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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.
Sudan Looks East
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99By successfully turning to China, Malaysia and India from the mid-1990s, amidst civil war and political isolation, Khartoum's 'Look East' policy transformed Sudan's economy and foreign relations. Sudan, in turn, has been a key theatre of Chinese, Indian and Malaysian overseas energy investment. What began as economic engagements born of pragmatic necessity later became politicized within Sudan and without, resulting in global attention.
Despite its importance, widespread sustained interest and continuing political controversy, there is no single volume publication examining the rise and nature of Chinese, Malaysian and Indian interests in Sudan, their economic and political consequences, and role in Sudan's foreign relations. Addressing this gap, this book provides a groundbreaking analysis of Sudan's 'Look East' policy. It offers the first substantive treatment of a subject of fundamental significancewithin Sudan that, additionally, has become a globally prominent dimension of its changing international politics.
Daniel Large is research director of the Africa Asia Centre, Royal African Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and founding director of the Rift Valley Institute's digital Sudan Open Archive.
Luke A. Patey is a Research Fellow at the Danish Institute for International Studies.
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
Remaking Mutirikwi
Regular price $39.95 Save $-39.95Finalist for the African Studies Association 2016 Melville J. Herskovits Award
The Mutirikwi river was dammed in the early 1960s to make Zimbabwe's second largest lake. This was a key moment in the Europeanisation of Mutirikwi's landscapes, which had begun with colonial land appropriations in the 1890s. But African landscapes were not obliterated by the dam. They remained active and affective. At independence in 1980, local clans reasserted ancestral land claims in a wave of squatting around Lake Mutirikwi. They were soon evicted as the new government asserted control over the remaking of Mutirikwi's landscapes. Amid fast-track land reform in the 2000s, the same people returned again to reclaim the land. Many returned to the graves and ruins of past lives forged in the very substance of the soil, and even incoming war veterans and new farmers appealed to autochthonous knowledge to make safe theirresettlements. This book explores those reoccupations and the complex contests over landscape, water and belonging they provoked. The 2000s may have heralded a long-delayed re-Africanisation of Lake Mutirikwi, but just as African presence had survived the dam, so white presence remains active and affective through Rhodesian-era discourses, place-names and the materialities of ruined farms, contour ridging and old irrigation schemes. Through lenses focused on the political materialities of water and land, this book reveals how the remaking of Mutirikwi's landscapes has always been deeply entangled with changing strategies of colonial and postcolonial statecraft. It highlights howthe traces of different pasts intertwine in contemporary politics through the active, enduring yet emergent, forms and substances of landscape.
Joost Fontein is Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa.
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).
Achebe and Friends at Umuahia
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99The author meticulously contextualises the experiences of Achebe and his peers as students at Government College Umuahia and argues for a re-assessment of this influential group of Nigerian writers in relation to the literary culture fostered by the school and its tutors.
Maps the literary awakening of the young intellectuals who became known as Nigeria's "first-generation" of postcolonial writers: Chinua Achebe, Elechi Amadi, Chike Momah, Christopher Okigbo, Chukwuemeka Ike, Gabriel Okara, Ken Saro-Wiwa and I.C. Aniebo. The author provides fresh perspectives on Postcolonial and World literary processes, colonial education in British Africa, literary representations of colonialism and Chinua Achebe's seminal position in African literature. She demonstrates how each of the writers used this very particular education to shape their own visions of the world and examines the implications for African literature as a whole.
Supplementary material is available online of some of the original sources. See: http://boybrew.co/9781847011091_2
Terri Ochiagha is a Teaching Fellow in the History of Modern Africa at King's College, London and a Honorary Research Fellowat the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham. She was previously a British Academy Newton Fellow at the University of Sussex.
The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars
Regular price $36.95 Save $-36.95Sudan's post-independence history has been dominated by political and civil strife. Most commentators have attributed the country's recurring civil war either to an age-old racial divide between Arabs and Africans, or to recent colonially constructed inequalities. This book attempts a more complex analysis, briefly examining the historical, political, economic and social factors which have contributed to periodic outbreaks of violence between the state and its peripheries. In tracing historical continuities, it outlines the essential differences between the modern Sudan's first civil war in the 1960s and today, including an analysis of the escalation of the Darfur war, implementation of the 2005 peace agreement and implications of the Southern referendum in 2011 and the new war in Sudan's new south and South Sudan. The author also looks at the series of minor civil wars generated by, and contained within, the major conflict, as well as the regional and international factors - including humanitarian aid - which have exacerbated civil violence. This introduction is aimed at students of North-East Africa, and of conflict and ethnicity. It is essential reading for those in aid and international organizations who need a straightforward analytical survey which will help them assess the prospects for a lasting peace in Sudan.
Douglas H. Johnson is an independent scholar and former international expert on the Abyei Boundaries Commission.
Writing Spatiality in West Africa
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99Examines 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.
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
Zimbabwe's Land Reform
Regular price $36.95 Save $-36.95Ten years after the land invasions of 2000, this book provides the first full account of the consequences of these dramatic events. This land reform overturned a century-old pattern of land use, one dominated by a small group of large-scale commercial farmers, many of whom were white. But what replaced it?
This book challenges five myths through the examination of the field data from Masvingo province:
Myth 1 Zimbabwean land reform has been a total failure
Myth 2 The beneficiaries of Zimbabwean land reform have been largely political 'cronies'
Myth 3 There is no investment in the new resettlements
Myth 4 Agriculture is in complete ruins creating chronic food insecurity
Myth 5 The rural economy has collapsed
By challenging these myths, and suggesting alternative policy narratives, this book presents the story as it has been observed on the ground: warts and all. What comes through very strongly is the complexity, the differences, almost farm by farm: there is no single, simple story of the Zimbabwe land reform as sometimes assumed by press reports, political commentators, or indeedmuch academic study.
Ian Scoones, Professorial Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, with co-authors Nelson Marongwe, Blasio Mavedzenge, Jacob Mahenehene, Felix Murimbarimba and Chrispen Sukume.
Zimbabwe: Weaver Press
Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): Jacana
Faith, Power and Family
Regular price $36.95 Save $-36.95Finalist for the 2019 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for Best Book in Africana Religions
Between the two World Wars, the radical innovations of African Catholic and Protestant evangelists repurposed Christianity to challenge local and foreign governments operating in the French-administered League of Nations Mandate of Cameroon. Walker-Said explores how African believers transformed foreign missionary societies into profoundly local religious institutions with indigenous ecclesiastical hierarchies and devotional social and charitable networks,devising novel authority structures to control resources and govern cultural and social life. She analyses how African Christian religious leaders transformed social and labour relations, contesting forced labour and authoritarian decentralized governance as threats to family stability and community integrity. Inspired by Catholic and Protestant doctrines on conjugal complementarity and social equilibrium, as well as by local spiritual and charismatic movements, African Christians re-evaluated and renovated family and community authority structures to address the devastating changes colonialism wrought in the private sphere. The history of these reform-minded believers reveals howfamily intimacies and kinship ties constituted the force of community resistance to oppression and also demonstrates the relevance of faith in the midst of a tumultuous series of forces arising out of the colonial situation peculiar to Cameroon.
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
African Theatre 13: Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Wole Soyinka
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong'o are the pre-eminent playwrights of West and East Africa respectively and their work has been hugely influential across the continent. This volume features directors' experiences of recent productions of their plays, the voices of actors and collaborators who have worked with the playwrights, and also provides a digest of their theatrical output. Contributors provide new readings of Ngugi and Soyinka's classic texts, and astimulating new approach for students of English, Theatre and African studies.
The playscript for this volume is a previously unpublished radio play by Wole Soyinka entitled A Rain of Stones, first broadcast onBBC Radio 4 in 2002.
Volume Editors: MARTIN BANHAM & FEMI OSOFISAN Guest Editor: KIMANI NJOGU
Series Editors: Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies, University of Leeds; James Gibbs,Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West of England; Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama at the University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds; Yvette Hutchison, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick
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).
Ghosts of Kanungu
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99On 17 March 2000 several hundred members of a charismatic Christian sect, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (MRTC), burnt to death in the group's headquarters in the Southwest Ugandan village of Kanungu. Days later the Ugandan police discovered a series of mass graves containing over 400 bodies on various other properties belonging to the sect. Was this mass suicide or mass murder?
Based on eight years of historical andethnographic research, Ghosts of Kanungu provides a comprehensive and scholarly account of the MRTC and of the events leading up to the inferno. It argues that none of these events can be understood without reference to abroader social history of Southwestern Uganda during the twentieth century, in which anti-colonial movements, Catholic White Fathers missionaries, colonial relocation schemes, the breakdown of the Ugandan state, post-war reconstruction, the onset of HIV/AIDS, and the transformation of the regional Nyabingi fertility cult into a Marian church with worldwide connections, all played their part.
RICHARD VOKES is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Adelaide, Australia
Uganda: Fountain Publishers (PB)
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)
Beyond Religious Tolerance
Regular price $26.99 Save $-26.99Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since 9/11, religion has become an increasingly important factor of personal and group identification. Based on an African case study, this book calls for new ways of thinking about diversity that go "beyond religious tolerance". Focusing on the predominantly Muslim Yoruba town of Ede, the authors challenge the assumption that religious difference automatically leads to conflict: in south-west Nigeria, Muslims,Christians and traditionalists have co-existed largely peacefully since the early twentieth century. In some contexts, Ede's citizens emphasise the importance and significance of religious difference, and the need for tolerance.But elsewhere they refer to religious boundaries in passing, or even celebrate and transcend religious divisions.
Drawing on detailed ethnographic and historical research, survey work, oral histories and poetry by UK- and Nigeria- based researchers, the book examines how Ede's citizens experience religious difference in their everyday lives. It examines the town's royal history and relationship with the deity Sàngó, its old Islamic compounds and itsChristian institutions, as well as marriage and family life across religious boundaries, to illustrate the multiplicity of religious practices in the life of the town and its citizens and to suggest an alternative approach to religious difference.
