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This book examines the many ways social groups have adopted, transformed, and used the North African myth of Kahina.
Two questions dominate this ethnographic, literary, and historical study of Somali society through its orature. First, in what ways do Somali oral texts provide information about women and gender relations in Somalisociety? Second, how do these oral texts present the concepts of "tradition" and an authentic cultural heritage and identity, particularly as these concepts affect women and gender relations? In seeking to answer these questions, Kapteijns has gathered a considerable number of Somali oral texts and popular songs. The firstpart of the book focuses on the texts from the colonial period and develops a critical ethnography of women and gender relations while the second part considers contemporary love songs as important cultural sites for debate about women and "tradition." Kapteijns' book will enlighten readers unfamiliar with the wit and spirit of Somali culture. Somali readers will find the book essential for critically engaging the received notions of their past and traditions.
This book provides a new concept framework for understanding the factors that lead soldiers to challenge civil authority in developing nations. By exploring the causes and effects of the 1964 East African army mutinies, it provides novel insights into the nature of institutional violence, aggression, and military unrest in former colonial societies. The study integrates history and the social sciences by using detailed empirical data on the soldiers' protests in Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya.
Much writing about 19th-century East Africa has been distorted by the legacy of post-Enlightenment thought as well as by more insidious racist ideologies. Humanitarian lobbies throughout Western Europe, strongly influenced by positivist ideas, and campaigning to highlight the ravages of the slave trade, condemned Africa in their writings and propaganda to the periphery, outside universal history. Africa was reduced to a continent of slavery, in which the market, entrepreneurship and free wage labour could not exist. These ideas penetrated scholarly works and still survive in some guises. The consequence is that a variety of initiatives and forms of labour organization associated with the long distance trades in ivory and imported cloth have been overlooked by scholars, while the slave paradigm received widespread attention. Utilizing the conceptual tool of crew culture, Rockel documents a large-scale African migrant labour system. Nyamwezi caravan porters from the interior, as well as coastal Zanzibaris and Waungwana, forged a unique way of life in which market values and experience of wage labour and the caravan safari combined with customary standards and notions of honour derived from innovative reconceptualizations of tradition. The safari experience, commercial change, and interactions with peasant and pastoral communities along the trade routes, all contributed to the emergence of a unique East Africa modernity. This book can be read on a variety of levels It is a journey, a labour history, a story of African initiative and adaptation to modernity, and a contribution to a history of Tanzania and East Africa that gives due attention to intersocietal linkages, and networks.Rockel utilizes a variety of methodologies and theoretical approaches derived from neo-Marxist and postcolonial perspectives, as well as Africanist innovations in oral historiography and labour and gender studies. Drawing on such insights, Carriers of Culture develops and expands our understanding of the way workers invent new and unique cultures to make sense of and control the labour process, create support networks including collective leisure activities, maximize and protect economic interests, and manage the labour market. The book is clearly written, and is illustrated with late-19th-century photographs and artwork.
This book examines the mentalities of various communities within a district of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Focusing in particular on white administrators and missionaries in the Melsetter District, it combines linguisitc/lexical analysis with historical interpretation, in an attempt to reconstruct what whites and Africans actually meant by the words and practices they used in interactions with each other. Jeater provides a detailed study of translation work in Mt Selinda, an evangelical mission; it also examines formal and informal court hearings, to contrast the perceptions and meanings ascribed to cases by white adjudicators and by African participants. This leads into an initial attempt to map out the birth of ethnography in Southern Rhodesia and to contrast it with anthropology in South Africa. By the 1920s, Africans' expertise in their own languages and culture had been usurped by self-referential white linguists and ethnographers. This account suggests that there is a tendency among archive-oriented historians to overestimate how far white missionaries and administrators really understood what Africans said and did. In addition to making a contribution to our empirical knowledge of Zimbabwe's history, the book focuses on how and why investigators first began to make claims to such knowledge. It urges those studying African history to be self-reflective about their practice, examining the historical roots of their claims to expertise. such claims
Beginning in the late 1930s, a crisis in colonial Gusiiland developed over traditional marriage customs. Couples eloped, wives deserted husbands, fathers forced daughters into marriage, and desperate men abducted women as wives. Existing historiography focuses on women who either fled their rural homes to escape a new dual patriarchy-African men backed by colonial officials-or surrendered themselves to this new power. Girl Cases: Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya 1890-1970 takes a new approach to the study of Gusii marriage customs and shows that Gusii women stayed in their homes to fight over the nature of marriage. Gusii women and their lovers remained committed to traditional bridewealth marriage, but they raised deeper questions over the relations between men and women.During this time of social upheaval, thousands of marriage disputes flowed into local African courts. By examining court transcripts, Girl Cases sheds light on the dialogue that developed surrounding the nature of marriage. Should parental rights to arrange a marriage outweigh women's rights to choose their husbands? Could violence by abductors create a legitimate union? Men and women debated these and other issues in the courtroom, and Brett L. Shadle's analysis of the transcripts provides a valuable addition to African social history.
