within their home communities.

West African Challenge to Empire
Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War
By Mahir Şaul and Patrick Royer

West African Challenge to Empire examines the anticolonial war in the Volta and Bani region in 1915–16. It was the largest challenge that the French ever faced in their West African colonial empire, and one of the largest armed oppositions to colonialism anywhere in Africa. How such a movement could be organized in the face of European technological superiority despite the fact that this region is generally described as having consisted of rival villages and descent groups is a puzzle.

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

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

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.

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

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

Carceral Afterlives
Prisons, Detention, and Punishment in Postcolonial Uganda
By Katherine Bruce-Lockhart

This social and political history analyzes how incarceration, a practice and policy with colonial origins, was central to both the exertion of and challenges to state power in postcolonial Uganda. The book also illustrates the persistent imbrication of prisons, punishment, politics, and struggles for decolonization and freedom across the globe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities
Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920
By Lenny A. Ureña Valerio

Ureña Valerio illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources ranging from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. She analyzes scientific and medical debates to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism, providing an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.

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.