INSA NOLTE is Reader in African Studies, University of Birmingham, and Visiting Research Professor, Osun State University, Osogbo. OLUKOYA OGEN is Former Provost, Adeyemi College of Education, Ondo,Professor of History, Osun State University, Osogbo, and Visiting Senior Research Fellow, University of Birmingham. REBECCA JONES, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Birmingham, is author of At the Crossroads: NigerianTravel Writing and Literary Culture in Yoruba and English, published by James Currey in 2019. All three editors worked on the ERC project 'Knowing Each Other: Everyday Religious Encounters, Social Identities and Tolerance in Southwest Nigeria'. Nigeria: Adeyemi College Academic Press (paperback)
South Africa - The Present as History
Regular price $26.99 Save $-26.99In 1994, the first non-racial elections in South Africa brought Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress to office; elections since have confirmed the ANC's hold, both popular and legitimate, on power. Yet, at the same time, South Africa has one of the highest rates of protest and dissent in the world - underscored by the police shooting of 34 striking miners at Marikana in 2012 - regions of deep poverty and environmental degradation, rising inequality and high unemployment rates. This book looks at this paradox by examining the precise character of the post-apartheid state, and the roots of the hope that something better than the semi-liberation that the ANC has presided over must not be long delayed - both within the ANC itself and within the broader society of South Africa.
The authors present a history of South Africa from earliest times, with today's post-apartheid society interpreted andunderstood in the context of and through the lens of its earlier history. Following the introduction, which offers an analytical background to the narrative that follows, they track the course of South African history: from its origins to apartheid in the 1970; through the crisis and transition of the 1970s and 1980s to the historic deal-making of 1994 that ended apartheid; to its recent history from Mandela to Marikana, with increasing signs of social unrest and class conflict. Finally, the authors reflect on the present situation in South Africa with reference to the historical patterns that have shaped contemporary realities and the possibility of a 'next liberation struggle'.
Shortlisted for the 2014 Tamara and Isaac Deutscher Prize
John S. Saul is Professor Emeritus at York University (Canada). Patrick Bond is Senior Professor of Development Studies and Director of the Centre forCivil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Durban).
Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland & Botswana): Jacana
ALT 6 Poetry in Africa: African Literature Today
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99First published in 1973, this volume of the series includes a tribute from the Editor to the poet Christopher Okigbo who died fighting in the Biafran War in 1967, and two articles on his poetry. Also discussed are Leopold Senghor,Dennis Brutus, Wole Soyinka, Lenrie Peters and Ferdinand Oyono. The contributions analyse East African poetry, French Algerian poetry, Zulu poetry, and "Rara" chants in Yoruba oral poetry. Donatus I. Nwoga writes a general article on modern African poetry. The new books reviewed include Mazisi Kunene's Zulu Poems and Okot p'Bitek's Two Songs: "Song of Prisoner" and "Song of Malaya" and Taban lo Liyong's Another Nigger Dead.
The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England
Regular price $170.00 Save $-170.00Cruciform brooches were large and decorative items of jewellery, frequently used to pin together women's garments in pre-Christian northwest Europe. Characterised by the strange bestial visages that project from the feet of thesedress and cloak fasteners, cruciform brooches were especially common in eastern England during the 5th and 6th centuries AD. For this reason, archaeologists have long associated them with those shadowy tribal originators of the English: the Angles of the Migration period.
This book provides a multifaceted, holistic and contextual analysis of more than 2,000 Anglo-Saxon cruciform brooches. It offers a critical examination of identity in Early Medievalsociety, suggesting that the idea of being Anglian in post-Roman Britain was not a primordial, tribal identity transplanted from northern Germany, but was at least partly forged through the repeated, prevalent use of dress and material culture. Additionally, the particular women that were buried with cruciform brooches, and indeed their very funerals, played an important role in the process. These ideas are explored through a new typology and an updated chronology for cruciform brooches, alongside considerations of their production, exchange and use. The author also examines their geographical distribution through time and their most common archaeological contexts: the inhumation and cremation cemeteries of early Anglo-Saxon England.
Dr Toby Martin is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford University.
Faith, Power and Family
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Finalist for the 2019 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for Best Book in Africana Religions
Between the two World Wars, the radical innovations of African Catholic and Protestant evangelists repurposed Christianity to challenge local and foreign governments operating in the French-administered League of Nations Mandate of Cameroon. Walker-Said explores how African believers transformed foreign missionary societies into profoundly local religious institutions with indigenous ecclesiastical hierarchies and devotional social and charitable networks,devising novel authority structures to control resources and govern cultural and social life. She analyses how African Christian religious leaders transformed social and labour relations, contesting forced labour and authoritarian decentralized governance as threats to family stability and community integrity. Inspired by Catholic and Protestant doctrines on conjugal complementarity and social equilibrium, as well as by local spiritual and charismatic movements, African Christians re-evaluated and renovated family and community authority structures to address the devastating changes colonialism wrought in the private sphere. The history of these reform-minded believers reveals howfamily intimacies and kinship ties constituted the force of community resistance to oppression and also demonstrates the relevance of faith in the midst of a tumultuous series of forces arising out of the colonial situation peculiar to Cameroon.
Writing the Nigeria-Biafra War
Regular price $190.00 Save $-190.00The Nigeria-Biafra War lasted from 6 July 1966 to 15 January 1970, during which time the post-colonial Nigerian state fought to bring the South-Eastern region, which had seceded as the State or Republic of Biafra, back into the newly independent but ideologically divided nation. This volume discusses the trends and methodologies in the civil war writings, both fictional and non-fictional, and is the first to analyse in detail the intellectual and historical circumstances that helped to shape these often contentious texts.
The recent high-profile fictional account by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Half of a Yellow Sun was preceded by works by Ken Saro-Wiwa, Elechi Amadi, Kole Omotoso, Wole Soyinka, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Chukwuemeka Ike and Chris Abani, all of which strongly convey the horrific human cost of the war on individuals and their communities. The non-fictional accounts, including Chinua Achebe's last work There Was a Country, are biographies, personal accounts and essays on the causes and course of the war, its humanitarian crises and the collaboration of foreign nations. The contributors examine writers' and protagonists' use of contemporary published texts as a means of continued resistance and justification of the war, the problems of objectivity encountered in memoirs, and how authors' backgrounds and sources determine thekinds of biases that influenced their interpretations, including the gendered divisions in Nigeria-Biafra War scholarship and sources. By initiating a dialogue on the civil war literature, this volume engages a much-needed discourse on the problems confronting a culturally diverse post-war Nigeria.
Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University ofTexas at Austin; Ogechukwu Ezekwem is a PhD student in the Department of History, University of Texas at Austin.
Lost Nationalism
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00A lively account of the 1924 Revolution in Sudan and the way in which the colonial situation has affected its representation, a case in point inthe histories of nationalist anti-colonial movements in Africa and the Middle East.
The 1924 Revolution was a watershed in Sudanese history, the first episode of anti-colonial resistance in which a nationalist ideology was explicitly used, and part of a global wave of anti-colonial movements after the First WorldWar that can be seen as the "spring of the colonial nations".
This detailed account of the uprising, and its eventual failure, explores the cosmopolitan nationalism embraced by the White Flag League, the movement that sparked the revolution, and its ability to attract people from diverse origins, classes and professions. It examines the international genesis of the movement; the strategies put in place to spread it in different areas of Sudan and among different groups; the movement's inclusive ideology and its definition of the Sudanese nation, as well as the limitations to its inclusiveness; and the way in which this episode reveals deeper questions relating to origins, social hierarchies and power. The book also unravels the complex history of the memory of 1924, the politics of its representation and the underlying power struggles that saw 1924 largely lost from the historical record.
ElenaVezzadini is a historian of modern Sudan affiliated to the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, University of Bergen, and Institut des Mondes Africains, Paris.
Ploughing New Ground
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00Winner of the Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize to the author of the best book on East African Studies, 2018.
In October 2016, the Ethiopian administration declared a State of Emergency in response to anti-Government demonstrations and mass riots. While the Government claimed the riots stemmed from subversive activities among large diasporic populations in the West, the evidence suggests that they were provoked by widespread internal dissatisfaction.Land deals by the Government with foreign investors, the building of vast hydroelectric dams, sugar estates and industry parks, and urban sprawl have put pressure on agricultural, rural areas. Today, dispossessions, drought and social unrest surround fears of the worst food shortages in decades. Examining these developments in Ethiopia's lake region, the author shows how transformations in state-society relations and the organization of production and exchange have impacted on a population of smallholder farmers for whom agriculture is not only the mainstay of the economy but a way of life.
Getnet Bekele is Associate Professor of History at Oakland University, MI, wherehe teaches African History and the Environmental and Economic History of Africa and the Global South.
Volunteer Economies
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Across Africa today, as development activities animate novel forms of governance, new social actors are emerging, among them the volunteer. Yet, where work and resources are limited, volunteer practices have repercussions that raise contentious ethical issues. What has been the real impact of volunteers economically, politically and in society? The interdisciplinary experts in this collection examine the practices of volunteers - both international and local - and ideologies of volunteerism. They show the significance of volunteerism to processes of social and economic transformation, and political projects of national development and citizenship, as well as to individual aspirations in African societies.
These case studies - from South Africa, Lesotho, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Sierra Leone and Malawi - examine everyday experiences of volunteerism and trajectories of voluntary work, trace its broaderhistorical, political and economic implications, and situate African experiences of voluntary labour within global exchanges and networks of resources, ideas and political technologies. Offering insights into changing configurations of work, citizenship, development and social mobility, the authors offer new perspectives on the relations between labour, identity and social value in Africa.
Ruth Prince is Associate Professor in Medical Anthropology at the University of Oslo; with her co-author Wenzel Geissler, she won the 2010 Amaury Talbot Prize for their book The Land is Dying: Contingency, Creativity and Conflict in Western Kenya. Hannah Brown is a lecturer in Anthropology at Durham University.
Mandela's Kinsmen
Regular price $24.99 Save $-24.99At a time of increasing regional fractures within the African National Congress, Mandela's Kinsmen provides a timely study of South Africa's nationalist elite. Whilst mass protests against apartheid were forged in the crucible of township and trade union politics, Gibbs focuses on Mandela's fraught relationships to his kinsmen inside apartheid's foremost "tribal" Bantustan, the Transkei. He uncovers the enduring connections between the nationalist elites and the chieftaincy areas, and argues the enduring institutional legacies of the Bantustans continue to shape post-apartheid South Africa.
