A critical examination of the engaging voice and multiple stories of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on war, feminism, art, ideology, hair, complex human identities and the challenges of multicultural existence.
Easily the leading and most engaging voice of her era and generation, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has bridged gaps and introduced new motifs and narrative styles which have energized contemporary African fiction since her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003). With Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) and The Thing Around Your Neck - Short Stories (2009), she established herself as a preeminent story-teller. Americanah (2013), with ingeniouscraftsmanship addresses the sensitive themes of passionate love, independence, freedom and moral responsibility with extravagant and versatile narrative innovations.
Through her writings, she has made herself relevant topeople of all ages - across racial and linguistic boundaries. Her talks, blogs, musings on social media, essays and commentaries, workshop-mentoring for budding young writers, lecture circuit discourses, all enrich her imaginativecreativity as they expand and define her mission as a writer. "We Should All be Feminists" she proclaimed in an essay, giving feminism a "tweak and twist" and suggesting new outlooks in literary theory.
Her contributionsto African, Diasporic and World literatures deserve serious analyses, commentaries and interpretations, and this Companion to her work critically examines her creative outputs from her art and ideology, from feminism to war, to matters of myth and perception, and the challenges of multicultural existence and complex human identities.
Ernest N. Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA.
Ernest N Emenyonu
A Companion to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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A critical examination of the engaging voice and multiple stories of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on war, feminism, art, ideology, hair, complex human identities and the challenges of multicultural existence.
Easily the leading and most engaging voice of her era and generation, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has bridged gaps and introduced new motifs and narrative styles which have energized contemporary African fiction since her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003). With Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) and The Thing Around Your Neck - Short Stories (2009), she established herself as a preeminent story-teller. Americanah (2013), with ingeniouscraftsmanship addresses the sensitive themes of passionate love, independence, freedom and moral responsibility with extravagant and versatile narrative innovations.
Through her writings, she has made herself relevant topeople of all ages - across racial and linguistic boundaries. Her talks, blogs, musings on social media, essays and commentaries, workshop-mentoring for budding young writers, lecture circuit discourses, all enrich her imaginativecreativity as they expand and define her mission as a writer. "We Should All be Feminists" she proclaimed in an essay, giving feminism a "tweak and twist" and suggesting new outlooks in literary theory.
Her contributionsto African, Diasporic and World literatures deserve serious analyses, commentaries and interpretations, and this Companion to her work critically examines her creative outputs from her art and ideology, from feminism to war, to matters of myth and perception, and the challenges of multicultural existence and complex human identities.
Grant Hamilton
A Companion to Mia Couto
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This new research in English on the work of the Mozambican writer Mia Couto provides a comprehensive introduction to the critical terrain of Couto's literary thought.
Already well-established in the Lusophone world, Mia Couto is increasingly acknowledged as a major voice in World literature. Winner of the Camões Prize for Literature in 2013, the most prestigious literary prize honouring Lusophone writers, he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2014, and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Yet, despite this high profile there are very few full-length critical studiesin English about his writing.
Mia Couto is known for his imaginative re-working of Portuguese, making it distinctively Mozambican in character. This book brings together some of the key scholars of his work such as Phillip Rothwell, Luís Madureira, and his long-time English translator David Brookshaw. Contributors examine not only his early works, which were written in the context of the 16-year post-independence civil war in Mozambique, but alsothe wide span of Couto's contemporary writing as a novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. There are contributions on his work in ecology, theatre and journalism, as well as on translation and Mozambican nationalist politics. Most importantly the contributors engage with the significance of Couto's writing to contemporary discussions of African literature, Lusophone studies and World literature.
Grant Hamilton is Associate Professor of English literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the editor of Reading Marechera (James Currey, 2013). David Huddart is Associate Professor of English literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kongand is author of Involuntary Associations: World Englishes and Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool University Press, 2014]
Grace A. Musila
A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour
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Re-examines this unresolved murder in Kenya and the underlying role of rumour, the media and inter-state relations on how the death has been reported and investigated.
Julie Ann Ward was a British tourist and wildlife photographer who went missing in Kenya's Maasai Mara Game Reserve in 1988 and was eventually found to have been murdered. Her death and the protracted search for her killers, stillat large, were hotly contested in the media. Many theories emerged as to how and why she died, generating three trials, several "true crime" books, and much speculation and rumour.
At the core of Musila's study are thefollowing questions: why would this young woman's death be the subject of such strong contestations of ideas and multiple truths? And what does this reveal about cultural productions of truth and knowledge in Kenya and Britain, particularly in the light of the responses to her disappearance of the Kenyan police, the British Foreign Office, and the British High Commission in Nairobi.
Building on existing scholarship on African history, narrative, gender and postcolonial studies, the author reveals how the Julie Ward murder and its attendant discourses offer insights into the journeys of ideas, and how these traverse the porous boundaries of the relationship between Kenya and Britain, and, by extension, Africa and the Global North.
Grace A. Musila is a lecturer in the English Department of Stellenbosch University, South Africa
John McCracken
A History of Malawi
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WINNER: 2013 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award
A distinguished scholar's magnum opus and the first full account of Malawi's colonial history.
This is the first comprehensive history of Malawi during the colonial period. Using a wide range of primary and secondary sources, John McCracken places the history of Malawi within the context of its pre-colonial past. The book examines the way in which British people, starting with David Livingstone, followed by the pioneer Scottish Presbyterian missionaries and including soldiers, speculators, colonial officials and politicians, played an influential part in shaping Malawi. But even more important is the story of how Malawian people responded to the intrusion of colonialism and imperialism and the role they played in the dissolution of the colonial state.
There is muchhere on resistance to colonial occupation, including religious-inspired revolt, on the shaping of the colonial economy, on the influence of Christian missions and on the growth of a powerful popular nationalism that contained within it the seeds of a new authoritarianism. But space is also given to less mainstream activities: the creation of dance societies, the eruption of witchcraft eradication movements and the emergence of football as a popular national sport. In particular, the book seeks to demonstrate the interrelationship between environmental and economic change and the impact these forces had on a poverty-stricken yet resilient Malawian peasantry.
John McCracken is Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Stirling University. He has taught at University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, University College of Dar es Salaam and was Professor and Head of the Department of History at Chancellor College, University of Malawi from 1980-83 and returned as Visiting Professor in 2009. John McCracken was awarded ASAUK's Distinguished Africanist Award in 2008.
John McCracken
A History of Malawi
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A distinguished scholar's magnum opus and the first full account of Malawi's colonial history.
WINNER: 2013 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award
This is the first comprehensive history of Malawi during the colonial period. Using a wide range of primary and secondary sources, it places this history within the context of the pre-colonial past. The book examines the way in which British people, starting with David Livingstone, followed by the pioneer Scottish Presbyterian missionaries and including soldiers, speculators, colonial officials and politicians, played an influential part in shaping Malawi. But even more important is the story of how Malawian people responded to the intrusion of colonialism and imperialism and the role they played in the dissolution of the colonial state. There is much here on resistance to colonial occupation, including religious-inspired revolt, on the shaping of the colonial economy, on the influence of Christian missions and on the growth of a powerful popular nationalism that contained within it the seeds of a new authoritarianism. But space is also given to less mainstream activities: the creation of dance societies, the eruption of witchcraft eradication movements and the emergence of football as a popular national sport. In particular, the book seeks to demonstrate the interrelationship between environmental and economic change and the impact these forces had on a poverty-stricken yet resilient Malawian peasantry.
Malawi: Mzuni Press
John McCracken is Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Stirling University. He has taught at University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, University College of Dar es Salaam and was Professor and Head of the Department of History at Chancellor College, University of Malawi from 1980-83 and returned as Visiting Professor in 2009. John McCracken was awarded ASAUK's Distinguished Africanist Award in 2008.
Brenda Cooper
A New Generation of African Writers
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Brenda Cooper examines the work of the new generation of African writers who have placed migration as central to their writing.
There is a new interest among publishers in New York and London in books by writers of African origin. These authors have often grown up or passed their early adult years out of Africa. The Orange Prize for Fiction was awarded inLondon 2007 to Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, and the Caine Prize for African Writing has introduced new writers such as Leila Aboulela, Biyi Bandele and Chimamanda Adichie herself to agents and publishers. This examination of the extraordinary work which has recently appeared is therefore very timely. Migration is a central theme of much African fiction written in English. Here, Brenda Cooper tracks the journeys undertakenby a new generation of African writers, their protagonists and the solid objects that populate their fiction, to depict the material realities of their multiple worlds and languages. The book explores the uses to which the Englishlanguage is put in order to understand these worlds. It demonstrates how these writers have contested the dominance of colonising metaphors. The writers' challenge is to find an English that can effectively express their many lives, languages and identities.
BRENDA COOPER is Director of the Centre for African Studies and a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town.
Southern Africa(South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland): University of KwaZulu-Natal Press (PB]
Lisa Elena Fuchs
A Political Ecology of Kenya’s Mau Forest
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A timely and important examination of the environmental crises, investigating their biophysical, political, economic, and socio-cultural aspects, that reveals why previous conservation efforts failed.
The eastern part of the Mau Forest, the most important closed-canopy forest in East Africa, has come under severe threat since the 1990s. In this political ecology Lisa Fuchs exploring the failure of the government-led forest restoration and rehabilitation initiative to 'Save the Mau', launched in 2009, the author examines two of the most contentious issues in Kenya since colonial times: land and the environment. She sheds light on the structural factors and the role of individuals in the forest's destruction and of non-protection and traces the colonial legacy of post-independent environmental conservation policies and practices. In doing so, Fuchs demonstrates that the Mau crisis is more than an environmental crisis: it is also a political, an economic, and a socio-cultural crisis. Though a detailed empirical analysis, the author shows that the 'Mau crisis' led to the near collapse of landscapes and livelihoods in the Mau Forest ecosystem. She traces the implementation of insufficient conservation programmes, which resulted from historical path-dependency and the adoption of global environmental governance blueprints, forest allocation and benefits, and exposes a forest management system that prioritises commercial forest production over biodiversity conservation. Access and entitlements to the highly fertile forest land, and the amalgamation of forest rehabilitation with the reclamation of grabbed public forest are emphasised as a further core contributor to the crisis. The socio-cultural dynamics within and among various forest-dwelling communities, including the indigenous hunting and gathering Ogiek and 'in-migrant' groups, are also analysed. The book highlights that local types of environmentalism are caught between the 'invention of traditions' and 'perverse modernisation' and shows the contradictory effects of the celebrated, highly anticipated but poorly executed 'Save the Mau' initiative, and how the presence of political will to maintain the crisis conditioned its perseverance. Finally, the book proposes realistic alternatives to sustainable forest management in politicised environments, whose relevance and applicability are considerable in this age of anthropogenic 'environmental' crises and conflicts.
Published in association with IFRA/AFRICAE
Peter P. Garretson
A Victorian Gentleman and Ethiopian Nationalist
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Hakim Wärqenäh Eshäté (Dr Charles Martin), born into a family of Ethiopian aristocrats but adopted by a British officer and raised in India, played a significant role in influencing medicine, education and economic development in Ethiopia throughout the first half of the 20th century.
This is the first full biography of Hakim Wärqenäh Eshäté, or Dr Charles Martin (1865-1952), who was Ethiopia's first western trained physician as well as a statesman, administrator, diplomat, author and a major progressiveforce in modern Ethiopian history. Yet he had overlapping identities as a world citizen, citizen of the British empire and Ethiopian nationalist, living in many different countries but never wholly belonging in any one. The childof Ethiopian aristocrats, he was found on the battlefield of Magdala by a British officer and raised and educated in India. First employed in the Indian civil service he subsequently served as a physician to three Ethiopian emperors. The key turning point in his life came with his marriage to an Ethiopian aristocrat, closely related to two Empresses, a marriage which greatly enhanced his influence at court. This is as much a family biography as hisbiography, and focuses especially on his work as an educator, governor of a model province and, finally, the climax of his career when, as Ethiopian ambassador to England, he was a key international figure in protesting the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and mobilizing world opinion against Italy and for Ethiopia. He became a spokesman for the African diaspora during the 1930s and an Ethiopian elder statesman in the 1940s, and his extended family (and many of those he mentored) had an impact on modern Ethiopian history. The biography is based on Charles Martin's unpublished diary and autobiography and archival research in Ethiopia and Europe.
Peter Garretson was educated in Ethiopia (the Sandford School), London (Westminster School and SOAS) and the United States (Haverford College). He has taught at the University of Khartoum, Swarthmore and Florida State University, where he is now Associate Professor of History and Director of the Middle East Center.
Terri Ochiagha
Achebe and Friends at Umuahia
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WINNER OF THE ASAUK FAGE & OLIVER PRIZE 2016
The author meticulously contextualises the experiences of Achebe and his peers as students at Government College Umuahia and argues for a re-assessment of this influential group of Nigerian writers in relation to the literary culture fostered by the school and its tutors.
This is the first in-depth scholarly study of the literary awakening of the young intellectuals who became known as Nigeria's "first-generation" writers in the post-colonial period. Terri Ochiagha's research focuses on Chinua Achebe, Elechi Amadi, Chike Momah, Christopher Okigbo and Chukwuemeka Ike, and also discusses the experiences of Gabriel Okara, Ken Saro-Wiwa and I.C. Aniebo, in the context of their education in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s at Government College, Umuahia. The author provides fresh perspectives on Postcolonial and World literary processes, colonial education in British Africa, literary representations of colonialism and Chinua Achebe's seminal position in African literature. She demonstrates how each of the writers used this very particular education to shape their own visions of the world in which they operated and examines the implications that this had for African literature as a whole.
Supplementary material is available online of some of the original sources. See: http://boybrew.co/9781847011091_2
Terri Ochiagha holds one of the prestigious British Academy Newton International Fellowships (2014-16) hosted by the School of English, University of Sussex. She was previously a Senior Associate Member of St Antony's College, University of Oxford.
