This book brings together the newest and the most innovative scholarship on Nigerian children-one of the least researched groups in African colonial history. It engages the changing conceptions of childhood, relating it to the broader themes about modernity, power, agency, and social transformation under imperial rule.

Post-colonial South Asia and Africa invite comparison: along with their political boundaries, they inherited from colonial regimes administrative languages, a cluster of sovereign state institutions and modern economic nuclei. When they became independent, South Asian and African states were - for all their diversity - thrust into a common position in the international system, and embarked on a common history as 'emergent', 'non-aligned', 'developing nations'. This is the first book to offer a single-volume comparative history of postcolonial South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa in the first generation since independence. South Asia and Africa After Independence draws together the political and economic history of these two regions, assessing the colonial impact, establishing breaks and continuities, and highlighting their diversity and interplay. Waites sets out a framework for analysing the first generation of post-colonial history, offering an interpretation of 'post-colonialism' as a historical phenomenon, and provocatively challenging us to re-think this term in relation to South Asian and African history. This book is an important reference for the study of global, world, African and South Asian history.

The violent colonization of Africa by European nations toward the end of the 19th century--a colonization justified by theories about the African Mind promulgated in the Age of Reason--had a profound impact upon the mind of Black Africa. After World War II, the mind of Black Africa rebelled; this rebellion led to a struggle for the self. After Africans achieved political independence, the new African leaders betrayed their own people. Africans now have the responsibility of restoring and reaffirming their true inheritance--the mind of Black Africa.

Henry Edward O'Neill was British Consul in Mozambique from 1879 to 1889. He completed thirteen exploratory journeys in northern Mozambique, including the first exploration of the Makua and Lomwe countries between Mozambique Island and Lake Malawi. This recreation of the book, which he never published, makes available for the first time a large body of information on the peoples of northern Mozambique (a region still little researched), on the history of the slave trade in the western Indian Ocean and on the expansion of Portuguese rule and the resistance to it by powerful local communities. The Introduction includes the first ever biographical study of O'Neill and his contribution to African exploration.

Rick Turner was one of South Africa's most original and powerful thinkers and is remembered today as a remarkable teacher and activist. For almost ten years, from 1968, when he returned to South Africa from his studies at the Sorbonne, to 1978, when he was shot by an unknown assassin, Rick Turner played an important role in the opposition to apartheid, especially by provoking whites to expand their vision of what South Africa could be. Believing in the 'necessity of utopian thinking', he wrote a short book, The eye of the needle (1972), that sought to envision a very different kind of society. It has become a classic of its kind. For the authorities Rick Turner was a constant source of annoyance, a threat and anomaly that had to be dealt with. What was most dangerous about him was that his life and thought failed to fit within the dominant narrative of his time. Never a member of the ANC or the Communist Party or any political party for that matter, he propounded a vision for the transformation of South Africa that was both independent and radical. Although he lived a short life, he nevertheless had a great influence on those around him, including people like Steve Biko, and had a profound effect on people's imagining of what was possible. In the end, he became too much for the apartheid system and was killed. Even today, in the severely compromised political climate after the end of apartheid, the need for the kind of idealist vision that Rick Turner lived and died for is perhaps just as urgent.

In an effort to restore its world-power status after the humiliation of defeat and occupation, France was eager to maintain its overseas empire at the end of the Second World War. Yet just fifteen years later France had decolonized, and by 1960 only a few small island territories remained under French control.The process of decolonization in Indochina and Algeria has been widely studied, but much less has been written about decolonization in France's largest colony, French West Africa. Here, the French approach was regarded as exemplary -- that is, a smooth transition successfully managed by well intentioned French politicians and enlightened African leaders. Overturning this received wisdom, Chafer argues that the rapid unfurling of events after the Second World War was a complex , piecemeal and unpredictable process, resulting in a 'successful decolonization' that was achieved largely by accident. At independence, the winners assumed the reins of political power, while the losers were often repressed, imprisoned or silenced.This important book challenges the traditional dichotomy between 'imperial' and 'colonial' history and will be of interest to students of imperial and French history, politics and international relations, development and post-colonial studies.