Timothy Gibbs is a Lecturer in African History, University College London.
Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland & Botswana): Jacana
Afro-European Trade in the Atlantic World
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00From 1550 to colonial partition in the mid-1880s, trade was key to Afro-European relations on the western Slave Coast (the coastal areas of modern Togo and parts of what are now Ghana and Benin). This book looks at the commercialrelations of two states which played a crucial role in the Atlantic slave trade as well as the trade in ivory and agricultural produce: Hula, known to European traders as Grand Popo (now in Benin) and Ge, known as Little Popo (nowin Togo). Situated between the Gold Coast to the west and the eastern Slave Coast to the east, this region was an important supplier of provisions for Europeans and the enslaved Africans they purchased. Also, due to its positionin the lagoon system, it facilitated communication along the coast between the trading companies' headquarters on the western Gold Coast and their factories on the eastern Slave Coast, particularly at Ouidah, the Slave Coast's major slave port. In the 19th century, when the trade at more established ports was disrupted by the men-of-war of the British anti-slave trade squadron, the western Slave Coast became a hot-spot of illegal slave trading.
Providing a detailed reconstruction of political and commercial developments in the western Slave coast, including the transition from the slave trade to legitimate commerce, this book also reveals the region's position in the wider trans-Atlantic trade network and how cross-cultural partnerships were negotiated; the trade's impact on African coastal "middlemen" communities; and the relative importance of local and global factors for the history of a region or community.
Silke Strickrodt is Research Fellow in Colonial History, German Historical Institute London. She is co-editor (with Robin Law and Suzanne Schwarz) of Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa (James Currey, 2013).
Puritanism and the Pursuit of Happiness
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00The traditional view of puritans is that they were killjoys - serious, austere, gloomy people who closed theatres and abolished Christmas. This book, based on extensive original research, presents a different view. Focusing on both the writings of the leading Independent divine, Ralph Venning, and also on his pastoral work in the 1640s and 1650s when he was successively chaplain to the Tower of London and vicar of St Olave's, Southwark, the book revealsa much neglected strand of puritan theology. This emphasised the importance of inner happiness and the development of a personal piety which, the author argues, was similar in its nature to medieval mysticism, not that differentfrom the piety promoted by earlier metaphysical preachers, and not at all driven by the predestinarian ideas usually associated with puritans, ideas liable to induce a sense of helplessness and despair. In addition, the book reassesses the role of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where Venning was educated, in shaping puritan thought, discusses Max Weber's ideas about puritanism and capitalism especially in relation to recreation and leisure activities, and demonstrates that Venning's strand of puritanism favoured toleration, moderation and church unity to a much greater degree than is usually associated with puritans.
Stephen Bryn Roberts was awarded his doctorate from theUniversity of Aberdeen and has been Adjunct Lecturer in Early Modern Church History at International Christian College, Glasgow since 2011.
The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa
Regular price $39.95 Save $-39.95What 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.
Africa's Land Rush
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99Africa has been at the centre of a "land grab" in recent years, with investors lured by projections of rising food prices, growing demand for "green" energy, and cheap land and water rights. But such land is often also used or claimed through custom by communities. What does this mean for Africa? In what ways are rural people's lives and livelihoods being transformed as a result? And who will control its land and agricultural futures?
The case studies explore the processes through which land deals are being made; the implications for agrarian structure, rural livelihoods and food security; and the historical context of changing land uses, revealing that these land grabs may resonate with, even resurrect, forms of large-scale production associated with the colonial and early independence eras. The book depicts the striking diversity of deals and dealers: white Zimbabwean farmers in northern Nigeria,Dutch and American joint ventures in Ghana, an Indian agricultural company in Ethiopia's hinterland, European investors in Kenya's drylands and a Canadian biofuel company on its coast, South African sugar agribusiness in Tanzania's southern growth corridor, in Malawi's "Greenbelt" and in southern Mozambique, and white South African farmers venturing onto former state farms in the Congo.
Ruth Hall is Associate Professor at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa; Ian Scoones is a Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex and Director of the ESRC STEPS Centre; Dzodzi Tsikata is Associate Professor at the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) at the University of Ghana, Legon.
Sects & Social Disorder
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00Nigerian society has long been perceived as divided along religious lines, between Muslims and Christians, but alongside this there is an equally important polarization within the Muslim population in beliefs, rituals and sectarian allegiance. This book highlights the crucial issue of intra-Muslim pluralism and conflict in Nigeria.
Conflicting interpretations of texts and contexts have led to fragmentation within northern Nigerian Islam, and differentIslamic sects have often resorted to violence against each other in pursuit of 'the right path'. The doctrinal justification of violence was first perfected against other Muslim groups, before being extended to non-Muslims: conflict between Muslim groups therefore preceded the violence between Muslims and Christians. It will be impossible to manage the relationship between the latter, without addressing the schisms within the Muslim community itself.
Nigeria: Premium Times Books
Abdul Raufu Mustapha is Associate Professor in African Politics, University of Oxford. His publications include (co-edited with Lindsey Whitfield) Turning Points in African Democracy (James Currey, 2009).
Forthcoming: Creed & Grievance: Muslims, Christians & Society in Northern Nigeria edited by Abdul Raufu Mustapha and David Ehrhardt.
African Local Knowledge & Livestock Health
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Understanding local knowledge has become a central academic project among those interested in Africa and developing countries. In South Africa, land reform is gathering pace and African people hold an increasing proportion of thelivestock in the country. Animal health has become a central issue for rural development. Yet African veterinary medical knowledge remains largely unrecorded. This book seeks to fill that gap. It captures for the first time the diversity, as well as the limits, of a major sphere of local knowledge.
Beinart and Brown argue that African approaches to animal health rest largely in environmental and nutritional explanations. They explore the widespread use of plants as well as biomedicines for healing. While rural populations remain concerned about supernatural threats, and many men think that women can harm their cattle, the authors challenge current ideas on the modernisation of witchcraft. They examine more ambient forms of supernatural danger expressed in little-known concepts such as mohato and umkhondo. They take the reader into the homesteads and kraals of rural black South Africans and engage with a key rural concern - vividly reporting the ideas of livestock owners. This is groundbreaking research which will have important implications for analyses of local knowledge more generally as well as effectivestate interventions and animal treatments in South Africa.
William Beinart is Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, African Studies Centre, University of Oxford; Karen Brown is an ESRC Research Fellow at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford.
Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland): Wits University Press
The Eritrean National Service
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99The 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.
ALT 8 Drama in Africa: African Literature Today
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99First published in 1976, this volume has a focus on African drama and carries an introductory article by Ghanaian poet and playwright J.C. de Graft. There are three articles on Wole Soyinka's work as a playwright and an article onthe dramatic works of Ama Ata Aidoo, as well as an article on four dramatists from East Africa. The dilemmas of the popular playwright are discussed in an article on two Zambian writers and Eldred Jones's Editorial gives examplesfrom Sierra Leone of the challenges faced by more "popular" playwrights and those with the more "literary" concerns of publication.
Conflict and Security in Africa
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99More than any other part of the globe, Africa has become associated with conflict, insecurity and human rights atrocities. In the popular imagination and the media, overpopulation, environmental degradation and ethnic hatred dominate accounts of African violence, while in academic and policy-making circles, conflict and insecurity have also come to occupy centre stage, with resource-hungry warlords and notions of 'greed' and 'grievance' playing key explanatory roles. Since the attacks of 9/11, there has also been mounting concern that the continent's so-called 'ungoverned spaces' will provide safe havens for terrorists intent on destroying Western civilization.
The Review of African Political Economy has engaged extensively with issues of conflict and security, both analysing on-going conflicts and often challenging predominant modes of explanation and interpretation. This Review of African Political Economy Reader provides a timely, comprehensive and critical contribution to contemporary debates about conflict and security on the continent. The first section, covers some of the continent's main post-Cold War conflicts and demonstrates their global connections. The articles also discuss the so-called 'resource curse', as well as the global arms trade, and reveal the complexities of the relationship between the economic and the political. The second section focuses on security as part of post-Cold War global governance, and discusses the effects of liberal peace-building as well as the link between development assistance and the 'war on terror'. The final section examines life as it continues in conditions of war and shows how insecurity reconfigures urban space, transforms social order, identities and authority.
Rita Abrahamsen is Professor in the Graduate School of Publicand International Affairs, University of Ottawa, Canada
Published in association with ROAPE
ROAPE African Readers
Series Editors: Tunde Zack-Williams & Ray Bush
Thomas Morley: Elizabethan Music Publisher
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00The Renaissance composer and organist Thomas Morley (c.1557-1602) is best known as a leading member of the English Madrigal School, but he also built a significant business as a music publisher. This book looks at Morley's pioneering contribution to music publishing in England, inspired by an established music printing culture in continental Europe. A student of William Byrd, Morley had a conventional education and early career as a cathedral musician both in Norwich and at St Paul's cathedral. Morley lived amongst the traders, artisans and gentry of England's major cities at a time when a market for recreational music was beginning to emerge. His entrepreneurial drive combinedwith an astute assessment of his market resulted in a successful and influential publishing business. The turning point came with a visit to the Low Countries in 1591, which gave him the opportunity to see a thriving music printpublication business at first hand.
Contemporary records provide a detailed picture of the processes involved in early modern music publishing and enable the construction of a financial model of Morley's business. Morley died too young to reap the full rewards of his enterprise, but his success inspired the publication by his contemporaries of a significant corpus of readily available recreational music for the public. Critical to Morley's successwas his identification of the sort of music, notably the Italianate lighter style of madrigal, that would appeal to amateur musicians. Surviving copies of the original prints show that this music continued to be used for severalgenerations: new editions in modern notation started to appear from the mid eighteenth century onwards, suggesting that Morley truly had the measure of the market for recreational music. Thomas Morley: Elizabethan Music Publisher will be of particular interest to scholars and students of renaissance music, as well as the history of music publishing and print.
Tessa Murray is an honorary research fellow at the University of Birmingham.