Terri Ochiagha
Achebe and Friends at Umuahia
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WINNER OF THE ASAUK FAGE & OLIVER PRIZE 2016
The author meticulously contextualises the experiences of Achebe and his peers as students at Government College Umuahia and argues for a re-assessment of this influential group of Nigerian writers in relation to the literary culture fostered by the school and its tutors.
Maps the literary awakening of the young intellectuals who became known as Nigeria's "first-generation" of postcolonial writers: Chinua Achebe, Elechi Amadi, Chike Momah, Christopher Okigbo, Chukwuemeka Ike, Gabriel Okara, Ken Saro-Wiwa and I.C. Aniebo. The author provides fresh perspectives on Postcolonial and World literary processes, colonial education in British Africa, literary representations of colonialism and Chinua Achebe's seminal position in African literature. She demonstrates how each of the writers used this very particular education to shape their own visions of the world and examines the implications for African literature as a whole.
Supplementary material is available online of some of the original sources. See: http://boybrew.co/9781847011091_2
Terri Ochiagha is a Teaching Fellow in the History of Modern Africa at King's College, London and a Honorary Research Fellowat the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham. She was previously a British Academy Newton Fellow at the University of Sussex.
Miles Larmer
Across the Copperbelt
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The first comparative historical analysis - local, national and transnational - of the cross-border Central African copperbelt; a key work in studies of labour, urbanisation and African studies.
The Central African Copperbelt, encompassing the mining communities of Katanga (DR Congo) and Zambia, has been central to the study of modernisation and rapid social and political change in urban Africa. This volume expands upon earlier studies of industrial mining, male-dominated formal labour organisation and political change by examining both sides of the border from pre-colonial history to the present and encompassing a wide range of economic, social and cultural identities and activities. Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, the contributors explore copperbelt communities' sense of identity - expressed in comic strips and football matches, their precarious and inventive ways of living, their involvement in church and education, and the processes and impact of urbanisation and development, environmental degradation and changing gender relations. A major contribution to borderland studies, in showing how the meaning and relevance of the border to the copperbelt's mixed and mobile population has changed constantly over time, the book's engagement with communities at the nexus of social, economic and political change makes it a key study for those working in global urban development.
This book is available under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC. It is based on research that is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no: 681657): 'Comparing the Copperbelt: Political Culture and Knowledge Production in Central Africa'.
Stephen Ellis
Africa Now
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An introductory text.
This overview of Africa is intended as an introduction for people who have a professional contact with the continent, such as workers in NGOs and international organizations, investors in emerging markets, bankers and people in business, diplomats, as well as teachers and students.
Ian Taylor
Africa Rising?
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Explores to what extent Africa's "rise" has impacted on development and whether the BRICS are creating a new version of dependency.
Africa is said to be rising, turning a definitive page in its history, heralding new and exciting possibilities for the continent. This discourse maintains that with upsurge in economic growth comes improved governance and endogenous dynamics; that the emerging economies, and especially the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), have been instrumental in diversifying Africa's international relations, perhaps leading to a radical change in theglobal order, favourable to the developing world. But to what extent is this true, and how deep and how broad has been the impact on society at large? This book takes a critical look at the prevalent Africa Rising discourse,and explores the nature and implications of Africa's "rise" and the role that the BRICS have played in it. The author argues that Africa has still to undergo any structural transformation; that there is strong evidence that deindustrialisation and jobless growth have accompanied the upsurge of interest in the continent; and that far from making a radical turn in its developmental trajectory, Africa is being pushed into the resource corner as commodity exporters, to the North (and now, the BRICS) with little scope for industrial progress or skills advancement. Hope that the BRICS might offer an alternative to the extant neoliberal order are misplaced, for the BRICS have a stake in maintaining the current global unequality. Africa must therefore fashion its own independent path - while the emerging economies will be important, relying on external actors may simply reproduce anew the current state of underdevelopment.
Ian Taylor is Professor in International Relations and African Politics, University of St Andrews; Chair Professor, Renmin, University of China; Professor Extraordinary, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa; Honorary Professor, Institute of African Studies, Zhejiang Normal University, China; and a Visiting Scholar at Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Uganda.
Ruth Hall
Africa's Land Rush
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Interrogates the narratives of "land grabbing" and "agricultural investment" through detailed local studies that illuminate how these are experienced on the ground and the implications for Africa's land and agricultural economy.
Africa has been at the centre of a "land grab" in recent years, with investors lured by projections of rising food prices, growing demand for "green" energy, and cheap land and water rights. But such land is often also used or claimed through custom by communities. What does this mean for Africa? In what ways are rural people's lives and livelihoods being transformed as a result? And who will control its land and agricultural futures?
The case studies explore the processes through which land deals are being made; the implications for agrarian structure, rural livelihoods and food security; and the historical context of changing land uses, revealing that these land grabs may resonate with, even resurrect, forms of large-scale production associated with the colonial and early independence eras. The book depicts the striking diversity of deals and dealers: white Zimbabwean farmers in northern Nigeria,Dutch and American joint ventures in Ghana, an Indian agricultural company in Ethiopia's hinterland, European investors in Kenya's drylands and a Canadian biofuel company on its coast, South African sugar agribusiness in Tanzania's southern growth corridor, in Malawi's "Greenbelt" and in southern Mozambique, and white South African farmers venturing onto former state farms in the Congo.
Ruth Hall is Associate Professor at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa; Ian Scoones is a Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex and Director of the ESRC STEPS Centre; Dzodzi Tsikata is Associate Professor at the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) at the University of Ghana, Legon.
David M. Anderson, R.J.A.R. Rathbone
Africa's Urban Past
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Urbanization has been an important feature of Africa's history for over 2000 years.
Towns and cities have been arenas around which societies have organized themselves: as centres of trade and economic activity; as foci of political action and authority; as military garrisons; as sites of ritual power; and as places of refuge and collective security in troubled times. This collection reveals the depth of urbanization in African history.
Brenda Cooper
Africa-centred Knowledges
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Proposes a dynamic new approach to the production of knowledge on Africa, one that is global, multiple and heterogeneous, elucidating this through both discursive theoretical chapters and case histories.
Knowledge production is a highly political and politicized practice. This book questions the way in which knowledge of and about Africa is produced and how this influences development policy and practice. Rebutting both Euro-and Afrocentric production of knowledge, this collection proposes a multiple, global and dynamic Africa-centredness in which scholars use whatever concepts and research tools are most appropriate to the different African contextsin which they work. In the first part of the book key conceptual themes are raised and the epistemological foundations are laid through questions of gender, literature and popular music. Contributors in the second part apply andtest these tools and concepts, examining the pressures on doctoral students in a South African university, the crisis in knowledge about declining marine fish populations, perplexities around why certain ICT provisions fail, or how some Zimbabwean students, despite being beset by poverty, succeed. The light thrown on the mechanics of how knowledge comes into being, and in whose interests, illuminates one of the key issues in African Studies.
Brenda Cooper is an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Manchester. She was for many years the Director of the Centre for African Studies and a Professor in the English department at the University of Cape Town, where she is now Emeritus Professor. Robert Morrell is Coordinator of the Programme for the Enhancement of Research Capacity at the University of Cape Town.
Walter E A Van Beek
African Hosts and their Guests
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Africa is a 'theme park' for Western tourists to experience untouched wilderness, untamed nature, and truly 'authentic' cultures, where the hosts, too, are part of a discourse about the 'other' and ourselves, about wildness, danger and roots.
Tourism is important for Africa: international tourist arrivals to Africa continue to grow, income from tourism is crucial to national economies, and tourism investments are considered among the most profitable. This edited volumedeals with the interaction of local communities with tourists coming into their areas and villages. Based upon a common theoretical approach, fourteen cases of African tourism are discussed which involve direct contact between 'hosts' and 'guests'. The viewpoint throughout is from the side of the locals, establishing how the processes of interaction shape each small scale destination. Crucial in Africa is the fact that the large majority of tourism is game oriented and the interaction between locals and visitors is very much 'tainted' by this fact. Central is the notion of the tourist bubble - the infrastructure that is generated locally (and internationally) for hosting tourists, as it is this institutional interface that tends to impact on the local society and culture, not the tourists themselves directly. The examples come from all over Africa, from the Sahara to the Eastern Cape, and from Kenyato Ghana. All contributions are based upon original fieldwork.
Walter van Beek is professor of anthropology at Tilburg University and Senior Researcher at the African Studies Centre, Leiden; Annette Schmidt is curatorof the African department at the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, and is an archaeologist with a long experience in cultural management projects.
Shola Adenekan
African Literature in the Digital Age
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The first book-length study on the relationship between African literature and new media.
The digital space provides a new avenue to move literature beyond the restrictions of book publishing on the continent. Arguing that writers are putting their work on cyberspace because communities are emerging from this space, and because increasing numbers of Africans use the internet as part of their day-to-day engagement with their societies and the world, Shola Adenekan explores this transformative development in Nigeria and Kenya, both significant countries in African literature and two of the continent's largest digital technology hubs. Queer Kenyans and Nigerians find new avenues for their work online where print publishers are refusing to publish short stories and poems on same-sex desire. Binyavanga Wainaina's rise to critical acclaim arguably started on the literary blog Generator 21. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's literary celebrity partly relies on her prolific use of social media to tell thestory of powerful Nigerian women. With further examples from the development of literature across the continent, this innovative book sheds new light on narratives about digital Africa. It will also be the first major work to provide a trajectory of class consciousness in Kenyan and Nigerian writing. Through this analysis, the book articulates the difference in attitudes towards queerness, sexuality, and hetero-normativity among successive generations of writers.
Shola Adenekan
African Literature in the Digital Age
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The first book-length study on the relationship between African literature and new media.
The digital space provides a new avenue to move literature beyond the restrictions of book publishing on the continent. Arguing that writers are putting their work on cyberspace because communities are emerging from this space, and because increasing numbers of Africans use the internet as part of their day-to-day engagement with their societies and the world, Shola Adenekan explores this transformative development in Nigeria and Kenya, both significant countries in African literature and two of the continent's largest digital technology hubs.
Queer Kenyans and Nigerians find new avenues for their work online where print publishers are refusing to publish short stories and poems on same-sex desire. Binyavanga Wainaina's rise to critical acclaim arguably started on the literary blog Generator 21. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's literary celebrity partly relies on her prolific use of social media to tell the story of powerful Nigerian women. With further examples from the development of literature across the continent, this innovative book sheds new light on narratives about digital Africa. It will also be the first major work to provide a trajectory of class consciousness in Kenyan and Nigerian writing. Through this analysis, the book articulates the difference in attitudes towards queerness, sexuality, and hetero-normativity among successive generations of writers.
Funded by the Knowledge Unlatched Select 2023 collection, this title is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons License: CC BY NC
William Beinart, Karen Brown
African Local Knowledge & Livestock Health
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A much needed examination of contemporary approaches to animal healing in South Africa, and the role of local knowledge.
Understanding local knowledge has become a central academic project among those interested in Africa and developing countries. In South Africa, land reform is gathering pace and African people hold an increasing proportion of thelivestock in the country. Animal health has become a central issue for rural development. Yet African veterinary medical knowledge remains largely unrecorded. This book seeks to fill that gap. It captures for the first time the diversity, as well as the limits, of a major sphere of local knowledge.
Beinart and Brown argue that African approaches to animal health rest largely in environmental and nutritional explanations. They explore the widespread use of plants as well as biomedicines for healing. While rural populations remain concerned about supernatural threats, and many men think that women can harm their cattle, the authors challenge current ideas on the modernisation of witchcraft. They examine more ambient forms of supernatural danger expressed in little-known concepts such as mohato and umkhondo. They take the reader into the homesteads and kraals of rural black South Africans and engage with a key rural concern - vividly reporting the ideas of livestock owners. This is groundbreaking research which will have important implications for analyses of local knowledge more generally as well as effectivestate interventions and animal treatments in South Africa.
William Beinart is Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, African Studies Centre, University of Oxford; Karen Brown is an ESRC Research Fellow at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford.
Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland): Wits University Press
David Kerr
African Popular Theatre
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An overview of African popular theatre, its history and contemporary forms
In this survey of theatre forms in sub-Saharan Africa from pre-colonial times to the present day, popular theatre is interpreted widely to include not only conventional drama, but such non-literary forms of performance as dance, mime, dramatised story-telling, masquerades, improvised urban vaudeville theatre, and the theatre of resistance and social action. The book also considers theatre embedded in the modern media of film, radio and television.
Kenya: EAEP
Thomas J. Bassett, Donald Crummey
African Savannas
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This work outlines the importance of local knowledge for understanding environmental change.
African farmers and herders modify landscapes in far more subtle and unexpected ways than commonly depicted in environment and development debates. This interdisciplinary collection uses collaborative research from the major savanna regions which stretch across Africa to make its case, and covers topics such as land users and landscapes, pastoral ecologies and policy, producers and resources. Environmental thinking about Africa is dominated by narratives of degradation and chaos. The contributors demonstrate that the empirical foundations of such long-held views are shaky at best.
Martin Banham
African Theatre 10: Media and Performance
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Examines the impact of new media (such as video and YouTube) and the use of multi-media on live and recorded performance in Africa.
Focuses on the ways African theatre and performance relate to various kinds of media. Includes contributions on dance; popular video, with an emphasis on video drama and soaps from Eastern and Southern Africa, and the Nigerian 'Nollywood' phenomenon; the interface between live performance and video (or still photography), and links between on-line social networks and new performance identities. As a group the articles raise, from original angles, the issues of racism, gender, identity, advocacy and sponsorship.
Volume Editor: DAVID KERR is Professor of English in the University of Botswana, and is the author of African Popular Theatre
Series Editors: Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies, University of Leeds; James Gibbs, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West of England; Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama at the University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds; Yvette Hutchison, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick
Martin Banham
African Theatre 11: Festivals
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Contributors examine how international theatre festivals have been organised and how they have affected the evolution of sustainable theatre.
