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  3. African Studies

The African Studies series, founded in 1968, is a prestigious series of monographs, general surveys, and textbooks on Africa covering history, political science, anthropology, economics, and ecological and environmental issues. The series seeks to publish work by senior scholars as well as the best new research.

  • Editorial Boards: David Anderson, University of Warwick, Carolyn Brown, Rutgers University, New Jersey, Christopher Clapham, University of Cambridge, Richard L. Roberts, Stanford University, California, Leonardo A. Villalón, University of Florida

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115 results in African Studies

Page 4 of 6

Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara
  • Regional Connectivity in the Twentieth Century
  • Judith Scheele
  • Published online:
    05 May 2012
    Print publication:
    30 April 2012
  • Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara describes life on and around the contemporary border between Algeria and Mali, exploring current developments in a broad historical and socioeconomic context. Basing her findings on long-term fieldwork with trading families, truckers, smugglers and scholars, Judith Scheele investigates the history of contemporary patterns of mobility from the late nineteenth century to the present. Through a careful analysis of family ties and local economic records, this book shows how long-standing mobility and interdependence have shaped not only local economies, but also notions of social hierarchy, morality and political legitimacy, creating patterns that endure today and that need to be taken into account in any empirically-grounded study of the region.

Zimbabwe's Guerrilla War
  • Peasant Voices
  • Norma J. Kriger
  • Published online:
    05 January 2012
    Print publication:
    07 November 1991
  • Studies of revolution generally regard peasant popular support as a prerequisite for success. In this study of political mobilization and organization in Zimbabwe's recent rural-based war of independence, Norma Kriger is interested in the extent to which ZANU guerrillas were able to mobilize peasant support, the reasons why peasants participated, and in the links between the post-war outcomes for peasants and the mobilization process. Hers is an unusual study of revolution in that she interviews peasants and other participants about their experiences, and she is able to produce fresh insights into village politics during a revolution. In particular, Zimbabwean peasant accounts direct our attention to the ZANU guerrillas' ultimate political victory despite the lack of peasant popular support, and to the importance that peasants attached to gender, generational and other struggles with one another. Her findings raise questions about theories of revolution.

The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589
  • Toby Green
  • Published online:
    05 November 2011
    Print publication:
    10 October 2011
  • The region between the river Senegal and Sierra Leone saw the first trans-Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century. Drawing on many new sources, Toby Green challenges current quantitative approaches to the history of the slave trade. New data on slave origins can show how and why Western African societies responded to Atlantic pressures. Green argues that answering these questions requires a cultural framework and uses the idea of creolization - the formation of mixed cultural communities in the era of plantation societies - to argue that preceding social patterns in both Africa and Europe were crucial. Major impacts of the sixteenth-century slave trade included political fragmentation, changes in identity and the re-organization of ritual and social patterns. The book shows which peoples were enslaved, why they were vulnerable and the consequences in Africa and beyond.

Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900–1955
  • Katherine Luongo
  • Published online:
    07 October 2011
    Print publication:
    26 September 2011
  • Focusing on colonial Kenya, this book shows how conflicts between state authorities and Africans over witchcraft-related crimes provided an important space in which the meanings of justice, law and order in the empire were debated. Katherine Luongo discusses the emergence of imperial networks of knowledge about witchcraft. She then demonstrates how colonial concerns about witchcraft produced an elaborate body of jurisprudence about capital crimes. The book analyzes the legal wrangling that produced the Witchcraft Ordinances in the 1910s, the birth of an anthro-administrative complex surrounding witchcraft in the 1920s, the hotly contested Wakamba Witch Trials of the 1930s, the explosive growth of legal opinion on witch-murder in the 1940s, and the unprecedented state-sponsored cleansings of witches and Mau Mau adherents during the 1950s. A work of anthropological history, this book develops an ethnography of Kamba witchcraft or uoi.

A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960
  • Bruce S. Hall
  • Published online:
    05 August 2011
    Print publication:
    06 June 2011
  • The mobilization of local ideas about racial difference has been important in generating, and intensifying, civil wars that have occurred since the end of colonial rule in all of the countries that straddle the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. From Sudan to Mauritania, the racial categories deployed in contemporary conflicts often hearken back to an older history in which blackness could be equated with slavery and non-blackness with predatory and uncivilized banditry. This book traces the development of arguments about race over a period of more than 350 years in one important place along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert: the Niger Bend in northern Mali. Using Arabic documents held in Timbuktu, as well as local colonial sources in French and oral interviews, Bruce S. Hall reconstructs an African intellectual history of race that long predated colonial conquest, and which has continued to orient inter-African relations ever since.

