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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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113 results in African Studies

Page 4 of 6

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.

Islam and Social Change in French West Africa
  • History of an Emancipatory Community
  • Sean Hanretta
  • Published online:
    15 December 2009
    Print publication:
    23 March 2009
  • Exploring the history and religious community of a group of Muslim Sufi mystics in colonial French West Africa, this study shows the relationship between religious, social and economic change in the region. It highlights the role that intellectuals played in shaping social and cultural change and illuminates the specific religious ideas and political contexts that gave their efforts meaning. In contrast to depictions that emphasize the importance of international networks and anti-modern reaction in twentieth-century Islamic reform, this book claims that, in West Africa, such movements were driven by local forces and constituted only the most recent round in a set of centuries-old debates about the best way for pious people to confront social injustice. It argues that traditional historical methods prevent an appreciation of Muslim intellectual history in Africa by misunderstanding the nature of information gathering during colonial rule and misconstruing the relationship between documents and oral history.

Africans
  • The History of a Continent
  • 2nd edition
  • John Iliffe
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    13 August 2007
  • In a vast and all-embracing study of Africa, from the origins of mankind to the AIDS epidemic, John Iliffe refocuses its history on the peopling of an environmentally hostile continent. Africans have been pioneers struggling against disease and nature, and their social, economic and political institutions have been designed to ensure their survival. In the context of medical progress and other twentieth-century innovations, however, the same institutions have bred the most rapid population growth the world has ever seen. Africans: The History of a Continent is thus a single story binding living Africans to their earliest human ancestors.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade
  • Boubacar Barry
  • Published online:
    31 October 2009
    Print publication:
    13 December 1997
  • Boubacar Barry is one of the leading figures in West African historiography. His authoritative study of 400 years of Senegambian history is unrivalled in its detailed grasp of published and unpublished materials. Taking as its subject the vast area covering the Senegal and Gambia river basins, this book explores the changing dynamics of regional and Atlantic trade, clashes between traditional African and emergent Muslim authorities, the colonial system and the slave trade, and current obstacles to the integration of the region's modern states. Professor Barry argues cogently for the integrity of the Senegambian region as a historical subject, and he forges a coherent narrative from the dismemberment and unification which characterised Senegambia's development from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. This newly-translated study is a vital tool in our understanding of West African history.

Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa
  • The Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century
  • Martin Lynn
  • Published online:
    04 December 2009
    Print publication:
    11 December 1997
  • A key theme in the West African trading system of the nineteenth century is the transition from the slave trade to 'legitimate' commerce, and its significance for the African societies of the region. In this period of transition, trade in palm oil was at the core of relations between Britain and West Africa, and of immense importance to the economies of large parts of West Africa. Martin Lynn's authoritative and comprehensive study of the palm oil trade covers the whole of this critical period for all of West Africa. It explains how the palm oil trade grew organically out of the organisation of the slave trade. The situation changed sharply with the development of steam communication between Britain and West Africa from the 1850s, leading to severe problems for the commerce in the second half of the century, the erosion of African brokers' powers, and the restructuring of the trade thereafter. The result was a crisis within the trade towards the end of the century and, eventually, with the arrival of colonial rule, the ending of the long established structures of the commerce.

Peasant Revolution in Ethiopia
  • The Tigray People's Liberation Front, 1975–1991
  • John Young
  • Published online:
    12 November 2009
    Print publication:
    04 September 1997
  • In the wake of the overthrow of the Haile-Selassie regime in Ethiopia in 1974 and the coming to power of the military, a number of opposition forces launched insurrections. But only one movement, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) triumphed, liberating Tigray in 1989, and in an ethnic-based coalition which it dominated, assuming state power in 1991. This is the first chronicle of the history of that struggle, and it is based largely on interviews with peasants who formed the core of the Tigrayan revolution and the TPLF leadership. It provides the necessary background to understanding post-1991 political developments in Ethiopia. It also offers an explanation of peasant-based revolution that contrasts with contemporary approaches by Marxists, Skocpol, and in particular the works of Wolf, Paige and Scott, all of whom largely ignore the political considerations and the role of the revolutionary party, which Dr Young identifies as a critical element in his study.