Violent Conversion
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00There has been an extraordinary growth in Pentecostalism in Africa, with Brazilian Pentecostals establishing new transnational Christian connections, initiating widespread changes not only in religious practice but in society. This book describes its rise in Maputo, capital of Mozambique, and the sometimes dramatic impact of Pentecostalism on women. Here large numbers of urban women are taking advantage of the opportunities Pentecostalism offers to overcome restrictions at home, pioneer new life spaces and change their lives through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Yet, conversion can also mean a violent rupturing with tradition, with family and with social networks. As the pastors encourage women to cut their ties with the past, including ancestral spirits, they come to see their kin and husbands as imbued with evil powers, and many leave their families. Conquering spheres that used to be forbidden to them, they often live alone as unmarried women, sometimes earning more than men of a similar age. They are also expected to donate huge sums to the churches, often money that they can ill afford, bringing new hardships.
Linda van de Kamp is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Africa-centred Knowledges
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00Knowledge production is a highly political and politicized practice. This book questions the way in which knowledge of and about Africa is produced and how this influences development policy and practice.
Rebutting both Euro-and Afrocentric production of knowledge, this collection proposes a multiple, global and dynamic Africa-centredness in which scholars use whatever concepts and research tools are most appropriate to the different African contextsin which they work. In the first part of the book key conceptual themes are raised and the epistemological foundations are laid through questions of gender, literature and popular music. Contributors in the second part apply andtest these tools and concepts, examining the pressures on doctoral students in a South African university, the crisis in knowledge about declining marine fish populations, perplexities around why certain ICT provisions fail, or how some Zimbabwean students, despite being beset by poverty, succeed. The light thrown on the mechanics of how knowledge comes into being, and in whose interests, illuminates one of the key issues in African Studies.
Brenda Cooper is an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Manchester. She was for many years the Director of the Centre for African Studies and a Professor in the English department at the University of Cape Town, where she is now Emeritus Professor.
Robert Morrell is Coordinator of the Programme for the Enhancement of Research Capacity at the University of Cape Town.
The Oromo and the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia
Regular price $45.95 Save $-45.95This 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.
The New Black Middle Class in South Africa
Regular price $36.95 Save $-36.952016 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
The African Garrison State
Regular price $95.00 Save $-95.00Examines Eritrea's deprivation of human rights since independence and its transformation into a militarised "garrison state".
When Eritrea gained independence in 1991, hopes were high for its transformation. In two decades, however, it became one of the most repressive in the world, effectively a militarised "garrison state". This comprehensive and detailed analysis examines how the prospects for democracy in the new state turned to ashes, reviewing its development, and in particular the loss of human rights and the state's political organisation. Beginning with judicial development in independent Eritrea, subsequent chapters scrutinise the rule of law and the court system; the hobbled process of democratisation, and the curtailment of civil society; the Eritrean prison system and everyday life of detention and disappearances; and the situation of minorities in the country, first in general terms and then through exploration of a case study of the Kunama ethnic group. While the situation is bleak, it is not without hope, however:the conclusion focuses on opposition to the current regime, and offers scenarios of regime change and how the coming of a second republic may yet reconfigure Eritrea politically.
Kjetil Tronvoll is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Bjoerknes College, founding and senior partner of the International Law and Policy Institute, Oslo, and a former Professor of Human Rights at the University of Oslo; Daniel R. Mekonnen is Senior Legal Advisor, International Law and Policy Institute, Oslo, and former Judge of the Zoba Maekel Provincial Court in Eritrea.
Nyerere
Regular price $36.95 Save $-36.95Julius 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. 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, enabling 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 and archival sources including his letters as a student and colonial authorities files on him, this biography brings a new perspective on how the scholarship that Nyerere engaged with as a young man 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 Senior Lecturer in African Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
Population, Welfare and Economic Change in Britain, 1290-1834
Regular price $39.95 Save $-39.95Population, Welfare and Economic Change presents the latest research on the causes and consequences of British population change from the medieval period to the eve of the Industrial Revolution, in both town and countryside. Its overarching concern is with the economic and demographic decision-making of individuals and groups and the extent to which these were constrained by institutions and resources. Within this, the volume's particular focus is on population growth: its causes and the welfare challenges it posed. Several chapters investigate the success with which the English Old Poor Law provided care for the poor and elderly, and new work on alternative welfare institutions, such as almshouses, is also presented.
A further distinctive feature of this book is its comparative perspective. By making systematic comparisons between economic and demographic developments in pre-industrial Britain and those taking place in various regions of contemporary Continental Europe and Russia, several chapters uncover how far Britain in this period was 'different'. Stimulating to experts and students alike, Population, Welfareand Economic Change offers overviews and summaries of the latest scholarship by leading economic historians and historical demographers, alongside detailed case studies which showcase the original research of younger scholars.
Chris Briggs is Lecturer in Medieval British Economic and Social History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Selwyn College. P.M. Kitson is a former Research Associate at the Cambridge Group for the Historyof Population and Social Structure and Bye-Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge. S.J. Thompson is a former J.H. Plumb Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Christ's College, Cambridge.
CONTRIBUTORS: Lorraine Barry, Jeremy Boulton, Chris Briggs, Bruce M.S. Campbell, Tracy Dennison, Nigel Goose, R.W. Hoyle, Peter Kitson, Julie Marfany, Rebecca Oakes, Sheilagh Ogilvie, Stephen Thompson, Samantha Williams, Sir Tony Wrigley, Margaret Yates
Remaking Mutirikwi
Regular price $170.00 Save $-170.00A detailed ethnographic and historical study of the implications of fast-track land reform in Zimbabwe from the perspective of those involvedin land occupations around Lake Mutirikwi, from the colonial period to the present day.
The Mutirikwi river was dammed in the early 1960s to make Zimbabwe's second largest lake. This was a key moment in the Europeanisation of Mutirikwi's landscapes, which had begun with colonial land appropriations in the 1890s. ButAfrican landscapes were not obliterated by the dam. They remained active and affective. At independence in 1980, local clans reasserted ancestral land claims in a wave of squatting around Lake Mutirikwi. They were soon evicted asthe new government asserted control over the remaking of Mutirikwi's landscapes. Amid fast-track land reform in the 2000s, the same people returned again to reclaim the land. Many returned to the graves and ruins of past lives forged in the very substance of the soil, and even incoming war veterans and new farmers appealed to autochthonous knowledge to make safe their resettlements.
This book explores those reoccupations and the complex contests overlandscape, water and belonging they provoked. The 2000s may have heralded a long-delayed re-Africanisation of Lake Mutirikwi, but just as African presence had survived the dam, so white presence remains active and affective through Rhodesian-era discourses, place-names and the materialities of ruined farms, contour ridging and old irrigation schemes.
Through lenses focused on the political materialities of water and land, this book reveals how the remaking of Mutirikwi's landscapes has always been deeply entangled with changing strategies of colonial and postcolonial statecraft. It highlights how the traces of different pasts intertwine in contemporary politics through the active, enduring yet emergent, forms and substances of landscape.
Joost Fontein is Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa.
The Quest for Socialist Utopia
Regular price $36.95 Save $-36.95Finalist for the Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize to the author of the best book on East African Studies, 2015.
In the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s, the Ethiopian student movement became the major oppositionforce against the imperial regime in Ethiopia, ultimately playing a fundamental role in the shaping of the country's future political and social development. Bahru Zewde, one of the students involved in the uprising, draws on interviews with former student leaders and activists, as well as documentary sources, to describe the steady radicalisation of the movement, characterised particularly after 1965 by annual demonstrations against the regime and culminating in the ascendancy of Marxism-Leninism by the early 1970s. In 1969, the students broached what came to be famously known as the "national question", ultimately resulting in the adoption of the Leninist/Stalinist principle of self-determination up to and including secession. On the eve of the revolution, the student movement abroad split into two rival factions - a split that would ultimately lead to the liquidation of both and the consolidation of military dictatorship.
Bahru Zewde is Emeritus Professor of History at Addis Ababa University and founding Fellow and Vice President of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. He has authored many books and articles, notably A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855-1974 and Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia: The Reformist Intellectuals of the Early Twentieth Century.
Ethiopia: Addis Ababa University Press
Volunteer Economies
Regular price $36.95 Save $-36.95Across Africa today, as development activities animate novel forms of governance, new social actors are emerging, among them the volunteer. Yet, where work and resources are limited, volunteer practices have repercussions that raise contentious ethical issues. What has been the real impact of volunteers economically, politically and in society? The interdisciplinary experts in this collection examine the practices of volunteers - both international and local - and ideologies of volunteerism. They show the significance of volunteerism to processes of social and economic transformation, and political projects of national development and citizenship, as well as to individual aspirations in African societies.
These case studies - from South Africa, Lesotho, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Sierra Leone and Malawi - examine everyday experiences of volunteerism and trajectories of voluntary work, trace its broaderhistorical, political and economic implications, and situate African experiences of voluntary labour within global exchanges and networks of resources, ideas and political technologies. Offering insights into changing configurations of work, citizenship, development and social mobility, the authors offer new perspectives on the relations between labour, identity and social value in Africa.
Ruth Prince is Associate Professor in Medical Anthropology at the University of Oslo; with her co-author Wenzel Geissler, she won the 2010 Amaury Talbot Prize for their book The Land is Dying: Contingency, Creativity and Conflict in Western Kenya. Hannah Brown is a lecturer in Anthropology at Durham University.
Liberation Movements in Power
Regular price $45.95 Save $-45.95The liberation movements of Southern Africa arose to combat racism, colonialism and settler capitalism and engaged in armed struggle to establish democracy. After victory over colonial and white minority regimes, they moved into government embodying the hopes and aspirations of their mass of supporters and of widespread international solidarity movements. Even with the difficult legacies they inherited, their performance in power has been deeply disappointing. Roger Southall tracks the experiences in government of ZANU-PF, SWAPO and the ANC, arguing that such movements are characterised by paradoxical qualities, both emancipatory and authoritarian. Analysis is offered of their evolution into political machines through comparative review of their electoral performance, their relation to state and society, their policies regarding economic transformation, and their evolution as vehicles of class formation andpredatory behaviour. The author concludes that, while they will survive organizationally, their essence as progressive forces is dying, and that hopes of a genuine liberation throughout the region will depend upon political realignments alongside moral and intellectual regeneration.