During the last fifty years, large sums of money, huge resources of labour and vast amounts of creative energy have been invested in international theatre festivals in Africa. Under banners such as 'Reclaiming the African Past' and 'African Renaissance', the festival participants have used the performing arts to address a variety of topical issues and to confront images embedded by a century of patronising colonial expositions. The themes indicate the desire to take history by the forelock, challenge perceptions and transform communities.
Volume Editor: JAMES GIBBS
Series Editors: Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies, University of Leeds; James Gibbs, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West of England; Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama at the University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds; Yvette Hutchison, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick
Martin Banham
African Theatre 12: Shakespeare in and out of Africa
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A key volume for Shakespeare, African theatre and postcolonial cultural scholars, promoting debate on the role of Western cultural icons in contemporary postcolonial cultures.
This volume takes as its starting point an interrogation of the African contributions to the Globe to Globe festival staged in London in 2012, where 37 Shakespeare productions were offered, each from a different nation. Five African companies were invited to perform and there are articles on four of these productions, examining issues of interculturalism, postcolonialism, language, interpretation and reception. The contributors are both Shakespeare and African theatre scholars, promoting discourse from a range of geographical and cultural perspectives. A critical debate about the process of the Globe to Globe festival is initiated in the form of a discussion article featuringsome of its directors and actors. Two further articles look at Shakespeare productions made purely for Africa, from Mauritius and Cape Verde, and leading Nigerian playwright and cultural commentator Femi Osofisan provides an overview article examining Shakespeare in Africa in the 21st century. The playscript in this volume of African Theatre is Femi Osofisan's Wesoo, Hamlet! or the Resurrection of Hamlet.
Volume Editor: JANE PLASTOW
Series Editors: Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies, University of Leeds; James Gibbs, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West of England; Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama at the University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds; Yvette Hutchison, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick
Martin Banham
African Theatre 13: Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Wole Soyinka
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Directors and collaborators assess and comment on the production of plays by West Africa's Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka and East Africa's most influential author Ngugi wa Thiong'o.
Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong'o are the pre-eminent playwrights of West and East Africa respectively and their work has been hugely influential across the continent. This volume features directors' experiences of recent productions of their plays, the voices of actors and collaborators who have worked with the playwrights, and also provides a digest of their theatrical output. Contributors provide new readings of Ngugi and Soyinka's classic texts, and astimulating new approach for students of English, Theatre and African studies.
The playscript for this volume is a previously unpublished radio play by Wole Soyinka entitled A Rain of Stones, first broadcast onBBC Radio 4 in 2002.
Series Editors: Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies, University of Leeds; James Gibbs,Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West of England; Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama at the University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds; Yvette Hutchison, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick
Martin Banham
African Theatre 14: Contemporary Women
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Looks at the lives, challenges and contributions of African women from across the continent to making and participating in theatre in the 21st century.
Drawing on expertise from across the African continent this collection reflects the realities for women working and making theatre: how Egyptian director Dalia Basiouny has documented the "Tahrir Stories" of the Egyptian Revolution; how in Uganda women have used various theatrical devices, such as oral poetry, to seek common ground in a rural-urban inter-generational theatre project; and the use of physical theatre to examine disavowed memory in South Africa. The contributors also look at how practitioners are re-thinking performance space and modes of performance for gendered advocacy in Botswanan theatre, and how women are addressing gender-based violence and rape culture, comparing performance and street-based activism in South Africa and India. A particular strength of the volume is its interviews: with Jalila Baccar of Tunisia, by Marvin Carlson; six Ethiopian actresses are interviewed and introduced by Jane Plastow and Mahlet Solomon; and Ariane Zaytzeff explores "Making art to reinvent culture" with Odile Gakire Katese of Rwanda. The new play to be published is The Sentence by Sefi Atta, introduced and contextualized by Christine Matzke.
Volume Editors: JANE PLASTOW & YVETTE HUTCHISON Guest Editor: CHRISTINE MATZKE Series Editors: Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies, University of Leeds; James Gibbs, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West of England; Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama at the University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds; Yvette Hutchison, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick
Martin Banham
African Theatre 15: China, India & the Eastern World
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Extends the study of China's "soft power" into theatre studies and looks more widely at syncretic traditions evolving in other long-term historic exchanges between Asia and Africa.
2016 Thalia Prize of the International Association of Theatre Critics
China is the main focus of this volume, and articles consider the way it is using "soft power" in its extensive engagement with South Africa, and, through its support for theatre festivals, with Lusophone countries in Africa. China's involvement with the construction of theatres, opera houses and cultural facilities as part of its foreign aid programmes in such countries as Algeria, Cameroon, Mauritius, Ghana and Senegal, provides the background to the playscript from this volume, Blickakte (Acts of Viewing) by Daniel Schauf, Philipp Scholtysik & Jonas Alsleben, that explores Chinese impact in Somalia. Issues also emerge around what China is "importing" culturally fromAfrica. In 2012, Soyinka's The Lion & the Jewel was produced there, and a season of Fugard's work was enjoyed in Beijing during 2014. During 2016 Brett Bailey's Macbeth Opera will be performed in Macao.
In recent years courses in African theatre have been started in Beijing by Biodun Jeyifo, and also taught by Femi Osofisan whose well-known Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels and Once Upon Four Robbers have been translatedinto Mandarin, along with Soyinka's The Lion & the Jewel. The volume also includes contributions on exchanges between other Asian countries and Africa such as articles on the production of African plays in Bangladesh and onthe persistence of African performance traditions among African migrants in India. Attention is paid to the syncretic theatre traditions that have evolved wherever African and Asian populations have been in close and extended contact, as in Mauritius and Durban. Unusual exchanges and globalized theatre surfaces in the course of the volume. For example, while the Guangdong Provincial Puppet Art Theatre Group performed at the 41st Grahamstown Festival (2015), Chinese puppeteers are being trained to manipulate the War Horse for a Beijing production.
Volume Editors: JAMES GIBBS & FEMI OSOFISAN FEMI OSOFISAN Thalia Laureate of the International Association of TheatreCritics 2016
Series Editors: Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies, University of Leeds; James Gibbs, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West of England; Femi Osofisan, Professor ofDrama, University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds; Yvette Hutchison, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick.
Martin Banham
African Theatre 16: Six Plays from East & West Africa
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A collection of playscripts and texts that give an English-reading audience access to key plays as well as less well-known and previously untranslated works - a superb resource for scholars and theatre practitioners.
This volume makes available some of the most influential, imaginative and exciting plays to come out of East and West Africa from the 1970s to the present day. Deliberately excluding playscripts by the regions' two best known playwrights, Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, whose work was profiled in African Theatre 13 the editors have selected plays, some well-known and some less widely available, that represent the diversity and richness of thesetwo very different African regions. The playscripts include a new translation from Amharic, as well as the English version of a play originally written in French, making more theatre from some of Africa's multitude of languages accessible to an English-reading audience. Each script is accompanied by an essay from an expert on the work, the playwright, and the context in which the play was produced, so that the volume will be of maximum use to both researchers and students of African theatre.
Volume Editors: MARTIN BANHAM & JANE PLASTOW
Series Editors: Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies, University of Leeds; James Gibbs, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West of England; Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama, University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds; Yvette Hutchison, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick
Yvette Hutchison
African Theatre 17: Contemporary Dance
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African dance is discussed here in its global as well as local contexts as a powerful vehicle of aesthetic and cultural exchange and influence.
To date, scholars have tended, with a few exceptions, to write about African dance in primarily ethnographic terms. This collection seeks to challenge this pattern and expand dance research by engaging with the aesthetics and socio-political impact of dance for communities in and out of Africa in an increasingly global context. Contributors to this issue look at the impact that specifically situated indigenous dance forms have had on the development of newforms locally, and the reciprocal impact of local and international infrastructures, including funding bodies, tourism and festivals. African Theatre 17 examines how dance is contributing to a particularly African interculturalism, while analysing the issues of representation of Africa in a postcolonial context. Articles address the efficacy of dance to engage audiences with disavowed issues regarding gender, sexuality and dis/ability both within and beyond Africa. Highlights include a dance photo essay on F.O.D. Gang's 2017 site-specific street performance "Untitled" in Lagos, a new non-themed section, and the playscript Lunatic! by Zimbabwean playwright Thoko Zulu.
Volume Editors: YVETTE HUTCHISON & CHUKWUMA OKOYE
Series Editors: Yvette Hutchison, Reader, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick; Chukwuma Okoye, Reader in African Theatre & Performance University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds.
Chukwuma Okoye
African Theatre 18
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Highlighted in this volume is the detective play The Inspector and the Hero by Femi Osofisan, one of Africa's leading playwrights. The play has until now only been published in Nigeria.
This open issue of African Theatre is a departure from the traditional themed format to showcase the plethora of styles, approaches and perspectives that populate the contemporary field of African theatre studies, with contributions from Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa and Ghana. Focusing mainly on case studies, contributors engage a variety of performance forms, ranging from investigations into radical dramatic and popular musical performances, through "street theatre" (festivals and masquerade shows) and pop culture, to consideration of applied theatre, dance, audience, cultural performances and folktales. Articles address African American and African cultural dialogue; choreographic study; the carnivalization of indigenous African festivals; the stigmatization of disability; the performance of nationality, as well as orality and African performance aesthetics. Highlighted in this volume is the playscript of the detective play The Inspector and the Hero by Femi Osofisan, one of Africa's foremost playwrights. Volume Editor: CHUKWUMA OKOYE Series Editors: Yvette Hutchison, Reader, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick; Chukwuma Okoye, Reader in African Theatre & Performance, University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds.
Christine Matzke
African Theatre 19
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Compelling inside views of what characterises opera and music theatre in African and African diasporic contexts.
Music is often cited as a central artistic mode in African theatre and performance practices. However, little attention has been paid to music theatre on the continent in general, and to opera in particular, with the exceptions ofa few noted genres, such as Concert Party or the Yorùbá "folk opera" of the 1960s, and the emerging research on opera culture in South Africa. This volume of African Theatre highlights the diversity across the continent from a variety of perspectives - including those of genre, media, and historiography. Above all, it raises questions and encourages debate: What does "opera" mean in African and African diasporic contexts? What are its practices and legacies - colonial, postcolonial and decolonial; what is its relation to the intersectionalities of race and class? How do opera and music theatre reflect, change or obscure social, political and economic realities? How are they connected to educational and cultural institutions, and non-profit organisations? And why is opera contradictorily, at various times, perceived as both "grand" and "elitist, "folk" and "quotidian", "Eurocentric" and "indigenous"? Contributors also address aesthetic transformation processes, the porousness of genre boundaries and the role of space and place, with examples ranging from Egypt to South Africa, from Uganda to West Africa and the USA. The playscript in this volume is We Take Care of Our Own by Zainabu Jallo GUEST EDITORS: Christine Matzke, Lena van der Hoven, Christopher Odhiambo & Hilde Roos
Series Editors: Yvette Hutchison, Reader, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick; Chukwuma Okoye, Reader in African Theatre & Performance University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds.
Martin Banham
African Theatre 1: African Theatre in Development
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This volume features the play Babalawo, Mystery-Master by Agbo Sikuade.
First title in the African Theatre series with accounts of Theatre for Development workshops and critical discussions of the theme which continues to be a major area of endeavour in African theatre. Series editors: Martin Banham, James Gibbs, Femi Osofisan
North America: Indiana University Press
Martin Banham
African Theatre 4: Southern Africa
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Includes the playscript of Workshop Negative by Cont Mhlanga.
This volume in the African Theatre series includes the familiar territory of South Africa and Zimbabwe but also countries which have received little previous attention, such as Angola and Namibia. The articles range from evaluations of single plays to accounts of play-making processes, theatre for development and the relationship between modern drama and indigenous performance.
Guest edited by DAVID KERR Series editors: Martin Banham, James Gibbs, Femi Osofisan
North America: Africa World Press
Martin Banham
African Theatre 7: Companies
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Profiles theatre companies in Africa working creatively in the context of financial and political constraints.
A close scrutiny of how theatre companies operate is an often neglected aspect of theatre life in Africa, yet, as companies profiled here grapple with the issues of 'creativity and collaboration' much is revealed about the way theatre companies across the continent face the challenges of financial constraints, the political complications of sponsorship and funding, the need for creative or intellectual freedoms, the intricacies of contracts and the crucial decisions about venues and audiences.
Volume Editor: JAMES GIBBS, University of the West of England. Series editors: Martin Banham, James Gibbs, Femi Osofisan
The contributors include: DEXTER LYNDERSAY, FOLUKE OUGUNLEYE, SIRI LANGE, ALLY MKUMBILA, BRACCO CHITOSA, MANFRED LOIMEIR, LUCY RICHARDSON, CHRISTINE MATZKE, VICTOR S. DUGGA, PATRICK-JUDE OTEH, BASIL JONES, MICHAEL WALLING, BRITISH COUNCIL, JOS REPERTORY THEATRE.
Martin Banham
African Theatre 8: Diasporas
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This volume in the African Theatre series celebrates the African theatrical diaspora from Brazil to Tasmania, and Canada to Cuba, and also includes the playscript Messing with the Mind by Egyptian writer and director Khaled El-Sawy.
Diasporas', as used in the title of this volume, refers to a multitude of groups and communities with widely differing histories, identities and current locations. This book brings together essays on theatre by people of Africandescent in North America, Cuba, Italy, the UK, Israel and Tasmania. Several chapters present overviews of particular national contexts, others offer insights into play texts or specific performances. Offering a mix of academic andpractitioner's points of views, Volume 8 in the African Theatre series analyses and celebrates various aspects of African diasporic theatre worldwide.
