This is the first full- length historical analysis of Victoria Falls. The text offers a critical examination of Victoria Falls providing new insight into the British Southern African project and reveals how Victoria Falls became one of the first modern African tourist destinations. This book makes a case for a critical reading of Victoria Falls as much more than a localized natural wonder. Europeans with multiple and often competing agendas, as well as African leaders and laborers were brought into contact with one another at Victoria Falls. Their visions of the past and hopes for the future shared Victoria Falls as a common point of inspiration. The value these parties placed on the Falls extended far beyond its location on the Zambezi and had broad implications for the British Empire in Southern and Central Africa.

The Rise of the African Novel is the first book to situate South African and African-language literature of the late 1880s through the early 1940s in relation to the literature of decolonization that spanned the 1950s through the 1980s, and the contemporary generation of established and emerging continental and diaspora African writers of international renown.

Calling it a major crisis in African literary criticism, Mukoma Wa Ngugi considers key questions around the misreading of African literature: Why did Chinua Achebe’s generation privilege African literature in English despite the early South African example? What are the costs of locating the start of Africa’s literary tradition in the wrong literary and historical period? What does it mean for the current generation of writers and scholars of African literature not to have an imaginative consciousness of their literary past?

While acknowledging the importance of Achebe’s generation in the African literary tradition, Mukoma Wa Ngugi challenges that narrowing of the identities and languages of the African novel and writer. In restoring the missing foundational literary period to the African literary tradition, he shows how early South African literature, in both aesthetics and politics, is in conversation with the literature of the African independence era and contemporary rooted transnational literatures.

This book will become a foundational text in African literary studies, as it raises questions about the very nature of African literature and criticism. It will be essential reading for scholars of African literary studies as well as general readers seeking a greater understanding of African literary history and the ways in which critical consensus can be manufactured and rewarded at the expense of a larger and historical literary tradition.

This book analyzes the influence of memory on social conflict as well as the role of ethnicity in state formation and governance in Nigeria. It examines the nexus between the Nigerian civil war and the conflict in the oil rich Niger Delta against the background of memory and ethnicization of the state. Ultimately, both social conflicts, though separated by decades, profit from shared memories in a largely ethnicized state structure. Nigeria emerges as a centrifugal state characterized by bias in resource distribution and concentration of power in the center. These forces create the perception of marginalization and sponsor enduring memory of a biased state not helped by failure of the state to ensure closure of the civil war. The book argues that the non-systematic closure of the civil war has generated memory lapse which has given rise to social conflicts and dissension in the socio-geographical region of the erstwhile Biafra republic. These conflicts in the contemporary history of Nigeria include the persistent Niger Delta oil conflict and recurrent struggle for the realization of a sovereign state of Biafra. In effect, these conflicts are products of structural bias and distributional injustice; and both can be related to the social memory lag of the civil war and weak Nigerian state. The book traces how memory is produced and disseminated within social groups in Southeastern Nigeria, which is the theater of both the civil war and youth-driven oil conflict in the Niger Delta. While these conflicts have without doubt benefitted from memory lapse of the past, they have equally drawn momentum from ethnicity which has significantly and negatively affected the role of the state.

This volume calls attention to the worst massacre of Christians that has occurred on the African continent, a 1937 attack on the monastic village of Debre Libanos that has previously been hidden from public knowledge. Between 20 and 29 May 1937, about 2000 monks and pilgrims, considered "conniving" in the attack on the fascist Italian viceroy Rodolfo Graziani, were killed in Ethiopia. The attack on Debre Libanos, the most famous sanctuary of Ethiopian Christianity, far exceeded the logic of a strictly military operation. It represented the apex of wide-ranging repressive action, aimed at crushing the Ethiopian resistance and striking at the heart of the Christian tradition for its historical link with the imperial power of the Negus. Although known to scholars, the episode was totally removed from national historical memory. Now available in English, this book's analysis of the events culminating in the massacre, including the cover-up afterward, is a necessary record for scholars of European colonialism, Christian history, and colonial Africa.

Although it lasted only thirty years, German colonial rule dramatically transformed South West Africa. The colonial government not only committed the first genocide of the twentieth century against the Herero and Nama, but in their efforts to establish a "model colony" and "racial state," they brought about even more destructive and long-lasting consequences. In this now-classic study-available here for the first time in English-the author provides an indispensable account of Germany's colonial utopia in what is present-day Namibia, showing how the highly rationalized planning of Wilhelmine authorities ultimately failed even as it added to the profound immiseration of the African population.