A Modern History of Tanganyika
  • John Iliffe
  • Published online:
    03 May 2011
    Print publication:
    10 May 1979
  • This is the first comprehensive and fully documented history of modern Tanganyika (mainland Tanzania). After introductory chapters on the nineteenth century, Dr Iliffe concentrates on the colonial period, and especially on economic, social and intellectual change among Africans as the core of their colonial experience and the basis of their political behaviour. Particularl attention is paid to the consequences for small-scale societies of their incorporation into the international order; the impact of capitlaism and the emergence of capitalist relationships and attitudes; African attempts to defend or reform indigenous institutions and to organise movements of protest or revolt against European control; the successive formation and dissolution of a specifically colonial society; and the effects of economic change on Tanganyika's ecology in modern times. The book brings together the research which scholars of many nationalities have carried out in Tanzania over the last twenty years, and attempts to synthesise their findings with the evidence available from African and European records in Tanzania, Britain and Germany.

Slow Death for Slavery
  • The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria 1897–1936
  • Paul E. Lovejoy, Jan S. Hogendorn
  • Published online:
    03 May 2011
    Print publication:
    01 July 1993
  • This book examines the gradual decline of slavery in Northern Nigeria during the first forty years of colonial rule. At the time of the British conquest, the Sokoto Caliphate was one of the largest slave societies in modern history. The authors have written a thoughtful and provocative book which raises doubts over the moral legitimacy of both the Sokoto Caliphate and the colonial state. They chart the development of British colonial policy towards resolving the dilemma of slavery and how to end it.

African Railwaymen
  • Solidarity and Opposition in an East African Labour Force
  • R. D. Grillo
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    03 January 1974
  • This was the first anthropological monograph to have dealt at length with the labour force of a major East African industry. It is a study of the African employees of the East African Railways and Harbours stationed at Kampala, Uganda, and living on the Railway-owned Nsambya housing estate. Set in the years 1964–5, shortly after Uganda's and Kenya's Independence, the book explores some of the consequences for African migrant workers of the changes affecting their society. Dr Grillo describes how falling prices for primary agricultural products, educational expansion and rising wages have created a high demand for employment. Those fortunate enough to find work enjoy a relatively high standard of living. Partly in consequence, the Railway labour force has become stabilised with a low turnover of employees, the majority of whom bring wives and children to live in town. They are, however, still migrants who maintain social and economic ties with their areas of origin. By fulfilling customary and personal obligations, individuals retain a position within an 'ethnic' system which provides one framework for relationships of solidarity and opposition. The industry itself with its work-units, occupational groups and grading system provides another.

The Settler Economies
  • Studies in the Economic History of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia 1900–1963
  • Paul Mosley
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    19 May 1983
  • The economic history of developing countries, particularly the former colonies, has become polarized between two ideologies. The apologists for colonialism have emphasized the stimulus given to the indigenous economy by the introduction of foreign capital; the 'underdevelopment theorists' have turned this interpretation on its head and represented the relationship as being, particularly in 'settler colonies' such as Kenya and Zimbabwe, one not of stimulus but of rape and plunder. In this study, Dr Mosley considers the economies of colonial Kenya and Southern Rhodesia and argues, in the light of recently assembled statistical data, that the truth is more complex than either of these simple interpretations allows. At the level of policy, most white producers acknowledged that they could not afford to let 'white mate black in a very few moves': they needed his cheap labour, cattle and maize too much to wish to damage seriously the peasant economy that sustained them.

Politics of Decolonization
  • Kenya Europeans and the Land Issue 1960–1965
  • Gary Wasserman
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    27 August 1976
  • Decolonization in the Third World has most often been approached by tracing the ties of nationalist movements to the attainment of independence. This book attempts to revise the perspective. It presents a model of decolonization centring on the idea that the process was shaped by the reaction of colonial interests to the ascendancy of a nationalist elite. Rather than tracing the upward development of a nationalist movement, it traces the downward manipulation of that movement into a colonial system. The study concludes that instead of being a separating step to remove colonial influence, decolonization in more important respects ensured the continuity of the colonial political economy. The book is of interest to scholars, students and others interested in decolonization, white settles, East African affairs and land reform, as well as the general reader following current events in Africa.

