History | Africa | South | General

Written Out
The Silencing of Regina Gelana Twala
By Joel Cabrita

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

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.

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

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

Environment, Power, and Justice
Southern African Histories
Edited by Graeme Wynn, Jane Carruthers, and Nancy J. Jacobs

With appreciation for both regional and chronological variation, this volume’s contributors track the global concept of environmental justice to analyze its influence in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho and to expand popular understandings of social-environmental harm.

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

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

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.

Mozambique’s Samora Machel
A Life Cut Short
By Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman
· Foreword by Albie Sachs

From his anti-colonial military leadership to the presidency of independent Mozambique, Samora Machel held a reputation as a revolutionary hero to the oppressed. Although killed in a 1987 plane crash, for many Mozambicans his memory lives on as a beacon of hope for the future.

African Apocalypse
The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a Twentieth-Century South African Prophet
By Robert R. Edgar and Hilary Sapire

The devastating influenza epidemic of 1918 ripped through southern Africa. In its aftermath, revivalist and millenarian movements sprouted. Prophets appeared bearing messages of resistance, redemption, and renewal. African Apocalypse: The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, A Twentieth-Century Prophet is the remarkable story of one such prophet, a middle-aged Xhosa woman named Nontetha.

Individual Freedoms and State Security in the African Context
The Case of Zimbabwe
By John Hatchard

In 1980 the ZANU/PF government of Robert Mugabe came to power after an extended war of liberation. They inherited a cluster of emergency laws similar to those available to the authorities in South Africa. It was also the beginning of the cynical South African state policy of destabilization of the frontline states. This led to a dangerous period of insurrection in Mashonaland and increased activity by Renamo.Dr.