Guest Editors: CHRISTINE MATZKE, Lecturer in African Literatures and Cultures, Humboldt-University, Berlin; and OSITA OKAGBUE, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Drama, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Series Editors: Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies,University of Leeds; James Gibbs, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West of England; Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama at the University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds;Yvette Hutchison, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick
David Hulme, Marshall W. Murphree
African Wildlife and Livelihoods
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This volume examines just how successful community-based conservation approaches have been in their twin objectives of conserving African environments and improving rural livelihoods.
Recent conservation policies in Africa have followed three main principles: 1) that conservation should be community-based; 2) that things conserved should be managed to achieve both development and conservation goals; 3) that markets should play a role in shaping the incentives for conservation. The editors and contributors of this volume examine the success or otherwise of these practices in a number of different contexts across the continent.
An innovative and valuable resource for understanding women's roles in changing societies, this book brings together the history of Africa, the Atlantic and gender before the 20th century. It explores trade, slavery and migrationin the context of the Euro-African encounter.
HONORABLE MENTION FOR AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW BEST AFRICA-FOCUSED ANTHOLOGY OR EDITED COLLECTION, 2019
While there have been studies of women's roles in African societies and of Atlantic history, the role of women in Westand West Central Africa during the period of the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition remains relatively unexamined. This book brings together scholars from Africa, North and South America and Europe to show, for the first time,the ways in which African women participated in economic, social and political spaces in Atlantic coast societies. Focusing on diversity and change, and going beyond the study of wealthy merchant women, the contributors examine the role of petty traders and enslaved women in communities from Sierra Leone to Benguela. They analyse how women in Africa used the opportunities offered by relationships with European men, Christianity and Atlantic commerce to negotiate their social and economic positions; consider the limitations which early colonialism sought to impose on women and the strategies they employed to overcome them; the factors which fostered or restricted women's mobility,both spatially and socially; and women's economic power and its curtailment.
Mariana P. Candido is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame; Adam Jones recently retired as Professor of African History and Culture History at the University of Leipzig.
In association with The Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame
Mariana P. Candido
African Women in the Atlantic World
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An innovative and valuable resource for understanding women's roles in changing societies, this book brings together the history of Africa, the Atlantic and gender before the 20th century. It explores trade, slavery and migrationin the context of the Euro-African encounter.
HONORABLE MENTION FOR AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW BEST AFRICA-FOCUSED ANTHOLOGY OR EDITED COLLECTION, 2019
While there have been studies of women's roles in African societies and of Atlantic history, the role of women in Westand West Central Africa during the period of the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition remains relatively unexamined. This book brings together scholars from Africa, North and South America and Europe to show, for the first time,the ways in which African women participated in economic, social and political spaces in Atlantic coast societies. Focusing on diversity and change, and going beyond the study of wealthy merchant women, the contributors examine the role of petty traders and enslaved women in communities from Sierra Leone to Benguela. They analyse how women in Africa used the opportunities offered by relationships with European men, Christianity and Atlantic commerce to negotiate their social and economic positions; consider the limitations which early colonialism sought to impose on women and the strategies they employed to overcome them; the factors which fostered or restricted women's mobility,both spatially and socially; and women's economic power and its curtailment.
Mariana P. Candido is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame; Adam Jones recently retired as Professor of African History and Culture History at the University of Leipzig.
In association with The Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame
Silke Strickrodt
Afro-European Trade in the Atlantic World
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A uniquely detailed account of the dynamics of Afro-European trade in two states on the western Slave Coast over three centuries and the transition from slave trade to legitimate commerce.
From 1550 to colonial partition in the mid-1880s, trade was key to Afro-European relations on the western Slave Coast (the coastal areas of modern Togo and parts of what are now Ghana and Benin). This book looks at the commercialrelations of two states which played a crucial role in the Atlantic slave trade as well as the trade in ivory and agricultural produce: Hula, known to European traders as Grand Popo (now in Benin) and Ge, known as Little Popo (nowin Togo). Situated between the Gold Coast to the west and the eastern Slave Coast to the east, this region was an important supplier of provisions for Europeans and the enslaved Africans they purchased. Also, due to its positionin the lagoon system, it facilitated communication along the coast between the trading companies' headquarters on the western Gold Coast and their factories on the eastern Slave Coast, particularly at Ouidah, the Slave Coast's major slave port. In the 19th century, when the trade at more established ports was disrupted by the men-of-war of the British anti-slave trade squadron, the western Slave Coast became a hot-spot of illegal slave trading. Providing a detailed reconstruction of political and commercial developments in the western Slave coast, including the transition from the slave trade to legitimate commerce, this book also reveals the region's position in the wider trans-Atlantic trade network and how cross-cultural partnerships were negotiated; the trade's impact on African coastal "middlemen" communities; and the relative importance of local and global factors for the history of a region or community.
Silke Strickrodt is Research Fellow in Colonial History, German Historical Institute London. She is co-editor (with Robin Law and Suzanne Schwarz) of Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa (James Currey, 2013).
Silke Strickrodt
Afro-European Trade in the Atlantic World
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A uniquely detailed account of the dynamics of Afro-European trade in two states on the western Slave Coast over three centuries and the transition from slave trade to legitimate commerce.
From 1550 to colonial partition in the mid-1880s, trade was key to Afro-European relations on the western Slave Coast (the coastal areas of modern Togo and parts of what are now Ghana and Benin). This book looks at the commercialrelations of two states which played a crucial role in the Atlantic slave trade as well as the trade in ivory and agricultural produce: Hula, known to European traders as Grand Popo (now in Benin) and Ge, known as Little Popo (nowin Togo). Situated between the Gold Coast to the west and the eastern Slave Coast to the east, this region was an important supplier of provisions for Europeans and the enslaved Africans they purchased. Also, due to its positionin the lagoon system, it facilitated communication along the coast between the trading companies' headquarters on the western Gold Coast and their factories on the eastern Slave Coast, particularly at Ouidah, the Slave Coast's major slave port. In the 19th century, when the trade at more established ports was disrupted by the men-of-war of the British anti-slave trade squadron, the western Slave Coast became a hot-spot of illegal slave trading. Providing a detailed reconstruction of political and commercial developments in the western Slave coast, including the transition from the slave trade to legitimate commerce, this book also reveals the region's position in the wider trans-Atlantic trade network and how cross-cultural partnerships were negotiated; the trade's impact on African coastal "middlemen" communities; and the relative importance of local and global factors for the history of a region or community.
Silke Strickrodt is Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham. She is co-editor (with Robin Law and Suzanne Schwarz) of Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa (James Currey, 2013).
Elke Grawert
After the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan
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The Sudanese peace agreement reached a crisis point in its final year. This book offers an analysis of the impact of the implementation of the agreement on different Sudanese communities and neighbouring regions.
After a long process of peace negotiations the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed on 9 January 2005 between the Government of Sudan (GOS) and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). The CPA raised initialhopes that it would be the foundation block for lasting peace in Sudan. This book compiles scholarly analyses of the implementation of the power sharing agreement of the CPA, of ongoing conflicts with particular respect to land issues, of the challenges of the reintegration of internally displaced people and refugees, and of the repercussions of the CPA in other regions of Sudan as well as in neighbouring countries.
Elke Grawert is SeniorLecturer at the Institute for Intercultural & International Studies (InIIS), Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Bremen, Germany.
Roger Field
Alex la Guma
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The life and works of South African writer, political activist and artist, from his early life in District Six, his arrest and trial for treason, to his eventual reluctant exile in Cuba.
Best known as a novelist and political activist, Alex la Guma (1925-85) was also a journalist, comic strip artist, reviewer, sketcher, painter, short story writer and travel writer. Born in Cape Town's famous multiracial DistrictSix, he was a founder member of the South African Coloured People's Organisation and a leading member of the Congress Alliance during the 1950s and 1960s. Due to his political activity he was detained without trial, shot at, placed under house arrest, and ultimately tried for treason in 1956-61. He reluctantly went into exile in 1966, where he continued his writing and political work for the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party, travelling widely as an ANC spokesperson on cultural matters. In 1979 he became the ANC's Chief Representative in Central and Latin America and moved to Havana, where he died in 1985. La Guma attracted the attention of critics and literary scholars from the time his first short stories appeared in the 1950s, and he has been hailed by such important literary figures as Achebe, Soyinka and J.M. Coetzee. His novels continue to sell steadily and inspire comments by literary critics, who have studied different aspects of his work, but who have left the rest of his life and his literary and political influences relatively untouched. Drawing on a far wider range of his writing and artwork, some previously unpublished, this book combines biography with literary and political analyses to offer fresh insights into his major texts: A Walk in the Night (1962), And a Threefold Cord (1964),The Stone Country (1967), In the Fog of the Seasons' End (1972) , A Soviet Journey (1975) and Time of the Butcherbird(1979).
ROGER FIELD is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English atthe University of the Western Cape.
Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): Jacana (PB)
Edited by Ernest N. Emenyonu
ALT 42: Oral and Written African Poetry and Poetics
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Examines the state of African poetry today, the continuing influence of Africa's pioneer poets, today's new generation of poets, and their work in written poetry and in the spoken word, continuing oral indigenous traditions.
Almost half a century after ALT 6 and thirty-three years after ALT 16, what is the state of poetry and poetics in Africa? This volume of ALT highlights major developments and continuities in the practice of the art of poetry in the continent. Contributions analyse new frontiers in the traditional African epic and the Yoruba <I>oríkì</I> genre and innovations in form and theme, such as 'spoken word poetry' shared on digital media and pandemic poetry in the wake of COVID-19. They compare and contrast the work of Romeo Oriogun, Christopher Okigbo, and Gabriel Okara and of T.S. Eliot and Kofi Anyidoho. Other essays examine the complexities of translation from Ewe into English and the development of oral African poetry, underscoring its dynamism and the centrality of performance. The volume also includes interviews with poets Kofi Anyidoho, Kwame Dawes, and Kehinde Akano and tributes to Ama Ata Aidoo. Altogether, it highlights the richness and vibrancy of contemporary praxis and points to future directions in the field.
Eldred Durosimi Jones
ALT 1-4: African Literature Today
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The re-issue of archival volumes ALT 1 to ALT 14 makes the complete series available and provides the historical perspective of these early contributions to the literature and its criticism.
The intention of the African Literature Today series [ALT] was, and still is, to encourage African writing in any language, whether of fiction, poetry or plays, and also to encourage its criticism. The critic's role, according toEldred Durosimi Jones in his 1968 Introduction to ALT 1, is to make the work accessible to a wider readership and to help establish literary standards for African literature: "The more permissive the publisher's policy is,the more necessary becomes the function of the critic." This book combines the first 4 volumes in the series, which had been published as single volumes between 1968 and 1970, then combined into one volume in 1972. It includes Bernth Lindfors' essay "The palm wine with which Achebe's words are eaten", plus early reviews of Elechi Amadi's The Concubine, Aimé Césaire's Une Saison au Congo, Flora Nwapa's Efuru and Ngugi's A Grainof Wheat.
Eldred Durosimi Jones
ALT 10 Retrospect & Prospect: African Literature Today
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The re-issue of archival volumes ALT 1 to ALT 14 makes the complete series available and provides the historical perspective of these early contributions to the literature and its criticism.
In this 10th anniversary volume, first published in 1979, Eldred Jones outlines the trend over the years since independence of "a greater degree of alienation or dissidence of the principal writers from established regimes and a movement towards a closer identification with what they see as the needs of the ordinary people. Writers increasingly found themselves in difficulties with their respective governments, with ensuing consequences of loss of favour,of exile - enforced or voluntary - or worse still of detention or imprisonment in their own countries." This issue makes a reassessment of African writing with special articles on novels, drama and poetry and particular studies ofthe work of Kofi Awoonor, Ngugi, Ezekiel Mphalele, Richard Rive, Cyprian Ekwensi, Ayi Kwei Armah, Yambo Ouologuem and Arthur Nortje.
Eldred Durosimi Jones
ALT 11 Myth & History: African Literature Today
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The re-issue of archival volumes ALT 1 to ALT 14 makes the complete series available and provides the historical perspective of these early contributions to the literature and its criticism.
This volume, first published in 1980, provides an overview of the way myth and history have influenced both the literature of Africa and individual writers. Isidore Okpewho, Solomon O. Iyasere and Mazisi Kunene contribute here onmyth, oral tradition and African cosmological systems. Armah's vision of history is examined both in the way that it appears in his novels and in comparison with Ouologuem and Soyinka; also examined are Elechi Amadi's view of thegods, Achebe's use of myth in Arrow of God and the inward journey of Tutuola's Palm-Wine Drinkard. There are views across the Atlantic of the way the Middle Passage resonates in the work of Edouard Glissant and in the work of a number of writers from West Africa.
Eldred Jones
ALT 12 New Writing, New Approaches: African Literature Today
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The re-issue of archival volumes ALT 1 to ALT 14 makes the complete series available and provides the historical perspective of these early contributions to the literature and its criticism.
In his Editorial to African Literature Today 12, first published in 1982, Eldred Jones laments the death of Camara Laye and gives tribute to him as one of the pioneers of African literature. The volume celebrates new writers whose works "have not received much critical attention either because they are relatively new, or because not being what might be described as mainstream they may unintentionally, perhaps, have been damned with faint praise or neglect." There are contributions on the works of Gabriel Okara, Robert Serumaga, Hamidou Kane and John Munonye, and emerging as significant new voices are playwrights Femi Osofisan and Ola Rotimi, and feminist writer Mariama Bâ.
Eldred Jones
ALT 13 Recent Trends in the Novel: African Literature Today
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The re-issue of archival volumes ALT 1 to ALT 14 makes the complete series available and provides the historical perspective of these early contributions to the literature and its criticism.