ANC South Africa
SWAPO Namibia
Zanu-PF Zimbabwe
Roger Southall is Professor Emeritus in Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand and a Research Associate of the Society, Work and Development Institute.
Consumption and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Ireland
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00This book, based on extensive original research, argues that everyday Irish consumption underwent major changes in the 16th century. The book considers the changing nature of imported goods in relation especially to two major activities of daily living: dress and diet. It integrates quantitative data on imports with qualitative sources, including wills, archaeological and pictorial evidence, and contemporary literature and legislation. It shows that changes in Irish consumption mirrored changes occurring in England and across Europe and that they were a function of broader developments in the Irish economy, including the increasing participation of Irish merchants in European markets. The book also discusses how consumption was related to wider political, economic and cultural developments in Ireland, showing how the acquisition and interpretation of material goods were key factors in the mediation of political and social boundaries in a semi-colonised and contested society.
Susan Flavin completed her doctorate in early modern history at the University of Bristol.
Achebe and Friends at Umuahia
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00The author meticulously contextualises the experiences of Achebe and his peers as students at Government College Umuahia and argues for a re-assessment of this influential group of Nigerian writers in relation to the literary culture fostered by the school and its tutors.
This is the first in-depth scholarly study of the literary awakening of the young intellectuals who became known as Nigeria's "first-generation" writers in the post-colonial period. Terri Ochiagha's research focuses on Chinua Achebe, Elechi Amadi, Chike Momah, Christopher Okigbo and Chukwuemeka Ike, and also discusses the experiences of Gabriel Okara, Ken Saro-Wiwa and I.C. Aniebo, in the context of their education in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s at Government College, Umuahia. The author provides fresh perspectives on Postcolonial and World literary processes, colonial education in British Africa, literary representations of colonialism and Chinua Achebe's seminal position in African literature. She demonstrates how each of the writers used this very particular education to shape their own visions of the world in which they operated and examines the implications that this had for African literature as a whole.
Supplementary material is available online of some of the original sources. See: http://boybrew.co/9781847011091_2
Terri Ochiagha holds one of the prestigious British Academy Newton International Fellowships (2014-16) hosted by the School of English, University of Sussex. She was previously a Senior Associate Member of St Antony's College, University of Oxford.
African Theatre 12: Shakespeare in and out of Africa
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99This volume takes as its starting point an interrogation of the African contributions to the Globe to Globe festival staged in London in 2012, where 37 Shakespeare productions were offered, each from a different nation. Five African companies were invited to perform and there are articles on four of these productions, examining issues of interculturalism, postcolonialism, language, interpretation and reception.
The contributors are both Shakespeare and African theatre scholars, promoting discourse from a range of geographical and cultural perspectives. A critical debate about the process of the Globe to Globe festival is initiated in the form of a discussion article featuringsome of its directors and actors. Two further articles look at Shakespeare productions made purely for Africa, from Mauritius and Cape Verde, and leading Nigerian playwright and cultural commentator Femi Osofisan provides an overview article examining Shakespeare in Africa in the 21st century.
The playscript in this volume of African Theatre is Femi Osofisan's Wesoo, Hamlet! or the Resurrection of Hamlet.
Volume Editor: JANE PLASTOW
Series Editors: Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies, University of Leeds; James Gibbs, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West of England; Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama at the University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds; Yvette Hutchison, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick
Women, Migration & the Cashew Economy in Southern Mozambique
Regular price $95.00 Save $-95.00JOINT RUNNER-UP FOR THE 2017 AIDOO-SNYDER BOOK PRIZE
Between the late 1940s and independence in 1975, rural Mozambican women migrated to the capital, Lourenço Marques, to find employment in the cashew shelling industry.This book tells the labour and social history of what became Mozambique's most important late colonial era industry through the oral history and songs of three generations of the workforce. In the 1950s Jiva Jamal Tharani recruited a largely female labour force and inaugurated industrial cashew shelling in the Chamanculo neighbourhood. Seasonal cashew brews had long been an essential component of the region's household, gift and informal economies, but bythe 1970s cashew exports comprised the largest share of the colony's foreign exchange earnings.
This book demonstrates that Mozambique's cashew economy depended fundamentally on women's work and should be understood as "whole cloth". Drawing on over 100 interviews, the rich narratives convey layered histories: the rural crises that triggered the flight of women, their lives as factory workers, widespread payment and wage fraud, the formation of innovative urban families, and the health costs that all African families paid for municipal neglect of their neighbourhoods.
Jeanne Marie Penvenne is Professor of History, and core faculty in International Relations, Africana and Women, and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Tufts University.. She is the author of the Herskovits shortlisted African Workers and Colonial Racism (James Currey/Heinemann, 1995)
Radio in Africa
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Contributors investigate the multiple roles of radio in the lives of African listeners across the continent. Some essays turn to the history of radio and its part in culture and politics. Others show how radio throws up new tensions, yet endorses social innovation and the making of new publics. A number of contributors look at radio's current role in creating listening communities that radically shift the nature of the public sphere. Yet others cover radio's central role in the emergence of informed publics in fragile national spaces, or in failed states. The book also highlights radio's links to the new media, its role in resistance to oppressive regimes, and points in several cases to the importance of African languages in building modern communities that embrace both local and global knowledge.
Liz Gunner is visiting Professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research; Dina Ligagais a lecturer in the Department of Media Studies, University of the Witwatersrand; Dumisani Moyo is Research and Publications Manager at the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa.
Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Zimbabwe & Swaziland): Wits University Press
Social Relations and Urban Space: Norwich, 1600-1700
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00This is a book about seventeenth-century Norwich and its inhabitants. At its core are the interconnected themes of social topographies and the relationships between urban inhabitants and their environment. Cityscapes were, and are, shaped and given meaning during the practice of people's lived experiences. In return, those same urban places lend human interactions depth and quality. Social Relations and Urban Space uncovers manifold possible landscapes, including those belonging to the rich and to the poor, to men, to women, to 'strangers and foreigners', to political actors of both formal and informal means. Norwich's inhabitants witnessed the tumultuous seventeenth centuryat first hand, and their experiences were written into the landscape and immortalised in its exemplary surviving records. This book offers an insight into the social relationships and topographies that fashioned both city life and landscape and serves as a useful counterpoise in a field that has largely focused on London.
FIONA WILLIAMSON is currently Senior Lecturer in History at the National University of Malaysia.
Creed & Grievance
Regular price $39.95 Save $-39.95In northern Nigeria, high levels of ethnic diversity have resulted in 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 partof 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 Christiangroups contending for influence and relevance, and the doctrinal, political and historical drivers of conflict and violence between and within them. They analyse some of the region's most contentious issues: conflict and peacebuilding in Jos; the Boko Haram insurgency; the informal economy; 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 policyresponses 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 (deceased 2017), was Associate Professor in African Politics, University of Oxford. David Ehrhardt is Assistant Professor of International Development at Leiden University College, The Netherlands.
Companion volume: Sects & Social Disorder: Muslim Identities & Conflict in Northern Nigeria edited by Abdul Raufu Mustapha (James Currey 2014)
Nigeria: Premium Times Books
Writing Revolt
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99I did not set out for Rhodesia as a radical' writes Terence Ranger. This memoir of the years between 1957, when he first went to Southern Rhodesia, and 1967 when he published his first book, is both an intimate record of the African awakening which Ranger witnessed during those ten years, and of the process which led him to write Revolt in Southern Rhodesia. Intended as both history and as historiography, Writing Revolt is also about the ways in which politics and history interacted. The men with whom Ranger discussed Zimbabwean history were the leaders of African nationalism; his seminar papers were sent to prisons and into restricted areas. Both they and he were making political as well as intellectual discoveries. The book also includes a brief account of Ranger's life before he went to Africa.
TERENCE RANGER was Emeritus Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, University of Oxfordand author of many books including Are we not also Men? (1995), Voices from the Rocks (1999) and Bulawayo Burning (2010), and co-editor of Violence and Memory (2000).
Zimbabwe & Southern Africa (South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Namibia): Weaver Press
ALT 7 Focus on Criticism: African Literature Today
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99First published in 1975, this volume of the series continues in more depth the debate on the role of critics and the purpose of criticism. As Eldred Jones reminds the reader in his Editorial: "African Literature Today has always aimed to be a forum for discussion ... Not surprisingly some opinions have provoked strong reactions. Indeed where there is time reactions are deliberately sought so that differing opinions can appear close to each other....African Literature Today is happy to serve as the threshing floor."
The lively exchanges on who is best placed to judge African literature and how best to teach it continue both in responding articles and in the Comments section of the volume. Eldred Jones again embraces this debate and is reminded of the Igbo proverb: "The world is like a mask dancing; if you want to see it well you must not stand in one place."
Dealing with Government in South Sudan
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00South Sudan became Africa's newest nation in 2011, following decades of armed conflict. Chiefs - or 'traditional authorities' - became a particular focus of attention during the international relief effort and post-war reconstruction and state-building. But 'traditional' authority in South Sudan has been much misunderstood. Institutions of chiefship were created during the colonial period but originated out of a much longer process of dealing with predatory external forces. This book addresses a significant paradox in African studies more widely: if chiefs were the product of colonial states, why have they survived or revived in recent decades? By examining the long-term history ofchiefship in the vicinity of three towns, the book also argues for a new approach to the history of towns in South Sudan. Towns have previously been analysed as the loci of alien state power, yet the book demonstrates that thesegovernment centres formed an expanding urban frontier, on which people actively sought knowledge and resources of the state. Chiefs mediated relations on and across this frontier, and in the process chiefship became central to constituting both the state and local communities.
Cherry Leonardi is Senior Lecturer in African History at Durham University, a former course director of the Rift Valley Institute's Sudan course, and a member of the council of the British Institute in Eastern Africa
Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa.
ALT 32 Politics & Social Justice: African Literature Today
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99In 1965, Chinua Achebe, in his classic essay "The Novelist as Teacher", declared that the "African past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the early Europeans acting on God's behalf, delivered them." That assertion included a still reverberating sentiment shared by many of the first generation of African writers that it is possible to reclaim that distorted past creatively in order to show and understand "where andwhen the rain started beating Africa".
