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Cervantes: Essays on Social and Literary Polemics
Regular price $105.00 Save $-105.00A number of longstanding polemical issues related to Cervantes' life and creativity are closely examined here, throwing new light on his work as a whole. The book begins by exploring Cervantes' complex and ambivalent attitude towards academic life, which yielded comic portraits of students and many parodies of the academic tendencies of false praise, pedantry and pompousness. It goes on to consider the impact of the converso, or New Christian, on Spanish collective thinking, and Cervantes and Lope de Vega in particular; Old Christian versus New Christian rhetoric frequently determines the expression of such characters as Sancho Panza. An analysis of Cervantes' controversialinterpolation of stories in the first part of Don Quijote follows, and Professor Finello concludes by looking at the enigmatic discourse and dialogue of Don Quijote himself, elegant and harmonious despite the knight's apparent madness, arguing that since Quijote believes he is justified in imposing his chivalric values upon those who come into contact with him, he adjusts the situations in which he finds himself to the appropriate rhetoric of literary tradition.
DOMINICK FINELLO is Professor of Spanish at Rider University.
Kamba Proverbs from Eastern Kenya
Regular price $190.00 Save $-190.00Not simply relics of the past, proverbs are an oral tradition containing historical and anthropological knowledge missing from conventional sources, and as micro-histories, provide a valuable source for the reconstruction of the manners, characteristics, and worldviews of societies. While only a few hundred Kamba proverbs have ever appeared in print, thousands have circulated over time, from the monsoon exchange era of the Roman Empire through the advent of Islam, European imperialism and colonialism to independence. Today, a resurgence of interest in the form has been generated via social media, songs and vernacular radio programmes.
This book provides the first, comprehensive collection of Kamba proverbs from Eastern Kenya in their original Kĩkamba language and in translation. Analysing 2,000 proverbs drawn from oral interviews, archival collections, museum artefacts and published sources, the author traces the origins of each and explores their meaning, interpretation and use. Covering a diverse range of subjects that ranges from plants, animals, birds and insects, to weather, land, the roles of men and women, cosmology, ritual and belief, healing, trade, politics and peacemaking, the book offers new insights into Kenya's rural world and the expansion of Kamba society, East African history, language and culture of vital significance for the social sciences. A valuable comparative work for societal change elsewhere in Africa and beyond, the book also suggests an innovative, alternative approach to the study of the African past.
Carpentier's Baroque Fiction
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00This study focuses on one of the first novelists to introduce a version of magical realism and the neo-baroque into Latin American fiction. Original research colours eyewitness accounts of Alejo Carpentier's travels through Spainbefore and during the Spanish Civil War and the inspiration that he drew from the Baroque architecture he encountered there. The origins of Carpentier's uniquely 'baroque' style are found in his endeavour to create a period ambience in his historical fictions through descriptions of visual arts and architectural settings, and parodies of the literary style of Spanish Golden Age writers. 'Medusa's gaze' is used as a metaphor for the petrifying power of theBaroque as a weapon of European dominance. By wielding the same weapon in an act of postcolonial defiance, Carpentier enabled a reassertion of Latin American culture, and laid the foundations for the 1960s 'Boom' in the Latin American novel.
STEVE WAKEFIELD is Visiting Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Australia
Competing Catholicisms
Regular price $95.00 Save $-95.00At a time when most African countries were moving towards independence, the Vatican was speeding up the Church's indigenization agenda in an effort to secure its survival in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, at the same time, African nationalism was on the rise and, following the collapse of its colonial empire, France was attempting to reassert its influence in Africa. This book shows how the Vatican, French Jesuits, the rising Cameroonian indigenous clergy and leadership, and the first Cameroonian Jesuits competed for the Catholic evangelization of French Africa during the mid-20th century. In the mission field, they also competed with different Protestant groups, with whom they shared acommon aim: to convert African traditional religionists and different groups of African Muslims to Christ, while containing the spread of anti-religious ideologies such as Communism.
Tracing the rapid expansion of Christianity in Central and Western French Africa during the second half of the twentieth century, the author shows in this book how this competition for faith helped both build the church in French West Africa and Africanize the church alongside missionary Christianity in postcolonial Africa. He also explores the African reaction to this diverse and competing global agenda of Christianization, especially after Chad and Cameroon came together as part of a single Jesuit jurisdiction in 1973, and the way in which, despite differing interpretations of Catholicity which generated internal conflicts, Western Jesuits focus on popular masses and the poor, was able to contain the spread of Islam, counter the Chad's persecution of Christians during the Cultural Revolution (1973-1975) and secure the survival of Christianity as a missionary movement in which Western missionaries worked alongside a rising African clergy and leadership.
JEAN LUC ENYEGUE, SJ is the Director of the Jesuit Historical Institute in Africa, Nairobi. He also lectures on church history at Hekima University College, Catholic University of Eastern Africa.
Playing the King: Lope de Vega and the Limits of Conformity
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00This book offers a radical re-evaluation of Lope's theatre, which will affect the way in which the comedia in general is read. It spans Lope's literary career, discussing (pseudo-)historical, tragic and peasant plays in order to show Lope's texts as complex negotiations between author and public, between conservatism and subversion, between representations of the ideal of kingship and its political reality, in a period of social and political change. Drawing on contemporary Spanish political philosophy, McKendrick shows that far from glorifying monarchy and advocating absolutism (the orthodox view in the Hispanic world), Lope's political plays constitute an informed critiqueof kingship; she also challenges the received wisdom that the comedia was an instrument of stage and that its playwrights were the conscious propagandists of an aristocratic elite. With the help of insights and models provided by the speech act theory, the stratagems and techniques utilised by Lope to follow the path of prudence between the acceptable and the unacceptable in political commentary in the commercial theatre are scrutinised, illustrating how richly nuanced texts produce not an ideologically monolithic and complacent drama but one which is at once politically anxious and probing.
MELVEENA MCKENDRICK is Professor of Spanish Literature, Culture and Societyat the University of Cambridge.
Scoring Race
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00What are the cultural implications of Louis Armstrong's 1960 visit to Africa? Why are so many postcolonial novels in French fascinated with jazz? In defining jazz as "black music", France's "jazzophilia" has had wide-reaching effects on contemporary perceptions of the artistic and political efficacy of black writers, musicians, and their aesthetic productions. Scoring Race explores how jazz masters Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane became touchstones for claims to African authorship and aesthetic subjectivity across the long twentieth century.
The book focuses on how this naturalization of black musicality occurred and its impact on Francophone African writers and filmmakers for whom the idea of their own essential musicality represented an epistemological obstacle. Despite this obstacle, because of jazz's profound importance to diaspora aesthetics, as well as its crucial role in the French imaginary, many African writers have chosen to make it a structuring principle of their literary projects.
In Scoring Race Pim Higginson draws on race theory, aesthetics, cultural studies,musicology, and postcolonial studies to examine the convergence of aesthetics and race in Western thought and to explore its impact on Francophone African literature. How and why, Pim Higginson asks, did these writers and filmmakers approach jazz and its participation in and formalization of the "racial score"? To what extent did they reproduce the terms of their own systematic expulsion into music and to what extent, in their impossible demand for writing(or film-making), did they arrive at tactical means of working through, around, or beyond the strictures of their assumed musicality?
Pim Higginson is Professor of Global French Studies at the University of New Mexico,Albuquerque.
Una Poética de la Oscuridad
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00Luis de Góngora completed the first version of his Soledad primera in the spring of 1613. Immediately his poem became the centre of a vigorous literary polemic. The writings of his detractors and of his supporters marked the beginning of a period of intense literary criticism in Spanish letters. The corpus of these writings has yet to be properly listed, edited and analysed in its totality.
Approaching the problem of the obscurity of Góngora's writings by way of the reception of the Soledades in the seventeenth century, the author has been able to determine why his contemporaries found difficulty with the poems, and to study the significance of literaryobscurity, its sources, causes and consequences and the new emphasis lent to it by Góngora. On the basis of this new interpretation the critic reconsiders and reviews various long-held assumptions in Gongorine criticism.
The work includes a preface by Robert Jammes, of the Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail.
JOAQUIN ROSES LOZANO lectures in Spanish at the University of Córdoba.
Los aposentos del Corral de la Cruz: 1581-1823
Regular price $115.00 Save $-115.00The Corral de la Cruz (1579-1736) is the less well known of Madrid's Golden Age playhouses. This latest volume in Tamesis's Fuentes series is a detailed study of one of its most distinctive features: the boxes, or aposentos, fromwhich the privileged and powerful, including Philip IV, witnessed the premieres of so many plays by Lope de Vega, Calderón and others. These boxes were rooms overlooking the yard, but were situated in private houses outside the walls of the playhouse, with independent access. Their structure and history are traced here through a substantial corpus of new documents containing information on the location, structure, dimensions, owners, lessees and users of the boxes and the houses, as well as the vexed question of payment for viewing rights. This provides an indispensable basis for the reconstruction of the first permanent theatre in the Spanish capital, in both its architectural andsocioeconomic aspects.
CHARLES DAVIS is a Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow at the University of Valencia and Honorary Research Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London.
El Corral de la Cruz (1579-1736) es elmenos conocido de los dos corrales de comedias madrileños. Este último tomo de las Fuentes de Tamesis es un estudio pormenorizado de uno de sus elementos más característicos: los aposentos, o palcos, desde donde los espectadoresmás privilegiados, entre ellos el propio Felipe IV, presenciaban los estrenos de tantas obras de Lope de Vega, Calderón y otros. Eran habitaciones que daban al patio, pero estaban situadas en casas particulares fuera de las medianerías del teatro, con entradas independientes. Se traza aquí su historia y estructura a través de un nutrido corpus documental que ofrece nuevos datos sobre la ubicación, estructura, medidas, propietarios, inquilinos y usuarios delos aposentos y las casas.
African Theatre 15: China, India & the Eastern World
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.002016 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.
Studies in Portuguese Literature and History in honour of Luis de Sousa Rebelo
Regular price $105.00 Save $-105.00
Protestant Missionaries & Humanitarianism in the DRC
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00In the wake of the civil wars in Congo from 1960 to 1973, international and internal struggles for power led to famines, the collapse of public health and a huge population of refugees. This book explores the role played by missionaries from the US, Canada and the UK who organized aid, and shows how they had to redefine their roles in independent Africa after the end of colonialism. Partnering US government officials to overcome the humanitarian crisis as the politics of aid threatened to sink their efforts, Protestant aid programs also worked with US-backed Congolese military efforts to crush leftist rebels and joined with Angolan rebels to help hundreds of thousands of Angolan refugees fleeing Portuguese colonialism. After Mobutu Sese Seko seized power in 1965, they found themselves adjusting with difficulty to the rise of Congolese religious leaders who demanded aid workers and donor agencies accept African control over development projects.
In this examination of the changing history of humanitarianism in Central Africa, the author shows how aid workers, who believed themselves to be politically neutral humanitarians, had to question their privileged role, and negotiate new ways of collaboration. Offering material aid and support, they hoped to heal the wounds of colonial repression and the violence of independence - abandoned hospitals, starving refugees, economic recession - yet also sought to ensure a Christian Congo would emerge allied to Western countries. The author explores the role of Protestant aid workers in the ethnic violence of South Kasai province; shows how Protestant aid became a tool in US-back counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist rebels; examines the interplay of Congolese and Western medicine in the work of Protestant medical volunteers; and discusses conflict in the aims of the missionaries and Africans over the control of aid funds and aid initiatives.
The Cancionero de la Sablonara
Regular price $410.00 Save $-410.00This long-awaited critical edition of the Cancionero de la Sablonara offers a complete transcription of both the poetry and the music, whilst introductory chapters review the scholarship and research to date on the manuscript.
The notes and introduction to this volume are in English.