South Africa's current political upheavals are the most significant since the transition from apartheid. Its powerful trade unions are playing a central role, and the political direction they take will have huge significance for how we understand the role of labour movements in struggles for social justice in the twenty-first century.

This study is the first comprehensive assessment of warfare in Angola to cover all three phases of the nation's modern history: the anti-colonial struggle, the Cold War phase, and the post-Cold War era. It also covers, in detail, the final phase of warfare in Angola, culminating in Jonas Savimbi's death and the signing of the Luena Accord

In this transnational account of black protest, Nicholas Grant examines how African Americans engaged with, supported, and were inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement. Bringing black activism into conversation with the foreign policy of both the U.S. and South African governments, this study questions the dominant perception that U.S.-centered anticommunism decimated black international activism. Instead, by tracing the considerable amount of time, money, and effort the state invested into responding to black international criticism, Grant outlines the extent to which the U.S. and South African governments were forced to reshape and occasionally reconsider their racial policies in the Cold War world. This study shows how African Americans and black South Africans navigated transnationally organized state repression in ways that challenged white supremacy on both sides of the Atlantic. The political and cultural ties that they forged during the 1940s and 1950s are testament to the insistence of black activists in both countries that the struggle against apartheid and Jim Crow were intimately interconnected.

Looks at the political and social history of the Gold Coast in West Africa from the early 16th century to the second half of the 18th. The book examines how political entities in Nzema were structured territorially, as well as the formation of ruling groups and aspects of their political, economic, and military actions.

This is a valuable scholarly analysis of the ways that the practices of three members of the Basel Mission (Evangelische Missionsgesellschaft Basel)-Andreas Riis (1804-1854), Rosine Widmann (1828-1909), and Carl Christian Reindorf (1834-1917)-informed the nineteenth-century mission field of the Gold Coast between the years 1832-1895. This study is based upon the original handwritten documents of these three missionaries, which are housed in the Basel Mission Archive in Basel, Switzerland. The book is located within the larger discipline of postcolonial studies, and more particularly within the framework of Tzvetan Todorov's discussion of 'signs' in his 1984 work The Conquest of America. The study also is set against the backdrop of the important theories on missions in the writings of Schleiermacher, Fabri, and Warneck. A significant contribution made by this study is that it contains the first discussion of the female German missionary Rosine Widmann, who serves as a kind of example of the then current Missionsfrauen. This book leads to a better understanding of the Gold Coast, and makes important contributions to scholarship in the fields of mission studies, German historical theology, German studies, and African studies.

Benin is now perceived of as a model of democracy in Africa because it has successfully established a democratic political system based on consensus and regular and fair elections, and it continues to improve its electoral and parliamentary systems. Since its democracy it has taken important steps towards laying the foundation for the rule of law by establishing stable political institutions that can withstand the test of time. It has also engaged in an important legal, institutional, and regulatory reform to establish a more favorable environment for private initiative. The fourth edition of Historical Dictionary of Benin covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 900 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Benin.

Holocene Saharans addresses issues of continuity and change in past life-ways as well as radical shifts in techniques, innovation and achievements of the Saharan people during the Holocene period, the last 10,000 years. The project is accomplished through a series of precise case studies, each addressing a topical space-time problem. The key pre-occupation linking the case studies is a concern with the replicability of research protocols and the testability of suggested results. The anthropological perspective advocated in this book is anchored on the investigation of dynamic processes that have shaped the archaeological record and the evolution of past Saharan societies. The approach delineated is a broad one and does not focus exclusively on any one of the many conflicting approaches currently debated by archaeologists. Theoretical issues are systematically woven with the empirical record and consistently tested, supported or refuted with hard archaeological facts.

The history of European expansion overseas also includes the history of the expansion of concepts and principles of European law into the non-European world. The values and ideas it expressed have, to this day, deeply influenced indigenous societies and governments. At the same time indigenous concepts of law were 'discovered' and codified by European scholars. The outcome of this was a complex and intense interaction between European and local concepts of law, which resulted in many dual legal systems in the African and Asian colonies and which is examined in this volume by prominent historians, lawyers and legal anthropologists.