Misreading the African Landscape
  • Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic
  • James Fairhead, Melissa Leach
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    17 October 1996
  • Islands of dense forest in the savanna of 'forest' Guinea have long been regarded both by scientists and policy-makers as the last relics of a once more extensive forest cover, degraded and degrading fast due to its inhabitants' land use. In this 1996 text, James Fairhead and Melissa Leach question these entrenched assumptions. They show, on the contrary, how people have created forest islands around their villages, and how they have turned fallow vegetation more woody, so that population growth has implied more forest, not less. They also consider the origins, persistence, and consequences of a century of erroneous policy. Interweaving historical, social anthropological and ecological data, this fascinating study advances a novel theoretical framework for ecological anthropology, encouraging a radical re-examination of some central tenets in each of these disciplines.

Decolonization and African Society
  • The Labor Question in French and British Africa
  • Frederick Cooper
  • Published online:
    22 February 2010
    Print publication:
    28 August 1996
  • This detailed and authoritative volume changes our conceptions of 'imperial' and 'African' history. Frederick Cooper gathers a vast range of archival sources in French and English to achieve a truly comparative study of colonial policy toward the recruitment, control, and institutionalization of African labor forces from the mid 1930s, when the labor question was first posed, to the late 1950s, when decolonization was well under way. Professor Cooper explores colonial conceptions of the African worker and shows how African trade union and political leaders used the new language of social change to claim equality and a share of power. This helped to persuade European officials that the 'modern' Africa they imagined was unaffordable. Britain and France could not reshape African society. As they left the continent, the question was how they had affected the ways in which Africans could reorganize society themselves.

Kingship and State
  • The Buganda Dynasty
  • Christopher Wrigley
  • Published online:
    12 January 2010
    Print publication:
    23 February 1996
  • The precolonial kingdom of Buganda, nucleus of the present Uganda state, has long attracted scholarly interest. Since written records are lacking entirely until 1862, historians have had to rely on oral traditions that were recorded from the end of the nineteenth century. These sources provide rich materials on Buganda in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in this 1996 book Christopher Wrigley endeavours to show that the stories which appear to relate to earlier periods are largely mythology. He argues that this does not reduce their value since they are of interest in their own mythical right, revealing ancient traces of sacred kingship, and also throwing oblique light on the development of the recent state. He has written an elegant and wide-ranging study of one of Africa's most famous kingdoms.

Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville
  • Phyllis Martin
  • Published online:
    09 November 2009
    Print publication:
    11 January 1996
  • In this book, Phyllis Martin, a well-known Africanist scholar, opens up a whole new field of African research: the leisure activities of urban Africans. Her comprehensive study, set in colonial Brazzaville and based on a wide variety of written sources and interviews, investigates recreational activities from football and fashion to music, dance and night life. In it, she brings out the ways in which these activities built social networks, humanised daily life and forged new identities, and explains how they ultimately helped to remake older traditions and values with new cultural forms.

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.

The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya
  • Angelique Haugerud
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    11 May 1995
  • Once the major success story of a troubled continent, by the early 1990s Kenya came to be regarded as its fallen star. This book challenges such images of reversal and the analytical polarities which sustain them. Based on several years of research in Kenya, the analysis ranges from telescopic to microscopic fields of vision - from national political culture, oratory, and the staging of politics, to everyday struggles for livelihood among people in one rural locale during the past century. This sliding scale of analysis allows the author to experiment theoretically with a number of themes informed by contemporary analytical tensions among post-modernist 'chaos', historical contingency, and structural regularities. The result is a study which combines many disciplines and perspectives to give a rich and varied picture of the culture of politics in twentieth-century Kenya.

Islamic Society and State Power in Senegal
  • Disciples and Citizens in Fatick
  • Leonardo A. Villalón
  • Published online:
    10 November 2009
    Print publication:
    16 February 1995
  • The Sufi Muslim orders to which the vast majority of Senegalese belong are the most significant institutions of social organization in the country. While studies of Islam and politics have tended to focus on the destabilizing force of religiously based groups, the author argues that in Senegal the orders have been a central component of a political system that has been among the most stable in Africa. Focusing on a regional administrative centre, he combines a detailed account of grassroots politics with an analysis of national and international forces to examine the ways in which the internal dynamics of the orders shape the exercise of power by the Senegalese. This is a major study that should be read by every student of Islam and politics as well as of Africa.

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.

Page 4 of 6