Professor JUDITH ETZION is chair of the Musicology Department, Tel Aviv University.
Reading for the Stage: Calderón and his Contemporaries
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00The focus of this book falls less on performance and more on how the playtext may be approached from a theatrical viewpoint. In the theatre, the playtext, addressed traditionally to the theatre professional rather than the averagereader, is usually read by the company at an initial stage in the production of a play. The process by which this type of reading "opens" the text differs from a literary reading of the text. The result of such an analysis givesnew insights into the theatrical text and the playwright's coded directions as to how to translate its content from page to stage.
The theoretical premises explored here may be applied as much to a reading of the plays of Calderón's European near-contemporaries as to Calderón and his contemporaries at the birth of the commercial theatre in seventeenth-century Spain: indeed, the book makes frequent reference to Shakespearean playtexts and their bibliography.
ISAAC BENABU is a professor of theatre studies at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
War and the Politics of Identity in Ethiopia
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00Images of war, narratives of suffering and notions of ethnicity are intrinsically linked to Western perceptions of Africa. Filtered through a mostly international media the information of African wars is confined to narrow categories of explanation emerging from and adapted to a Western history and political culture. This book aims at reversing this process; to look at war and suffering from the point of view of those who fight it and suffer through it. Indoing so it reveals that the simplistic models explaining contemporary wars in Africa which are reproduced in a Western discourse are basically false.
This book examines the understanding of war and the impact of warfare onthe formation and conceptualisation of identities in Ethiopia. Building on historical trajectories of enemy images, the recent Eritean-Ethiopian war [1998-2000] is used as an empirical backdrop to explore war's formative impact, by analysing politics of identity and shifting perceptions of enemies and allies.
KJETIL TRONVOLL is Professor in Human Rights, Peace and Conflict Studies at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo. Hisother publications include Brothers at War: Making Sense of the Eritrean-Ethiopian War (co-author; James Currey/Ohio University Press, 2000) and The Ethiopian Red Terror Trials: Transitional Justice Challenged (co-editor; James Currey 2009) .
White Ink
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00An analysis of the use made of five structuring devices, or motifs - the Bildungsroman, the patriarchal prison, the fairy tale, sexual politics and gender trouble -in a selection of representative women's novels from Spain and Latin America written between 1936 and the present.
STEPHEN M. HART is Reader in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at University College London.
The Crisis of Democratization in the Greater Horn of Africa
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00In the early 1990s, a wave of democratization swept through many African countries, but its prevailing election-centred liberal approach failed to result in sustainable democracies. Why should this be and what can be done about it? This multi-disciplinary work on the Greater Horn investigates the impact on the efforts to bring greater democratization of the characteristically complex socio-economic state structures of the countries of the Greater Horn of Africa and, importantly, suggests an alternative, more effective, approach.
Detailed studies of Ethiopia, Somaliland, Djibouti, Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda reveal the difficulties posed by institutional structures that are often weak and lack accountability; fragmented economies - which range from modern capitalist to subsistence farming and pastoral systems; and governance marked by differing conceptions of property rights and conflict adjudication practices and varied resource allocation systems. Chronic violent ethnic-based civil wars and social conflicts and deep-rooted ethnic divisions only exacerbate the states' ability to foster democratic governance, or even to manage diversity properly. The contributors examine why the countries of the Horn have been unable to overcome these obstacles to democratization and explore how and why an alternative approach is more likely tobe compatible with the socioeconomic realities and cultural values in transitional societies.
Kidane Mengisteab is Professor of African Studies and Political Science at Pennsylvania State University. He is co-editor ofRegional Integration, Identity and Citizenship in the Greater Horn of Africa (James Currey, 2012) and, most recently, Traditional Institutions in Contemporary African Governance (2017).
Poetry and Truth in the Spanish Works of Fray Luis de León
Regular price $105.00 Save $-105.00Luis de León, poet and Biblical exegete, lived from 1527 to 1591. The study attempts to explain the impression received from his prose and verse works that he intended them to conform to what he believed to exist in Nature, society, and the spiritual world, but that he gave equal attention to their aesthetic form, i.e. the figures and fictions they contain. The following questions are posed: does Fray Luis make any distinction between truth and fiction inthe content of his works, or between poetic language and logical language in their form? If so, does he use any consistent criteria for these distinctions?
They Called You Dambudzo
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00How shall I tell our story? I hear your voice ringing in mine. I struggle to disentangle a dense tapestry of memories. One thread will be caught up in another. Early images will embrace later ones. My gaze will often be filtered through your eyes, your poems. In the end I will not always be able to tell the original from the reflection. Just as you wrote, Time's fingers on the piano / play emotion into motion / the dancers in the looking glass never recognise us as their originals.
This book is a memoir with a 'double heartbeat'. At its centre is the author's relationship with the late Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera, whose award-winning book The House of Hunger marked him as a powerful, disruptive, perhaps prophetic voice in African literature. Flora Veit-Wild is internationally recognised for her significant contribution to preserving Marechera's legacy. What is less known about Marechera and Veit-Wild is that they had an intense, personal and sexual relationship. This memoir explores this: the couple's first encounter in 1983, amidst the euphoria of the newly independent Zimbabwe; the tumultuous months when the homeless writer moved in with his lover and her family; the bouts of creativity once he had his own flat followed by feelings of abandonment; the increasing despair about a love affair that could not stand up against reality; and the illness of the writer and his death of HIV related pneumonia in August 1987. What follows are the struggles Flora went through once Dambudzo had died. On the one hand she became the custodian of his life and work, on the other she had to live with her own HIV infection and the ensuing threats to her health.
Jacana: Southern Africa
Contesting Catholics
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Assassinated by Idi Amin and a democratic ally of J.F. Kennedy during the Cold War, Benedicto Kiwanuka was Uganda's most controversial and disruptive politician, and his legacy is still divisive. On the eve of independence, he led the Democratic Party (DP), a national movement of predominantly Catholic activists, to end political inequalities and religious discrimination. Along the way, he became Uganda's first prime minister and first Ugandan chief justice. Earle and Carney show how Kiwanuka and Catholic activists struggled to create an inclusive vision of the state, a vision that resulted in relentless intimidation and extra-judicial killings. Focusing closely on the competing Catholic projects that circulated throughout Uganda, this book offers new ways of thinking about the history of democratic thought, while pushing the study of Catholicism in Africa outside of the church and beyond the gaze of missionaries. Drawing on never before seen sources from Kiwanuka's personal papers, the authors upend many of the assumptions that have framed Uganda's political and religious history for over sixty years, as well as repositioning Uganda's politics within the global arena.
Fountain: Uganda
Tirant lo Blanc: New Approaches
Regular price $105.00 Save $-105.00In Don Quixote, Cervantes describes Tirant lo Blanc as `the best book in the world'. A remarkable work of fiction, probably the finest to appear anywhere in Europe before Rabelais, it has recently become increasinglyfamiliar to English readers. However, it is a problematic book to categorise: on the one hand, it is an exciting story of Tirant's military exploits and his love for the Princess Carmesina; on the other, it is an encyclopedic work treating many aspects of late fifteenth-century society in vivid detail.
The essays collected in this volume offer a variety of fresh interpretations. They cover a vast amount of material, from questions of authorship toclose readings of particular episodes, bringing a varietyof new interpretations to bear.
ARTHUR TERRY is Emeritus Professor of Literature at the University of Essex.
Contributors: RAFAEL BELTRAN, JOSEP GUIA, THOMASR. HART, ALBERT G. HAUF, JEREMY LAWRANCE, MONTSERRAT PIERA, JOSEP PUJOL, JESUS D. RODRIGUEZ VELASCO, MARIA JESUS RUBIERA Y MATA, ARTHUR TERRY, CURT WITTLIN
God's Obvious Design
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00
African Theatre 18
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00This 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.
Calderón: Estructura y Ejemplaridad
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00Dr Pring-Mill is one of the most eminent Calderón scholars, and this volume demonstrates the development of his critical thinking over a period of some forty years. The essays, collected in one volume for the first time, and fullyrevised and updated, include his classic exposition of the critical method for which he coined the term `análisis temático-estructural', and his comparison of Calderón's approach to the different media of auto and comedia. As a whole, the volume makes a major contribution to the study of Spain's greatest dramatist on the eve of his fourth centenary.
Spanish language.
Dr R.D.F. PRING-MILL is an Emeritus Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford, and the author of numerous studies on Hispanic literature, ranging from Ramón Lull to Cardenal and Neruda.
Cyril Ramaphosa
Regular price $45.00 Save $-45.00President Cyril Ramaphosa is South Africa's fifth post-apartheid president. He first came to prominence in the 1980s as the founder of the National Union of Mineworkers. When Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990, Ramaphosa was at the head of the reception committee that greeted him. Chosen as secretary general of the African National Congress in 1991, Ramaphosa led the ANC's team in negotiating the country's post-apartheid constitution.Thwarted in his ambition to succeed Mandela, he exchanged political leadership for commerce, ultimately becoming one of the country's wealthiest businessmen, a breeder of exotic cattle, and a philanthropist.
This fully revised and extended edition charts Ramaphosa's early life and education, and his career in trade unionism - including the 1987 21-day miners' strike when he committed the union to the wider liberation struggle - politics, and constitution-building. Extensive new chapters explore his contribution to the National Planning Commission, the effects of the Marikana massacre on his political prospects, and the real story behind his rise to the deputy presidency of the country in 2014. They set out the constraints Ramaphosa faced as Jacob Zuma's deputy, and explain how he ultimately triumphed in the election of the ANC's new president in 2017. The book concludes with an analysis of the challenges Ramaphosa faces as the country's fifth post-apartheid president.
Based on numerous personal conversations with Ramaphosa over the past decade, and on rich interviews with many of the subject's friends and contemporaries,this new biography offers a frank appraisal of one of South Africa's most enigmatic political figures.
ANTHONY BUTLER is Professor of Political Studies at the University of Cape Town. He has been a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and a past Director of the Policy and Administration programme at Birkbeck College, University of London, and Chair in Political Studies at the University of the Witswatersrand.
Exclusive sales rightsin the UK, Europe and North America, non-exclusive elsewhere (not for sale in South Africa - Jacana)
Women, Land and Justice in Tanzania
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00Recent decades have seen a wave of land law reforms across Africa, in the context of a "land rush" and land-grabbing. But how has this been enacted on the ground and, in particular, how have women experienced this? This book seeksto re-orientate current debates on women's land rights towards a focus on the law in action. Drawing on the author's ethnographic research in the Arusha region of Tanzania, it explores how the country's land law reforms have impacted on women's legal claims to land. Centring on cases involving women litigants, the book considers the extent to which women are realising their interests in land through land courts and follows the progression of women's claims to land - from their social origins through processes of dispute resolution to judgment.
Dancer's work explores three central issues. First, it considers the nature of women's claims to land in Tanzanian family contexts,the value of land in an era of land reform and the 'land rush' across Africa, and the extent to which the social issues raised are addressed by Tanzania's current laws and legal system. Secondly, it examines how agency and power relations between social and legal actors engaged in legal processes affect women's access to justice and the progression of claims. Thirdly, it explores Tanzanian concepts of justice and rights and how women's claims have been judged by land courts in practice.
Helen Dancer is a lecturer in Law at the University of Brighton. She practised as a barrister in England specialising in family legal aid cases prior to training as a legal anthropologist. She is also a consultant for Future Agricultures at IDS, University of Sussex. Her areas of research interest include law and development, gender and land, and human rights and legal pluralism.
Namib
Regular price $190.00 Save $-190.00The first full-length examination of the archaeology and history of the Namib Desert.