First published in 1983, this volume looks at new developments in the African novel and also at those aspects of more established works that received less critical attention, such as writing from southern Africa, to which censorship and war restricted access. Eldred Jones in his Editorial also cites the "searing impact of the Nigerian Civil War, on the consciousness, not just on Nigerians, but on Africans as a whole". There are also contributions on Nigerian populist Kole Omotoso and Dambudzo Marechera's prize-winning House of Hunger. One of the most significant trends is the emergence of the powerful feminist talents of Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Bessie Head, Ama Ata Aidoo and Rebeka Njau. Articles by Eustace Palmer and Femi Ojo-Ade examine the depth and intensity with which some new novelists present the female point of view.
Eldred Durosimi Jones, Eustace Palmer, Marjorie Jones
ALT 14 Insiders & Outsiders: African Literature Today
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The re-issue of archival volumes ALT 1 to ALT 14 makes the complete series available and provides the historical perspective of these early contributions to the literature and its criticism.
This volume, first published in 1984, studies the attraction of Africa for non-African writers and the widespread and differing outside influences on African writers. This relationship raises complex problems such as which language to write in, and the representation or misrepresentation of the continent. Kole Omotoso gives a trans-Saharan view of Africa, Funso Aiyejina a West Indian perspective highlighting the work of George Lamming and Denis Williams, and Katherine Frank examines the relevance of feminist criticism to the African novel. Other contributors compare and contrast the works of European, American, Caribbean and African writers: Graham Greene and Dadié; Soyinka and Beckett; Laye, Lamming and Wright; Camus and Césaire; Yeats and J.P. Clark; Equiano and Defoe; Ernest Gaines and Oyono.
Ernest N Emenyonu
ALT 26 War in African Literature Today
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How have African writers addressed the issue of war and its impact across the continent?
Since the second half of the twentieth century, no single phenomenon has marred the image and development of Africa more than senseless fratricidal wars which rapidly followed the political independence of nations. This issue ofAfrican Literature Today is devoted to studies of how African writers, as historical witnesses, have handled the recreation of war as a cataclysmic phenomenon in various locations on the continent. The contributors explore the subject from a variety of perspectives: panoramic, regional, national and through comparative studies. War has enriched contemporary African literature, but at what price to human lives, peace and the environment?
ERNESTEMENYONU is Professor of the Department of Africana Studies University of Michigan-Flint. The contributors include: CHIMALUM NWANKWO, CHRISTINE MATZKE, CLEMENT A. OKAFOR, INIBONG I. UKO, OIKE MACHIKO, SOPHIE OGWUDE, MAURICE TAONEZVI VAMBE, ZOE NORRIDGE and ISIDORE DIALA.
Nigeria: HEBN
Ernest N Emenyonu
ALT 27 New Novels in African Literature Today
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This issue of African Literature Today focuses on new novels by emerging as well as established African novelists.
This is a seminal work that discusses the validity of the perception that the new generation of African novelists is remarkably different in vision, style, and worldview from the older generation. The contention is that the oldergeneration novelists who were too close to the colonial period in Africa had invariably made culture-conflict and little else their dominant thematic concern while the younger generation novelists are more versatile in their thematic preoccupations, and are more global in their vision and style. Do the facts in the novels justify and validate these claims? The 13 papers in this volume have been carefully selected to consider these issues. Brenda Cooper a renowned literary scholar from Cape Town writes on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, while Charles Nnolim writes about Adichie's more recent novel Half of a Yellow Sun; Omar Sougou of Universite GastonBerger, Senegal discusses 'ambivalent inscriptions' in Buchi Emecheta's later novels; Clement Okafor of the University of Maryland, addresses the theme of 'racial memory' in Isidore Okpewho's Call Me By My Rightful Name, juxtaposed between the world of the old and the realities of the present. Joseph McLaren, Hofstra University, New York, discusses Ngugi's latest novel, Wizard of the Crow, while Machiko Oike, Hiroshima University, Japan looksat a new theme in African adolescent literature, 'youth in an era of HIV/AIDS'. There is abundant evidence of the contrasts and diversities which characterize the African novel not only geographically, but also ideologically andgenerationally.
ERNEST EMENYONU is Professor of the Department of Africana Studies University of Michigan-Flint.
Nigeria: HEBN
Ernest N Emenyonu
ALT 28 Film in African Literature Today
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From Hollywood to Nollywood: this issue of African Literature Today examines the relationship between film and video and the literatures of Africa.
A recent literary phenomenon in contemporary Africa is the developing relationship between film and African literature. ALT 28 focuses on the interface between film and literature in contemporary African writing and imagination. Contributors have examined the issue from a variety of perspectives: critiques of adaptations of African creative works into film, analyses of filmic structures in African dramatic literature, African writers as film makers, and the impact of the video film industry on literature and the reading culture in Africa.
Ernest N. Emenyonu is Professor of the Department of Africana Studies, University of Michigan-Flint
Nigeria: HEBN
Ernest N Emenyonu
ALT 29 Teaching African Literature Today
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Brings together experiences of teachers of African literature from around the world in the context of technological change.
Focuses on theoretical and pedagogical approaches to the teaching of African Literature on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. The publication of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in 1958 drew universal attention not only to contemporary African creative imagination, but also established the art of the modern African novel. In 1986, Wole Soyinka became the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and opened the 'gate' for other African writers. By the close of the 20th century, African Literature had gained world-wide acceptance and legitimacy in the academy and featured on the literature curriculum of schools and colleges across the globe. This specialissue of African Literature Today, examines the diverse experiences of teachers of African Literature across regional, racial, cultural and national boundaries. It explores such issues as student responses, productive pedagogical innovations, the impact of modern technology, case studies of online teaching, teaching Criticism of African Literature, and teaching African Literature in an age of multiculturalism. It is intended as an invaluable teacher's handbook and essential student companion for the effective study of African Literature.
Ernest Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA; the editorial board is composed of scholars from US, UK and African universities
Nigeria: HEBN
Ernest N Emenyonu
ALT 31 Writing Africa in the Short Story: African Literature Today
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The success of the Caine Prize for African Writing and the growth of online publishing have played key roles in putting the short story in its rightful place within the study and criticism of African literature.
African writers have, much more than the critics, recognized the beauty and potency of the short story. Always the least studied in African literature classrooms and the most critically overlooked genre in African literature today, the African short story is now given the attention it deserves. Contributors here take a close look at the African short story to re-define its own peculiar pedigree, chart its trajectory, critique its present state and examineits creative possibilities. They examine how the short story and the novel complement each other, or exist in contradistinction, within the context of culture and politics, history and public memory, legends, myths and folklore.
Ernest Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA; the editorial board is composed of scholars from US, UK and African universities
Nigeria: HEBN
Ernest N Emenyonu
ALT 32 Politics & Social Justice: African Literature Today
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Examines some of the varied African literary responses to politics and social justice and injustice under colonialism/neocolonialism.
In 1965, Chinua Achebe, in his classic essay "The Novelist as Teacher", declared that the "African past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the early Europeans acting on God's behalf, delivered them." That assertion included a still reverberating sentiment shared by many of the first generation of African writers that it is possible to reclaim that distorted past creatively in order to show and understand "where andwhen the rain started beating Africa". Many genres and forms of literary and cultural production have recalled and recorded and reconfigured that past - many projecting a new confident African future defined by self-determination. The spectrum of that complex engagement, which encompasses critical issues in politics and social justice, provides the basis of this volume, which concludes with tributes to the life and works of Kofi Awoonor.
Articles on: Binyavanga Wainaina + Ben Okri & Nationhood + J.M. Coetzee & the Philosophy of Justice + Isidore Okpewho & "Manhood" + Ngugi's Matigari & the Postcolonial Nation + Politics & Women in Irene Salami's MoreThan Dancing + Ayi Kwei Armah's The Resolutionaries
Ernest Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA; the editorial board is composed of scholars from US, UK and African universities
Nigeria: HEBN
Ernest N. Emenyonu
ALT 33 Children's Literature & Story-telling
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Contributors analyse the theories behind children's literature, its functions and cultural significance, and suggest the new directions this literature is taking in terms of its craft, themes and intentions.
Africa's encounter with the West and its implications and consequences remain far-reaching and enduring in the craft and thrust of its creative writers. The contributors to ALT 33 analyse the connections between traditional stories and myths that have been told to children, as well as the work of contemporary creative writers who are writing for children in order that they understand this complex history. Some of these writers are developing traditional myths, folk tales, and legends and are writing them in new forms, while others focus on the encounter with the West that has dominated much modern African literature for adults. The previous neglect of the cultural significance, study, criticism and teaching of children's literature is addressed in this volume: How can the successes and/or failures of stories and story-telling for children in Africa be measured? Are there models to be followed and whatmakes them models? What is the relationship between the text and the illustration of children's books? What should guide the reader or critic of children's literature coming out of Africa - globalism, transculturality or internalregionalism? What problems confront teachers, students, publishers and promoters of children's books in Africa?
Ernest Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA; the editorial board is composed of scholars from US, UK and African universities.
Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma
HEBN: Nigeria
Ernest N. Emenyonu, Helen Cousins, Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo
ALT 34 Diaspora & Returns in Fiction
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Imagined or actual returns to a "homeland" in African literature are examined in relation to changing concepts of identity, belonging, migration and space.
This special issue focuses on literary texts by African writers in which the protagonist returns to his/her "original" or ancestral "home" in Africa from other parts of the world. Ideas of return - intentional and actual - have been a consistent feature of the literature of Africa and the African diaspora: from Equiano's autobiography in 1789 to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2013 novel Americanah. African literature has represented returnees in a range of locations and dislocations including having a sense of belonging, being alienated in a country they can no longer recognize, or experiencing a multiple sense of place. Contributors, writing on literature from the 1970s to thepresent, examine the extent to which the original place can be reclaimed with or without renegotiations of "home".
GUEST EDITORS: HELEN COUSINS, Reader in Postcolonial Literature at Newman University, Birmingham, UK; PAULINE DODGSON-KATIYO, was formerly Head of English at Newman University, Birmingham, UK, and Dean of the School of Arts at Anglia Ruskin University.
Series Editor: Ernest Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA.
Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma
Ernest N Emenyonu
ALT 35: Focus on Egypt
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As well as a rare examination of Egyptian literature, this volume includes a non-themed section of Featured Articles and a Literary Supplement.
Creativity has flourished in Egypt, a historically important and strategically located North African country and a leading nation in the Arab world. The main focus in this volume is to examine Egyptian writers, especially those whose works have enriched African Literature through their depiction of historical, cultural and socio-political forces such as Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, Nawal El Saadawi, Ahdaf Soueif, Tawfiq al-Hakim and Alifa Rifaat (Fatimah Rifaat). Writing in both Arabic and the English language, their thematic concerns have been as versatile as they have been controversial. Nawal El Saadawi provides a Foreword to the volume and an interview.
This volume also includes a non-themed section of Featured Articles and a Literary Supplement. Volume Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA. Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma
Ernest N Emenyonu
ALT 36: Queer Theory in Film & Fiction
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ALT 36 turns a "queer eye" on Africa, offering provocative (re-)readings of texts to position formerly erased sexualities and contemporary sexual expression among Africans on the continent, and abroad.
Debates on the future of the African continent and the role of gender identities in these visions are increasingly present in literary criticism forums as African writers become bolder in exploring the challenges they face and celebrating gender diversity in the writing of short stories, novels, poetry, plays and films. Controversies over the rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer (LGBTIQ) communities in Africa, as elsewhere, continue inthe context of criminalization and/or intimidation of these groups. Residual colonial moralizing and contemporary western identity norms and politics vie with longstanding polyvalent indigenous sexual expression. In addition to traditional media, the new social media have gained importance, both as sources of information exchange and as sites of virtual construction of gender identities. As with many such contentious issues, the variety of responses to the"state of the question" is strikingly visible across the continent. In this issue of ALT, guest editor John Hawley has sampled the ongoing conversations, in both African writing and in the analysis of contemporary African cinema,to show how queer studies can break with old concepts and theories and point the way to new gender perspectives on literary and cinematic output.
This volume also includes a non-themed section of Featured Articles anda Literary Supplement.
Guest Editor: John C. Hawley is Professor in the Department of English, Santa Clara University Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA. Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma
Ernest N Emenyonu
ALT 37
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AFRICAN LITERATURE TODAY was established at a time of uncertainty and reconstruction but for 50 years it has played a leading role in nurturing imaginative creativity and its criticism on the African continent and beyond.
Contemporary African creative writers have confidently taken strides which resonate all over the world. The daring diversities, stylistic innovations and enchanting audacities which characterize their works across many different genres resonate with readers beyond African geographic and linguistic boundaries. Writers in Africa and the diaspora seem to be speaking with collective and individual voices that compel world attention and admiration. And they arebeing read in numerous world languages. This volume's contributors recognize the foundations laid by the pioneer African writers as they point vigorously to contemporary writers who have moved African imaginative creativityforward with utmost integrity, and to the critics who continue to respond with unyielding tenacity. The founding Editor of ALT, Professor Eldred Durosimi Jones, recalls in an interview in this volume, the role ALT played in the evolution and stimulation of a wave of African literary studies and criticism in mid-20th century: "The 1960s saw a good deal of activity among scholars teaching African Literature throughout Africa and the world, and this ledto a series of conferences in African Literature in Dakar, Nairobi, and Freetown.around the idea of communication between the various English Departments which took an interest in African Literature. We decided on a bulletin, which was just a kind of newsletter between departments saying what was going on....it was that bulletin that showed the potential of this kind of communication... after that we started African Literature Today as a journal inviting articles on the works of African writers." Contributors to the series demonstrate the impact of the growth in studies and criticism of African Literature in the 50 years since its founding.
Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA. Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma
Louise Green
ALT 38 Environmental Transformations
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Investigates what literary strategies African writers adopt to convey the impact of climate transformation and environmental change.
