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Books > Humanities > History > African history
Together with Mauritius, Botswana is often categorized as one of
two growth miracles in sub-Saharan Africa. Due to its spectacular
long-run economic performance and impressive social development, it
has been termed both an economic success story and a developmental
state. While there is uniqueness in the Botswana experience,
several aspects of the country's opportunities and challenges are
of a more general nature. Throughout its history, Botswana has been
both blessed and hindered by its natural resource abundance and
dependency, which have influenced growth periods, opportunities for
economic diversification, strategies for sustainable economic and
social development, and the distribution of incomes and
opportunities. Through a political economy framework, Hillbom and
Bolt provide an updated understanding of an African success story,
covering the period from the mid-19th century, when the Tswana
groups settled, to the present day. Understanding the interaction
over time between geography and factor endowments on the one hand,
and the development of economic and political institutions on the
other, offers principle lessons from Botswana's experience to other
natural resource rich developing countries.
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.
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.
"The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of
leadership," concludes internationally acclaimed writer Chinua
Achebe. In this book Achebe broke his silence about the 1983
Nigerian elections. The style and wit in part cover his deep
despair over the direction of change in his home country.
Wanneer ’n mens aan die ervarings van Boerevroue en -kinders tydens
die Anglo-Boereoorlog dink, is die outomatiese konnotasie die van
konsentrasiekamplyding. ’n Fassinerende en grotendeels onbekende
buitebeentjie in hierdie genre is die dagboek van Anna Barry,
waaruit ’n unieke en veelkantige beeld van die oorlog na vore kom.
Aan die een kant van Anna se oorlogservaring staan haar broer Japie
– ’n begeesterde jong soldaat wat uiteindelik as krygsgevangene op
Ceylon sterf. Hierteenoor le haar geliefde pa Thomas (aanvanklik ’n
gerespekteerde veldkornet) al in 1900 die eed van neutraliteit af,
en wag hy die grootste gedeelte van die oorlog in die neutrale
Basoetoland uit. Vir die tienderjarige Anna is die oorlog as gevolg
hiervan ’n uiters verwarrende ervaring en haar dagboek bied ’n
sonderlinge blik op die gefragmenteerdheid en buigbaarheid van
konsepte soos “identiteit”, “nasie” en “volk”. Die feit dat die
dagboek eers in 1960 vir die eerste keer gepubliseer is en daarna
grotendeels in die vergetelheid verval het, is verder veelseggend
in terme van hoe Anna self verwag het haar ervarings kort na die
oorlog ontvang sou word – maar ook in terme van hoe blinde
lojaliteit aan sekere groepe so dikwels in die geskiedenis van
Suid-Afrikaners vereis is. Die dagboekteks, geboekstut deur Ena
Jansen se insiggewende en verhelderende voor- en nawoord, bied nie
slegs ’n sonderlinge blik op die Anglo-Boereoorlog nie, maar is
verweef met kwessies van taal, politieke mag en sosiale status wat
vandag nog net so relevant is soos toe die dagboek geskryf is.
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.
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.
Late in 1755, an army of British regulars and Massachusetts
volunteers completed one of the cruelest, most successful military
campaigns in North American history, capturing and deporting seven
thousand French-speaking Catholic Acadians from the province of
Nova Scotia, and chasing an equal number into the wilderness of
eastern Canada. Thousands of Acadians endured three decades of
forced migrations and failed settlements that shuttled them to the
coasts of South America, the plantations of the Caribbean, the
frigid islands of the South Atlantic, the swamps of Louisiana, and
the countryside of central France. The Acadian Diaspora tells their
extraordinary story in full for the first time, illuminating a
long-forgotten world of imperial desperation, experimental
colonies, and naked brutality. Using documents culled from archives
in France, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States,
Christopher Hodson reconstructs the lives of Acadian exiles as they
traversed oceans and continents, pushed along by empires eager to
populate new frontiers with inexpensive, pliable white farmers.
Hodson's compelling narrative situates the Acadian diaspora within
the dramatic geopolitical changes triggered by the Seven Years'
War. Faced with redrawn boundaries and staggering national debts,
imperial architects across Europe used the Acadians to realize
radical plans: tropical settlements without slaves, expeditions to
the unknown southern continent, and, perhaps strangest of all,
agricultural colonies within old regime France itself. In response,
Acadians embraced their status as human commodities, using
intimidation and even violence to tailor their communities to the
superheated Atlantic market for cheap, mobile labor. Through vivid,
intimate stories of Acadian exiles and the diverse, transnational
cast of characters that surrounded them, The Acadian Diaspora
presents the eighteenth-century Atlantic world from a new angle,
challenging old assumptions about uprooted peoples and the very
nature of early modern empire.
The story is set during the closing years of the eighteenth dynasty
in ancient Egypt. It covers the rise of an ambitious child of a
farmer, as he successfully climbs the ladder of power, until he
wears the crown of the Pharaoh of all Egypt. During his rise, the
novel tries to follow the accepted history of the known rulers. We
meet Akhenaton and Nefertiti, Tutankhamen, and Ankhesenamun, and
also Horemheb and Mutnedjmet. Many more known and unknown
characters appear as we tie the story together. There is intrigue,
treachery, and murder, as well as love, sadness, and joy. It's a
bit of a saga as individuals come and go. This era of Egyptian
history, for all of its study, has many blanks, and this story
attempts to fill them in. It is my hope that you will read it with
interest and pleasure.