This is a story of human survival over the last one million years in the Namib Desert - one of the most hostile environments on Earth. Namib reveals the resilience and ingenuity of desert communities and provides a vivid picture of our species' response to climate change, and ancient strategies to counter ever-present risk. Dusty fragments of stone, pottery and bone tell a history of perpetual transition, of shifting and temporary states of balance. Namib digs beneath the usual evidence of archaeology to uncover a world of arcane rituals, of travelling rain-makers, of intricate social networks which maintained vital systems of negotiated access to scarce resources. Ranging from the earliest evidence of human occupation, through colonial rule and genocide, to the invasion of the desert by South African troops during the First World War, this is the first comprehensive archaeology of the Namib. Among its important contributions are the reclaiming of the indigenous perspective during the brutal colonial occupation, and establishing new material links between the imperialist project in German South West Africa during 1885-1915 and the Third Reich, and between Nazi ideology and Apartheid.
Southern Africa: University of Namibia Press/Jacana
Lope de Vega's `Comedias de tema religioso': Re-creations and Re-presentations
Regular price $105.00 Save $-105.00Lope de Vega's religious plays are a distinctive part of his output, but little scholarly work is available on them. This study focuses on five plays, La hermosa Ester, the Isidro plays, Lo fingido verdadero and La buena guarda. Within the context of the seventeenth-century stage, Canning examines Lope's manipulation of religious material, and his treatment of socio-literary themes - love, the role of women - and the way in which theyare employed to generate audience reception. She considers the relationship between religious drama and metatheatre, focusing on Lope's techniques for highlighting the illusory nature of life and the relationship between lo verdadero and lo divino, concepts which lie at the heart of the theocentric world view of seventeenth-century Spain. The conflicting imperatives of human and divine love and the issue of identity are features of all of theplays. And she shows that the interplay between illusion and reality and the relationship between playwright and audience are crucial to Lope's dramatic output.
ELAINE CANNING lectures in Spanish at the University of Wales, Bangor.
Women & Peacebuilding in Africa
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00Even in the best of circumstances, women are all too often excluded from formal peacemaking and peacebuilding processes and relegated to the sidelines as observers or limited to informal peacebuilding strategies. Yet there is enormous potential in these strategies as women often strive to build bridges across political, ethnic, religious, clan and other differences through alliances arising from common concerns around violence, land, access to resources, and protection of their families and communities, and address sources of conflict at both national and local levels.
Drawing on cutting-edge research by scholars and women's rights activists in South Sudan, Sudan, Algeria, northern Nigeria, and Somalia, this book focuses on the consequences of the continuing exclusions of women from peace talks and from post-conflict governance structures. The case studies reveal how peacebuilding is gendered and why this matters in developing meaningful and sustainable approaches to peacebuilding. Examining how women activists have made a difference through informal peacebuilding activities, the contributors explore women's efforts to reshapethe post-conflict context by struggling for legislative and constitutional reforms and by advocating for political representation and political inclusion more generally within peacebuilding processes. They also look at how women have pushed back against the conservative Islamist forces that today dominate much armed conflict in Africa. Suggesting that women's formal participation in peace negotiations is vital in bringing about an end to conflict and preventing its resumption, as well as the one of the most effective strategies, this book will be essential reading for scholars and NGOs involved in development, conflict resolution and peacebuilding.
The book is the product of a research project on Women and Peacebuilding in Africa, funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Norwegian Foreign Ministry.
Labour & Christianity in the Mission
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00The important role missions played as places of work has been underexplored, yet missionaries were some of the earliest Europeans who tried to control African labour. African mission workers' roles were not just religious and educational, as they were actively involved, not always voluntarily, in building and domestic work. Focusing on the Anglican Universities' Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) in Tanganyika and Zanzibar in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Michelle Liebst shows how missionaries both supported and undermined the livelihood trajectories of Africans. Revealing the changing nature of relations over time between missionaries - who referred to themselves as "workers" - and the African mission workers, including teachers and priests - whom missionaries referred to as "helpers" - reflected broader political transformations, and this innovative study of missions' role in society adds a critical dimension to our understanding of their function and socio-economic impact and the history of Christianity in Africa.
Pokot Pastoralism
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00In East Africa and beyond, pastoral groups find themselves and their livelihoods under increasing threat when dealing with rapid environmental change. On the one hand, they contemplate major upheaval as a result of landscape and climate change on a scale never seen before. At the same time, these often-marginalised groups find themselves subsumed by the wider interests of national political economies prioritising new investment in land as well as encouraging tourism. This book investigates one such group - the nomadic pastoralists in East Pokot in north-west Kenya - and traces their social and ecological transformation over the past two hundred years to show how modern challenges are linked to the past history and also shape the perceptions of pastoral futures.
In East Pokot the grass bush savannah upon which the pastoral lifestyle depends has strongly declined over a long period of time, with encroachment of acacia. Though traditionally cattle-rearing, its people have been forced to diversify into raising other browsing animals as well as cattle husbandry. The development efforts of the Kenyan government to use natural resources have also threatened their environment and their way of life. Bringing a long view to the history of human-environmental relations, the author reveals a more complex picture of change that, contrary to earlier assumptions, is not due exclusively to the pastoralists' pasture management, but also to the extinction of wildlife populations in the region, which were hunted heavily in colonial times. Attempts to move beyond Pokot territory, to the regions west of Lake Baringo and to the hard-fought Laikipia Plateau, have often been compromised by violent conflicts. While a younger generation looks to develop new sources of income through the job opportunities created by geothermal energy production, and diversify into other agricultural activities, this has also brought a dynamic social transformation: increasing production and sale of alcohol, decreasingly nomadic lifestyle, growing differences between the older and younger generations, and so on. Contributing to debates on future rural Africa, ecological history and environmental change, the book will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, historians and development scholars.
Published in association with the Collaborative Research Centre FUTURE RURAL AFRICA, funded by the German Research Council (DFG).
Political Legitimacy in Postcolonial Mali
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00The 2012 coup d'état in Mali, and the political destabilization that followed, brought an abrupt end to the country's success story as a "donor darling" and as a model of successful democratization. In spite of signing a peace treaty, Muslim militants continue to launch attacks in the country's northern and central territories and to challenge Mali's government and state institutions. The challenge is compounded by the massive opposition mobilized by protagonists of Salafi- inspired readings of Islam in the capital Bamako. Why should this be, and how can it be that these actors, particularly those employing the language of Islam, have emerged as a serious challenge to the political order and government in Mali, and garner support among the country's urban and rural populations?
Against the background dynamics of the political turmoil that has shaken Mali in recent years and the uncertainties surrounding the present government, this book looks to the nature and extent of legitimacy of Mali's postcolonial state and also explores more general questions regarding the nature of political legitimacy. Schulz examines the attitudes, judgments and practices by which inhabitants of a rural area in south-western Mali attribute or disclaim the legitimacy of the state political order and of individual representatives. Countering the tendency of some scholars to adopt a belief-centered approach or to use a broad approach to legitimacy, she suggests a more comprehensive and systematic approach to legitimation that takes into account the subjective attitudes of actors as well as their material circumstances and the state of institutional governance.
The Politics of Work in a Post-Conflict State
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00High youth unemployment is seen as a major issue across Africa and globally, not solely as a source of concern for economic development, but as a threat to social stability and a challenge to fragile peace. In countries emerging from civil war in particular, it is identified as a key indicator for likelihood of relapse. But what do we really know about how lack of work shapes political identities and motivates youth violence? Drawing on rich empirical dataabout young people on the margins of the informal economy in Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, in the wake of its civil war (1991-2002), this book moves beyond reductive portrayals of unemployed youth as "ticking bombs" to show how labour market experiences influence them towards political mobilisation. The author argues that violence is not inherent to unemployment, but that the impact of joblessness on political activism is mediated by social factors and the specific nature of the post-war political economy. For Freetown's youth, labour market exclusion is seen to have implications for social status, identities and social relations, ultimately keeping them in exploitative patterns of dependence. This in turn shapes their political subjectivities and claims on the state, and structures the opportunities and constraints to their collective action.
Luisa Enria is a Lecturer in International Development at the University of Bath, where she also holds an ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellowship for the project "States of Emergency: Citizenship in Times of Crisis in Sierra Leone".
The Genocide against the Tutsi, and the Rwandan Churches
Regular price $170.00 Save $-170.00Why did some sectors of the Rwandan churches adopt an ambiguous attitude towards the genocide against the Tutsi which claimed the lives of around 800,000 people in three months between April and July 1994? What prevented the churches' acceptance that they may have had some responsibility? And how should we account for the efforts made by other sectors of the churches to remember and commemorate the genocide and rebuild pastoral programmes? Drawing on interviews with genocide survivors, Rwandans in exile, missionaries and government officials, as well as Church archives and other sources, this book is the first academic study on Christianity and the genocide against the Tutsi to explore these contentious questions in depth, and reveals more internal diversity within the Christian churches than is often assumed. While some Christians, Protestant as well as Catholic, took risks to shelter Tutsi people, others uncritically embraced the interim government's view that the Tutsi were enemies of the people and some, even priests and pastors, assisted the killers. The church leaders only condemned the war: they never actually denounced the genocide against the Tutsi. Focusing on the period of the genocide in 1994 and the subsequent years (up to 2000), Denis examines in detail the responses of two churches, the Catholic Church, the biggest and the most complex, and the Presbyterian Church in Rwanda, which made an unconditional confession of guilt in December 1996. A case study is devoted to the Catholic parish La Crête Congo-Nil in western Rwanda, led at the time by the French priest Gabriel Maindron, a man whom genocide survivors accuse of having failed publicly to oppose the genocide and of having close links with the authorities and some of the perpetrators. By 1997, the defensive attitude adopted by many Catholics had started to change. The Extraordinary Synod on Ethnocentricity in 1999-2000 was a milestone. Yet, especially in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, tension and suspicion persist.
Fountain: Rwanda, Uganda
Imperialism and Development
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00As colonial development took off after the Second World War, in the context of national food shortages, Britain's Labour Government initiated the Groundnut Scheme, an extraordinarily ambitious project to convert 3 million acres of bush in Tanganyika into the largest mechanized groundnut farm in the world. It was to prove the largest, most expensive and most disastrous development scheme ever undertaken by the British Government. Never previously analysed in depth, the author draws on a wide range of sources to discuss the political dynamics that drove the Groundnut Scheme forward, despite the gravest doubts of agriculturalists and economists, why it went wrong, and what its impact has been since on the practice of economic development.
Initially employing the United Africa Company as agent, the government set up an Overseas Food Corporation to manage the Groundnut Scheme as an example of socialist development in Africa. Army surplus kit and demobbed soldiers poured into the country and were sent up the railway line to Kongwa to beat the bush. By the time the effort was abandoned in 1950, costs had risen to a colossal 36 million - equivalent to over 1 billion today - and yet almost no groundnuts had been exported. The prototype of many large-scale, government-run, high-cost development projects that failed to deliver, the Groundnut Scheme was perhaps the first major failure of agricultural development in Africa, and its legacy in development practice still with us today.
Gender, Home & Identity
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00Analyses the experiences of exile and return of Nuer women and men of all ages and how they negotiate and reshape gender identities and relations in the context of prolonged war and violence.
Joint Winner of the Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology 2014
How and where did returning Nuer refugees make their 'homes' in southern Sudan? How were gender relations and identity redefined as a result of war, displacement and return to post-war communities? And how were those displaced able to recreate a sense of home, community and nation?
During the civil wars in southern Sudan (1983-2005) many of the displaced Sudanese, including many Nuer, were in refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. In the aftermath of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, they repatriated to southern Sudan. Faced with finding long-lost relatives and local expectations of 'proper behaviour', they often felt displaced again.
This book follows the lives of a group of Nuer in the Greater Upper Nile region. The narratives of those displaced and those who stayed behind reveal the complexity of social change, in particular, the crucial yet relatively unconsidered transformation of gender and generational relations, and how this has impacted on state formation in what is now South Sudan.