History is preserved by individuals. Ernest M. Kongola, a retired educator in living in Dodoma, Tanzania, has devoted much of the last twenty years to preserving the history of his people, the Gogo. He has produced seven volumes of clan histories, biographies, accounts of important events, and descriptions of customs and traditions. Maddox demonstrates how the past is constructed by critical actors like Ernest Kongola as part of an ongoing process of constructing the present.Kongola participates in the construction and maintenance of a truly post-colonial social order. His work as a public historian, as much as his written narratives, shapes the role of history in the region. In his projects, he seeks to harmonize three different visions of the past. One defines community created by ties of blood and located in a specific place. A second characterizes history as the development of the modern nation. The third sees history as the struggle to attain a state of grace with the divine. Kongola seeks to place his community, which he defines as family and tribe, within the context of the Tanzanian nation, within the moral and spiritual order of Christianity, and within a global society. By performing history as a public figure, he defines more than just himself and his place in the social order of modern Tanzania; he defines his class. He consciously seeks to redefine social norms and cultural practices and to regularize them with Christianity and secular nationalism. In doing so he participates in the creation of both a national, Tanzanian modernity and a particular, Gogo one.
In this groundbreaking work, Mandala argues that there is more to food studies than the analysis of famine-that hunger exists only as an integral part of abundance. Basing his case on the history of southern Malawi, he identifies several factors that explain why, although notorious for its annual food deficits, the region is not a land of frequent famine. By proving that seasonal hunger does not lead to famine in the absence of political crisis, and showing in detail how rare events get their meaning from the everyday, Mandela underscores the need to understand the daily and seasonal routines of food cultivation and eating in their own right.
The oral histories and folk stories of the Hausa women are examined to challenge the written documentation of the Sokoto Caliphate during the colonization of Western Africa.
This is your starter tool kit, the author says. Get ready for some excitement-a synthesis of tools, strategies, and insights to truly energize any classroom. Usable for teachers of any discipline and any age student, this toolkit will also be used by professional staff developers and is guaranteed to enliven even the dullest teacher inservice workshop.Challenge yourself to break out of your old routines. Think anew.Ken Wilson, educator, trainer and consultant has assembled a versatile, practical and generic book to use across disciplines and with all age levels. This collection of accessible, user-friendly tools incorporates and connects current education research-without the jargon.This is your starter tool kit, the author says. Get ready for some excitement-a synthesis of tools, strategies, and insights to truly energize any classroom. Fabulous for teachers and professional staff developers, it is guaranteed to enliven even the dullest teacher inservice workshop.
