Bøker i Africa and the Diaspora: History, Politics, Culture-serien

To understand the genocide and other dramatic events of Rwanda's recent past, one must understand the history of the earlier realm. Jan Vansina provides a critique of the history recorded by early missionaries and court historians.

Even in its heyday European rule of Africa had limits. Whether through complacency or denial, many colonial officials ignored the signs of African dissent. This work analyzes a panoply of archival and oral resources, and public and private actions to show how power may be exercised not only by rulers but also by the ruled.

Advances an approach that shows how a cultural process - the naming of Europeans - can provide a point of entry into economic and social histories. Drawing on archival documents and oral interviews, this book encounters and analyzes a welter of coded fragments.

How does having a female body affect one's experience of indigenized Christianity in Africa? This title addresses this question by exploring the ways ritual, symbol, and dogma circumscribe, constrain, and liberate women in AICs (variously, African Initiated, African Instituted, or African Independent Churches).

Explores the fascinating role of language in national, transnational, postcolonial, racial, and migrant identities. Capturing the experiences of Senegalese in Paris, Rome, and New York, this book depicts how they make sense of who they are - and how they fit into their communities, countries, and the larger global Senegalese diaspora.

In 1914, Blaise Diagne was elected as Senegal's first black African representative to the National Assembly in France. Education as Politics reinterprets the origins and significance of this momentous election, showing how colonial schools had helped reshape African power and politics during the preceding decades and how they prepared the way for Diagne's victory.

A case study of colonialism in Africa from economic, religious, and political perspectives that examines the participation of African elites in colonial rule. This is a richly documented history of the arrival of rubber traders, new Christian missionaries, and the Portuguese colonial state in the Kongo realm, told from the perspective of the kingdom's inhabitants.

Refusing to generalize or oversimplify, Aaron R. Denham offers an ethnographic study of the spirit child phenomenon in Northern Ghana that considers medical, economic, religious, and political realities. He examines both the motivations of the families and the structural factors that lead to infanticide, framing these within the context of global public health.

By focusing on one particular type of NGO - those organized to help prevent the spread and transmission of HIV in Kenya - Megan Hershey interrogates the ways NGOs achieve (or fail to achieve) their planned outcomes. Along the way, she examines the slippery slope that is often used to define ""success"".

Based on extensive field research in the Manianga region of the Lower Congo, Health in a Fragile State is an anthropological account of public health and health care after the collapse of the Congolese state in the 1980s and 1990s.

Colonial immigrants and their French offspring have been a significant presence in the Parisian landscape since the 1940s. Expanding the narrow script of what and who is Paris, Laila Amine explores the novels, films, and street art of Maghrebis, Franco-Arabs, and African Americans in the City of Light.

In 1963 David P. Sandgren went to Kenya to teach in a small, rural school for boys, where he remained for the next four years. These were heady times for Kenyans, as the nation gained its independence, approved a new constitution, and held its first elections. In the school where Sandgren taught, the sons of Gikuyu farmers rose to the challenges of this post colonial era and, in time, entered Kenyan society as adults, joining Kenya's first generation of post colonial elites. In Mau Mau's Children, Sandgren has reconnects with these former students. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews, he provides readers with a collective biography of the lives of Kenya's first postcolonial elite, stretching from their 1940s childhood to the peak of their careers in the 1990s. Through these interviews, Mau Mau's Children shows the trauma of growing up during the Mau Mau Rebellion, the nature of nationalism in Kenya, the new generational conflicts arising, and the significance of education and Gikuyu ethnicity on his students' path to success.