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Our examination of the biographies in African historiography reveals a tension between the less studied biographies of “ordinary” heroes and the more canonical “approach to the personal stories of "great men" and, now increasingly, great women. Over the last two decades, the biographies of personalities who fought for independence and built new nations have received more attention, most of these studies have been written from national and sometimes even nationalistic frames stressing local boundaries and official history. Our book wants to revert this also by considering the reality of Portuguese-speaking African countries.
Contributors are Figueiredo Baqueiro, Isabel Casimiro, Teresa Cruz y Sylva, Colin Darch, Ute Fendler, Carlos Fernandes, Patricia Hayes,Paolo Israel, Enoncent Msindo, Clinarete Munguambe, Chapane Mutiua, Livio Sansone, Issa Shivji, Peter Simatei, Antonio Tomas, Cheick Thiam, Valdemir Zamparoni.
Price: $100.00
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Publication Date:
19 November 2026
ISBN: 9789004763357
Format: Hardcover
Livio Sansone, PhD 1992, University of Amsterdam, is professor of anthropology at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), head of the Factory of Ideas Program – an advanced international course in ethnic and African studies – and coordinates the Digital Museum of African and Afro-Brazilian Heritage. He has published many articles in the journals Vibrant, Codesria Bulletin, Historia, Ciencias, Saude - Manguinhos, Berose, Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports, Oxford Research Encyclopedia for African History and Cahiers des Ameriques Latines. His most recent book is Field Station Bahia. Brazil in the work of Lorenzo Dow Turner E. Franklin Frazier, Frances and Melville Herskovits – 1935-1967 (2023, Brill, Leiden).
Carlos Fernandes, PhD, Federal University of Bahia, is a researcher and the Deputy Director for Research and Extension at the Center of African Studies from Eduardo Mondlane University. He published many articles in Afro-Asia, Kronos, Journal of Southern Africa, Social Dynamics, American Historical Review, and the Journal of African History. His research interests are in the field of sociology of knowledge, intellectual history, and social conditions of knowledge production in Africa.
Enocent Msindo, PhD, is a social and political historian of Africa who has written extensively on a number of issues regarding precolonial, colonial and post-independent Africa, with a focus largely on Zimbabwe. He writes mainly on issues of identities, particularly ethnicity, nationalism, chieftaincy and matters of communities on the margins of the state. This focus led to his book Ethnicity in Zimbabwe and a number of journal papers and book chapters in leading international journals. He also works on social histories of medicine, and more recently, he was a corresponding editor for two volumes on Covid-19 in Africa. Enocent is the outgoing Dean of Humanities at Rhodes University. He also served, just before Covid-19, as the president of the Southern African Historical Society.
Chapane Mutiua holds a PhD, University of Hamburg, is full time researcher at the Centre for African Studies of Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Maputo, Mozambique. His research interests include: the History of Islam and Islamic Culture in the Western Indian Ocean with focus on Mozambique; Swahili and Transnational Identities in East and Southern Africa; Religions and Society in Mozambique; Swahili and Islamic manuscript cultures of Mozambique and East Africa; Ajami literacy and elite formation in Swahili coast; local knowledge and the discourse of modernity and development.