This book analyzes the development of indigenous religious, commercial, and political institutions among the Oromo mainly during the relatively peaceful two centuries in its history, from 1704 to 1882. The largest ethnic group in East Africa, the Oromo promoted peace, cultural assimilation, and ethnic integration.

Bronwen Everill offers a new perspective on African global history, applying a comparative approach to freed slave settlers in Sierra Leone and Liberia to understand their role in the anti-slavery colonization movements of Britain and America.

One night in the year 411/1021, the powerful ruler of the Fatimid empire, al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, rode out of the southern gates of Cairo and was never seen again. Was the caliph murdered, or could he have decided to abandon his royal life, wandering off to live alone and anonymous? Whatever the truth, the fact was that al-Hakim had literally vanished into the desert. Yet al-Hakim, though shrouded in mystery, has never been forgotten. To the Druze, he was (and is) God, and his disappearance merely indicated his reversion to non-human form. For Ismailis, al-Hakim was the sixteenth imam, descended from the Prophet, and infallible. Jews and Christians, by contrast, long remembered him as their persecutor, who ordered the destruction of many of their synagogues and churches. Using all the tools of modern scholarship, Paul Walker offers the most balanced and engaging biography yet to be published of this endlessly fascinating individual.
To some, al-Hakim was God incarnate, to others an infallible imam, to still others he was a capricious tyrant. This book examines myth and fact, document and opinion, to present the most complete and detailed history yet written of the life and times of one of the medieval Islamic world's most controversial figures.

Knowledge And Global Power is a ground-breaking international study which examines how knowledge is produced, distributed and validated globally.

The former imperial nations – the rich countries of Europe and North America – still have a hegemonic position in the global knowledge economy. Fran Collyer, Raewyn Connell, João Maia and Robert Morrell, using interviews, databases and fieldwork, show how intellectual workers respond in three Southern tier countries, Brazil, South Africa and Australia. The study focuses on new, socially and politically important research fields: HIV/AIDS, climate change and gender studies.

The research demonstrates emphatically that ‘place matters’, shaping research, scholarship and knowledge itself. But it also shows that knowledge workers in the global South have room to move, setting agendas and forming local knowledge.

The Mummy, A Handbook of Egyptian Funerary Archaeology is linguist and Orientalist E.A. Wallis Budge's detailed overview of Egyptian funeral practices and beliefs. Included is a history of Egypt, as well as the translation of common hieroglyphs, to augment readers' understanding of Egyptian culture. He describes in detail the wrapping and burying of mummies, the attendants to the tombs and the dead, drawings and hieroglyphs found on tomb walls, coffins and sarcophagi, treasures buried with the dead, and scarabs, among other things. This book is a beautiful complement to The Book of the Dead, which describes the Egyptian afterlife and the motivations for detailed and drawn-out burials. This edition is the revised and enlarged edition, originally published in 1925. SIR ERNEST ALFRED THOMPSON WALLIS BUDGE (1857-1934) was born in Bodmin, Cornwall in the UK and discovered an interest in languages at a very early age. Budge spent all his free time learning and discovering Semitic languages, including Assyrian, Syriac, and Hebrew. Eventually, through a close contact, he was able to acquire a job working with Egyptian and Iraqi artifacts at the British Museum. Budge excavated and deciphered numerous cuneiform and hieroglyphic documents, contributing vastly to the museum's collection. Eventually, he became the Keeper of his department, specializing in Egyptology. Budge wrote many books during his lifetime, most specializing in Egyptian life, religion, and language.

This volume offers a comprehensive history and analysis of the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the tumultuous period of 1997-2001. The author examines the most recent events in this turbulent region, offering a contemporary account that is both extensive and detailed.

This personal memoir composed by a medieval scholar reveals an important discourse with two Ismaili leaders who spearheaded the Fatimid revolution in North Africa in 909-910. By reporting the thoughts and activities of Abu 'Abdallah al-Shi'i and his brother Abu'l-Abbas over a period of seven months, Ibn al-Haytham in his Kitab al-Munazarat (The Book of Discussions) provides an unparalleled insider's view to the foundations of the Fatimid state. As such, it is a unique document in the literature of early Islamic revolutionary movements as much as it represents one of the most valuable sources for the history of the medieval Muslim world.