This special issue examines the ways fiction and poetry engage with environmental consciousness, and how African literary criticism addresses the implications of global environmental transformations. Does environmentalist literature offer new possibilities for critical thinking about the future? What constitutes environmentalist fiction and poetry? What kind of texts, themes and topics does climate writing include? Does any text in which the environment features become available to environmentalist criticism? In their engagement with the diverse genres, themes and frameworks through which contemporary African writers address topics including urbanisation, cross-species communication, nature and climate change, contributors to this special issue help to define African environmental writing. They look at the literary strategies adopted by creative writers to convey the impact of environmental transformationin narratives that are historically informed by a century of colonialism, nationalist political activism, urbanisation and postcolonial migration. How does environmental literature intervene in these histories? Can creative writers, with their powerfully post-human and cross-species imaginations, carry out the ethical work demanded by contemporary climate science? From Tanure Ojaide's and Helon Habila's attention to environmental decimation in the Niger Delta through to Nnedi Okorafor's and Kofi Anyidoho's imaginative cross-species encounters, the special issue asks how literature mediates the specificities of climate change in an era of global capitalism and technological transformation, and what the limits of creative writing and literary criticism are as tools for discussing environmental issues.
This volume also includes a Literary Supplement.
Guest Editors: Cajetan Iheka (Associate Professor of English, Yale University) and Stephanie Newell (Professor of English, Yale University) Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu (Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint) Reviews Editor:Obi Nwakanma (Fellow, Department of English University of Central Florida)
Ernest N Emenyonu
ALT 39
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Explores the ways in which African writers have approached speculative fiction through in-depth articles on the use of language, terminology and the genealogy of the works.
Over the past two decades, there has been a resurgence in the writing of African and African diaspora speculative and science fiction writing. Recent discussions around the "rise of science-fiction and fantasy" in Africa have led to a push-back, in which writers and scholars have suggested that science fiction and fantasy is not a new phenomenon in African literature, but that the deep past of the African world and its complex and mysterious foundations still register in burgeoning modern literary productions. Such influences can be seen in early twentieth-century writers such as D.O. Fagunwa's classic novel (1938) Ogboji Ode ninu Igbo Irunmale (The Forest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunter's Saga), the mythopoeia of Elechi Amadi's The Concubine (1966) as well as the dystopian writing of Buchi Emecheta in The Rape of Shavi (1983). This volume shows this long tradition of speculative literature in examining African classics such as Kojo Laing's Woman of the Aeroplanes (1988) and the oeuvre of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. The volume also critically examines modern African texts from writers including Nnedi Okorafor, Namwali Serpell and Masande Ntshanga, as well as critically looking at the terms 'Afrofuturism' and 'Africanfuturism' vis-à-vis their particular cultural aesthetics and suitability in describing tradition rooted African speculative arts.
This volume also includes a Literary Supplement.
Guest Editors: LOUISA UCHUM EGBUNIKE (Associate Professor in African and Caribbean Literature, Durham University) and CHIMALUM NWANKWO (Writer-in-Residence, Department of English and Literary Studies, Veritas University, Abuja, Nigeria).
Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu (Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint) Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma (Fellow, Department of English University of Central Florida).
Edited by Ernest N. Emenyonu
ALT 40
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Explores and interrogates the many and diverse perspectives of the new frontiers of African literary studies.
Publication of the seminal volume African Literature Comes of Age, by C.D. Narasimhaiah (India) and Ernest N. Emenyonu (Nigeria), in 1988 generated the consciousness that African literature had attained maturity by the evolution of diverse concerns among scholars, critics, and researchers over the decades following the publication, in the English language, of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in 1958. Since the publication of the first volume of African Literature Today (ALT) in the 1970s, the writings of Africans across the continent have spread across the globe, constituting refreshing and hitherto unimaginable epistemologies. This 40th volume provides a serious critical response to those changing horizons and reflects African literature's maturity, diversity, scope, spread, and above all, relevance. The topics discussed range from sickle cell disease to the animalization of humans, new feminisms and stereotypes of womanhood, the different shades of black masculinity, and political exploitation in creative works. Reaching across boundaries, recent fictions are seen to suggest a widening of conventional literary genres, and new forms that change the known trajectories of dramatic theatre. The substance, freshness, and vitality that characterize the articles in this volume of African Literature Today bring a welcome perspective to the continent's rich creative life.
Funded by the Knowledge Unlatched Select 2023 collection, this title is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons License: CC BY NC
Ernest N Emenyonu
ALT 41
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Interrogates and explores African literature in African languages today, and the continuing interfaces between works in indigenous languages and those written in European languages or languages of colonizers.
Sixty years after the Conference of African Writers of English Expression at Makerere University, the dominance in the global canon of African literatures written in European languages over those in indigenous languages continues to be an issue. This volume of ALT re-examines this central question of African literatures to ask, 'What is the state of African literatures in African languages today?' Contributors discuss the translation of Gurnah's novel Paradise to Swahili, and Osemwegie's Ọrọ Epic to English, and Wolof wrestlers' panegyrics. They analyse Edo eco-critical poetry, and the poetics of Igbo mask poetry, and morality in early prose fiction in indigenous Nigerian languages. Other essays contribute a semiotic analysis of Duruaku's A Matter of Identity, and the decolonization of trauma in Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them. Overall, the volume paints a complex image of African cultural production in indigenous languages, especially in the ways Africa's oral performance traditions remain resilient in the face of a seemingly undiminished presence of non-African language literary traditions.
Funded by the Knowledge Unlatched Select 2024 collection, this title is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons License: CC BY-NC-ND.
Eldred Jones
ALT 5 The Novel in Africa: African Literature Today
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The re-issue of archival volumes ALT 1 to ALT 14 makes the complete series available and provides the historical perspective of these early contributions to the literature and its criticism.
Originally published in 1971, this was the first volume in the series to focus on a specific theme, in this case the novel, but continues the format of including contributions from both writers and critics. There are articles on:Equiano, Onuora Nzekwu, T.M. Aluko, Ngugi, Sarif Easmon, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. The volume also includes a contribution from Ernest Emenyonu asking of African Literature "What does it take to be its critic" plus reviews of Sembene Ousmane's newly published God's Bits of Wood, Mbella Sonne Dipoko's Because of WomenChief, The Honourable Minister and Flora Nwapa's Idu.
Eldred Jones
ALT 6 Poetry in Africa: African Literature Today
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The re-issue of archival volumes ALT 1 to ALT 14 makes the complete series available and provides the historical perspective of these early contributions to the literature and its criticism.
First published in 1973, this volume of the series includes a tribute from the Editor to the poet Christopher Okigbo who died fighting in the Biafran War in 1967, and two articles on his poetry. Also discussed are Leopold Senghor,Dennis Brutus, Wole Soyinka, Lenrie Peters and Ferdinand Oyono. The contributions analyse East African poetry, French Algerian poetry, Zulu poetry, and "Rara" chants in Yoruba oral poetry. Donatus I. Nwoga writes a general article on modern African poetry. The new books reviewed include Mazisi Kunene's Zulu Poems and Okot p'Bitek's Two Songs: "Song of Prisoner" and "Song of Malaya" and Taban lo Liyong's Another Nigger Dead.
Eldred Jones
ALT 7 Focus on Criticism: African Literature Today
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The re-issue of archival volumes ALT 1 to ALT 14 makes the complete series available and provides the historical perspective of these early contributions to the literature and its criticism.
First published in 1975, this volume of the series continues in more depth the debate on the role of critics and the purpose of criticism. As Eldred Jones reminds the reader in his Editorial: "African Literature Today has always aimed to be a forum for discussion ... Not surprisingly some opinions have provoked strong reactions. Indeed where there is time reactions are deliberately sought so that differing opinions can appear close to each other....African Literature Today is happy to serve as the threshing floor." The lively exchanges on who is best placed to judge African literature and how best to teach it continue both in responding articles and in the Comments section of the volume. Eldred Jones again embraces this debate and is reminded of the Igbo proverb: "The world is like a mask dancing; if you want to see it well you must not stand in one place."
Eldred Durosimi Jones
ALT 8 Drama in Africa: African Literature Today
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The re-issue of archival volumes ALT 1 to ALT 14 makes the complete series available and provides the historical perspective of these early contributions to the literature and its criticism.
First published in 1976, this volume has a focus on African drama and carries an introductory article by Ghanaian poet and playwright J.C. de Graft. There are three articles on Wole Soyinka's work as a playwright and an article onthe dramatic works of Ama Ata Aidoo, as well as an article on four dramatists from East Africa. The dilemmas of the popular playwright are discussed in an article on two Zambian writers and Eldred Jones's Editorial gives examplesfrom Sierra Leone of the challenges faced by more "popular" playwrights and those with the more "literary" concerns of publication.
Eldred Jones
ALT 9 Africa, America & the Caribbean: African Literature Today
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The re-issue of archival volumes ALT 1 to ALT 14 makes the complete series available and provides the historical perspective of these early contributions to the literature and its criticism.
This volume, first published in 1978, looks at the fascinating literary links of the African diaspora in Harlem, Cuba and Haiti. Eldred Jones outlines in his Editorial the impact of the pride in connections with an African past as"one of the great transformations of modern times". The impact on writing moved in all directions and comparisons in this volume are made between Wole Soyinka and Leroi Jones, and between African and Irish Nationalist writing. Among the contributions are articles on the American background to Ayi Kwei Armah's Why Are We So Blest?, the African elements of Cuban literature, and an analysis of the early works and later crime fiction of Chester Himes.The Reviews include Kadiatu Sesay on Ekwensi and Okpwewho, Maryse Condé on Sembene Ousmane's Xala and Eustace Palmer on Meja Mwangi's Going Down River Road and Nuruddin Farah's Naked Needle.
Matthew J. Christensen
Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940-2020
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Providing a survey of Anglophone African detective fiction, from the late 1940s to the present day, this study traces its history both as a literary form and a mode of critical exploration of the fraught sovereignties of the African state and its citizens.
Since the late 1940s, African writers including Cyprian Ekwensi, Arthur Maimane, Adaora Lily Ulasi, Hilary Ng'weno, Unity Dow, Parker Bilal, and Angela Makholwa have published over 200 murder mysteries, police procedurals, spy thrillers, and other fictional narratives of investigation and discovery in English-language newspapers, magazines, and novels. Distributed widely across the continent's diverse cultural and political geographies, these texts share aesthetic characteristics and thematic preoccupations that reflect transnational networks of production, circulation, and influence. Anglophone African Detective Fiction, 1940-2020 surveys this literary history and examines how African writers have repeatedly harnessed the detective story to interrogate postcolonial realities of selfhood and the state. It argues that African writers have turned the detective story into a highly productive, while at the same time suspense-filled and entertaining, mode of social and political critique, first of colonialism and the independence era and latterly of neoliberal governance. Offering an overview of paradigmatic texts, from Ghana to Kenya and Sudan to South Africa, the book traces the contours of the history of Anglophone African detective fiction that is at once a cultural history of a uniquely African assessment of the ongoing problematics of sovereignty and decolonization.
Michael Brett
Approaching African History
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Explores how the conception of Africa and its history has changed over time and narrates the story of this vast continent over the past 10,000 years.
Africa is a huge continent, as large as the more habitable areas of Europe and Asia put together. It has a history immensely long, yet the study of that history as an academic discipline in its own right is little more than fiftyyears old. Since then the subject has grown enormously, but the question of what this history is and how it has been approached still needs to be asked, not least to answer the question of why should we study it.
This book takes as its subject the last 10,000 years of African history, and traces the way in which human society on the continent has evolved from communities of hunters and gatherers to the complex populations of today. Approaching that history through its various dimensions: archaeological, ethnographic, written, scriptural, European and contemporary, it looks at how the history of such a vast region over such a length of time has been conceived and presented, and how it is to be investigated. The problem itself is historical, and an integral part of the history with which it is concerned, beginning with the changing awareness over the centuries of what Africa might be. MichaelBrett thus traces the history of Africa not only on the ground, but also in the mind, in order to make his own historical contribution to the debate.
Michael Brett is Emeritus Reader in the History of North Africa at SOAS.
Martin Hall
Archaeology Africa
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Provides a detailed introduction to archaeology as practised in the African continent.
Martin Hall explains how archaeologists find sites, design an excavation, date finds, and write history. The reader is given an outline of the history of the African continent, from the early hominids to the present.
South Africa: David Philip/New Africa Books
Yusuf M. Juwayeyi
Archaeology and Oral Tradition in Malawi
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First comprehensive account of the origins and early history of the Chewa as revealed by oral tradition and archaeology that allows a more accurate picture of a pre-literate society.
The Chewa are the largest ethnic group in Malawi, representing a third of the population of approximately 19 million, and their language - Chichewa - is Malawi's national language. Yet the last book on the history of this group was published in 1944, and was based on oral history, or tradition. As with much African history, oral history started to be recorded only in the late 19th century. This is the first book to use not only oral history, but also documents written by early Portuguese explorers, traders and government officials, as well as archaeology, to piece together the early history of the Chewa. The author is an archaeologist, who discovered the first major Chewa settlement, Mankhamba, near the southern part of Lake Malawi. His excavations have enabled a more scientific chronology of the migrations of the Chewa into what is today Malawi and have provided physical proof of their early history as well as their material and spiritual culture and way of life. Professor Yusuf Juwayeyi has written and documented a very readable history and description of archaeology, which reveals the value of combining oral tradition together with archaeology to arrive at a more accurate picture of the history of a pre-literate society. This book will be of value not only to historians, archaeologists and anthropologists, but also the general reader interested in Africanhistory.
YUSUF M. JUWAYEYI is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York.
South Africa: UCT Press
Yusuf M. Juwayeyi
Archaeology and Oral Tradition in Malawi
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First comprehensive account of the origins and early history of the Chewa as revealed by oral tradition and archaeology that allows a more accurate picture of a pre-literate society.
