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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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116 results in African Studies

Page 6 of 6

West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce
  • The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860
  • James F. Searing
  • Published online:
    19 October 2009
    Print publication:
    22 July 1993
  • West African societies were transformed by the slave trade, even in regions where few slaves were exported. While many books have been written on the import and export trade and on warrior predation, Dr Searing's concern is with the effects of the Atlantic slave trade on the societies of the Senegal river valley in the eighteenth century. He shows that the growth of the Atlantic trade stimulated the development of slavery within West Africa. Slaves worked as seamen in the river and coasting trades, produced surplus grain to feed slaves in transit, and sometimes came to hold pivotal positions in the political structure of the coastal kingdoms of Senegambia. This local slave system had far-reaching consequences, leading to religious protest and slave rebellions. The changes in agricultural production fostered an ecological crisis.

The Shell Money of the Slave Trade
  • Jan Hogendorn, Marion Johnson
  • Published online:
    12 October 2009
    Print publication:
    11 September 1986
  • This study examines the role of cowrie-shell money in West African trade, particularly the slave trade. The shells were carried from the Maldives to the Mediterranean by Arab traders for further transport across the Sahara, and to Europe by competing Portuguese, Dutch, English and French traders for onward transport to the West African coast. In Africa they served to purchase the slaves exported to the New World, as well as other less sinister exports. Over a large part of West Africa they became the regular market currency, but were severely devalued by the importation of thousands of tons of the cheaper Zanzibar cowries. Colonial governments disliked cowries because of the inflation and encouraged their replacement by low-value coins. They disappeared almost totally, to re-appear during the depression of the 1930s, and have been found occasionally in the markets of remote frontier districts, avoiding exchange and currency control problems.

The Politics of Harmony
  • Land Dispute Strategies in Swaziland
  • Laurel L. Rose
  • Published online:
    01 October 2009
    Print publication:
    31 January 1992
  • Laurel Rose analyses how traditional ruling elites in Swaziland, as in other parts of Africa, use harmony ideologies to downplay and resolve land disputes. Such disputes could be used by foreign development agents or indigenous new élites as justification for implementing land tenure changes, including a reduction of traditional elites' power based upon land control. Swazi commoners accept the cultural value and legitimacy of most harmony ideologies, but they use strategies when disputing about particular land rights to produce more favourable outcomes. This book is unusual in its focus on political rather than economic dimensions of land tenure and disputes. It searches for links between individual concerns with land use rights and national concerns with land policy. It also examines gender and leadership issues associated with land, showing how women and new élites threaten land interests of men and traditional leaders.

Class, Power and Ideology in Ghana
  • The Railwaymen of Sekondi
  • Richard Jeffries
  • Published online:
    30 September 2009
    Print publication:
    02 November 1978
  • Although there is a growing body of literature on the process and potential political consequences of class-formation in Africa, there are virtually no detailed studies of the political attitudes and behaviour of African industrial workers. First published in 1978, this study analyses the political history and sociology of one particular group - the railway workers of Ghana's third city, Sekondi-Takoradi, who are renowned for their leading role in the Ghanaian nationalist movement and for their sustained opposition to the elitism and authoritarianism of post-Independence governments. In seeking to explain the ideological consistency which has informed the political activities of the railway workers, Richard Jeffries shows how, within a close-knit and relatively stable community, a keen sense of their own history has provided the basis for a shared political culture.

The Kanyok of Zaire
  • An Institutional and Ideological History to 1895
  • John C. Yoder
  • Published online:
    29 September 2009
    Print publication:
    23 April 1992
  • In this study John Yoder chronicles the history of the Kanyok, a people from the southern savanna of Zaire, from before 1500 until their incorporation into the Congo Free State in the 1890s. By analysing their oral histories, myths, and legends, he describes the political and cultural development of a people who, before 1891, had no written records. Yoder sets his work firmly within the larger context of the southern savanna by extending his investigations to the traditions of neighbouring peoples, in particular to the Luba and the Lunda, whose empires once dominated the region. In this way he demonstrates how the same stories and ideas circulated over a vast area but were continually adapted to local circumstances. Yoder's history of the Kanyok of Zaire thereby forms the nucleus for a broader and more composite understanding of the entire region.

