Bøker i African Studies-serien

A local study of National Party and Afrikaner politics, this book focusses on Stellenbosch as a university and a town. It illustrates, at a local level and using detailed materials, how identity was constructed through a process of excluding some (English, Jew, Coloured) and including others.

This volume deftly undertakes both a theoretical deconstruction of the concept of civil society, civility and related themes, and an empirical analysis of the radicalisation process in Southern Nigeria.

This is the detailed narrative of the Kat River Settlement, located on the border between the Cape Colony and the amaXhosa in the Eastern Cape of South Africa during the nineteenth century. The settlement created a fertile landscape and developed a political theology of great political and racial importance to the evolution of the Cape and South Africa as a whole.

This book chronicles the experiences, identity and achievements of enslaved black people in Morocco from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, arguing that we cannot rely solely on Islamic ideology as the key to explaining social relations and particularly the history of black slavery in the Muslim world.

Originally published in 1985, this book examines the rising of the menalamba, the Red Shawls, against French colonial rule in Madagascar in the 1890s. Using the words of the Malagasy themselves and the archives of the Malagasy kings and queens, as well as European records, it tells from the inside the story of an Afro-Asian society at a moment of crisis.

Originally published in 1987, this book used data from Kisangani, Upper Zaire and North Kivu to demonstrate the emergence of an indigenous bourgeoisie of local capitalists without political position. The text discusses how the spiralling economic crisis in Zaire resulted in a severe decline in the administrative capacity of the state, but also opened up opportunities for social mobility.

This book explains the shift from the government of empires to that of NGOs in the region just south of the Sahara. It describes the ambitions of newly independent African states, their political experiments, and the challenges they faced. No other book places black American activism, Amnesty International, and CARE together in the history of African politics.

Drawing on a historical study of Nigeria since independence, this book argues that the structure of the policy-making process - by which different policy demands are included or excluded - explains variations in government performance better than other commonly cited factors, such as oil, colonialism, ethnic diversity, foreign debt, and dictatorships.

Based on years of unique access to Islamists, generals, and business elites, Harry Verhoeven tells the story of Africa's most ambitious state-building project in the modern era and how Sudan's gamble to instrumentalise water to consolidate power is linked to globalisation, Islamist ideology, and the intensifying geopolitics of the Nile.

This book examines the internal politics of the war that divided Angola for over a quarter-century after its independence. Drawing upon interviews with farmers, town dwellers, soldiers and politicians in Central Angola, Justin Pearce examines the ideologies about nation and state that elites deployed in pursuit of hegemony.

This book traces the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) across its three decades in exile through rich, local histories of the camps where Namibian exiles lived in Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola and highlights how different Namibians experienced these sites, as well as the tensions that developed within.

From Slavery to Aid takes two major themes of African historiography - the death of slavery and the birth of aid - and constructs a social history of the Ader region, an understudied region of the West African Sahel in today's Republic of Niger.

This book examines the role of the law in the constitution and contestation of state power in Zimbabwean history. It is for researchers interested in the history of the state in Southern Africa, as well as those interested in African legal history.

This book traces the development of a new Sudanese state during the postcolonial era, following how economic development fostered state formation and civil war. It is for historians of colonial and postcolonial Africa. It offers important archival research for those examining the economic history of Sudan and the wider region.

This book offers an intellectual history of colonial Buganda, using previously unseen archival material to recast the end of empire in East Africa. It will be ideal for researchers, upper-level undergraduate and graduate students interested in the cultural, intellectual, religious and political history of modern East Africa.

Telling a neglected history of decolonisation and violence in Burundi, Aidan Russell examines the political language of truth that drove extraordinary change, from democracy to genocide. His study is the only English account of the first postcolonial genocide on the African continent.

Reconstructing Jomo Kenyatta's political biography and presidency in order to explore the links between his emergence as an uncontested leader and the deeper colonial and postcolonial history of Kenya, this is the first study to use Kenyatta as a basis for examining the origins of presidentialism in Africa.

A history of 150 years of social-ecological transformations in one of southern Africa's most sought after exotic tourism destinations, often dubbed as 'Arid Eden'. It demonstrates the impacts of colonialism, capitalism and creative local adaptations of environmental infrastructures in the region.

Drawing on more than a thousand cases from a diverse set of courts, Thornberry provides a ground breaking social and political history of rape in colonial South Africa, as well as an important case study for comparative legal history, histories of sexuality, and public policy on sexual violence.

A comparative analysis of how African states have engaged with fundamentalist Muslim groups between the 1950s and today. Elischer outlines how African states can become radicalizers or demobilizers of homegrown violent extremism, providing a nuanced and systematic review of state-Islamic relations.