Katarzyna Grabska is a research fellow with the Department of Anthropology and Sociology of Development at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. She is co-editor (with Lyla Mehta), of Forced Displacement: Why Rights Matter? (Palgrave: 2008)
Ethiopian Warriorhood
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Today best known for their role in defending Ethiopia from Italian invasion 1935-41, chewa warriors protected Ethiopia for centuries. Yet, depicted by some 19th-century Western observers as little more than "a horde" of warmongers, and later suppressed by Ethiopian monarchs who sought to create a centralized modern state, their contribution has been neglected. Drawing on oral and written sources, as well as the zeraf poetry through which theyexpressed themselves, this book explores for the first time in depth the history, practices and principles of warriorhood of the chewa, and their wider influence on society and state. Often self-trained individuals who began by defending their communities, by the end of the 19th century there were chewa warrior groups from almost all linguistic groups who fought together to resist foreign invaders. Some chewa enrolled in the service of the Ethiopian "kings of kings", who organized them as named corps that supplemented the formal defence of the state. Today, chewa political identity, which transcended social, familial, political and other groupings, remains deeply rooted in Ethiopian society.
Tsehai Berhane-Selassie taught Social Anthropology, Gender and Development Studies in universities in Ethiopia, the UK, the USA and Ireland. She is a former member of The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Her publications include editing Gender Issues in Ethiopia.
Marikana
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00In August 2012 the South African police - at the encouragement of mining capital, and with the support of the political state - intervened to end a week-long strike at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana, in South Africa's NorthWest Province. On the afternoon of Thursday, 16 August, the police shot and killed 34 men. Hundreds more were injured, some shot as they fled. None posed a threat to any police officer. Recognised by many as an event of international significance in stories of global politics and labour relations, the perspectives of the miners has however been almost missing from published accounts. This book, for the first time, brings into focus the mens' lives - and deaths - telling the stories of those who embarked on the strike, those who were killed, and of the family members who have survived to fight for the memories of their loved ones. It places the strike in the context of South Africa's long history of racial and economic exclusion, explaining how the miners came to be in Marikana, how their lives were ordinarily lived, and the substance of their complaints. It shows how the strike developed from an initial gathering into a mass movement of more than 3,000 workers. It discusses the violence of the strike and explores the political context of the state's response, and the eagerness of the police to collaborate in suppressing the strike. Recounting the events of the massacre in unprecedented detail, the book sets out how each miner died and everything we know about the police operation. Finally, Brown traces the aftermath: the attempts of the families of the deceased to identify and bury their dead, and then the state's attempts to spin a narrative that placed all blame on the miners; the subsequent Commission of Inquiry - and its failure to resolve any real issues; and the solidarity politics that have emerged since.
Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): Jacana.
Keorapetse Kgositsile & the Black Arts Movement
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00The cultural configurations of the Black Atlantic cannot be fully understood without recognising the significant presence of writers and artists from the African continent itself. Among the most influential was South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile, or 'Bra Willie', as he was affectionately known. Yet, until now, there has been no full-length study of his work.
Uhuru Phalafala's wide-ranging book reveals the foundational influence of Kgositsile's mother and grandmother on his craft and unveils the importance of the oral/aural traditions, indigenous knowledge systems, and cosmologies he carried with him into and after exile. It illuminates a southern African modernity that was strongly gendered and deployed in anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, anti-apartheid, and civil rights struggles. Using the original concept of 'elsewhere', the author maps the sources of Kgositsile's transformative verse, which in turn generated 'poetics of possibility' for his contemporaries in the Black Arts and Black Power Movements and beyond - among them Maya Angelou, Larry Neal, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tom Dent, members of The Last Poets, Otabenga Jones & Associates, and rapper Earl Sweatshirt - who all looked to his work to model their identities, cultural movements and radical traditions.
The State of Post-conflict Reconstruction
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00Naseem Badiey examines the local dynamics of the emerging capital city of Juba, Southern Sudan, during the historically pivotal transition period following the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). Focusing on the intersections of land tenure reform and urban development, she challenges the dominant paradigm of 'post-conflict reconstruction' and re-conceptualizes state-building as a social process underpinned by negotiation. Badiey explores local resistance to reconstruction programmes, debates over the interpretation of peace settlements, and competing claims to land and resources not as problems to be solved through interventions but as negotiations of authority which are fundamental to shaping the character of the 'state'.
While donors and aid agency officials anticipated clashes between the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) following the CPA, they did not foresee internal divisions that impeded reconstruction in Southern Sudan, raising serious questions about the viability of an independent state. In Juba local elites interpreted the CPA in line with their economic and political interests, using claims to land, authority and political power to challenge the SPLM's agenda for urban reconstruction. In revealing how local actors strategically interpreted the framework of land rights in Southern Sudan, the book offers a basis for understanding the challenges that confront the nascent South Sudan's state-builders and their international partners in the future.
NASEEM BADIEY is Assistant Professor of International Development andHumanitarian Action at California State University Monterey Bay.
ALT 36: Queer Theory in Film & Fiction
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Debates 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
From Rebels to Rulers
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00Sokoto was the largest and longest lasting of West Africa's nineteenth-century Muslim empires. Its intellectual and political elite left behind a vast written record, including over 300 Arabic texts authored by the jihad's leaders: Usman dan Fodio, his brother Abdullahi and his son, Muhammad Bello (known collectively as the Fodiawa). Sokoto's early years are one of the most documented periods of pre-colonial African history, yet current narratives pay little attention to the formative role these texts played in the creation of Sokoto, and the complex scholarly world from which they originated. Far from being unified around a single concept of Muslim statecraft, this book demonstrates how divided the Fodiawa were about what Sokoto could and should be, and the various discursive strategies they used to enrol local societies into their vision. Based on a close analysis of the sources (some appearing in English translation for the first time) and an effort to date their intellectual production, the book restores agency to Sokoto's leaders as individuals with different goals, characters and methods. More generally, it shows how revolutionary religious movements gain legitimacy, and how the kind of legitimacy they claim changes as they move from rebels to rulers.
Land, Investment & Politics
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00More than ever before, the gaze of global investment has been directed to the drylands of Africa, but what does this mean for these regions' pastoralists and other livestock-keepers and their livelihoods? Will those who have occupied drylands over generations benefit from the developments, as claimed, or is this a new type of territorialisation, exacerbating social inequality?
This book's detailed local studies of investments at various stages of development - from Kenya, Tanzania, Somaliland, Ethiopia - explore, for the first time, how large land, resource and infrastructure projects shape local politics and livelihoods. Land and resources use, based on ancestral precedenceand communal practices, and embedded regional systems of trade, are unique to these areas, yet these lands are now seen as the new frontier for development of national wealth. By examining the ways in which large-scale investmentsenmesh with local political and social relations, the chapters show how even the most elaborate plans of financiers, contractors and national governments come unstuck and are re-made in the guise of not only states' grand modernist visions, but also those of herders and small-town entrepreneurs in the pastoral drylands. The contributors also demonstrate how and why large-scale investments have advanced in a more piecemeal way as the challenges of implementation have mounted.
JEREMY LIND is Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex. DORIS OKENWA holds a PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics. IAN SCOONES is a Professorial Fellow at the IDS, University of Sussex and co-director of the ESRC STEPS Centre.
The Kenyan Cut Flower Industry & Global Market Dynamics
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00From a macro-perspective, it appears that the cut flower industry has changed into a buyer-driven value chain with corporate retailers as the new lead firms. Yet, as this book shows, this is insufficient to explain how new trade relations come into being, and the consequences of this, not only for global economics, but for the producers, climate change and rural livelihoods. As the retailers and wholesalers of the flower industry in the West linked directly to producers in the Global South, trade relations changed fundamentally, and this critical new book explores the complexities of the power asymmetries and the way in which corporate retailers have shaped the market to promote their own interests, as well as the role non-economic actors played.
This book examines in detail the situation at Lake Naivasha, Kenya, which has played a central part within this new market order. Since the 1970s, the area has developed into one of the most important production areas for the ready-made bouquets that sell so cheaply in European supermarkets. For the flower growers themselves, however, coping with the new conditions of supply and demand, the new market order has brought financial precariousness. Farms needed to be flexible in the production and marketing of their flowers. Yet while they were able to expand their production and achieve more stable employment conditions, this has not resulted in significantly higher remuneration. The rapidly changing economic situation has also had a profound impact, not only on local stakeholders, but on the environment, where there is intensified competition for resources and new production technologies.
Published in association with the Collaborative Research Centre FUTURE RURAL AFRICA, funded by the German Research Council (DFG).
Nyerere
Regular price $95.00 Save $-95.00Julius Kambarage Nyerere (1922-1999), the first President of Tanzania, was a man whose political life was uniquely and inextricably bound into the history of the nation he created. Yet, though 'Baba wa Taifa', Father of the Nation, there is still no adequate biography.
This book presents the first truly rounded portrait of Nyerere's early life, from his birth in 1922 until his graduation from Edinburgh in 1952, helping us to see his later political achievements in a new light. It was after returning to Tanganyika that 'Mwalimu' (the teacher) formally entered politics, and led efforts to deliver Tanganyika to independence. Drawing on interviews with his contemporaries, as wellas archival sources, including his letters as a student and files that the colonial authorities kept on him, this revelatory and engaging account allows us to see Nyerere afresh. It also brings a new perspective on how the scholarship that Nyerere engaged with as a young man in Scotland influenced his ideas of the uhuru movement against colonial rule and, later, the ujamaa policy of African socialism that so defined his leadership of an independent Tanzania.
Thomas Molony is Lecturer in African Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
Whites and Democracy in South Africa
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00How have whites adjusted to, contributed to and detracted from democracy in South Africa since 1994? Engaging with the literature on 'whiteness' and the current trope that the democratic settlement has failed, this book provides a study of how whites in the last bastion of 'white minority rule' in Africa have adapted to the sweeping political changes they have encountered. It examines the historical context of white supremacy and minority rule, in the past, and the white withdrawal from elsewhere on the African continent. Drawing on focus groups held across the country, Southall explores the difficult issue of 'memory', how whites seek to grapple with the history of apartheid, and how this shapes their reactions to political equality. He argues that whites cannot be regarded as a homogeneous political grouping concluding that while the overwhelming majority of white South Africans feared the coming of democracy during the years of late apartheid, they recognised its inevitability. Many of their fears were, in effect, to be recognised by the Constitution, which embedded individual rights, including those to property and private schooling, alongside the important principle of proportionality of political representation. While a small minority of whites chose to emigrate, the large majority had little choice but to adjust to the democratic settlement which, on the whole, they have done - and in different ways. It was only a small right wing which sought to actively resist; others have sought to withdraw from democracy into social enclaves; but others have embraced democracy actively, either enthusiastically welcoming its freedoms or engaging with its realities in defence of 'minority rights'. Whites may have been reluctant to accept democracy, but democrats - of a sort - they have become, and notwithstanding a significant racialisation of politics in post-apartheid South Africa, they remain an important segment of the "rainbow", although dangers lurk in the future unless present inequalities of both race and class are challenged head on.