Kingdoms arose during the early centuries of the Common Era across a wide region of West Africa. A rich source of information about West Africa is available in the Arabic sources written by geographers and chroniclers in the Muslim world between the 8th and the 15th centuries. In this volume are the actual primary sources upon which much modern knowledge about the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, Kanem-Borno and their neighbors depends. Here is the story of the conversion of the western Sudan to Islam, as well as accounts of the famous medieval gold trade, testimonies about the pilgrimage of Mansa Musa, and insightful introductions to many other less familiar personalities, activities and events.

This is the first comprehensive book-length study of gender politics in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's fiction. Brendon Nicholls argues that mechanisms of gender subordination are strategically crucial to Ngugi's ideological project from his first novel to his most recent one. Nicholls describes the historical pressures that lead Ngugi to represent women as he does, and shows that the novels themselves are symptomatic of the cultural conditions that they address. Reading Ngugi's fiction in terms of its Gikuyu allusions and references, a gendered narrative of history emerges that creates transgressive spaces for women. Nicholls bases his discussion on moments during the Mau Mau rebellion when women's contributions to the anticolonial struggle could not be reduced to a patriarchal narrative of Kenyan history, and this interpretive maneuver permits a reading of Ngugi's fiction that accommodates female political and sexual agency. Nicholls contributes to postcolonial theory by proposing a methodology for reading cultural difference. This methodology critiques cultural practices like clitoridectomy in an ethical manner that seeks to avoid both cultural imperialism and cultural relativisim. His strategy of 'performative reading,' that is, making the conditions of one text (such as folklore, history, or translation) active in another (for example, fiction, literary narrative, or nationalism), makes possible an ethical reading of gender and of the conditions of reading in translation.

He needed to hear Africa speak for itself after a lifetime of hearing Africa spoken about by others Electrifying essays on the history, complexity, diversity of a continent, from the father of modern African literature. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Steve Biko, the founder of the Black Consciousness philosophy, was killed in prison on 12 September 1977. Biko was only thirty years old, but his ideas and political activities changed the course of South African history and helped hasten the end of apartheid. The year 2007 saw the thirtieth anniversary of Biko's death. To mark the occasion, the then Minister of Science and Technology, Dr Mosibudi Mangena, commissioned Chris van Wyk to compile an anthology of essays as a tribute to the great South African son. Among the contributors are Minister Mangena himself, ex-President Thabo Mbeki, writer Darryl Accone, journalists Lizeka Mda and Bokwe Mafuna, academics Jonathan Jansen, Mandla Seleoane and Saths Cooper, a friend of Biko's and former president of Azapo. We Write What We Like proudly echoes the title of Biko's seminal work, I Write What I Like. It is a gift to a new generation which enjoys freedom, from one that was there when this freedom was being fought for. And it celebrates the man whose legacy is the freedom to think and say and write what we like.

The Soviet Union and Egypt, first published in 1993, sheds new light on Soviet policy towards the Middle East after 1945. It seeks to uncover and analyse the events leading to the eventual domination of Egypt and other Arab countries by the Soviet Union. Soviet penetration into the region can only be understood by tracing the roots and motives of Soviet policy after the Second World War. The strengthening of Soviet influence resulted from a process of gradual political and ideological development in Egypt. Special attention is drawn to domestic and foreign developments in both countries, and the book makes extensive use of recently declassified documents and primary sources.

First Published in 1965 Anglo - Egyptian Relations 1800-1956 provides a comprehensive overview of the political history of Egypt from 1800-1956. John Marlowe discusses important themes like the first British occupation; Great Britain and Mohamed Ali; second British Occupation; the 1936 treaty; the second German war; Egypt and the Arab League; post-war nationalism; revolution and the road to Suez. This book is a must read for students and scholars of Egyptian history, African history, and history in general.

First Published in 1966 Four Aspects of Egypt provides a picturesque tour of Egypt for visitors and new arrivals in the country. John Marlowe takes us on a journey by discussing the splendour and durability of the remains of Egypt's ancient civilization; the mosques, tombs, khans (inns) and sibilas (fountains) of mediaeval Cairo; the total dependence of Egypt upon the Nile and its life-giving waters; and with efforts of modernization in the country, to capture its enchantment through descriptions of the land and its history. This book will be an interesting read for general readers interested in history of Egypt and travelogues.

In the east end of the inner city of Johannesburg, a former textiles factory undergoes a dramatic transformation to become, over the next several years, one of the city’s foremost artists’ studios. When the sale of the building seems imminent, not only must the artists face the daunting prospect of relocation, but a remarkable chapter in the complex narrative of contemporary South African art seems about to close. Sensing the importance of this moment, Kim Gurney, herself a former tenant of the atelier, follows the stories of several of the August House denizens through some of the artworks that came to life in their studios. The result is a fascinating study of the role of the atelier and its artists in South Africa’s fractious art world, and a consideration of the relationship between art and the ever-changing city of Johannesburg.