British sleeping sickness control in colonial Uganda and Tanzania became a powerful mechanism for environmental and social engineering that defined and delineated African landscapes, reordered African mobility and access to resources. As colonialism shifted from conquest to occupation, colonial scientists exercised much influence during periods of administrative uncertainty about the role and future of colonial rule. Impartial and objective science helped to justify the British civilizing mission in East Africa by muting the moral ambiguities and violence of colonial occupation.Africans' actions shaped systems of western scientific knowledge as they evolved in colonial contexts. Bridging what might otherwise be viewed as the disparate colonial functions of environmental and health control, sleeping sickness policy by the British was not a straightforward exercise of colonial power. The implementation of sleeping sickness control compelled both Africans and British to negotiate. African elite, farmers, and fishers, and British administrators, field officers, and African employees, all adjusted their actions according to on-going processes of resistance, cooperation and compromise. Interactions between colonial officials, their African agents, and other African groups informed African and British understandings about sleeping sickness, sleeping sickness control and African environments, and transformed Western ideas in practice.
Conceptions of medicine and medical practice among the Kedjom peoples in Cameroon embrace more than western biomedical understandings of medicine. For these peoples, medicine implies substances, knowledge, practices and institutions bound up with protection and intervention against misfortune and the active promotion of well-being. Nor are medical concerns primarily about the individual. Medicine in the precolonial era was a matter for groups. In short, medicine was preeminently public. Perhaps the major transformation since the colonial period and extending into the postcolonial, has been the increasing commercialization of "traditional" medicine as African healers shift their practices away from group concerns to a focus more concerned with treating the individual. Written in a lucid style, full of vibrant anecdotes, Maynard's book will appeal not only to medical anthropologists and development workers, but also to anyone interested in nonwestern medicine and practices.
This work is a first of its kind historical introduction to the major religions of Africa. The vast majorities of Africa's peoples have been Muslim, Christian, or Traditionalist for a great deal of time, making an inclusive study of these religions essential. Isichei's work gives equal attention to all three religions and balances the elements of each to construct an easily accessible overview. It is also the first book to provide a comprehensive look at the traditional religion in Africa, filling the void in the literature on African religious history.Written by a pioneering scholar in the African religious experience, this volume blends in-depth research and personnel accounts to explore the origins and effects of religion in Africa. While primarily a work of history this book also incorporates the latest findings while engaging with current issues such as the interface of neo-traditional religion and contemporary cultures. This work includes four sections, each dedicated to a separate religion, detailed maps, a glossary, and a guide to further reading.
There is an adage that the Igbo have no kings. Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings focuses on an area in Igboland where, contrary to this popular belief, Igbos not only have kings, but female kings. It is an area where women served as warriors and even married many wives. Women in Nsukka Division feature as prominent actors in a complex and diverse set of interactions, relationships, and manifestations unmatched elsewhere in Igboland. Thus, the author argues that researchers cannot adequately analyze the political landscape of Nsukka Division (or any other African society, for that matter) without investigating the central place of women and the female principle in the political world of the society. The author examines the political economic and religious structures that allowed women and the female principle to achieve measures of power and determines some of the ways they reacted and adjusted to the challenges of European rule. Such an investigation into the history of this gender dynamic yields important results for both African History and Women's Studies.Achebe explores the politics of gender and the evolution of female power over the first six decades of the 20th century. The time period, approximately 1900-1960, is important because it allows for the exploration of continuity and change in Nuskka women's activities, as well as the female principle, over three periods-late precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial Nigeria. She raises and answers questions relating to scholarship on women, sex, and gender in Africa by uncovering the complexities of the Igbo gender construct. The study argues that sex and gender did not coincide in northern Igboland. Consequently, women were able to occupy positions that in other societies were exclusively monopolized by men, and men, those otherwise monopolized by women. Expanding on this premise, the author calls for a revision of traditional classifications of African women's activities that are defined strictly along sex lines. It reshapes conventional global frameworks by offering new theories that have the capacity to recognize African concepts such as female kings, female fathers, female sons, female husbands, female warriors, female warrant chiefs, and male priestesses.