African Sun Media: South Africa
Young Women against Apartheid
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00WINNER OF THE RHS GLADSTONE BOOK PRIZE 2022
WINNER OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF CHILDREN AND YOUTH GRACE ABBOTT BOOK PRIZE 2021
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ASAUK FAGE & OLIVER PRIZE 2022
While there have been many books on South Africa's liberation struggle during the 1980s and early 1990s, the story of the involvement of African girls and young women has been all but missing. This book tells their story, analysing what life was like for African girls under apartheid, why some chose to join the struggle, and how they navigated the benefits and pitfalls of political activism. These were women who, as teenagers and secondary school students,made an unconventional choice to join student organizations, engage in public protest, and take up arms against the state. They did so against their parents' wishes and in contravention of societal norms that confined girls to the home and made township streets dangerous places for female students. They participated in both non-violent and violent forms of political action, including attending marches and rallies, throwing stones or petrol bombs at police, and punishing suspected informers and other offenders, and even joining underground guerrilla armies. Thousands of these young women were eventually detained, interrogated, and tortured by the apartheid state. At the heart of this book lie the life histories of the female comrades themselves, who in interviews construct themselves as decisive actors in South Africa's liberation struggle.
Primarily a work of oral history, this book is not only concerned with what female comrades did, but equally with how these women remember and narrate their time as activists: how they reconstruct their pasts; relate their personal experiences to collective histories of the struggle; and insert themselves into a historical narrative from which they have been excluded. Through exploring these women's memories, this book serves as an important corrective to South Africa's male-centric literature on violence, and provides a new gendered perspective on the wider histories of township politics, activism, and conflict.
African Literature in the Digital Age
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00The 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.
Sacred Queer Stories
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Presenting the deeply moving personal life stories of Ugandan LGBTQ+ refugees in Nairobi, Kenya alongside an analysis of the process in which they creatively engaged with two Bible stories - Daniel in the Lions' Den (Old Testament) and Jesus and the Woman Caught in Adultery (New Testament) - Sacred Queer Stories explores how readings of biblical stories can reveal their experiences of struggle, their hopes for the future, and their faith in God and humanity. Arguing that the telling of life-stories of marginalised people, such as of Ugandan LGBTQ+ refugees, affirms embodied existence and agency, is socially and politically empowering, and enables human solidarity, the authors also show how the Bible as an authoritative religious text and popular cultural archive in Africa is often used against LGBTQ+ people but can also be reclaimed as a site of meaning, healing, and empowerment. The result of a collaborative project between UK-based academics and a Nairobi-based organisation of Ugandan LGBTQ+ refugees, the book provides a valuable insight into the narrative politics and theologies of LGBTQ+ life-storytelling. A key text for those in African Humanities, Queer Studies, Religious Studies, and Refugee Studies, among others, the book expresses an innovative methodology of inter-reading queer life-stories and biblical stories.
The Swahili Novel
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00An overview of the Swahili novel, its place in a globalized world and a reflection on the status and dynamism of Kafka's concept of 'minor literature'.
For more than fifty years a dynamic modern literature has been developing in the Kiswahili language. The political weight that Kiswahili carries as the emerging national and pan-national language of many East African countries places this literature, much of it in the form of novels, at the centre of heated literary debates on the social function of literature in the context of rapid global social change.
Garnier provides new insights into the Swahili novel form with all its vibrancy and capacity for experimentation. Its obsession with social issues relates to larger, all-pervasive political debates running through East Africa: in its press, its streets, its public and private places. The novels both record and provoke these debates. Based on the study of more than 175 Swahili novels by almost 100 authors, Garnier brings to light a body of work much neglected by African literary critics, but which looks outwards to the wider world.
Xavier Garnier teaches African Literature at the Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle and is former director of the Centre d'Etudes des Nouveaux Espaces Littéraires, Université Paris 13.
African Theatre 19
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Music 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.
A Companion to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Easily 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.
Breaking the Silence
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00South 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).
Sol Plaatje's Mhudi
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Joint winner of Best Non-Fiction Biography, Humanities and Social Sciences Awards 2020
Sol Plaatje's Mhudi is the first full-length novel in English to have been written by a black South African and is widely regarded as one of Africa's most important literary works. Drawing upon both oral and literary traditions, Plaatje uses the form of the historical novel, and romance genre, to explore the 19th-century dispossession of his people, to provide a novel black perspective on their history. It is a book that speaks to present-day concerns, to do with land, language, history and decolonisation. Today the novel has iconic status, not only in South Africa, but worldwide - it has been translated into a number of languages - and its impact on other writers has been profound. The novelist Bessie Head described it as "more than a classic; there is just no other book on earth like it. All the stature and grandeur of the author are in it."
A century after its writing in London in 1920 [it was published in South Africa in 1930, for reasons explained in the book], and at a time of intellectual ferment, with debates on decolonisation to the fore, in popular culture as much as in the academy, this book celebrates Mhudi's place in African literature, reviews its critical reception, and offers fresh perspectives. The contributors discuss Mhudis genesis, writing and publication; its reception by literary critics from the 1930s to thepresent; Mhudi as a feminist novel; Mhudis use of oral tradition; issues of translation; Mhudi in the context of African literature and history, and the decolonisation of the curriculum. An authoritative listing of all editions of Mhudi, translations as well as in English completes the book.
SABATA MOKAE is a novelist and lecturer in creative writing at Sol Plaatje University, Kimberley, and the author of The Story of Sol T. Plaatje (2010).
BRIAN WILLAN is Senior Research Fellow at Rhodes University, Extraordinary Professor at Sol Plaatje and North West Universities. He is the author of Sol Plaatje: a life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje,1876-1932 (2018), and co-editor (with Janet Remmington and Bheki Peterson) of Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa: Past and Present (2016).
Africa: Jacana
Archaeology and Oral Tradition in Malawi
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00The 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
Beyond Religious Tolerance
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Since 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)
Land, Migration and Belonging
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00Tracing the history of the Basotho, a small mainly Christianised community of evangelists working for the Dutch Reformed Church, this book examines the challenges faced by minority ethnic groups in colonial Zimbabwe and how they tried to strike a balance between particularism and integration. Maintaining their own language and community farm, the Basotho used ownership of freehold land, religion and a shared history to sustain their identity. The author analyses the challenges they faced in purchasing land and in engaging with colonial administrators and missionaries, as well as the nature and impact of internal schisms within the community, and shows how their "unity in diversity"impacted on their struggles for belonging and shaped their lives. This detailed account of the experiences and strategies the Basotho deployed in interactions with the Dutch Reformed Church missionaries and colonial administrators as well as with their non-Sotho neighbours will contribute to wider debates about migration, identity and the politics of belonging, and to our understanding of African agency in the context of colonial and missionary encounters.
Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa
The Mission of Apolo Kivebulaya
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Apolo Kivebulaya was a practitioner of indigenous religion and a Muslim before he became in 1895 a Christian missionary from Buganda to Toro and Ituri. He is still admired as a churchman and missionary in the Anglican churches ofUganda, Congo, Tanzania and Kenya, and is a significant civic figure in school curricula in Uganda. This book provides insight into religious encounter in the Great Lakes region of Africa, in which individuals like Kivebulaya remade themselves through conversion to Christianity and re-ordered social relations through preaching a transnational religion which brought technological advantage.
In re-examining Apolo's life the author reveals the historic social processes and the cultural motivations which provoked religious and socio-political change in colonial east Africa. She explores the processes of his religious adherence, his travels and church planting, his commitment to Bible translation and its role in developing national sensibilities, and his engagement with missionaries, the Ganda political elite, and the peoples of the Ituri forest, as well as British and Belgian colonial polities. Kivebulayautilized Christian repertoires of memory-making - the Bible, hymns, prayers and fellowship - in creating communities of disciples, and was instrumental in creating new forms of Christian identity in the region, fashioned by levelsof acceptance and resistance. By focusing on the role of indigenous agents as harbingers of change, the author offers a new perspective on the history of the northern Great Lakes region of Africa.
Emma Wild-Wood is Senior Lecturer of African Christianity and African Indigenous Religions and Co-director of the Centre for the Study of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh. Her books include Migration and Christian Identity in Congo (Brill, 2008) and editing, with Joel Cabrita and David Maxwell, Relocating World Christianity: Interdisciplinary Studies in Universal and Local Expressions of the Christian Faith (Brill, 2017).
Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan: Twaweza Communications
A Companion to Mia Couto
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00Already 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]
The Vaal Uprising of 1984 & the Struggle for Freedom in South Africa
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00On 3 September 1984 a bloody uprising set the African townships of the Vaal Triangle aflame. Triggered by dissatisfaction over rent increases and a local government that was failing to provide any meaningful political power or social transformation to the black majority, it heralded the insurrectionary period that was to profoundly challenge the administrative and coercive capacities of the apartheid state and greatly contribute towards its demise. Led by a broad coalition of civic organisations, student bodies and trade unions, nationwide protests followed demanding a new political and social order. By the mid-1980s the ideological influence of the African National Congress (ANC) had established its hegemony among township activists and was regarded as the main force in the liberation struggle.
Arguing that liberation from poverty and inequality played as significant role in driving the struggle against apartheid as political rights, Rueedi shows how the enactment of the ideals of the 1955 Freedom Charter during the insurrectionary period shaped how communities understood liberation and freedom, both during and after apartheid. She explores the ways in which the establishment and subsequent failure of the model townships was intertwined with struggles for social transformation and dignity; investigates the links between underground networks of the ANC and above ground community structures; and examines how increasing state repression fuelled militancy and political violence, leading to an impasse that signalled the beginning of the end of the apartheid regime.
Overcoming Boko Haram
Regular price $170.00 Save $-170.00It is now more than a decade since the violent Islamic group Boko Haram launched its reign of terror across northern Nigeria, claiming more than 27,000 lives and displacing over 2 million people. While its territorial gains have largely been recaptured, the insurgency rages on, devastating communities across vast stretches of the north-east and disrupting governance, livelihoods and food security, as well as posing a security risk to Niger, Chad and Cameroon.
Less attention is paid to the pervasive popular rejection of violent extremism on the ground. How did a diverse and economically dynamic West African society unravel so violently, and for so long? Why does radicalizationhave so little influence on large Muslim populations in surrounding areas, such as the Yoruba in south-western Nigeria, or the poor ethnically similar Muslim majority in central Niger just north of the border? This book looks beyond the details of the insurgency to examine the wider social and political processes that explain why Boko Haram emerged when and where it did, and what forces exist within society to contain it. Drawing on the detailed fieldworkof specialist Nigerian and Nigerianist scholars from Nigeria, connecting the worst of Boko Haram violence to the wider realities of the present, the book offers new insights into the drivers of Islamic extremism in Nigeria - poverty, regional inequality, environmental stress, migration, youth unemployment, and state corruption and human rights abuses - with a view to charting more sustainable paths out of the conflict.
Nigeria: Premium Times Books
General Labour History of Africa
Regular price $240.00 Save $-240.00Co-published with the International Labour Organization on the centenary of its founding in 1919, the General Labour History of Africa is a landmark in the study of labour history. It brings, for the first time, an African perspective within a global context to the study of labour and labour relations. The volume analyses key developments in the 20th century, such as the emergence of free wage labour; the transformation in labour relations; the role of capital and employers; labour agency and movements; the growing diversity of formal and informal or precarious labour; the meaning of work; and the impact of gender and age on the workplace.
The contributors - eminent historians, anthropologists and social scientists from Africa, Europe and the United States - examine African labour in the context of labour and social issues worldwide: mobility and colonial and postcolonial migration, forced labour, security, the growth of entrepreneurial labour, the informal sector and self-employment, and the impact of trade unionism, welfare and state relations. The book discusses key sectors such as mining, agriculture, industry, transport, domestic work, and sport, tourism and entertainment, as well as the international dimension and the history and impact of the International Labour Organization itself. This authoritative and comprehensive work will be an invaluableresource for historians of labour, social relations and African history.
In association with the ILO Regional Office for Africa
Stefano Bellucci is senior researcher at the International Institute of SocialHistory, Amsterdam, and lecturer in African History and Economy at Leiden University, the Netherlands; Andreas Eckert is Director of the International Research Centre for Work and the Human Life Cycle in Global History and professor of African history at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.