This book examines the gradual decline of slavery in Northern Nigeria during the first forty years of colonial rule. At the time of the British conquest, the Sokoto Caliphate was one of the largest slave societies in modern history. The authors have written a thoughtful and provocative book which raises doubts over the moral legitimacy of both the Sokoto Caliphate and the colonial state. They chart the development of British colonial policy towards resolving the dilemma of slavery and how to end it.

The small but important region of Dahomey (now the People's Republic of Benin) has played an active role in the world economy throughout the era of mercantile and industrial capitalism, beginning as an exporter of slaves and becoming an exporter of plain oil and palm kernels. This book covers a span of three centuries, integrating into a single framework the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial economic history of Dahomey. Mr Manning has pieced together an extensive body of new evidence and new interpretations: he has combined descriptive evidence with quantitative data on foreign trade, slave demography and colonial government finance, and has used both Marxian and Neoclassical techniques of economic analysis. He argues that, despite the severe strain on population and economic growth caused by the slave trade, the economy continued to expand from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and the colonial state acted as an economic depressant rather than a stimulant.

Political life among the Wolof (the largest and most powerful of Senegal's 'tribal' groups) is the principal theme of this collection of essays. The focus of study is on African political leadership, in towns and villages. Within the constraints of alien control or influence, it is argued, cultural and organisational barriers have consistently allowed a wide range of initiative to African leaders and communities in a creative and flexible adjustment to new and unfamiliar demands. Exploration of this African initiative in various contexts suggests a complex, fascinating pattern of cultural and structural interaction. The multidisciplinary approach to politics in these essays will interest historians and social anthropologists as well as political scientists. These studies are indeed relevant to any student of the problems of 'underdeveloped' societies involved in the modern state. Parts of the essays have been published elsewhere, but all have been extensively revised, updated and integrated to a coherent pattern of analysis.

Focusing on the role of religion and ethnicity in times of conflict, Terje ostebo investigates the Muslim-dominated insurgency against the Ethiopian state in the 1960s, shedding new light on this understudied case in order to contribute to a deeper understanding of religion, inter-religious relations, ethnicity, and ethno-nationalism in the Horn of Africa. Islam, Ethnicity and Conflict in Ethiopia develops new theoretical perspectives on the interrelations between ethnic and religious identities, considering ethnic and religious groups as mutually exclusive categories by applying the term peoplehood as an analytical tool, one that allows for more flexible perspectives. Exploring the interplay of imagination and lived, affective reality, and inspired by the 'materiality turn' in cultural- and religious studies, ostebo argues for an integrated approach which recognizes and explores embodiment and emplacement as intrinsic to formations of ethnic and religious identities.

"Challenging assumptions regarding the strength and control of authoritarian governments in Rwanda in the decades before the 1994 genocide, Marie-Eve Desrosiers uses original archival data and interviews to highlight the complex relations between authorities, opponents, and society. Through careful, detailed analysis Desrosiers offers a nuanced assessment of the functions and evolution of authoritarianism over time, demonstrating how the governments of Rwanda's first two post-independence Republics (1962- 1990) sought and often struggled to cement their rule. Whilst the deeper, lived realities of authoritarianism are generally neglected by multicases comparisons at the heart of comparative authoritarian studies, this illuminating survey highlights the essential, yet subtle authoritarian strategies, patterns, and forms of decay that are too often overlooked when addressing authoritarian contexts"--

"In this innovative new history, Erin Pettigrew utilizes invisible forces and entities - esoteric knowledge and spirits - to show how these forms of knowledge and unseen forces have shaped social structures, religious norms, and political power in the Saharan West. Situating this ethnographic history in what became la Mauritanie under French colonial rule and, later the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, Pettigrew traces the changing roles of Muslim spiritual mediators and their Islamic esoteric sciences - known locally as l'òhjåab - over the long-term history of the region. By exploring the impact of the immaterial in the material world and demonstrating the importance of Islamic esoteric sciences in Saharan societies, she illuminates peoples' enduring reliance upon these sciences in their daily lives and argues for a new approach to historical research that takes the immaterial seriously"--

"Exploring the multifaceted history of dispossession, consumption, and inequality in West Central Africa, Mariana P. Candido presents a bold revisionist history of Angola from the sixteenth century until the Berlin Conference of 1884-5. Synthesising disparate strands of scholarship, including the histories of slavery, land tenure, and gender in West Central Africa, Candido makes a significant contribution to ongoing historical debates. She demonstrates how ideas about dominion and land rights eventually came to inform the appropriation and enslavement of free people and their labour. By centring the experiences of West Central Africans, and especially African women, this book challenges dominant historical narratives, and shows that securing property was a gendered process. Drawing attention to how archives obscure African forms of knowledge and normalize conquest, Candido interrogates simplistic interpretations of ownership and pushes for the decolonization of African history"--