Horn and Crescent
  • Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800–1900
  • Randall L. Pouwels
  • Published online:
    23 September 2009
    Print publication:
    16 April 1987
  • In this first major historical study of Islam among the Swahili, Randall Pouwels shows how Islam and other aspects of coastal civilization have evolved since about AD 1000 as an organic whole. Coastal Africans, he argues, simply adopted Islam as the spiritual vehicle best suited to their expanding intellectual needs and to meeting the opportunities presented by their physical and cultural environment. The culture and religion that developed were strong, rich, supple, self-assured. yet capable of accommodating change where it was unavoidable or preferable. All these characteristics were put to the test in the nineteenth century, when coastal peoples were subjected to intense Arabizing and Westernizing influences. Pouwels demonstrates how local people went on asserting their own traditions while assimilating what they chose from both worlds. East African Muslims, therefore faced the twentieth century divided on issues of local cultural autonomy and the need to conform to external cultural pressures.

Kings, Commoners and Concessionaires
  • The Evolution and Dissolution of the Nineteenth-Century Swazi State
  • Philip Bonner
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    07 April 1983
  • This is the first full-length study of the political economy of one of the African states which were formed in the course of the nineteenth-century Zulu revolution. The early chapters examine the evolution of the Swazi state and the dynamics of its stratified systems, paying particular attention to the 'layering' of inequality through marriage and inheritance patterns, and the simultaneous integration of age regiments and the elaboration of a national ideology based on the Swazi royalty. Dr Bonner then sets the Swazi state in the wider context of south-eastern Africa and discusses its relations with the surrounding Boer societies. The later chapters analyse the role played by the great mining companies and their white concessionaires in the partition of southern Africa and in bringing about the dissolution of the Swazi state.

Guerrilla Veterans in Post-war Zimbabwe
  • Symbolic and Violent Politics, 1980–1987
  • Norma J. Kriger
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    29 May 2003
  • Zimbabwe's guerrilla veterans have burst into the international media as the storm troopers in Mugabe's new war of economic liberation. In this book, Norma Kriger gives the unfolding contemporary drama a historical background, and shows continuities between the present and past. Between 1980 and 1987, guerrilla veterans and the ruling party colluded with and manipulated each other to build power and privilege in the army, police, bureaucracy and among workers. Both relied chiefly on violence and appeals to their participation in the anti-colonial liberation war as they sought to vanquish their then political opponents. Today, violence and a liberation war discourse continue to be salient as Mugabe's party and its guerrilla veterans struggle to maintain power through land invasions and purges of a new political opposition. This study gives a critical review of guerrilla programs and the war-to-peace transitions literatures, thus changing the way we view post-conflict societies.

Transforming Mozambique
  • The Politics of Privatization, 1975–2000
  • M. Anne Pitcher
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    14 November 2002
  • Many of the economic transformations in Africa have been as dramatic as those in Eastern Europe. Yet much of the comparative literature on transitions has overlooked African countries. This 2002 study of Mozambique's shift from a command to a market economy draws on a wealth of empirical material, including archival sources, interviews, political posters and corporate advertisements, to reveal that the state is a central actor in the reform process, despite the claims of neo-liberals and their critics. Alongside the state, social forces - from World Bank officials to rural smallholders - have also accelerated, thwarted or shaped change in Mozambique. M. Anne Pitcher offers an intriguing analysis of the dynamic interaction between previous and emerging agents, ideas and institutions, to explain the erosion of socialism and the politics of privatization in a developing country. She demonstrates that Mozambique's political economy is a heterogenous blend of ideological and institutional continuities and ruptures.

Re-Imagining Rwanda
  • Conflict, Survival and Disinformation in the Late Twentieth Century
  • Johan Pottier
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    26 September 2002
  • The tragic conflict in Rwanda and the Great Lakes in 1994–1996 attracted the horrified attention of the world's media. Journalists, diplomats and aid workers struggled to find a way to make sense of the bloodshed. Johan Pottier's troubling study shows that the post-genocide regime in Rwanda was able to impose a simple yet persuasive account of Central Africa's crises upon international commentators new to the region, and he explains the ideological underpinnings of this official narrative. He also provides a sobering analysis of the way in which this simple, persuasive, but fatally misleading analysis of the situation on the ground led to policy errors that exacerbated the original crisis. Professor Pottier has extensive field experience in the region, from before and after the genocide, and he has also worked among refugees in eastern Zaire.

Pragmatism in the Age of Jihad
  • The Precolonial State of Bundu
  • Michael A. Gomez
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    14 January 1993
  • Bundu was an anomaly among the precolonial Muslim states of West Africa. Founded during the jihads which swept the savannah in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it developed a pragmatic policy, unique in the midst of fundamentalist, theocratic Muslim states. Located in the Upper Senegal and with access to the Upper Gambia, Bundu played a critical role in regional commerce and production and reacted quickly to the stimulus of European trade. Drawing upon a wide range of sources both oral and documentary, Arabic, English and French, Dr Gomez provides the first full account of Bundu's history. He analyses the foundation and growth of an Islamic state at a crossroads between the Saharan and trans-Atlantic trade, paying particular attention to the relationship between Islamic thought and court policy, and to the state's response to militant Islam in the early nineteenth century.