The Road to Soweto
Regular price $75.00 Save $-75.00This revisionary account of the Soweto Uprising of June 1976 and the decade preceding it transforms our understanding of what led to this crucial flashpoint of South Africa's history. Brown argues that far from there being "quiescence" following the Sharpeville Massacre and the suppression of African opposition movements, during which they went underground, this period was marked by experiments in resistance and attempts to develop new forms of politics that prepared the ground for the Uprising. Students at South Africa's segregated universities began to re-organise themselves as a political force; new ideas about race reinvigorated political thought; debates around confrontation shaped the development of new forms of protest. The protest then began to move off university campuses and onto the streets: through the independent actions of workers in Durban, and attempts by students to link their struggles with a broader agenda. These actions made protest public once again, and helped establish the patterns of popular action and state response that would come to shape the events in Soweto on 16 June 1976.
Julian Brown is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland & Botswana): Jacana
'throws new light on the background to the Soweto Uprising, providing insight into white and black student politics, worker protest and broader dissent' - William Beinart, University of Oxford
'an extremely important contribution to the historiography on protest in South Africa. It links black and white student protests (too often studied in isolation from one another) to workers' movements by looking at the changing forms of protest during the 1960s and 1970s, and the apartheid government's changing responses.' - Anne Heffernan, University of the Witwatersrand
'By showing how the Soweto Uprising served as a precursor for later historical and political events, the author convincingly shows the continuity from one from one protest and decade to the next.' - Dawne Curry, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Peacemaking and Peacebuilding in South Africa
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00It is now 30 years since the National Peace Accord (NPA) was signed in South Africa, bringing to an end the violent struggle of the Apartheid era and signalling the transition to democracy. Signed by the ANC Alliance, the Government, the Inkatha Freedom Party and a wide range of other political and labour organizations on 14 September 1991, the parties agreed in the NPA on the common goal of a united, non-racial democratic South Africa, and provided practical means for moving towards this end: codes of conduct for political organizations and for the police, the creation of national, regional and local peace structures for conflict resolution, the investigation and prevention of violence, peace monitoring, socio-economic reconstruction and peacebuilding.
This book, written by one of those involved in the process that evolved, provides for the first time an assessment and in-depth account of this key phase of South Africa's history. The National Peace Campaign set up under the NPA mobilized the 'silent majority' and gave peace an unprecedented grassroots identity and legitimacy. The author describes the formulation of the NPA by political representatives, with Church and business facilitators, which ended the political impasse, constituted South Africa's first experience of multi-party negotiations, and made it possible for the constitutional talks (Codesa) to start. She examines the work of the Goldstone Commission, which prefigured the TRC, as well as the role of international observers from the UN, EU, Commonwealth and OAU. Exploring the work of the peace structures set up to implement the Accord - the National Peace Committee and Secretariat, the 11 Regional Peace Committees and 263 Local Peace Committees, and over 18,000 peace monitors - Carmichael provides a uniquely detailed assessment of the NPA, the on-the-ground peacebuilding work and the essential involvement of the people at its heart. Filling a significant gap in modern history, this book will be essential reading for scholars, students and others interested in South Africa's post-Apartheid history, as well as government agencies and NGOs involved in peacemaking globally.
From Revolution to Rights in South Africa
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00Critics of liberalism in Europe and North America argue that a stress on 'rights talk' and identity politics has led to fragmentation, individualisation and depoliticisation. But are these developments really signs of 'the end ofpolitics'? In the post-colonial, post-apartheid, neo-liberal new South Africa poor and marginalised citizens continue to struggle for land, housing and health care. They must respond to uncertainty and radical contingencies on a daily basis. This requires multiple strategies, an engaged, practised citizenship, one that links the daily struggle to well organised mobilisation around claiming rights. Robins argues for the continued importance of NGOs, socialmovements and other 'civil society' actors in creating new forms of citizenship and democracy. He goes beyond the sanitised prescriptions of 'good governance' so often touted by development agencies. Instead he argues for a complex, hybrid and ambiguous relationship between civil society and the state, where new negotiations around citizenship emerge.
Steven L. Robins is Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Stellenbosch and editorof Limits to Liberation after Apartheid (James Currey).
ALT 37
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00Contemporary 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
Manhood, Morality & the Transformation of Angolan Society
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00SPECIAL COMMENDATION FOR 2020 AMAURY TALBOT PRIZE FOR AFRICAN ANTHROPOLOGY
Between 1975 and 2002 Angola underwent a very destructive civil war, in which much of the non-elite male population was conscripted into one or other of the contending armies, the country urbanised very rapidly, and colonial-era political and moral economies were radically reshaped. This book presents a detailed examination of the pronounced changes this wrought on Angolan society, and, for the first time, the gendered impact on a generation of Angolan menrecruited by the governing MPLA.
Spall shows that the war's effects went far beyond the political and economic, to affect sexual relations, the social valuation of money, respect for elder male wisdom and what it meant to bea senior man, and the role of Christianity in everyday life. Masculinity was central to how the social transformations of war were intimately experienced by Angolan soldiers and the book investigates the consequences of the men'sexperiences when they returned home and the important role of military service in constructing Angola's post-war social trajectory. A powerful study of the gendered dynamics created by the war, the book will not only be of interest to Angolanists, but to those researching masculinity and military service on the continent, and in the wider sphere.
ALT 38 Environmental Transformations
Regular price $95.00 Save $-95.00This 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)
Voices of Ghana
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Ghana's first radio programme of original literature, The Singing Net, began in 1955 as part of the development of a national radio station in the years leading to independence in 1957. Its central aim was to bring Ghanaianwriters to the forefront of cultural programming as part of the Africanisation of radio in Ghana. It was a critical cultural expression of the radical changes that were unfolding across the colonial world. The programme successfully introduced listeners to a series of pioneering Ghanaian authors who would go on to become significant figures of Anglophone West African literature in the early postcolonial decades: Efua Sutherland, Frank Parkes, Amu Djoleto,Geormbeeyi Adali-Mortty, Albert Kayper-Mensah, Kwesi Brew, Cameron Duodu, J.H. Nketia and many others. The anthology, Voices of Ghana (1958) is a collection of the poetry, short stories, play scripts and critical discussions that were aired on the Gold Coast Broadcasting Service (later the Ghana Broadcasting System) (1954-1958). Both The Singing Net and Voices of Ghana were edited by the BBC producer, Henry Swanzy.
The context of Ghana's independence, the singularity of the anthology's history, and the significance of many of the writers all contribute to the importance of this text. This second edition is a timely intervention into recent debateswithin postcolonial studies and world literature on the importance of broadcast culture in the dissemination of "new literatures" from the colonial world. It includes an unabridged version of the 1958 text, a new introduction andfootnoted annotations, which draw on extensive research undertaken in Ghana and Britain. It will appeal to a general readership with an interest in Ghanaian literature, 1950s broadcast culture, the figure of Dr Kwame Nkrumah and the making of a national literature in the era of decolonisation, as well as engaging scholars. The new edition presents a deeply insightful and engaging history of Voices of Ghana and reintroduces the original works on theoccasion of the anthology's 60th anniversary.
Victoria Ellen Smith is a Lecturer in the Department of History, University of Ghana, Legon
Ghana & Nigeria: Sub-Saharan Publishers
A History of Malawi
Regular price $190.00 Save $-190.00WINNER: 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.
Experiments with Truth
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Over the last decades, South Africa has seen an outpouring of life writing and narrative non-fiction. Authors like Panashe Chigumadzi, Jacob Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Antjie Krog, Sisonke Msimang, Njabulo Ndebele, Jonny Steinberg and Ivan Vladislavic; have produced a compelling and often controversial body of work, exploring the country's ongoing political and social transition with great ambition, texture and risk.
Experiments with Truth is the first book-length account of non-fiction in South African literature. It reads the country's transition as refracted through an array of documentary modes that are simultaneously refashioned and blurred into each other: long-form analytic journalism and reportage; experiments in oral history, microhistory and archival reconstruction; life-writing, memoir and the essay. It traces the strange and ethically complex process by which real people, places and events are shuffled, patterned and plotted in long-form prose narrative. While holding in mind the imperatives of testimony and witness so important to the struggle for liberation and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the case studies here are increasingly drawn to a post-TRC aesthetic: works that engage with difficult, inappropriate or unusable elements of the past, and the unfinished project of social reconstruction in SouthAfrica. The author examines non-fictions that are speculative, formally innovative and sometimes experimental, rather than informational or narrowly journalistic; that explore difficult subjects like collaboration, complicity, confession - and have embedded within them their own reflections on the problems of narrating within a scene of unresolved difference. In this way, southern African materials are placed in a global context, and in dialogue with otherimportant non-fictional traditions that have emerged at moments of social rupture and transition.
Hedley Twidle is a writer, teacher and researcher based in the English Department at the University of Cape Town. He specialises in twentieth-century, southern African and world literatures, as well as creative non-fiction and the environmental humanities. His essay collection, Firepool: Experiences in an Abnormal World, was published in 2017.
Written under the Skin
Regular price $95.00 Save $-95.00The author uses the image of blood under the skin as a way of understanding cultural and literary forms in contemporary South Africa. Chapters deal with the bloodied histories of apartheid and blood as trope for talking about change.
In this book the author argues that a younger generation of South Africans is developing important and innovative ways of understanding South African pasts, and that challenge the narratives that have over the last decades been informed by notions of forgiveness and reconciliation. The author uses the image of history-rich blood to explore these approaches to intergenerational memory. Blood under the skin is a carrier of embodied and gendered histories andusing this image, the chapters revisit older archives, as well as analyse contemporary South African cultural and literary forms.
The emphasis on blood challenges the privileged status skin has had as explanatory category inthinking about identity, and instead emphasises intergenerational transfer and continuity. The argument is that a younger generation is disputing and debating the terms through which to understand contemporary South Africa, as well as for interpreting the legacies of the past that remain under the visible layer of skin. The chapters each concern blood: Mandela's prison cell as laboratory for producing bloodless freedom; the kinship relations created and resisted in accounts of Eugene de Kock in prison; Ruth First's concern with information leaks in her accounts of her time in prison; the first human-to-human heart transplant and its relation to racialised attempts to salvage whiteidentity; the #Fallist moment; Abantu book festival; and activist scholarship and creative art works that use blood as trope for thinking about change and continuity.
Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland): Wits University Press
Islam in Uganda
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Between 2012 and 2016 several Muslim clerics were murdered in Uganda: there is still no consensus as to who was responsible. In this book Joseph Kasule seeks to explain this by examining the colonial and postcolonial history of the Muslim minority and questions of Muslim identity within a non-Muslim state. Challenging prevalent scholarship that has homogenized Muslims' political identity, Kasule demonstrates that Muslim responses to power have been varied and multiple. Beginning with the pre-colonial political community in Buganda, and Muteesa I's attempted Islamization of the country using Islam as a centralizing ideology, the author discusses how the political status of Islam and Muslims in Uganda has been defined under successive regimes. Muteesa I's Islamization faltered when Christianity entered Buganda in the latter half of the 19th century, resulting in division between Muslim and Christian sections. The colonial period created a new type of political project that defined the Muslim question as one of representation, and Kasule discusses how this laid the foundation for a politics of Muslim containment within a predominantly Christian power. He examines contrasting urban-based Muslim organizations and rural expressions of Islam; tension between representative claims of Muslim leaderships within the demand for Muslim autonomy; and the rise of new reform groups. As these splits turned violent, 'new' Muslim 'publics' emerged around opposing centres of Muslim power which sought different resolutions to their minority situation.