Many genres and forms of literary and cultural production have recalled and recorded and reconfigured that past - many projecting a new confident African future defined by self-determination. The spectrum of that complex engagement, which encompasses critical issues in politics and social justice, provides the basis of this volume, which concludes with tributes to the life and works of Kofi Awoonor.
Articles on:
Binyavanga Wainaina + Ben Okri & Nationhood + J.M. Coetzee & the Philosophy of Justice + Isidore Okpewho & "Manhood" + Ngugi's Matigari & the Postcolonial Nation + Politics & Women in Irene Salami's MoreThan Dancing + Ayi Kwei Armah's The Resolutionaries
Ernest Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA; the editorial board is composed of scholars from US, UK and African universities
Nigeria: HEBN
Scotland in the Age of Two Revolutions
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00The seventeenth century was one of the most dramatic periods in Scotland's history, with two political revolutions, intense religious strife culminating in the beginnings of toleration, and the modernisation of the state and its infrastructure. This book focuses on the history that the Scots themselves made. Previous conceptualisations of Scotland's "seventeenth century" have tended to define it as falling between 1603 and 1707 - the union of crowns and the union of parliaments. In contrast, this book asks how seventeenth-century Scotland would look if we focused on things that the Scots themselves wanted and chose to do. Here the key organising dates are not 1603 and 1707 but 1638and 1689: the covenanting revolution and the Glorious Revolution. Within that framework, the book develops several core themes. One is regional and local: the book looks at the Highlands and the Anglo-Scottish Borders. The increasing importance of money in politics and the growing commercialisation of Scottish society is a further theme addressed. Chapters on this theme, like those on the nature of the Scottish Revolution, also discuss central governmentand illustrate the growth of the state. A third theme is political thought and the world of ideas. The intellectual landscape of seventeenth-century Scotland has often been perceived as less important and less innovative, and suchperceptions are explored and in some cases challenged in this volume.
Two stories have tended to dominate the historiography of seventeenth-century Scotland: Anglo-Scottish relations and religious politics. One of the recentleitmotifs of early modern British history has been the stress on the "Britishness" of that history and the interaction between the three kingdoms which constituted the "Atlantic archipelago". The two revolutions at the heart ofthe book were definitely Scottish, even though they were affected by events elsewhere. This is Scottish history, but Scottish history which recognises and is informed by a British context where appropriate. The interconnected nature of religion and politics is reflected in almost every contribution to this volume.
SHARON ADAMS is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Freiburg. JULIAN GOODARE is Reader in History at the University of Edinburgh.
Contributors: Sharon Adams, Caroline Erskine, Julian Goodare, Anna Groundwater, Maurice Lee Jnr, Danielle McCormack, Alasdair Raffe, Laura Rayner, Sherrilynn Theiss, Sally Tuckett, Douglas Watt
Approaching African History
Regular price $170.00 Save $-170.00Africa is a huge continent, as large as the more habitable areas of Europe and Asia put together. It has a history immensely long, yet the study of that history as an academic discipline in its own right is little more than fiftyyears old. Since then the subject has grown enormously, but the question of what this history is and how it has been approached still needs to be asked, not least to answer the question of why should we study it.
This book takes as its subject the last 10,000 years of African history, and traces the way in which human society on the continent has evolved from communities of hunters and gatherers to the complex populations of today. Approaching that history through its various dimensions: archaeological, ethnographic, written, scriptural, European and contemporary, it looks at how the history of such a vast region over such a length of time has been conceived and presented, and how it is to be investigated. The problem itself is historical, and an integral part of the history with which it is concerned, beginning with the changing awareness over the centuries of what Africa might be. MichaelBrett thus traces the history of Africa not only on the ground, but also in the mind, in order to make his own historical contribution to the debate.
Michael Brett is Emeritus Reader in the History of North Africa at SOAS.
Lost Nationalism
Regular price $36.95 Save $-36.95A lively account of the 1924 Revolution in Sudan and the way in which the colonial situation has affected its representation, a case in point inthe histories of nationalist anti-colonial movements in Africa and the Middle East.
Winner of the African Studies Association 2016 Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize
The 1924 Revolution was a watershed in Sudanese history, the first episode of anti-colonial resistance in which a nationalist ideology was explicitly used, and part of a global wave of anti-colonial movements after the First World War that can be seen as the "spring of the colonial nations".
This detailed account of the uprising, and its eventual failure, explores the cosmopolitan nationalism embraced by the White Flag League, the movement that sparked the revolution, and its ability to attract people from diverse origins, classes and professions. It examines the international genesisof the movement; the strategies put in place to spread it in different areas of Sudan and among different groups; the movement's inclusive ideology and its definition of the Sudanese nation, as well as the limitations to its inclusiveness; and the way in which this episode reveals deeper questions relating to origins, social hierarchies and power. The book also unravels the complex history of the memory of 1924, the politics of its representation and the underlying power struggles that saw 1924 largely lost from the historical record.
Elena Vezzadini is a historian of modern Sudan affiliated to the CNRS, Institut des Mondes Africains, Paris.
A History of Malawi
Regular price $59.95 Save $-59.95A distinguished scholar's magnum opus and the first full account of Malawi's colonial history.
This is the first comprehensive history of Malawi during the colonial period. Using a wide range of primary and secondary sources, John McCracken places the history of Malawi within the context of its pre-colonial past. The book examines the way in which British people, starting with David Livingstone, followed by the pioneer Scottish Presbyterian missionaries and including soldiers, speculators, colonial officials and politicians, played an influential part in shaping Malawi. But even more important is the story of how Malawian people responded to the intrusion of colonialism and imperialism and the role they played in the dissolution of the colonial state.
There is muchhere on resistance to colonial occupation, including religious-inspired revolt, on the shaping of the colonial economy, on the influence of Christian missions and on the growth of a powerful popular nationalism that contained within it the seeds of a new authoritarianism. But space is also given to less mainstream activities: the creation of dance societies, the eruption of witchcraft eradication movements and the emergence of football as a popular national sport. In particular, the book seeks to demonstrate the interrelationship between environmental and economic change and the impact these forces had on a poverty-stricken yet resilient Malawian peasantry.
John McCracken is Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Stirling University. He has taught at University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, University College of Dar es Salaam and was Professor and Head of the Department of History at Chancellor College, University of Malawi from 1980-83 and returned as Visiting Professor in 2009. John McCracken was awarded ASAUK's Distinguished Africanist Award in 2008.
Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Bury St Edmunds is noteworthy in so many ways: in preserving the cult and memory of the last East Anglian king, in the richness of its archives, and not least in its role as a mediator of medical texts and studies. All these aspects, and more, are amply illustrated in this collection, by specialists in their fields. The balance of the whole work, and the care taken to place the individual topics in context, has resulted in a satisfying whole, which placesAbbot Baldwin and his abbey squarely in the forefront of eleventh-century politics and society. Professor Ann Williams.
The abbey of Bury St Edmunds, by 1100, was an international centre of learning, outstanding for its culting of St Edmund, England's patron saint, who was known through France and Italy as a miracle worker principally, but also as a survivor, who had resisted the Vikings and the invading king Swein and gained strength after 1066. Here we journey into the concerns of his community as it negotiated survival in the Anglo-Norman empire, examining, on the one hand, the roles of leading monks, such as the French physician-abbot Baldwin, and, on the other, the part played by ordinary women of the vill. The abbey of Bury provides an exceptionally rich archive, including annals, historical texts, wills, charters, and medical recipes. The chapters in this volume, written by leading experts, present differing perspectives on Bury's responses to conquest; reflecting the interests of the monks, they cover literature, music, medicine, palaeography, and the history of the region in its European context.
DrTom Licence is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History and Director of the Centre of East Anglian Studies at the University of East Anglia.
Contributors: Debbie Banham, David Bates, Eric Fernie, Sarah Foot, Michael Gullick,Tom Licence, Henry Parkes, Véronique Thouroude, Elizabeth van Houts, Thomas Waldman, Teresa Webber
Regional Integration, Identity and Citizenship in the Greater Horn of Africa
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00The Greater Horn of Africa (GHA) is engulfed by three interrelated crises: various inter-state wars, civil wars, and inter-communal conflicts; an economic crisis manifested in widespread debilitating poverty, chronic food insecurity and famines; and environmental degradation that is ravaging the region. While it is apparent that the countries of the region are unlikely to be able to deal with the crises individually, there is consensus that their chances of doing so improve markedly with collective regional action.
The contributors to this volume address the need for regional integration in the GHA. They identify those factors that can foster integration, such as the proper management of equitable citizenship rights, as well as examining those that impede it, including the region's largely ineffective integration scheme, IGAD, and explore how the former can be strengthened and the latter transformed; explain how regional integration can mitigate the conflicts; and examine how integration can help to energise the region's economy.
Kidane Mengisteab is Professor of African Studies and Political Science at Penn State University; Redie Bereketeab is a researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute, Sweden.
Darfur
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00This work engages with a fundamental question in the study of African history and politics: to what extent did the colonial state re-define the character of local politics in the societies it governed? Existing scholarship on Darfur under the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1916-1956) has suggested that colonial governance here represented either straightforward continuity or utterly transformative change from the region's deep history of independent statehoodunder the Darfur Sultanate. This book argues that neither view is adequate: it shows that British rule bequeathed a culture of governance to Darfur which often rested on state coercion and violence, but which was also influencedby enduring local conceptions of the relationship between ruler and ruled, and the agendas of local actors.
The state was perceived as a resource as well as a threat by local peoples. Although the British did introduce significant changes to the character of governance in Darfur, local populations negotiated the significance of these innovations, challenging the authority of state-appointed chiefs, defying official attempts to police the boundaries ofethnic territories, and competing for the resources of political support and development that the state represented. Even the violence of the state was shaped and channelled by the initiative of local elites. Finally, the authorsuggests that contemporary conflict and politics in the region must be understood in the context of this deeper history of interaction between state and local agendas in shaping everyday realities of power and governance.