The Chewa are the largest ethnic group in Malawi, representing a third of the population of approximately 19 million, and their language - Chichewa - is Malawi's national language. Yet the last book on the history of this group was published in 1944, and was based on oral history, or tradition. As with much African history, oral history started to be recorded only in the late 19th century. This is the first book to use not only oral history, but also documents written by early Portuguese explorers, traders and government officials, as well as archaeology, to piece together the early history of the Chewa. The author is an archaeologist, who discovered the first major Chewa settlement, Mankhamba, near the southern part of Lake Malawi. His excavations have enabled a more scientific chronology of the migrations of the Chewa into what is today Malawi and have provided physical proof of their early history as well as their material and spiritual culture and way of life. Professor Yusuf Juwayeyi has written and documented a very readable history and description of archaeology, which reveals the value of combining oral tradition together with archaeology to arrive at a more accurate picture of the history of a pre-literate society. This book will be of value not only to historians, archaeologists and anthropologists, but also the general reader interested in African history.
YUSUF M. JUWAYEYI is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York.
South Africa: UCT Press
Joanne Tomkinson
Architecture and Politics in Africa
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Honourable Mention - 2023 ASR Prize for Best Africa-focused Anthology or Edited Collection
Innovative study of state politics, identity and buildings that sheds new light on the links between the material and the ideational realms of contemporary life in Africa.
Buildings shape politics in the ways they define communities, enable economic activity, reflect political ideas, and impact state-society relations. They are materially and symbolically interwoven with the everyday lives of elites and citizens, as well global flows of money, goods, and contracts. Yet, to date, there has been no research that explicitly connects debates about Africa's domestic and international politics with the study of architecture. This innovative book fills this gap, providing a new and compelling reading of the politics of identity in sub-Saharan Africa through an examination of some of its most significant buildings. Using case studies from nine countries across sub-Saharan Africa, this volume reveals how they are commissioned and built, how they enable elites to project power, and how they form a basis for popular conceptions of the state. Exploring a diverse range of buildings including parliaments, airports, prisons, ministries, regional institutions, libraries, universities, shopping malls, public housing, cathedrals and palaces, the contributors suggest a innovative perspective on African politics, identity and urban development. This book will be a compelling reference for scholars and students of African politics, development studies and city life in its elaboration of and challenges to established concepts and arguments about the relationship between material objects and political ideas.
This book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND.
Terence Ranger
Are We Not Also Men?
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Terence Ranger collected a range of sources, including the archive of Thompson's papers, the National Archives and oral interviews.
This work provides a collective biography of Thompson Samkange and of two of his sons, Sketchley and Stanlake. Thompson Samkange was born in 1893 at the time that his land was being overwhelmed from the South. He was one of the founders of the African press. Stanlake Samkange, Professor of History and writer of historical novels, lived to see the achievement of Zimbabwe's independence in 1980. Terence Ranger has had access to a range of sources, including the archive of Thompson's papers, found in a tin trunk which had been kept amongst rats and damp in a laundry. He also discovered a large body of evidence for the modern history of Methodism in the National Archives. However,much of this book depends on the information gleaned from oral interviews.
Zimbabwe: Baobab
Rebecca Jones
At the Crossroads
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Shortlisted for the SAUK Fage & Oliver Prize 2020 'Honorable Mention' for the ALA First Book Award - Scholarship 2021
A path-breaking contribution to the critical literature on African travel writing.
Throughout the twentieth century, Nigerians have been writing about their travels within Nigeria using a variety of media and forms, from serialised newspaper travelogues to personal diaries, autobiographies and online narratives.These works offer important insights into how Nigerians have represented Nigeria to itself and to the world. This is the first book to examine the production of Nigerian travel narratives about Nigeria in the century from colonisation to independence. Rebecca Jones argues that we can read these texts both as the products of a local Nigerian print culture, and through their articulations with global travel writing traditions. Focusing on travel writing published from 1914 to 2014 in the Yoruba-speaking region of southwestern Nigeria, home to a well-established and prolific writing and print culture in both Yoruba and English, this cultural history of Nigerian travel comprisesclose readings of these works, and argues that the production of travel writing in the region can be read not simply as a foreign import, but as a cluster of genres with a cohesive local history. Writers discussed include Samuel Ajayi Crowther, I.B. Thomas, E.A. Akintan, Isaac Delano, D.O. Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola, Ben Okri, Babatunde Shadeko, Damilola Ajenifuja, Chibuzor Mirian Azubuike, Pelu Awofeso, Lape Soetan, Teju Cole, Adewale Maja-Pearce, Noo Saro-Wiwa, and the Invisible Borders collective.
Nigeria: Premium Times Books
Rebecca Jones
At the Crossroads
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Shortlisted for the SAUK Fage & Oliver Prize 2020 'Honorable Mention' for the ALA First Book Award - Scholarship 2021
A path-breaking contribution to the critical literature on African travel writing.
Throughout the twentieth century, Nigerians have been writing about their travels within Nigeria using a variety of media and forms, from serialised newspaper travelogues to personal diaries, autobiographies and online narratives.These works offer important insights into how Nigerians have represented Nigeria to itself and to the world. This is the first book to examine the production of Nigerian travel narratives about Nigeria in the century from colonisation to independence. Rebecca Jones argues that we can read these texts both as the products of a local Nigerian print culture, and through their articulations with global travel writing traditions. Focusing on travel writing published from 1914 to 2014 in the Yoruba-speaking region of southwestern Nigeria, home to a well-established and prolific writing and print culture in both Yoruba and English, this cultural history of Nigerian travel comprisesclose readings of these works, and argues that the production of travel writing in the region can be read not simply as a foreign import, but as a cluster of genres with a cohesive local history. Writers discussed include Samuel Ajayi Crowther, I.B. Thomas, E.A. Akintan, Isaac Delano, D.O. Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola, Ben Okri, Babatunde Shadeko, Damilola Ajenifuja, Chibuzor Mirian Azubuike, Pelu Awofeso, Lape Soetan, Teju Cole, Adewale Maja-Pearce, Noo Saro-Wiwa, and the Invisible Borders collective.
Nigeria: Premium Times Books
Donald Crummey
Banditry, Rebellion and Social Protest in Africa
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Marks a new stage in African resistance studies.
Previous work has tended to place the subject of resistance studies exclusively within an anticolonial context. This collection broadens the concept to include crime and violence.
Insa Nolte
Beyond Religious Tolerance
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A counterbalance to the predominant study of Islam's role in social and political struggles, this book examines life in Ede, south-west Nigeria, offering important analyses of religious co-existence.
Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since 9/11, religion has become an increasingly important factor of personal and group identification. Based on an African case study, this book calls for new ways of thinking about diversity that go "beyond religious tolerance". Focusing on the predominantly Muslim Yoruba town of Ede, the authors challenge the assumption that religious difference automatically leads to conflict: in south-west Nigeria, Muslims,Christians and traditionalists have co-existed largely peacefully since the early twentieth century. In some contexts, Ede's citizens emphasise the importance and significance of religious difference, and the need for tolerance.But elsewhere they refer to religious boundaries in passing, or even celebrate and transcend religious divisions. Drawing on detailed ethnographic and historical research, survey work, oral histories and poetry by UK- and Nigeria- based researchers, the book examines how Ede's citizens experience religious difference in their everyday lives. It examines the town's royal history and relationship with the deity Sàngó, its old Islamic compounds and itsChristian institutions, as well as marriage and family life across religious boundaries, to illustrate the multiplicity of religious practices in the life of the town and its citizens and to suggest an alternative approach to religious difference.
INSA NOLTE is Reader in African Studies, University of Birmingham, and Visiting Research Professor, Osun State University, Osogbo. OLUKOYA OGEN is Former Provost, Adeyemi College of Education, Ondo,Professor of History, Osun State University, Osogbo, and Visiting Senior Research Fellow, University of Birmingham. REBECCA JONES, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Birmingham, is author of At the Crossroads: NigerianTravel Writing and Literary Culture in Yoruba and English, published by James Currey in 2019. All three editors worked on the ERC project 'Knowing Each Other: Everyday Religious Encounters, Social Identities and Tolerance in Southwest Nigeria'. Nigeria: Adeyemi College Academic Press (paperback)
Insa Nolte
Beyond Religious Tolerance
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$130.00
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A counterbalance to the predominant study of Islam's role in social and political struggles, this book examines life in Ede, south-west Nigeria, offering important analyses of religious co-existence.
Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since 9/11, religion has become an increasingly important factor of personal and group identification. Based on an African case study, this book calls for new ways of thinking about diversity that go "beyond religious tolerance". Focusing on the predominantly Muslim Yoruba town of Ede, the authors challenge the assumption that religious difference automatically leads to conflict: in south-west Nigeria, Muslims,Christians and traditionalists have co-existed largely peacefully since the early twentieth century. In some contexts, Ede's citizens emphasise the importance and significance of religious difference, and the need for tolerance.But elsewhere they refer to religious boundaries in passing, or even celebrate and transcend religious divisions. Drawing on detailed ethnographic and historical research, survey work, oral histories and poetry by UK- and Nigeria- based researchers, the book examines how Ede's citizens experience religious difference in their everyday lives. It examines the town's royal history and relationship with the deity Sàngó, its old Islamic compounds and itsChristian institutions, as well as marriage and family life across religious boundaries, to illustrate the multiplicity of religious practices in the life of the town and its citizens and to suggest an alternative approach to religious difference.
Insa Nolte is Reader in African Studies at the University of Birmingham, and Visiting Research Professor at Osun State University, Osogbo. She is President of the African Studies Association of the UK(2016-18) and Principal Investigator of the ERC project "Knowing Each Other: Everyday Religious Encounters, Social Identities and Tolerance in Southwest Nigeria". Olukoya Ogen is Provost of Adeyemi College of Education, Ondo; Professor of History at Osun State University, Osogbo; and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. He is the Nigerian coordinator of the "Knowing Each Other" project. Rebecca Jones is Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the "Knowing Each Other" project. Her book, A Cultural History of Nigerian Travel Writing, will be published by James Currey in 2017.
Nigeria: Adeyemi College Academic Press (paperback)
Bernth Lindfors
Black African Literature in English 1997-1999
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This volume lists the work produced on anglophone black African literature between 1997 and 1999.
This bibliographic work is a continuation of the highly acclaimed earlier volumes compiled by Bernth Lindfors. Containing about 10,000 entries, some of which are annotated to identify the authors discussed, it covers books, periodical articles, papers in edited collections and selective coverage of other relevant sources.
Bernth Lindfors
Black African Literature in English, 1992-1996
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This volume lists all the important work produced on anglophone black African literature between 1992 and 1996.
This bibliographic work is a continuation of the earlier volumes compiled by Bernth Lindfors. Containing about 9000 entries, some of which areannotated to identify the authors discussed, it covers books, periodical articles, papers in edited collections and selective coverage of other relevant sources. Also included are a substantial number of African newspaper and magazine articles.
Basil Davidson
Black Star
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Basil Davidson's Black Star remains one of the most thoughtful and insightful views into the life and times of Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972)'.- Emmanuel Akyeampong, from the book's new Foreword
Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah seized opportunities to lead the countries of sub-Saharan Africa away from colonialism. In 1957, he became the first Prime Minister of Ghana. By the time he was overthrown in a coup in 1966 most African countries, outside the settler-dominated South, had also achieved independence. ' As a visionary Nkrumah was ahead of his times, with an astute understanding of colonialism that made the twin goals of socialism at home (Ghana) and African unity the abiding principles of his work and life.... Nkrumah's monumental role and place in modern Ghana's history mystifies him as a national hero; Black Star humanizes Nkrumah in important ways, and the reader gains a new understanding of a great man, but still a man.' - From the new Foreword by Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong, Professor of History, Harvard University
Dereje Feyissa, Markus Virgil Hoehne
Borders and Borderlands as Resources in the Horn of Africa
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Borders offer opportunities as well as restrictions, and in the Horn of Africa they are used as economic, political, identity and status resources by borderland peoples.
State borders are more than barriers. They structure social, economic and political spaces and as such provide opportunities as well as obstacles for the communities straddling both sides of the border. This book deals with the conduits and opportunities of state borders in the Horn of Africa, and investigates how the people living there exploit them through various strategies. Using a micro level perspective, the case studies, which include the borders of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, focus on opportunities, highlight the agency of the borderlanders, and acknowledge the permeability but consequentiality of the borders.
Dereje Feyissa is Africa Research Director at the International Law and Policy Institute and Adjunct Professor at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. Markus Virgil Hoehne is a Lecturer at the Institute of Anthropology at Leipzig University.
Dereje Feyissa, Markus Virgil Hoehne
Borders and Borderlands as Resources in the Horn of Africa
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Borders offer opportunities as well as restrictions, and in the Horn of Africa they are used as economic, political, identity and status resources by borderland peoples.
State borders are more than barriers. They structure social, economic and political spaces and as such provide opportunities as well as obstacles for the communities straddling both sides of the border. This book deals with the conduits and opportunities of state borders in the Horn of Africa, and investigates how the people living there exploit state borders through various strategies. Using a micro level perspective, the case studies, which includethe Horn and Eastern Africa, particularly the borders of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, focus on opportunities, highlight the agency of the borderlanders, and acknowledge the permeabilitybut consequentiality of the borders.
DEREJE FEYISSA, Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany; MARKUS VIRGIL HOEHNE, Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany.
Gerhard Seibert
Brazil-Africa Relations
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Fills an important gap in the study of Africa's international relations and its engagement with rising economies in the Global South.
When Lula da Silva became President of Brazil in 2003 he declared Africa a priority of his country's ambitious global foreign policy. During his presidency, Brazil became one of the key emergent powers in Africa through strengthening political ties, development cooperation and trade with the continent. While, the Dilma and Temer presidencies had other political priorities, strong links with the continent continued to exist. The authors trace the longhistory of Brazil-Africa relations from the early 16th century and the slave trade, through their decline during European colonialism, their resurgence following many African countries' independence, fluctuations during Brazil's military rule in the 1960s and '70s, to the expansion of its interests under Lula and the first years under Dilma. Taking a broad range of perspectives, they examine: the way in which the rights of those of African descent have become increasingly recognized without having brought racial equality; the strengthening of bilateral and multilateral links with the continent and the growth of South-South cooperation; and Brazil-Africa relations in the South Atlantic context. The final chapter looks at the wider implications of the present political and economic crises for Brazil's future foreign policy in Africa, and the likely impact of new president Jair Bolsonaro elected in late 2018.