East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi): Makerere Institute of Social Research
Islam and Ethnicity in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00The recent ethnic violence in Kenya has been preceded by a process of territorialization and politicization of ethnicity. This study examines a marginalized part of Kenya, the semi-arid north inhabited by pastoralists of three language groups - speakers of Oromo, Somali, and Rendille. It spans different periods of time, from early processes of ethnic differentiation between groups, through the colonial period when differences were reflected in administrative policies, to recent times, when global minority discourses, particularly those related to Islam, are tapped by local political agents and ethnic entrepreneurs.
A companion volume to Pastoralism and Politics in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia, this book is based on over thirty-four years of field research and synthesizes findings from history and political anthropology.
Günther Schlee is director of the Department of 'Integration and Conflict', Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany; Abdullahi Shongolo is an independent scholar based in Kenya.
African Women in the Atlantic World
Regular price $95.00 Save $-95.00HONORABLE 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
The War Within
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00The 1976-1992 civil war which opposed the Government of Frelimo and the Renamo guerrillas (among other actors) is a central event in the history of Mozambique. Aiming to open up a new era of studies of the war, this book re-evaluates this period from a number of different local perspectives in an attempt to better understand the history, complexity and multiple dynamics of the armed conflict. Focusing at local level on either a province or a single village, the authors analyse the conflict as a "total social phenomena" involving all elements of society and impacting on every aspect of life across the country. The chapters examine Frelimo and Renamo as well as private, popular and state militias, the Catholic Church, NGOs and traders. Drawing on previously unexamined sources such as local and provincial state archives, religious archives, the guerrilla's own documentation and interviews, the authors uncoveralternative dimensions of the civil war. The book thus enables a deeper understanding of the conflict and its actors as well as offering an explanatory framework for understanding peacemaking, the nature of contemporary politics,and the current conflict in the country.
Eric Morier-Genoud is a Lecturer in African history at Queen's University Belfast; Domingos Manuel do Rosário is Lecturer in electoral sociology and electoral governance at Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo, Mozambique; Michel Cahen is a Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at Bordeaux Political Studies Institute and at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid.
Slaves of Fortune
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00The Anglo-Egyptian re-conquest of Sudan - Churchill's 'River War' - has been well chronicled from the British point of view, but we still know little about its front line troops, the Sudanese soldiers of the Egyptian Army, the menwho fought in all the battles, served as interpreters, military recruiters, and ethnic ambassadors throughout the campaign, and who were the real victors at the Battle of Omdurman. Making use of both published contemporary accounts and unpublished primary sources located in the United Kingdom and Sudan, Slaves of Fortune provides an historiographic correction. It argues that nineteenth-century Sudanese slave soldiers were social beings and historical actors, shaping both European and African destinies, just as their own lives were being transformed by imperial forces.
Ronald M. Lamothe is Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
The Oromo and the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia
Regular price $170.00 Save $-170.00This revisionary account of the Oromo people and the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia transforms our perception of the country's development, rebutting the common depiction of the Oromo as no more than a destructive force and demonstrating their significant role in shaping the course of Ethiopian history.
Tracing the early history of the Oromo as part of the Cushitic language speaking family of peoples, it establishes that they were neither foreigners nor newcomers to Ethiopia, but have been an integral part of the indigenous population since at least the first half of the 14th century. The massive 16th-century pastoral Oromo population movement revolutionized relations between the Christians and the Oromo. During the long process of assimilation that followed, with periods of both war and peace in central and southern Ethiopia, Oromo society was able to absorb and assimilate Cushitic and Semitic languagespeakers and Oromize them through the open, democratic and egalitarian Gada system; while in northern Ethiopia the Oromo themselves were absorbed into Christian Amhara society.
Mohammed Hassen is Associate Professor in the Department of History, Georgia State University. His books include The Oromo of Ethiopia: A History, 1570 to 1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1990). He is a Contributing Editor of The Journal of Oromo Studies and The Horn of Africa journal.
Sheng
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00The city of Nairobi is a rich context for the study of sociolinguistic phenomena. The coexistence of speakers of many different languages, further differentiated by socio-economic status, age and ethnicity provide conditions for the development of a mixed code such as Sheng, an urban variety of Kenyan Swahili which has morphed from a "youth language" into a vernacular of wider use. Sheng is a unique phenomenon in the study of linguistic change and innovation in an African context, a reflection of the ethnolinguistic diversity of Kenya, and language asymmetry created by socio-economic disparities. It also provides a window into understanding the processes of urban multilingualism, within the specific space structuring of Nairobi city.
This book is a detailed account of the rise and development of Sheng, its linguistic structure, social functions, and possible future directions. The author's analysis ofits presence in newspapers, TV, radio and online, makes it clear that Sheng functions as a particularly useful lens through which to explore contemporary Kenya.
Nairobi in the Making
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00What does it mean to make a life in an African city today? How do ordinary Africans, surrounded by collapsing urban infrastructures and amid fantastical promises of hypermodern, globalised futures, try to ensure a place for themselves in the city's future? Exploring the relationship between the remains of empire and the global city, and themes of urban belonging and exclusion, housing and security, Constance Smith examines the making and remaking of one ofAfrica's most fragmented, vibrant cities.
Nairobi is on the cusp of radical urban change. As in other capital cities across Africa, the Kenyan government has launched "Vision 2030", an urban megaproject that envisions the capital as a "world class metropolis", a spectacular new node in a network of global cities. Yet as a city born of British colonialism, Nairobians also live amongst the dilapidated vestiges of imperial urban planning; spaces designed to regulate urban subjects. Based on extensive ethnographic research in a dilapidated, colonial-era public housing project built as a model urban neighbourhood but which is now slated for demolition, Smith explores how projects of self-making and city-making are entwined. She traces how it is through residents' everyday lives - in the mundane, incremental work of home maintenance, in the accumulation of stories about the past, in ordinary people's aspirations for the future - that urban landscapes are formed, imaginatively, materially and unpredictably, across time. Nairobi emerges as a place of pathways and plans, obstructions and aspirations, residues and endurances, thatinflect the way that ordinary people produce the city, generating practices of historymaking, ideas about urban belonging and attempts to refashion "Vision 2030" into a future more meaningful and inclusive to ordinary city dwellers.
Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa.
Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania,Rwanda: Twaweza Communications
African Theatre 16: Six Plays from East & West Africa
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00This 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
Tanzanian Development
Regular price $170.00 Save $-170.00Over the past thirty years, in common with a number of other Sub-Saharan African countries, Tanzania has experienced a period of painful adjustment followed by relatively rapid and stable economic growth. However the extent of progress on poverty reduction and the sustainability of the development process are both open to question. In this book, prominent international observers provide a range of different perspectives on the process of development over time and the issues facing a rapidly growing African economy: political economy; agriculture and rural livelihoods; industrial development; urbanisation; aid and trade; tourism; and the use of natural resources. Comparisons are drawn with other African economies as well as other developing countries, such as Vietnam. An invaluable deep review of Tanzania's economy and development, the book also looks at the wider implications of the research for the futureon the continent and beyond.
David Potts is Honorary Visiting Researcher at the University of Bradford and was Head of the Bradford Centre for International Development 2015-16. He worked for six years as an economist in Tanzania's Ministry of Agriculture in the 1980s, has had many subsequent short-term assignments in the country and is co-editor of Development Planning and Poverty Reduction (2003).
The Dennis Brutus Tapes
Regular price $95.00 Save $-95.00Dennis Brutus (1924-2009) is known internationally as a South African poet, anti-apartheid activist and campaigner for human rights and the release of political prisoners. His literary works include Sirens Knuckles Boots (1963), Letters to Martha, and Other Poems from a South African Prison (1968), A Simple Lust (1973), and Stubborn Hope (1978).
When Dennis Brutus was a Visiting Professor at The University of Texas at Austin in 1974-75, he recorded on tape a series of reflections on his life and career. In addition, he frequently responded to questions about his poetry and political activities put to him by students and faculty in formal and informal interviews that were also captured on tape. Transcripts of a selection of these tapes, as well as reprints of two interviews recorded earlier, are reproduced here in order to put on record fragments of the autobiography of a remarkable man who lived in extraordinary times and managed to leave his mark on the land and literature of South Africa.
Brutus was an effective anti-apartheid campaigner who succeeded in getting South Africa excluded from the Olympics. His opposition to racial discrimination in sports led to his arrest, banning, and imprisonment on Robben Island. Upon release, he left South Africa and lived most of the rest of his life in exile, where he continued his political work and simultaneously earned an international reputation as a poet who often sang of his love for his country.
The tapes are edited by Bernth Lindfors who has added an Introduction and a transcript of a 1970 interview as well as other transcripts of lectures and discussions.
Bernth Lindfors is Professor Emeritus of English and African Literatures, The University of Texas at Austin, and founding editor of Research in AfricanLiteratures. He has written and edited numerous books on African literature, including Folklore in Nigerian Literature (1973), Popular Literatures in Africa (1991), Africans on Stage (1999), Early Soyinka (2008), and Early Achebe (2009).
Land Tenure Security
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00The land issue, as in other parts of Africa, dominates life in Ethiopia, where agriculture accounts for 80 per cent of employment, but despite land reform, progress seems out of reach for many. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in northern Ethiopia from the 1990s onwards, this is a welcome and overdue local analysis of the impact of the land tenure system in the Amhara highlands. Complementing the macro research of international economists, the authors take a detailed look at the impact of the 1975 land reforms for those in North Shäwa, Wälo and Gojam regions, where the peasantry depend upon the land not only for their homes, but their livelihoods. The land tenure systemis commonly thought to have been settled by land certification following the reforms, but the contributors reveal that rather than this leading to periodic redistribution and tenure insecurity, farmers here had 'conditional' private ownership within the framework of ultimate state control. The book also reveals the importance of social differentiation, with the peasant farm closely linked to household processes. In rural economies such as Ethiopia, the land question remains critical for future development, and the book ends by drawing out the implications of the authors' research for policymakers, governments and societies in the Global South.
SVEIN EGE is Associate Professor in African Studies at the Department of Social Anthropology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. His published works include The Promised Land: The Amhara land redistribution of 1997 (1997).
The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa
Regular price $170.00 Save $-170.00What are the fundamental issues, processes, agency and dynamics that shape the political economy of life in modern Africa? In this book, the contributors - experts in anthropology, history, political science, economics, conflict and peace studies, philosophy and language - examine the opportunities and constraints placed on living, livelihoods and sustainable life on the continent. Reflecting on why and how the political economy of life approach is essential for understanding the social process in modern Africa, they engage with the intellectual oeuvre of the influential Africanist economic anthropologist Jane Guyer, who provides an Afterword. The contributors analyse the politicaleconomy of everyday life as it relates to money and currency; migrant labour forces and informal and formal economies; dispossession of land; debt and indebtedness; socio-economic marginality; and the entrenchment of colonial andapartheid pasts.
Wale Adebanwi is the Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at the University of Oxford. He is author of Nation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning (University of Rochester Press).
The Politics of Peacemaking in Africa
Regular price $85.00 Save $-85.00Throws light on the role of several key agents in bringing to an end one of the darkest episodes in post-independence African history.' Ebenezer Obadare, University of Kansas
Until the 1990s, conflict resolution and peacemaking fell to states, the UN and other intergovernmental organizations. In recent times it is non-armed, non-state actors who have had a pivotal role in seeking to resolve civil wars in Africa. This book examines, for the first time, through an examination of the Liberian Civil War in particular, how non-state actors have impacted upon peace processes.
The Liberian Civil War was the first post-Cold War intra-state conflict in West Africa and exemplified the "new wars" breaking out on the continent. The peace process that followed showed how future peacemaking processes might evolve, being not only the first in which a regional economic grouping had a role - in this case ECOWAS - but also involving non-state religious and diaspora actors.