With the eye of an urbanist, artist and resident, Kim Gurney [constructs] a compelling assemblage of individual, visual and urban narratives brilliantly illuminates the complex life of a building, August House, located in inner city Johannesburg. Her cast of characters—artists, workers, neighbours, August House and the city—lend poignant contours to the ebbs and flows of daily life,the pressures of gentrification, the ruthlessness of poverty, the radicality of the imagination and the ghosts of history.

An essential resource for students or general readers interested in post-colonial Africa, this encyclopedia provides coverage of different regions, countries, wars, battles, factions, leaders, and foreign powers. Armed conflict represents a substantial part of African history since around 1960, yet this history is either insufficiently taught or overshadowed by negative stereotypes about African "tribal warfare." In an effort to introduce this vital topic to students and general readers alike, this one-volume encyclopedia provides concise historical information on conflicts that occurred in postcolonial Africa. The entries cover all the regions of Africa (North, West, Central, East, and Southern); the Cold War and post-Cold War periods; a range of important leaders; various types of conflicts from civil wars and insurgencies to conventional military engagements; involvement of foreign powers; and such themes as airpower, women and war, and genocide. Includes more than 150 entries on various individuals, events, movements, and organizations Presents further reading sources at the end of each entry in order to further aid readers in their study of the topic Offers a chronology of the events discussed throughout the encyclopedia Features contributions from key scholars in the fields of African history and military studies

This is a study of the struggle for the restoration of legitimate power in Uganda following the 1986 National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) liberation battle led by President Yoweri Museveni. This book emphasizes the normative basis for the exercise of power in Uganda reconstruction efforts, tracing a philosophical thread through previous studies of democratization, human rights, and the role of women. "Political Legitimacy in Uganda" addresses the empirical consequences of legitimacy on power relations and how this affects democratization and economic progress.

Slavery, first published in 1958, examines four main types of modern slavery: chattel slavery; the sale of women into marriage; the sale of children into work and prostitution; serfdom. Mr Greenidge, a Director of the Anti-Slavery Society, marshals an astonishing array of findings into modern slavery, and outlines the history of the anti-slavery movement.

The African Link, first published in 1978, breaks new ground in the studies of pre-19th century racial prejudice by emphasizing the importance of the West African end of the slave trade. For the British, the important African link was the commercial one which brought slave traders into contact with the peoples of West Africa. Far from remaining covert, their experiences were reflected in a vast array of scholarly, educational, popular and polemical writing. The picture of Black Africa that emerges from these writings is scarcely favourable - yet through the hostility of traders and moralising editors appear glimpses of respect and admiration for African humanity, skills and artefacts. The crudest generalisations about Black Africa are revealed as the inventions of credulous medieval geographers and of the late 18th century pro-slavery lobby. The author combines the more matter-of-fact reports of the intervening centuries with analysis of 17th and 18th century social and scientific theories to fill a considerable gap in the history of racial attitudes.

1. This book explores the diversity of Africa's cultural heritage, analyses how and why this heritage has been managed and considers the factors that continue to influence management strategies and systems throughout the African continent. 2. This book includes contributions from a cast of prominent scholars and heritage professionals working across Africa. 3. This book examines the ideological influence of independence movements on the African continent's management and remembering of heritage. 4. This will be essential reading for those engaged in the study of museums and heritage, development, archaeology, anthropology, history and African studies. It will also be of interest to heritage and museum professionals who wish to learn more about the issues of decolonisation of heritage.

Drawing from an interdisciplinary body of research and data, Women of Piracy employs a criminological lens to explore how women have been involved in, and impacted by, maritime piracy operations from the 16th century to present day piracy off the coast of Somalia. The book challenges and resists popular understandings of women as peripheral to the criminal enterprise of piracy by presenting and analyzing their roles and experiences as victims, perpetrators, and criminal justice actors, showing that women have been, and continue to be, central figures in maritime piracy. Unfolding in three parts, part one sets the context by providing readers with a history of the masculinization of the sea. Part two focuses on the gendered division of labor in piracy operations, discussing how and why the roles and responsibilities associated with this gendered labor have emerged, persisted, evolved, and/or ceased over time, as well as considering which roles and responsibilities appear to be context-specific and which seem to transgress geographical locations. Part three explores how women have (or have not) been brought to justice for their participation in crimes of piracy as well as the roles of women in efforts to combat piracy. The overarching objective is to ignite a broader discussion about the various cultural, social, historical, and economic forces that create opportunities for women to participate in maritime piracy and counter-piracy, why women continue to be invisible figures of piracy, and what implications this has for how we study, police, and bring pirates to justice. The first criminologically-grounded, global study exploring the continuity and evolution of women in maritime piracy, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology, gender, feminist studies, international relations, anthropology, history, and political geography. It will also be useful to maritime and law enforcement professionals.