From Slave Trade to 'Legitimate' Commerce
  • The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa
  • Edited by Robin Law
  • Published online:
    21 September 2009
    Print publication:
    17 August 1995
  • This edited collection, written by eleven leading specialists, examines the nineteenth-century commercial transition in West Africa: the ending of the Atlantic slave trade and the development of alternative forms of 'legitimate' trade, mainly in vegetable products. Approaching the subject from an African, rather than a European or American, perspective, the case studies consider the effects of transition on the African societies involved. They offer significant insights into the history of pre-colonial Africa and the slave trade, the origins of European imperialism, and longer-term issues of economic development in Africa.

Black People and the South African War 1899–1902
  • Peter Warwick
  • Published online:
    21 September 2009
    Print publication:
    05 May 1983
  • The South African War was a costly and bitterly contested struggle. It was fought in a region populated by five million people, four million of whom were black. This is the first history of the war to focus upon the wartime experiences of black people, and to examine the war in the context of a complex and rapidly changing colonial society increasingly shaped, but not yet transformed, by mining capital. The ways in which the war influenced the lives and livelihoods of different sections of the black population are studied - from chiefs and newspaper editors to peasant farmers and artisans, to farm tenants and industrial workers. Dr Warwick shows that black people were far more than either spectators to, or passive victims of, a white man's quarrel, and presents a thorough revision of accepted views on the war. He reveals the vital roles performed by black people in both the British and Boer armies, and shows how the regular and irregular participation of blacks exercised an influence upon the course of war.

Palm Oil and Protest
  • An Economic History of the Ngwa Region, South-Eastern Nigeria, 1800–1980
  • Susan M. Martin
  • Published online:
    11 September 2009
    Print publication:
    10 March 1988
  • The Ngwa region lies in the heart of the Nigerian palm belt. Palm oil is one of the oldest foodstuffs of the region and has also been an export crop, produced mainly by women, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. This 1988 book describes the rise and fall of the oil palm export industry. In contrast to the views of both dependency and vent-for-surplus theorists, it is shown that patterns of export growth and capital investment were heavily influenced by locally inspired changes in food production methods, gender and intergenerational relationships. The processes of change within the domestic and export economies became increasingly closely intertwined after 1924, when African coastal middlemen began to settle further inland and to spread the knowledge of cassava and Christianity. This book draws upon a wide range of economic, botanical, anthropological and historical studies as well as on colonial archives, but its heart lies in the oral evidence and life histories generously provided by Ngwa men and women.

Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers
  • The Duala and their Hinterland, c.1600–c.1960
  • Ralph A. Austen, Jonathan Derrick
  • Published online:
    08 August 2009
    Print publication:
    21 January 1999
  • The Duala people entered the international scene as merchant-brokers for precolonial trade in ivory, slaves and palm products. Under colonial rule they used the advantages gained from earlier riverain trade to develop cocoa plantations and provide their children with exceptional levels of European education. At the same time they came into early conflict with both German and French regimes and played a leading - if ultimately unsuccessful - role in anti-colonial politics. In tracing these changing economic and political roles, this book also examines the growing consciousness of the Duala as an ethnic group and uses their history to shed light on the history of 'middleman' communities in surrounding regions of West and Central Africa. The authors draw upon a wide range of written and oral sources, including indigenous accounts of the past conflicting with their own findings but illuminate local conceptions of social hierarchy and their relationship to spiritual beliefs.

Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750–1870
  • A Tragedy of Manners
  • Robert Ross
  • Published online:
    07 July 2009
    Print publication:
    01 July 1999
  • In a compelling example of the cultural history of South Africa, Robert Ross offers a subtle and wide-ranging study of status and respectability in the colonial Cape between 1750 and 1850. His 1999 book describes the symbolism of dress, emblems, architecture, food, language, and polite conventions, paying particular attention to domestic relationships, gender, education and religion, and analyses the values and the modes of thinking current in different strata of the society. He argues that these cultural factors were related to high political developments in the Cape, and offers a rich account of the changes in social identity that accompanied the transition from Dutch to British overrule, and of the development of white racism and of ideologies of resistance to white domination. The result is a uniquely nuanced account of a colonial society.

Page 6 of 6