Gerhard Seibert is Lecturer at the Universidade da Integração Internacional da Lusofonia Afro-Brasileira (UNILAB), Brazil; Paulo Fagundes Visentini is Historian and Full Professor of International Relations at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).
Ellen Grünkemeier
Breaking the Silence
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Examines the South African HIV/AIDS epidemic through creative texts and the impact of these representations in determining which issues receive attention and how public understanding of the virus is shaped.
South Africa is one of the countries in the world most affected by HIV/AIDS, and yet, until recently, the epidemic was barely visible in South African literature. Much can be gained from approaching the South African epidemic through creative texts such as novels, photographs, films, cartoons and murals because they produce and circulate meanings of HIV/AIDS and its various facets such as its 'origin', 'transmission routes' and 'physical manifestations'. Other aspects explored are the denial of HIV/AIDS, its stigmatisation, discriminatory practices, modes of disclosure, access to anti-retroviral medication, as well as the role of alternative treatment.
Creative texts, which are open to different and possibly contradictory readings, can serve as a starting point to increase the cultural visibility of the virus and to challenge dominant ideas about the epidemic. The cultural constructions of HIV/AIDS should be carefully examined because the meanings are pervasive and have very 'real' consequences: they play a powerful role both in determining which issues receive attention and in shaping public understanding of the virus.
Ellen Grünkemeier is a lecturer and researcher in the English Department at Leibniz University of Hanover, Germany. Her publications include two co-edited volumes on postcolonial literatures and cultures, Listening to Africa. Anglophone African Literatures and Cultures (2012), and Postcolonial Studies across the Disciplines (ASNEL Papers 19, forthcoming).
Terence Ranger
Bulawayo Burning
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A unique and stylish contribution to the social history of African cities and Zimbabwean cultural life.
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This book is designed as a tribute and response to Yvonne Vera's famous novel Butterfly Burning, which is set in the Bulawayo townships in 1946 and dedicated to the author. It is an attempt to explorewhat historical research and reconstruction can add to the literary imagination. Responding as it does to a novel, this history imitates some fictional modes. Two of its chapters are in effect 'scenes', dealing with brief periods of intense activity. Others are in effect biographies of 'characters'. The book draws upon and quotes from a rich body of urban oral memory. In addition to this historical/literary interaction the book is a contribution to the historiography of southern African cities, bringing out the experiential and cultural dimensions, and combining black and white urban social history.
TERENCE RANGER was Emeritus Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, University of Oxford and author of many books including Writing Revolt, Are we not also Men? (1995), Voices from the Rocks (1999) and was co-editor of Violence and Memory (2000).
Zimbabwe: Weaver Press
Elodie Razy
Children on the Move in Africa
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A timely interdisciplinary, comparative and historical perspective on African childhood migration that draws on the experience of children themselves to look at where, why and how they move - within and beyond the continent - andthe impact of African child migration globally.
Children in Africa are heavily involved in migration but we know too little about the circumstances in which they migrate, their motivations and the impact of migration on their welfare, on wider society and in a global context. This book seeks to retrieve the experiences of child migrants, and to examine how child migration differs from adult migration and whether the condition of childhood pushes individuals towards specific migratory trajectories. It also examines the opportunities that child migrants seek elsewhere, the lack of opportunities that make them move elsewhere and to what extent their trajectories and strategies are gendered. Analysing the diversity and complexity of children's experiences of mobility in Ghana, Madagascar, Mali, Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal, Sudan, Togo and Zambia, the authors look at patterns of fosterage, child circulation within Africa and beyond the continent; therole of education, child labour and conceptions of place and "home"; and the place of the child narrator in migrant fiction. Comparing different methodological and theoretical approaches and setting the case studies within the broader context of family migration, transnational families, colonial and postcolonial migration politics, religious encounter and globalization in Africa, this book provides a much-needed examination of this contentious and criticalissue.
Elodie Razy is Associate Professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Liege (FaSS). She is the co-founder and co-editor of the online journal AnthropoChildren: Ethnographic Perspectivesin Children & Childhood. Marie Rodet is a Senior Lecturer in African History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London). She is currently working on her second monograph on slave resistance in Kayes,Mali.
Kenneth King
China's Aid and Soft Power in Africa
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China's increasing role as an education donor in Africa, and the significance of this both economically and politically.
Why does China run one of the world's largest short-term training programmes, with plans to bring 30,000 Africans to China between 2013 and 2015?
Why does it give generous support to 31 Confucius Institutes teaching Mandarin and Chinese culture at many of Africa's top universities from the Cape to Cairo?
Why is China one of the very few countries to increase the number of full scholarships for Africans to study in its universities,a total of 18,000 anticipated between 2013 and 2015?
China claims to have been involved for 60 years in South-South cooperation of mutual benefit to China and Africa. While its dramatic economic and trade impact, particularly on Africa, has caught global attention, little focus has yet been given to its role as an education donor - and especially to the critical role of China's support for training and human resource development for Africans inChina, and within Africa itself. It is vital that we understand what is going on, and why education is so important in China-Africa relations. Here is hard evidence from Ethiopia, South Africa and Kenya of the dramatic growth ofChina's soft power and increasing impact in capacity-building, and of the implications of this for Africa, China and the world.
Obi Nwakanma
Christopher Okigbo 1930-67
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This first biography is now in paperback marking the 50th anniversary of the start of the Nigeria-Biafra War and the anniversary of the death of Christopher Okigbo, the most anthologized modern African poet.
Christopher Okigbo, once described as "Africa's most lyrical poet of the twentieth century" was killed in September 1967, fighting for the independence of Biafra. The Sunday Times described his death as "the single most important tragedy of the Nigerian civil war". The manner in which Okigbo died typified the passionate, tortured and dramatic quality of his life. Widely considered along with Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe as part of modern Nigeria's greatest literary triumvirate, Okigbo's death promoted him to cult status among subsequent generations of African writers. This is the first full biography of the Nigerian poet. It places Okigbo within the turmoil of his generation and illustrates the aspects of his life that gave rise to such an intense poetry. How did his experience in the prestigious, English-type boarding school, Umuahia, where he was known more as a sportsman than a scholar, influence his life and later choices? Why was he sacked from the colonial service, and how did that lead him towards a search for private recovery, and ultimately towards poetry? What led him to take up arms? In other words, how didhis eclectic pursuits as high school teacher, university librarian, publisher, gun-runner and guerrilla fuel his poetic drive? Obi Nwakanma has written not just a biography of the poet but also a biography of the nation, and of an important time in the making of nation, giving powerful insights into the postcolonial transition in Nigeria and West Africa.
OBI NWAKANMA, journalist and poet, is Assistant Professor in the English Department,University of Central Florida, Orlando.
Nigeria: HEBN (PB)
Obi Nwakanma
Christopher Okigbo 1930-67
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The first full-length biography of Christopher Okigbo, the most anthologized modern African poet, giving an extended narrative and rounded account of his life and times.
Christopher Okigbo, once described as 'Africa's most lyrical poet of the twentieth century' was killed in September 1967, fighting for the independence of Biafra. The Sunday Times described his death as 'the single most important tragedy of the Nigerian civil war'. The manner in which Okigbo died typified the passionate, tortured and dramatic quality of his life. Widely considered along with Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe as part of modern Nigeria'sgreatest literary triumvirate, Okigbo's death promoted him to cult status among subsequent generations of African writers. This is the first full biography of the Nigerian poet. It places Okigbo within the turmoil of his generation and illustrates the aspects of his life that gave rise to such an intense poetry. How did his experience in the prestigious, English-type boarding school, Umuahia, where he was known more as a sportsman than a scholar, influence his life and later choices? Why was he sacked from the colonial service, and how did that lead him towards a search for private recovery, and ultimately towards poetry? What led him to take up arms? In other words, how didhis eclectic pursuits as high school teacher, university librarian, publisher, gun-runner and guerrilla fuel his poetic drive?
OBI NWAKANMA, journalist and poet, is Associate Professor of English, University of CentralFlorida
Nigeria: HEBN (PB)
Ros Gray
Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution
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A timely analysis that provides a pre-history to current debates on decolonisation, the politics of the moving image, and artistic engagements with anti-colonial archives.
In one of the first cultural acts to follow independence in 1975, Frelimo's new socialist government of Mozambique set up a National Institute of Cinema (the INC). In a country where many people had little previous experience of cinema, the INC was tasked to "deliver to the people an image of the people". This book explores how this unique culture of revolutionary filmmaking began during the armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism. Following independence, the INC began the task of decolonising the film industry, building on networks of solidarity with other socialist and non-aligned struggles. Mozambique became an epicentre for militant filmmakers from around the world and cinema played an essential role in building the new nation. Crucially, the book examines how filmmaking became a resource for resistance against Apartheid as the Cold War played out across Southern Africa during the late 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on detailed film analysis, production histories and testimonies of key participants, Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution provides a compelling account of this radical experiment in harnessing cinema to social change.
Professor Ebenezer Obadare
Civic Agency in Africa
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Examines the variety of mostly unorganized and informal ways in which Africans exercise agency and resist state power in the 21st century, through citizen action and popular culture, and how the relationship between ruler and ruled is being reframed.
The recent eruption of popular protests across North Africa and the Middle East has reopened academic debate on the meaning and strategies of resistance in the 21st century. This book argues that Western notions of state and civilsociety provide only a limited understanding of how power and resistance operate in the African context, where informality is central to the way both state officials and citizens exercise agency. With the principle of informality as a template, the chapters in this volume collectively examine the various modes - organised and unorganised, formal and informal, urban and rural, embodied and discursive, serious and ludic, online and offline, successful and failing - through which Africans contend with power. Resistance takes place against the backdrop of deep fractures in state sovereignty, the remnants of colonial rule and the constraints of a global, neoliberal economic system.
Ebenezer Obadare is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Kansas; Wendy Willems is Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Media Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Jelmer Vos
Coffee and Colonialism in Angola, 1820-1960
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A new perspective on Angolan colonial and labour history in the 19th and 20th centuries, which explores how the cultivation of coffee, the country's most significant export, shaped one of the oldest commercial frontiers in sub-Saharan Africa.
After the Second World War, Angola became one of the world's largest coffee producers, supplying robusta beans that formed the backbone of popular blends and soluble products consumed by millions worldwide. But each cup of coffee made with Angolan robustas carried with it a legacy of land expropriation and coerced labour. Coffee and Colonialism delves into the systematic exploitation of black workers on white settler plantations in Angola, where labour practices often evoked memories of slavery.
This book traces the origins of Angola's coffee trade to the early nineteenth century, examining how the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade gave rise to a new export-driven economy. As global demand for coffee surged, Portuguese colonizers transformed a thriving peasant economy into a settler-dominated system that, while highly productive, was profoundly exploitative and inefficient. Drawing upon extensive archival research, this work provides a compelling analysis of the intersections between colonialism, labour, property, and global trade, uncovering the political economy underpinning one of Africa's most enduring commodity frontiers.
Heike I. Schmidt
Colonialism and Violence in Zimbabwe
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A highly original treatment of significant topics in African Studies and beyond: violence, colonialism, landscape, memory and religion.
Suffering, the experience of violation brought on by an act of violence or violent circumstances, is omnipresent in today's world - if only indirectly through global media representation. Despite this apparent immediacy, understanding how a person makes sense of his or her suffering tends to be fragmentary and often elusive. This book examines this key question through the lens of rural Zimbabwe and a frontier area on the border with Mozambique. It shows how African women, men, and children fashioned their life-worlds in the face of conflict.
Historian Heike Schmidt challenges the apparently inseparable twin pairing of Africa and suffering. Even in situations of great distress, she argues, individuals and groups may articulate their social desires and political ambitions, and reforge their identities - as long as the experience of violence is not one of sheer terror. She emphasizes the crucial role women, chiefs, and youths played in the renegotiation of a sense of belonging during different periods of time. Based on sustained fieldwork, Colonialism and Violence offers a compelling history of suffering in a smallvalley in Zimbabwe over the course of 150 years.
Heike Schmidt is Lecturer in Modern History, University of Reading.
Robin Law
Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade & Slavery in Atlantic Africa
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Re-envisages what we know about African political economies through its examination of one of the key questions in colonial and African history, that of commercial agriculture and its relationship to slavery.
This book considers commercial agriculture in Africa in relation to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery within Africa itself, from the beginnings of European maritime trade in the fifteenth century to theearly stages of colonial rule in the twentieth century.
From the outset, the export of agricultural produce from Africa represented a potential alternative to the slave trade: although the predominant trend was to transport enslaved Africans to the Americas to cultivate crops, there was recurrent interest in the possibility of establishing plantations in Africa to produce such crops, or to purchase them from independent African producers. Thisidea gained greater currency in the context of the movement for the abolition of the slave trade from the late eighteenth century onwards, when the promotion of commercial agriculture in Africa was seen as a means of suppressing the slave trade. At the same time, the slave trade itself stimulated commercial agriculture in Africa, to supply provisions for slave-ships in the Middle Passage. Commercial agriculture was also linked to slavery within Africa, since slaves were widely employed there in agricultural production. Although Abolitionists hoped that production of export crops in Africa would be based on free labour, in practice it often employed enslaved labour, so that slaveryin Africa persisted into the colonial period.
Robin Law is Emeritus Professor of African History, University of Stirling; Suzanne Schwarz is Professor of History, University of Worcester; Silke Strickrodt is Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham.