The British Imperial Century provides a concise but comprehensive overview of the formation and administration of the empire from its origins in the early nineteenth century, to its climax at mid-century, to its denouement on the eve of the First World War. Considering the impact of British imperial rule and influence on subject peoples, Timothy H. Parsons explores the themes of cross-cultural social and environmental interaction from a world history perspective. He traces the transition from informal to formal empire, which broadened and intensified Britain's relations with Asia, Africa, and the western hemisphere. The establishment of extensive colonies and protectorates in Africa, the occupation of Egypt, the declaration of the Raj in India, and increased economic and political intervention in Latin America and in the Chinese and Ottoman empires brought ever-larger numbers of non-European peoples and cultures under either the influence or direct authority of the British Crown. By considering British imperialism through the lens of world history, Parsons moves beyond questions of Britain's motives in acquiring more territory to ask how it was able to acquire such an empire. As a global network of exchanges, the British Empire linked disparate regions in series of distinct but overlapping exchanges. This new "second" British Empire was also extremely fragile. Lacking the ability hold these possessions by force alone, empire builders needed to win the cooperation of at least a segment of the subject population. By co-opting and adapting the values and customs of their subjects imperial rulers strengthened their authority and legitimacy, but in doing so produced a hybrid culture that was largely British in style but not entirely British in substance. An ambitious and thoughtful contribution, The British Imperial Century will be invaluable for courses on world history and European history and as a supplement for courses on African, Asian, British, and Middle Eastern history.

The evolution of the Moslem capital of Cairo is studied beginning with the Arab conquest, which led to the widespread intermingling of peoples on two continents, and ending with the discovery of the route around the Cape of Good Hope, which was to undermine Egypt's active international role. The book is written for people of various interests.

These essays reexamine European forts in West Africa as hubs where different peoples interacted, negotiated and transformed each other socially, politically, culturally, and economically. This collection brings together scholars of history, archaeology, cultural studies, and others to present a nuanced image of fortifications, showing that over time the functions and impacts of the buildings changed as the motives, missions, allegiances, and power dynamics in the region also changed. Focusing on the fortifications of Ghana, the authors discuss how these structures may be interpreted as connecting Ghanaian and West African histories to a multitude of global histories. They also enable greater understanding of the fortifications' contemporary use as heritage sites, where the Afro-European experience is narrated through guided tours and museums.

Why did the Armenian genocide erupt in Turkey in 1915, only seven years after the Armenian minority achieved civil equality for the first time in the history of the Ottoman Empire? How can we explain the Rwandan genocide occurring in 1994, after decades of relative peace and even cooperation between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority? Addressing the question of how the risk of genocide develops over time, On the Path to Genocide contributes to a better understand why genocide occurs when it does. It provides a comprehensive and comparative historical analysis of the factors that led to the 1915 Armenian genocide and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, using fresh sources and perspectives that yield new insights into the history of the Armenian and Rwandan peoples. Finally, it also presents new research into constraints that inhibit genocide, and how they can be utilized to attempt the prevention of genocide in the future.

Using the socio-political discourse of Kwame Nkrumah, a pioneering Pan-Africanist and Ghana's independence leader, Nartey investigates the notion of political myth-making in a context underexplored in the literature. He examines Nkrumah's construction of a myth described in the book as the Unite or Perish myth (i.e., the idea of a 'United States of Africa' being a prerequisite for the survival of Africa in the post-independence period), exploring the rhetorical resources he deployed, categorizing and analyzing key tropes and metaphors, and setting out the myth's basic components. This book focuses on three areas: an investigation of political myth-making as a social and discursive practice in order to identify particular semiotic practices and linguistic patterns deployed in the construction of mythic discourse; the unpacking of the discursive manifestation, representation, features, and functions of political mythic themes; and finally to propose and implement an integrated discourse analytical framework to account for the complexities of mythic discourse and political narratives in general. It analyzes how Nkrumah deployed his discourse to concurrently construct heroes and villains, protagonists and antagonists, as part of an ideological mechanism aimed at galvanizing support for and instigating action on the part of the masses towards his lifelong African dream. Nartey's book steps out from the conventional domain of critical discourse studies to focus on myth as a form of populist performance. It will be of interest to postgraduate students and academics in (critical) discourse studies, rhetorical discourse analysis, African and Diaspora studies, and African history, as well as non-academics such as journalists, political commentators, and people who consider themselves to be Nkrumaists and Pan-Africanists.