The Elusive Granary
  • Herder, Farmer, and State in Northern Kenya
  • Peter D. Little
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    28 February 1992
  • First published in 1992, this book examines the social and political dimensions of Africa's food and environmental crises. Written by an anthropologist, it focuses on the changes and the problems faced during the last century by one particular ethnic group, the Il Chamus of Kenya and traces the area's transformation from a food-surplus 'granary' to one that is dependent on food imports and aid. By documenting the history, social structure and ecology of the area, Peter Little is able to show that the crisis among the region's herders is rooted in processes that preceded the devastating droughts of the 1980s. Drought is in fact a 'normal' state of affairs in semiarid Kenya, but the processes that have inhibited herders from adequately coping with it are not. The author analyses the relationships between social, political and ecological variables and he treats topics such as land management, food production, marketing, state policy making and labour organisation in an integrated fashion. This is a book that challenges many of the stereotypes about African social life, agriculture and ecology and it will be of interest to anthropologists, academics and practitioners in development studies, historians, ecologists and geographers.

The Lions of Dagbon
  • Political Change in Northern Ghana
  • Martin Staniland
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    03 July 1975
  • The political conflict that has taken the most violent form and proved costliest in human lives in Ghana in the last half century has been a chieftaincy dispute in the northern kingdom of Dagomba, known as the Yendi skin dispute. The major loss of life took puce in 1969 but the dispute has continued to trouble Ghanaian politics and has affected the careers of national leaders under both civilian and military regimes. It is one of the most complex, explosive and intractable disputes in a country noted for conflicts over chieftaincy. Mr Staniland examines the political history of Dagomba, one of the most important pre-colonial states in what is now Ghana, from its partition between the British and the Germans in 1899. He analyses the attitudes and policies of successive governments towards chieftaincy and `traditionalism', and the effects which outside control has had on dynastic politics.

Afrikaners of the Kalahari
  • White Minority in a Black State
  • Margo Russell, Martin Russell
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    08 March 1979
  • The popular image of the Kalahari is a romantic one of desert space and untouched Bushmen. The popular image of the Afrikaners is of a unique and vicious racialism. Yet Afrikaners have been living in the Kalahari for more than a hundred years, their presence often studiously ignored by writers; and since 1961 independent Botswana with its policy of scrupulous non-racialism has embraced both Afrikaner and Bushman in common citizenship. This book attempts to describe the complex and mundane reality of ethnic relations in the Kalahari, not only in the present, harried by relentless pressure to enter the cash economy of modernisation, but in the past. Using oral history as a source, the authors describe the 'Africanisation' of these poor white pastoralists of the interior, cut off by the thirstland from those influences which gave contemporary Afrikanerdom its particular cast. They describe the pragmatic relations developed by Afrikaners with other peoples of the interior, and how these have been perceived and redefined with the decisive shift in political power from British to Tswana hands.

Saints and Politicians
  • Donal B. Cruise O'Brien
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    23 January 1975
  • Political life among the Wolof (the largest and most powerful of Senegal's 'tribal' groups) is the principal theme of this collection of essays. The focus of study is on African political leadership, in towns and villages. Within the constraints of alien control or influence, it is argued, cultural and organisational barriers have consistently allowed a wide range of initiative to African leaders and communities in a creative and flexible adjustment to new and unfamiliar demands. Exploration of this African initiative in various contexts suggests a complex, fascinating pattern of cultural and structural interaction. The multidisciplinary approach to politics in these essays will interest historians and social anthropologists as well as political scientists. These studies are indeed relevant to any student of the problems of 'underdeveloped' societies involved in the modern state. Parts of the essays have been published elsewhere, but all have been extensively revised, updated and integrated to a coherent pattern of analysis.

Warfare in the Sokoto Caliphate
  • Historical and Sociological Perspectives
  • Joseph P. Smaldone
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    25 March 1977
  • The successful jihad of 1804 in Hausaland - perhaps the most important Islamic revolution in West African history, with consequences still apparent in Nigeria today - resulted in the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate, the largest and most enduring West African polity in the nineteenth century. The book is a full length study of traditional Sudanic military history, and an authoritative analysis of warfare in its most prominent Islamic state. After a brief survey of the evolution of Sudanic warfare and military organisation before 1800, Dr Smaldone examines the historical development and sociological implications of the two important revolutions in military technology which occurred in the nineteenth century: the adoption of cavalry during the jihad period and the introduction of firearms in the latter half of the century. He argues that these two revolutions were causal factors in producing two structural transformations in the emirates of the Caliphate, first from relatively egalitarian combatant communities to feudal systems, and then to centralised bureaucratic state organisations.