Religious actors, initiators of the Liberian peace process, were mediators, dialogue facilitators, watchdogs and trustees of the entire peace process. Although their efforts were mainly influenced by the desire to fulfil the divine mandate to "tend to the flock", they were also able to regain some of the societal influence that organized religion, especially Christianity, enjoyed during the 158 years of minority Americo-Liberian rule. Diaspora actors' roles ranged from being founders and sponsors of warring factions to providing succour to Liberians back home through remittances and engaging in the peace process.
Babatunde T. Afolabi is a Senior Programme Manager at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD). He had previously worked at the ECOWAS Commission where he was involved in peace processes across West Africa.
Limpopo's Legacy
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00In 2015 and 2016 waves of student protest swept South African campuses under the banner of FeesMustFall. This book brings an historical perspective to the recent risings by analysing regional influences on the ideologies that haveunderpinned South African student politics from the 1960s to the present. The author considers the history of student organization in the Northern Transvaal (today Limpopo Province) and the ways in which students and youth in this relatively isolated area in the north of South Africa have influenced political change on a national scale, over generations. Organized around the stories of several key political actors, the book introduces the reader to critical spaces of political mobilization in the region. Among the most prominent is the University of the North at Turfloop, which played an integral role in building the South African Students' Organisation (SASO) in the late 1960s and propagating Black Consciousness in the 1970s. It became an ideological battleground where Black Consciousness advocates and ANC-affiliates competed for influence in the 1980s. Turfloop has remained politically significant in thepost-apartheid era: it was here in 2007 that Julius Malema stumped for Jacob Zuma's ascension to the presidency during the ANC's pivotal party conference that resulted in the ousting of Thabo Mbeki. The final two chapters address Malema's political ascension in regional branches of the Congress of South African Students (COSAS) and the ANC Youth League.
Anne Heffernan is Assistant Professor in the History of Southern Africa at Durham University and a Research Associate of the History Workshop, University of the Witwatersrand. She is Co-editor of Students Must Rise: Youth Struggle in South Africa Before and Beyond Soweto '76 (Wits University Press, 2016).
Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland): Wits University Press
Creed & Grievance
Regular price $170.00 Save $-170.00In northern Nigeria, high levels of ethnic diversity have coincided with acute polarization between Muslims and Christians, increasingly fuelling violent conflict. The climate of insecurity threatens northern Nigeria's development, accentuates the inequalities between it and the rest of the country, and undermines the attempt to stabilize democracy in the country. Externally, fears have also been expressed that Islamist movements in northern Nigeria form part of a wider network constituting a threat to global peace and security.
Refuting a "clash of civilizations" between Muslims and Christians, the authors of this new study highlight the multiplicity of Muslim and Christian groups contending for influence and relevance, and the doctrinal, political and historical drivers of conflict and violence between and within them. They analyse three of the most contentious issues: the conflicts in Jos; the Boko Haram insurgency; and the challenges of legal pluralism posed by the declaration of full Sharia law in 12 Muslim majority states. Finally, they suggest appropriate and effective policy responses at local, national and international levels, discussing the importance of informal institutions as avenues for peace-building and the complementarities between local and national dynamics in the search for peace.
Abdul Raufu Mustapha is Associate Professor in African Politics, University of Oxford.
David Ehrhardt is Assistant Professor of International Development at Leiden University College.
Companion volume: Sects & Social Disorder: Muslim Identities &Conflict in Northern Nigeria edited by Abdul Raufu Mustapha (James Currey 2014)
Nigeria: Premium Times Books
Township Violence and the End of Apartheid
Regular price $85.00 Save $-85.00In 1993 South Africa state president F.W. de Klerk and African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime". Yet, while bothdeserved the plaudits they received for entering the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid, the four years of negotiations preceding the April 1994 elections, known as the transition era, were not "peaceful": they were the bloodiest of the entire apartheid era, with an estimated 14,000 deaths attributed to politically related violence.
This book studies, for the first time, the conflicts between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party that took place in South Africa's industrial heartland surrounding Johannesburg. Exploring these events through the perceptions and memories of combatants and non-combatants from war-torn areas, along with security force members, politicians and violence monitors, offers new possibilities for understanding South Africa's turbulent transition. Challenging the prevailing narrative which attributes the bulk of the violence to a joint state security force and IFP assault against ANC supporters, the author argues for a more expansive approach that incorporates the aggression of ANC militants, the intersection between criminal and political violence, and especially clashes between groups alignedwith the ANC.
Gary Kynoch is Associate Professor of History at Dalhousie University. He has written one previous book, We are Fighting the World: A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947-1999 (OhioUniversity Press, 2005).
Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland): Wits University Press
ALT 34 Diaspora & Returns in Fiction
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00This 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
Hawks and Doves in Sudan's Armed Conflict
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00WINNER OF THE 2019 AIDOO-SNYDER BOOK PRIZE
Al-Hakkamat Baggara women hold an instrumental position in rural Sudan, wielding agency, social and political power. This book uncovers their significant, but widely overlooked, role during the war in Darfur from the 1970s to today's continuing conflict. The author examines the influence they exercised through composing and reciting poems and songs, informal speech and other symbolic acts, and analysestheir impact in the social and political domains. Challenging the pervasive portrayal of women as natural peacebuilders and their roles as passive and submissive, the author highlights how Sudan's state government co-opted al-Hakkamat Baggara women to lobby on its behalf, to rally for war and to advocate for peace. Understanding how they can contribute to the resolution and resettlement processes is vital to sustainable reconciliation and post-conflict transformation of the unstable state.
Suad M.E. Musa (PhD) is a Freelance Consultant on gender and women's issues. She worked with the government of Sudan and with CSOs and INGOs in the Horn of Africa and Britain. She alsoworked as Assistant Professor of Sociology at Qatar University.
Borders and Borderlands as Resources in the Horn of Africa
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00State 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.
The New Black Middle Class in South Africa
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.002016 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title
The "rise of the black middle class" is one of the most visible aspects of post-apartheid society in South Africa. Yet while it has been a major actor in the country's democratic reshaping, analysis of its role has been all but lacking. Rather, the image presented by the media has been of "black diamonds", consumers of the products of advanced industrial economies, and of corrupt "tenderpreneurs" who use their political connections to obtain contracts. This book seeks to complicate that picture with a much-needed analysis that recounts its historical development in colonial society prior to 1994, before examining the size, shape andstructure of the new black middle class in contemporary South Africa and its relation to its counterparts in the Global South.
Roger Southall is Professor Emeritus in Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand.
Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland): Jacana
Village Matters
Regular price $95.00 Save $-95.00Kabylia is a Berber-speaking, densely populated mountainous region east of Algiers, that has played an important part in Algerian pre- and post-independence politics, and continues to be troublesome to central government. But 'Kabylia' is also an ideal, shaped and shared by a variety of intellectual trends both in Algeria and in France.
Kabylia was seen by sociologically minded nineteenth-century French authors as a model of primitive democracy and became central to their debates about good government, the nature of 'race', nationhood, and the social bond. These qualities have by now largely been appropriated by Kabyles themselves, and have become central to Kabyle self-images discussed on numerous websites run by Kabyle emigrants in France as much as by local parties and associations in Kabylia itself.
Central to this image is the Kabyles' attachment to their home villages. But what exactly makes a village a village? And how can this emphasis on communal autonomy be articulated within a modern nation-state? These are the questions this book tries to answer through an in-depth case study of one particular village, analysing the contemporary debates that animate it, and tracing its history through the French conquest and occupation, the Algerian war of independence, and the political turmoil, including the challenge of Islamist politics, that followed independence.
The 'village', as much as Kabylia as a whole, emerges as a place made by its internal contradictions, and that can only be understood with reference to the position it occupies within the various intellectual, political, economic and cultural 'world-systems' of which it is part.
Judith Scheele is a Research Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford
Electricity in Africa
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00No country has managed to develop beyond a subsistence economy without ensuring at least minimum access to electricity for the majority of its population. Yet many sub-Saharan African countries struggle to meet demand. Why is this, and what can be done to reduce energy poverty and further Africa's development? Examining the politics and processes surrounding electricity infrastructure, provision and reform, the author provides an overview of historical andcontemporary debates about access in the sub-continent, and explores the shifting role and influence of national governments and of multilateral agencies in energy reform decisions. He describes a challenging political environment for electricity supply, with African governments becoming increasingly frustrated with the rules and the processes of multilateral donors. Civil society also began to question reform choices, and governments in turn looked to new development partners, such as China, to chart a fresh path of energy transformation.
Drawing on over fifteen years of research on Uganda, which has one of the lowest levels of access to electricity in Africa and has struggled to construct several, large hydroelectric dams on the Nile, Gore argues that there is a critical need to recognize how the changing political and social context in African countries, and globally, has affected the capacity tofulfil national energy goals, minimize energy poverty and transform economies.
Christopher Gore is Associate Professor, Department of Politics and Public Administration, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.
OA EDITION
This book has been made available as Open Access through the support of the Office of the Dean, Faculty of Arts, Ryerson University; Ryerson International; and the Department of Politics and Public Administration, Ryerson University.
Christopher Okigbo 1930-67
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Christopher 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)
Children on the Move in Africa
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00Children 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; the role 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 critical issue.
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 Perspectives in 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.
Brazil-Africa Relations
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00When 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).
The Eritrean National Service
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00The Eritrean National Service (ENS) lies at the core of the post-independence state, not only supplying its military, but affecting every aspect of the country's economy, its social services, its public sector and its politics. Over half the workforce are forcibly enrolled into it by the government, driving the country's youth to escape national service by seeking employment and asylum elsewhere. Yet how did the ENS, which began during the 1961-91 liberation struggle as part of the idea of the "common good" - in which individual interests were sacrificed in pursuit of the grand scheme of independence and the country's development - degenerate into forced labour and a modern form ofslavery? And why, when Eritrea no longer faces existential threat, does the government continue to demand such service from its citizens?
This book provides for the first time an in-depth and critical scrutiny of the ENS'sachievements and failures and its overarching impact on the social fabric of Eritrea. The author discusses the historical backdrop to the ENS and the rationales underlying it; its goals and objectives; its transformative effects,as well as its impact on the country's defence capability, national unity, national identity construction and nation-building. He also analyses the extent to which the national service functions as an effective mechanism of transmitting the core values of the liberation struggle to the conscripts and through them to the rest of country's population. Finally, the book assesses whether the core aims and objectives of the ENS proclaimed by various governmentshave been or are in the process of being accomplished and, drawing on the testimony of the hitherto voiceless conscripts themselves, its impact on their lives and livelihoods.
GAIM KIBREAB is Professor of Research andDirector of Refugee Studies, School of Law and Social Science, London South Bank University. He is the author of Eritrea: A Dream Deferred (James Currey, 2009) and People on the Edge in the Horn (James Currey, 1996).
A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour
Regular price $45.00 Save $-45.00Julie 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
Writing Spatiality in West Africa
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00Examines the ways in which space and spatial structures have been constituted, contested and re-imagined in Francophone and Anglophone West African literature since the early 1950s.
From the "imaginative geographies" of conquest identified by Edward Said to the very real and material institution of territorial borders, regions and geographical amalgamations, the control, administration and integration of space are known to have played a central and essential role in the creation of contemporary "Africa". Space continues to be a site of conflict, from separatist struggles to the distribution of resources to the continued absorption ofAfrican territories into the uneven geographies of global capitalism.
In this book, Madhu Krishnan examines the ways in which the anxieties and conflicts engendered by these phenomena are registered in a broad set of literarytexts from British and French West Africa. By placing these novels in dialogue with a range of archival material such as territorial planning documents, legislative papers, records of liberation movements and development projects, this book reveals the submerged articulations between spatial planning and literary expression, generating new readings of canonical West African texts as well as analyses of otherwise under-researched material.
MadhuKrishnan is a Senior Lecturer in 20th/21st Century Postcolonial Writing in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. She is author of Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications(2014) and Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location (2018)