Chris Vaughan is Lecturer in African History at Liverpool John Moores University. Previously, he taught at the Universities of Durham, Leeds, Liverpool and Edinburgh. His articles have appeared in the Journal of African Historyand the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. He is co-editor (with Lotje De Vries and Mareike Schomerus) of The Borderlands of South Sudan.
Photography in Africa
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00This collection of studies in African photography examines, through a series of empirically rich historical and ethnographic cases, the variety of ways in which photographs are produced, circulated, and engaged across a range of social contexts. In so doing, it elucidates the distinctive characteristics of African photographic practices and cultures, vis-à-vis those of other forms of 'vernacular photography' worldwide. In addition, these studies develop areflexive turn, examining the history of academic engagement with these African photographic cultures, and reflecting on the distinctive qualities of the ethnographic method as a means for studying such phenomena.
The volumecritically engages current debates in African photography and visual anthropology. First, it extends our understanding of the variety of ways in which both colonial and post-colonial states in Africa have used photography as a means for establishing, and projecting, their authority. Second, it moves discussion of African photography away from an exclusive focus on the role of the 'the studio' and looks at the circulations through which the studios' products - the photographs themselves - later pass as artefacts of material culture. Last, it makes an important contribution to our understanding of the relationship between photography and ethnographic research methods, as these have been employed in Africa.
Richard Vokes is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and author of Ghosts of Kanungu
Civic Agency in Africa
Regular price $120.00 Save $-120.00The recent eruption of popular protests across North Africa and the Middle East has reopened academic debate on the meaning and strategies of resistance in the 21st century. This book argues that Western notions of state and civilsociety provide only a limited understanding of how power and resistance operate in the African context, where informality is central to the way both state officials and citizens exercise agency.
With the principle of informality as a template, the chapters in this volume collectively examine the various modes - organised and unorganised, formal and informal, urban and rural, embodied and discursive, serious and ludic, online and offline, successful and failing - through which Africans contend with power. Resistance takes place against the backdrop of deep fractures in state sovereignty, the remnants of colonial rule and the constraints of a global, neoliberal economic system.
Ebenezer Obadare is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Kansas; Wendy Willems is Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Media Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Masques, Mayings and Music-Dramas
Regular price $170.00 Save $-170.00Masques, Mayings and Music-Dramas comprises a sequence of in-depth case-studies of significant aspects of early twentieth-century English music-theatre. Vaughan Williams forms a central thread in this discussion, and Stratford-upon-Avon serves as a geographical focus-point for mediating conflicting visions of an English musical tradition. But the reach of the book is much wider, shedding new light on English Wagnerism (at Glastonbury especially) andon the reception of Wagner's ideas as a point of emulation and resistance. No less significant is the discussion of Purcell and the seventeenth-century masque - one of the primary sources for re-imagining an English dramatic tradition - and the more familiar images of the May festival, the Mummers' play and the pageant play, which are tellingly re-contextualised. The book also looks at the associations between Vaughan Williams, the theatre artist Edward Gordon Craig and the impresario Serge Diaghilev. The sequence is framed by the image of the pilgrim-vagabond Vaughan Williams's setting of the poetry of Matthew Arnold and Robert Louis Stevenson as a metaphor and paradigm for his creative career and personal progress.
The book not only sheds light on the activities and ambitions of principal agents but also illuminates a particularly dynamic moment in the re-emergence of a distinctively English music-theatrical practice: one especially concerned with calling on aspects of the past to help to secure a worthwhile future. Notions of Englishness turn out to be less insular than sometimes thought and the idea of a 'musical renaissance' more complex when the case-studies are understood in their proper historical context. Scholars and students of twentieth-century English music, theatre and opera will find this volume indispensable.
Roger Savage isHonorary Fellow in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely on theatre and its interface with music from the baroque to the twentieth century in leading journals and books.
Colonialism and Violence in Zimbabwe
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Suffering, the experience of violation brought on by an act of violence or violent circumstances, is omnipresent in today's world - if only indirectly through global media representation. Despite this apparent immediacy, understanding how a person makes sense of his or her suffering tends to be fragmentary and often elusive. This book examines this key question through the lens of rural Zimbabwe and a frontier area on the border with Mozambique. It shows how African women, men, and children fashioned their life-worlds in the face of conflict.
Historian Heike Schmidt challenges the apparently inseparable twin pairing of Africa and suffering. Even in situations of great distress, she argues, individuals and groups may articulate their social desires and political ambitions, and reforge their identities - as long as the experience of violence is not one of sheer terror. She emphasizes the crucial role women, chiefs, and youths played in the renegotiation of a sense of belonging during different periods of time. Based on sustained fieldwork, Colonialism and Violence offers a compelling history of suffering in a smallvalley in Zimbabwe over the course of 150 years.
Heike Schmidt is Lecturer in Modern History, University of Reading.
The Development State
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99How has development affected the practices of the state in Africa? How has the development state become the basis of social organisation? How do Tanzanians position themselves to obtain aid money to effect change in their personallives?
Financial aid flows have entrenched an economy of intervention in which the main beneficiaries are those who can claim to undertake development activities. Even for those not formally engaged in the development sector, its discourses influence everyday discussion about class and inequality, poverty and wealth, modernity and tradition. With Tanzania as the country focus, the author shows how the practices of development have infiltrated not only the state at large but many aspects of people's everyday lives.
Maia Green is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.
Foundations of an African Civilisation
Regular price $36.95 Save $-36.95This well-illustrated book provides an up-to-date survey of a key period in the history of northern Ethiopia and south-central Eritrea. It is accessible to the general reader, but its comprehensive references and guidance to controversies and research needs will render it invaluable to specialists and students. It considers how the region's literate communities arose and flourished during the last millennium BC, giving rise to the Aksumite civilisation whose achievements and intercontinental significance are increasingly recognised, and which formed an integral but often neglected component of the Christian world in Late Antiquity. Aksum is now seen as the ancestor of the region'smedieval Christian kingdom whose churches and associated art continue to attract many visitors to Ethiopia.
David W. Phillipson is Emeritus Professor of African Archaeology and former Director of the University Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, Cambridge. In 2014 he was made an Associate Fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences.
Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa.
Ethiopia: Addis Ababa University Press
Out in Africa
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Homosexuality was and still is thought to be quintessentially 'un-African'. Yet in this book Chantal Zabus examines the anthropological, cultural and literary representations of male and female same-sex desire in a pan-African context from the nineteenth century to the present. Reaching back to early colonial contacts between Europe and Africa, and covering a broad geographical spectrum, along a north-south axis from Mali to South Africa and an east-west axis from Senegal to Kenya, here is a comparative approach encompassing two colonial languages (English and French) and some African languages.
Out in Africa charts developments in Sub-Saharan African texts and contextsthrough the work of 7 colonial writers and some 25 postcolonial writers. These texts grow in complexity from roughly the 1860s, through the 1990s with the advent of queer theory, up to 2010. The author identifies those texts thatpresent, in a subterraneous way at first and then with increased confidence, homosexuality-as-an-identity rather than an occasional or ritualized practice, as was the case in the early ethnographic imagination. The work sketchesout an evolutionary pattern in representing male and female same-sex desire in the novel and other texts, as well as in the cultural and political contexts that oppose such desires.
Growing up with HIV in Zimbabwe
Regular price $95.00 Save $-95.00The study explores the lives of children growing up HIV-positive in the eastern Zimbabwean town of Mutare at a time of severe crisis in the state, marked by impoverishment, organized violence and mass death. This ethnography grewout of a psychotherapeutic engagement with a group of children living with HIV.
The study examines children's experiences through the institutional domains of family and kin, clinics and other forms of healing, churches andreligious practices, and experiences of dying and bereavement. Against patrilineal norms, much daily caring occurs in mothers' families. Clinics continue to offer partial western medical care despite daunting resource constraints. Western medicine sits on older templates of 'traditional' and 'spiritual' healing. Anti-retrovirals and other basic medicines are available but may exacerbate domestic discord and fail to meet more obvious physical symptoms. Children and their families appear to prefer spiritual alternatives to medical care, perhaps partly as a result of the severe limitations placed on the latter. A wide variety of religious practices, primarily Christian in a plethora of forms, flourish in the context. Dying may come to be seen by children as preferable to continued struggle against severe adversity. Child deaths are deeply imbued with religious practice and given voice through religious idioms.
Ross Parsons has extensive experience as a psychotherapist, a writer and a social researcher. He lives in Mutare and teaches anthropology and psychology at Africa University.
Weaver Press: Zimbabwe and Southern Africa (South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Namibia)
Loyalism and the Formation of the British World, 1775-1914
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00Loyalism in Britain and Ireland, which was once seen as a crude reaction against radicalism or nationalism, stimulated by the elite and blindly followed by plebeians, has recently been shown by historians to have been, on the contrary, a politically multi-faceted, socially enabling phenomenon which did much to shape identity in the British Isles. This book takes further this revised picture by considering loyalism in the wider British World. It considersthe overall nature of loyalism, exploring its development in England, Ireland and Scotland, and goes on to examine its manifestation in a range of British colonies and former colonies, including the United States, Canada, India, Australia and New Zealand. It shows that whilst eighteenth-century Anglo-centric loyalism had a core of common ideological assumptions, associational structures and ritual behaviour, loyalism manifested itself differently in different territories. This divergence is explored through a discussion of the role of loyal associations and military institutions, loyalism's cultural and ritual dimensions and its key role in the formation of political identities. Chronologically, the book covers a pivotal period, comprehending the American and French Revolutions, the 1798 Irish rebellion and Irish Union, the Canadian rebellions of 1837, and Fenianism and Home Rule campaigns throughout the British World.
Allan Blackstock is Reader in History at the University of Ulster and author of Loyalism in Ireland, 1789-1829 (Boydell, 2007).
Frank O'Gorman was Professor of History at the Universityof Manchester.