Using a wealth of previously misread or neglected documentation, Grier demonstrates that children and adolescents were a major preoccupation of settlers in the mining and agricultural sectors, of domestic service, and of officials whose task it was to provide conditions favorable to the accumulation of capital. By doing so, she uncovers how the youngest workers resisted attempts to control their mobility and labor. Young workers and migrants employed passive and active forms of resistance to assert or maintain their autonomy from patriarchy, capital, and the state. In addition to being the first historical treatment of child labor and the construction of childhood in African studies, this book is one of the few studies of child labor that represents children as active agents in the construction of their own childhood.Grier begins with children and work in the precolonial economy and with preexisting tensions between generations and genders as the basis for understanding why the young of Zimbabwe fled to urban areas during the early colonial period. The theme of resistance or agency continues as child migrants confronted the financial resources of settlers in mining and agriculture, and in the state whose task it was to establish and maintain the conditions for capital accumulation. Whether they were employed in the wage labor force or lived by their wits in town, boys and, as the colonial period unfolded, an increasing number of girls, presented a threat to the reproduction of the settler economic, social, and political order. Grier prepares the reader for the subsequent salience of African children as anti-apartheid activists, guerrillas, child soldiers, bandits, and street children.
Ufipa, a labor reserve for Tanganyika, witnessed minimal colonial development. Instead, evangelization by White Fathers' Catholic missionaries began in the 1870s. By the 1950s, the missionaries had secured varying degrees of political, economic and social authority in the region, witnessed by the fact that the vast majority of Fipa had converted to Catholicism. Fipa Families examines how this happened from the Fipa perspective.Written primarily for scholars and students of African colonial history, mission history, and family and childhood history, this study is based on a rich collection of oral and documentary sources. Working with this wealth of information, Smythe breaks new ground in placing African social and moral concerns parallel to those of missionaries, resurrecting the study of the family (rather than kinship, lineage, or clan) within African history, and demonstrating at the level of the family and village the ways in which ideas of socialization, reproduction, and education were challenged and re-created in the colonial context in Ufipa.Initially, employees of the mission sought to oversee the education and moral upbringing of at least one child from each family, substituting boarding school for the care relatives would otherwise have provided. A few mission parents even opted to forego the multiple benefits of grandchildren so a child could pursue the celibate path of a religious vocation.The opportunities of the Catholic Church complemented and competed with Fipa processes of social and biological reproduction, and Catholicism became part of the fabric of Fipa society because of, and despite, its resonance with Fipa culture. At the heart of both Fipa and missionary concerns were the processes of socialization (social reproduction) and biological reproduction, processes carried out within the context of the family.
Several hundred A-Z entries cover Achebe's major works, important characters and settings, key concepts and issues, and more.
Respectability and Resistance is the first major history of the black township of Sophiatown in western Johannesburg. Sophiatown, together with the neighboring townships of Newclare and Western Native Township, formed the center of black South African urban culture and politics in the 1940s and 1950s. Using a wealth of sources including oral history and much previously unknown archival material, Goodhew provides a detailed portrait of Sophiatown life. The widow turning to illegal liquor production to get her children a good education, the gang of miners who made common cause with the white police, the Communist Party's rather puritanical views on pleasure, and a nativity play satirizing state policy - these are just a few of the diverse strands of life that teemed through Sophiatown. With a social fabric always liable to fragment, the people of Sophiatown found a fragile unity through a culture of working class respectability. This, in turn, crucially fueled resistance to the state. Although respectability was undermined by state repression and popular militancy, it remains of significance. Goodhew's book joins the ranks of classic books on the working class in the tradition of E. P. Thompson. As such, Respectability and Resistance will be of interest to all labor and social historians.
Rituals are among the most enduring aspects of the African cultural landscape. They appear to exist outside of time, eternal and unchanging. Joseph Adjaye argues that while rituals may seem to be static, in reality, they are dynamic and changing. Through intense analysis of child naming ceremonies, libations, puberty initiation rights, funerals and two major Ghanaian festivals, Adjaye explores the interplay between ritual and audience interaction and participation. By so doing, he shows the many ways rituals have provided Ghanaians with a means to conceptualize and change their present and shape their future. In other words, rituals help individuals escape the boundaries of self by promoting a sense of collective purpose and agency. This book will appeal to not only Africanists, but to readers interested in the roles rituals play in their own lives and the ways that rituals encourage socially transforming initiatives.
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