The Ghanaian Factory Worker
  • Industrial Man in Africa
  • Margaret Peil
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    23 March 1972
  • A pioneering study of the social aspects of industrialisation in a developing country in tropical Africa. Though industrial workers form a relatively small proportion of the Ghanaian population, they represent the 'modern' sector of the economy and industrial jobs are much sought after by school leavers. The occupational and migration histories, the work and home lives of these men and women are examined in the framework of current theories of modernity to demonstrate the effects of industrialisation in those countries where the process has not yet gone very far. This book surveys the field of industrialisation in Ghana and its effects through such other factors as migration. It provides a valuable comparison both with industrialisation elsewhere and with other aspects of African social life.

Oral Poetry and Somali Nationalism
  • The Case of Sayid Mahammad 'Abdille Hasan
  • Said S. Samatar
  • Published online:
    07 May 2010
    Print publication:
    16 September 1982
  • This book explores the influence of oral poetry on Somali politics. By reconstructing the history of the Somali nationalist resistance movement, mainly through the use of political oratory in verse form by its leader, Sayyid Mahammad 'Abdille Hasan', the 'Mad Mullah' of British history, Said Samater shows how an indigenous resource can be harnessed in a non-literate society, not only as a medium of mass communication but also as a tool for acquiring political power. He traces the intimate correlation between language, politics and oral poetry and seeks to suggest to students of African societies ways of examining indigenous forms of communication used by traditional African creators of large-scale organisations in the absence of writing, to influence public opinion. The book is an important contribution to the history of the Horn of Africa and its new material on the role of oral literature in a non-literate society will interest linguists, sociologists and anthropologists, as well as students of folklore and comparative literature.

Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa
  • Martin A. Klein
  • Published online:
    07 May 2010
    Print publication:
    28 July 1998
  • Martin Klein's book is a history of slaves during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in three former French colonies. It investigates the changing nature of local slavery over time, and the evolving French attitudes towards it, through the phases of trade, conquest and colonial rule. The heart of the study focuses on the period between 1876 and 1922, when a French army composed largely of slave soldiers took massive numbers of slaves in the interior, while in areas near the coast, hesitant actions were taken against slave-raiding, trading and use. After 1900, the French withdrew state support of slavery, and as many as a million slaves left their masters. A second exodus occurred after World War I, when soldiers of slave origin returned home. The renegotiation of relationships between those who remained and their masters carries the story into the contemporary world.

Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda
  • Timothy Longman
  • Published online:
    03 May 2010
    Print publication:
    07 September 2009
  • Although Rwanda is among the most Christian countries in Africa, in the 1994 genocide, church buildings became the primary killing grounds. To explain why so many Christians participated in the violence, this book looks at the history of Christian engagement in Rwanda and then turns to a rich body of original national- and local-level research to argue that Rwanda's churches have consistently allied themselves with the state and played ethnic politics. Comparing two local Presbyterian parishes in Kibuye before the genocide demonstrates that progressive forces were seeking to democratize the churches. Just as Hutu politicians used the genocide of Tutsi to assert political power and crush democratic reform, church leaders supported the genocide to secure their own power. The fact that Christianity inspired some Rwandans to oppose the genocide demonstrates that opposition by the churches was possible and might have hindered the violence.

The Political Economy of Pondoland 1860–1930
  • William Beinart
  • Published online:
    26 February 2010
    Print publication:
    21 October 1982
  • This book examines in detail how the people of one formerly independent African chiefdom were absorbed into the wider South African society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first two chapters discuss the nature of the pre-colonial polity, changes in agricultural production during the early stages of colonisation, colonial policy and the beginnings of mass labour migrancy up to about 1910. The last three chapters, focusing on the period between about 1910 and 1930, analyse changing patterns of rural production and labour migrancy, the changing form of African homesteads, the position of chiefs in rural South African and new patterns of rural differentiation. The book questions some of the assumptions in the literature on 'underdevelopment' in Africa.

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