Contributors: Allan Blackstock, Richard P. Davis, Oliver Godsmark, William Gould, Jacqueline Hill, Andrew R. Holmes, Kyle Hughes, Mark G. McGowan, Donald M. MacRaild, Keith Mason, Patrick Maume, KatrinaNavickas, Frank O'Gorman, Brad Patterson, Scott W. See
Pastoralism and Politics in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99This study, based on anthropological field research over a period of thirty-four years, focuses on pastoralism, politics, policies and development in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia. The authors present a detailed ethnographic view of recent events of ethnic violence in Kenya and analyse how local patterns of conflict among pastoralists were influenced by both national and regional politics, which have encouraged an increased tendency of territorialized ethnicity. They propose ways of getting out of the ethnic trap and revitalizing a mobile livestock economy in a region where other forms of land use are impossible or much less effective.
A companion volume to Islam andEthnicity in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia, it will be of particular interest to political anthropologists, students of nomadism, pastoral economy ecology, and globalization.
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.
Losing your Land
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99Dispossession of land on a small scale can have as great an impact on living conditions as large-scale land-grabs. With the increasing commodification of land, new forms of dispossession, in urban as well as rural districts, are also gaining in importance.
This book looks at this largely uninvestigated issue through case studies in the Eastern DRC, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda: here the loss of land often represents the loss of people's livelihoods inthese areas of extreme land scarcity in highly populated regions. In the post-conflict states of the Great Lakes, governance challenges increase the risk of dispossession of the already poor and vulnerable: formal institutions are weak or biased; customary authorities have lost some of their moral authority. The cases in this book show in particular how local power dynamics, often rooted in history, bear upon the processes of land competition, dispossession and land grabbing. This timely volume will be important not only for those in African Studies, but for those in development studies, as well as practitioners and policy-makers worldwide.
An Ansoms is assistant professor in development studies at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium); Thea Hilhorst is a senior advisor at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam.
A New Generation of African Writers
Regular price $95.00 Save $-95.00There is a new interest among publishers in New York and London in books by writers of African origin. These authors have often grown up or passed their early adult years out of Africa. The Orange Prize for Fiction was awarded inLondon 2007 to Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, and the Caine Prize for African Writing has introduced new writers such as Leila Aboulela, Biyi Bandele and Chimamanda Adichie herself to agents and publishers.
This examination of the extraordinary work which has recently appeared is therefore very timely. Migration is a central theme of much African fiction written in English. Here, Brenda Cooper tracks the journeys undertakenby a new generation of African writers, their protagonists and the solid objects that populate their fiction, to depict the material realities of their multiple worlds and languages. The book explores the uses to which the Englishlanguage is put in order to understand these worlds. It demonstrates how these writers have contested the dominance of colonising metaphors. The writers' challenge is to find an English that can effectively express their many lives, languages and identities.
BRENDA COOPER is Director of the Centre for African Studies and a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town.
Southern Africa(South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland): University of KwaZulu-Natal Press (PB]
Ethiopia
Regular price $45.95 Save $-45.95Provides the gist of one scholar's knowledge of this country acquired over several decades. The author of numerous works on Ethiopia, Markakis presents here an overarching, concise historical profile of a momentous effort to integrate a multicultural empire into a modern nation state. The concept of nation state formation provides the analytical framework within which this process unfolds and the changes of direction it takes under different regimes, as well as a standard for assessing its progress and shortcomings at each stage.
Over a century old, the process is still far from completion and its ultimate success is far from certain. In the author's view, there are two major obstacles that need to be overcome, two frontiers that need to be crossed to reach the desired goal. The first is the monopoly of power inherited from the empire builders and zealously guarded ever since by a ruling class of Abyssinian origin. The descendants of the people subjugated by the empire builders remain excluded from power, a handicap that breeds political instability and violent conflict. The second frontier is the arid lowlands on the margins of the state, where the process of integration has not yet reached, and where resistance to it is greatest. Until this frontier is crossed, the Ethiopian state will not have the secure borders that a mature nation state requires.
John Markakis is a political historian who has devoted a professional lifetime to the study of Ethiopia and its neighbours in the Horn of Africa. He has published several books and many articles on this area.
The Advancement of Music in Enlightenment England
Regular price $130.00 Save $-130.00This is a book guaranteed to make waves. It skilfully weaves the story of one key musical figure into the story of one key institution, which it then weaves into the general story of music in eighteenth-century England. Anyone reading it will come away with fresh knowledge and perceptions - plus a great urge to hear Cooke's music.' Michael Talbot, Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Liverpool and Fellow of the British Academy.
Amidst the cosmopolitan, fashion obsessed concert life of later eighteenth century London there existed a discrete musical counterculture centred round a club known as the Academy of Ancient Music. Now largely forgotten, this enlightened school of musical thinkers sought to further music by proffering an alternative vision based on a high minded intellectual curiosity. Perceiving only ear-tickling ostentation in the showy styles that delighted London audiences, they aspired to raise the status of music as an art of profound expression, informed by its past and founded on universal harmonic principles.
Central to this group of musical thinkers was the modest yet highly accomplished musician-scholar Benjamin Cooke, who both embodied and reflected this counterculture. As organist of Westminster Abbey and conductor of the Academy of Ancient Music for much of the second half of the eighteenth century, Cooke enjoyed prominence in his day as a composer, organist, teacher, and theorist. This book shows how, through his creativity, historicism and theorising, Cooke was instrumental in proffering an Enlightenment-inspired reassessment of musical composition and thinking at the Academy. The picture portrayed counters the current tendency to dismiss eighteenth-century English musicians as conservative and provincial. Casting new and valuable light on English musical history and on Enlightenment culture more generally, this book reveals how the agenda for musical advancement shared by Cooke and his Academy associates foreshadowed key developments that would mould European music of the nineteenth century and after. It includes an extensive bibliography, a detailed overview of the Cooke Collection at the Royal College of Music and a complete list of Cooke's works.
TIM EGGINGTON is College Librarian at Queens'College, Cambridge.
Africa Rising?
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99Africa is said to be rising, turning a definitive page in its history, heralding new and exciting possibilities for the continent. This discourse maintains that with upsurge in economic growth comes improved governance and endogenous dynamics; that the emerging economies, and especially the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), have been instrumental in diversifying Africa's international relations, perhaps leading to a radical change in theglobal order, favourable to the developing world. But to what extent is this true, and how deep and how broad has been the impact on society at large?
This book takes a critical look at the prevalent Africa Rising discourse,and explores the nature and implications of Africa's "rise" and the role that the BRICS have played in it. The author argues that Africa has still to undergo any structural transformation; that there is strong evidence that deindustrialisation and jobless growth have accompanied the upsurge of interest in the continent; and that far from making a radical turn in its developmental trajectory, Africa is being pushed into the resource corner as commodity exporters, to the North (and now, the BRICS) with little scope for industrial progress or skills advancement. Hope that the BRICS might offer an alternative to the extant neoliberal order are misplaced, for the BRICS have a stake in maintaining the current global unequality. Africa must therefore fashion its own independent path - while the emerging economies will be important, relying on external actors may simply reproduce anew the current state of underdevelopment.
Ian Taylor is Professor in International Relations and African Politics, University of St Andrews; Chair Professor, Renmin, University of China; Professor Extraordinary, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa; Honorary Professor, Institute of African Studies, Zhejiang Normal University, China; and a Visiting Scholar at Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Uganda.
The African Garrison State
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99Examines Eritrea's deprivation of human rights since independence and its transformation into a militarised "garrison state".
When Eritrea gained independence in 1991, hopes were high for its transformation. In two decades, however, it became one of the most repressive in the world, effectively a militarised "garrison state". This comprehensive and detailed analysis examines how the prospects for democracy in the new state turned to ashes, reviewing its development, and in particular the loss of human rights and the state's political organisation. Beginning with judicial development in independent Eritrea, subsequent chapters scrutinise the rule of law and the court system; the hobbled process of democratisation, and the curtailment of civil society; the Eritrean prison system and everyday life of detention and disappearances; and the situation of minorities in the country, first in general terms and then through exploration of a case study of the Kunama ethnic group. While the situation is bleak, it is not without hope, however:the conclusion focuses on opposition to the current regime, and offers scenarios of regime change and how the coming of a second republic may yet reconfigure Eritrea politically.
Kjetil Tronvoll is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Bjoerknes College, founding and senior partner of the International Law and Policy Institute, Oslo, and a former Professor of Human Rights at the University of Oslo; Daniel R. Mekonnen is Senior Legal Advisor, International Law and Policy Institute, Oslo, and former Judge of the Zoba Maekel Provincial Court in Eritrea.
African Theatre 10: Media and Performance
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99Focuses on the ways African theatre and performance relate to various kinds of media. Includes contributions on dance; popular video, with an emphasis on video drama and soaps from Eastern and Southern Africa, and the Nigerian 'Nollywood' phenomenon; the interface between live performance and video (or still photography), and links between on-line social networks and new performance identities. As a group the articles raise, from original angles, the issues of racism, gender, identity, advocacy and sponsorship.
Volume Editor: DAVID KERR is Professor of English in the University of Botswana, and is the author of African Popular Theatre
Series Editors: Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies, University of Leeds; James Gibbs, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West of England; Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama at the University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds; Yvette Hutchison, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick
Domesticating Vigilantism in Africa
Regular price $95.00 Save $-95.00Self-justice and legal self-help groups have been gaining importance throughout Africa. The question of who is entitled to formulate 'legal principles', enact 'justice', police 'morality' and sanction 'wrongdoings' has increasingly become a subject of controversy and conflict. These conflicts focus on the strained relationship between state sovereignty and citizens' self-determination. More particularly, they concern the conditions, modes and means of thelegitimate execution of power, and in this volume are seen as a diagnostics as to how social actors in Africa debate and practise socio-political order.
State agencies try to bring vigilante groups under control by channelling their activities, repressing them, or using them for their own interests. Vigilante groups usually must struggle for recognition and acceptance in local socio-political spheres. As several of the contributions in the volume show, legal self-help groups in Africa therefore 'domesticate' themselves by, among other things, seeking legitimation, engaging in publicly acceptable non-vigilante activities, or institutionalizing what often began as a rather unrestrained and 'disorderly' social movement.
Thomas G. Kirsch is Professor & Chair of Social & Cultural Anthropology at the University of Constance, Germany; Tilo Grätz is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Hamburg, Germany & Associate Lecturer at the University of Halle-Wittenberg.