Violent Accounts presents a compelling study of how ordinary people
commit extraordinary acts of violence and how perpetrators and
victims manage in the aftermath. Grounded in extensive, qualitative
analysis of perpetrator testimony, the volume reveals the
individual experiences of perpetrators as well as general patterns
of influence that lead to collective violence. Drawing on public
testimony from the amnesty hearings of the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, the book interweaves hundreds of hours
of testimony from seventy-four violent perpetrators in apartheid
South Africa, including twelve major cases that involved direct
interactions between victims and perpetrators. The analysis of
perpetrator testimony covers all tiers on the hierarchy of
organized violence, from executives who translated political
doctrine into general strategies, to managers who translated these
general strategies into specific plans, to the staff-the foot
soldiers-who carried out the destructive plans of these managers.
Vivid and accessible, Violent Accounts is a work of innovative
scholarship that transcends the particulars of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission to reveal broader themes and unexpected
insights about perpetrators of collective violence, the
confrontations between victims and perpetrators in the aftermath of
this violence, the reality of multiple truths, the complexities of
reconciliation, and lessons of restorative justice.
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 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.
Drawing on previously inaccessible and overlooked archival sources,
The Herero Genocide undertakes a groundbreaking investigation into
the war between colonizer and colonized in what was formerly German
South-West Africa and is today the nation of Namibia. In addition
to its eye-opening depictions of the starvation, disease, mass
captivity, and other atrocities suffered by the Herero, it reaches
surprising conclusions about the nature of imperial dominion,
showing how the colonial state's genocidal posture arose from its
own inherent weakness and military failures. The result is an
indispensable account of a genocide that has been neglected for too
long.
Teen die einde van die Anglo-Boereoorlog was terme soos "misdaad
teen die mensdom", "oorlogsmisdadigers", volkemoord" en "etniese
suiwering" begrippe wat nog ver in die geskiedenis le. Bykans 'n
kwart van die konsentrasiekampbevolking het gedurende agt maande in
1901 daar omgekom. Aan die iende van die oorlog sou 29 000
afrikaners, waarvan 22 000 kinders, en moontlik soveel as 18 000
swart mense hulle einde in konsentrasiekapker-howe vind. Die
sterftes in die kampe, hele dorpe wat verwoes is, die platteland
wat grootskaals ontvolk is, en die vrees dat die "hele Afrikaanse
volk kan uitsterf", sou uiteindelik tot die Vrede van Vereeniging
lei. Die konsentrasiekampe het in die hart van die Afrikaner 'n
vuur van verbittering aangesteek wat dalk nooit geblus sal word
nie. As al die smart, smaad en verbittering wat die Afrikaner in sy
ganse geskiedenis gely het, lankal vergete sal wees, sal daardie
vuur nog vlam, want dit het " 'n merk vir die eeue gebrand op ons
volk"(Leipoldt).
One of the outstanding mysteries of the twentieth century, and one
with huge political resonance, is the death of Dag Hammarskjold and
his UN team in a plane crash in central Africa in 1961. Just
minutes after midnight, his aircraft plunged into thick forest in
the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), abruptly ending
his mission to bring peace to the Congo. Across the world, many
suspected sabotage, accusing the multi-nationals and the
governments of Britain, Belgium, the USA and South Africa of
involvement in the disaster. These suspicions have never gone away.
British High Commissioner Lord Alport was waiting at the airport
when the aircraft crashed nearby. He bizarrely insisted to the
airport management that Hammarskjold had flown elsewhere - even
though his aircraft was reported overhead. This postponed a search
for so long that the wreckage of the plane was not found for
fifteen hours. White mercenaries were at the airport that night
too, including the South African pilot Jerry Puren, whose bombing
of Congolese villages led, in his own words, to 'flaming huts . . .
destruction and death'. These soldiers of fortune were backed by
Sir Roy Welensky, Prime Minister of the Rhodesian Federation, who
was ready to stop at nothing to maintain white rule and thought the
United Nations was synonymous with the Nazis. The Rhodesian
government conducted an official inquiry, which blamed pilot error.
But as this book will show, it was a massive cover-up that
suppressed and dismissed a mass of crucial evidence, especially
that of African eyewitnesses. A subsequent UN inquiry was unable to
rule out foul play - but had no access to the evidence to show how
and why. Now, for the first time, this story can be told. Who
Killed Hammarskjoeld? follows the author on her intriguing and
often frightening journey of research to Zambia, South Africa, the
USA, Sweden, Norway, Britain, France and Belgium, where she
unearthed a mass of new and hitherto secret documentary and
photographic evidence.
Neopatrimonial analysts attribute the failure of development
policies in Nigeria to entirely internal problems emanating from
the personalization of state resources by rulers for their own
benefits and as forms of patronage for securing the loyalty of
clients. Based on elaborate theoretical and empirical analysis of
development policies in Nigeria with special focus on development
planning, this book argues that the neopatrimonial analysis is
one-sided and does not adequately capture the fundamental factors
responsible for the development malaise in the country.
Understanding Nigeria's development problems entails looking beyond
neopatrimonialism. The adverse effects of diffusionism that
underlined development policies, and the associated external
factors that fostered neocolonial dependence and peripheralization
of Nigeria's economy are crucial for understanding and coming to
terms with the development problem. This book makes a strong case
for endogenous formulation of development policies and for the
reformulation of the Nigerian state in order to make it more
developmental.
Ghana has always held a position of primacy in the African
political and historical imagination, due in no small part to the
indelible impression left president Kwame Nkrumah. This study
examines the symbolic strategies he used to construct the Ghanaian
state through currency, stamps, museums, flags, and other public
icons.
Whether by falling prey to Algerian corsairs or crashing onto the
desert shores of Western Sahara, a handful of Americans in the
first years of the Republic found themselves enslaved in a system
that differed so markedly from nineteenth century U.S. slavery that
some contemporaries and modern scholars hesitate to categorize
their experiences as 'slavery.' Sears uses a comparative approach,
placing African enslavement of Americans and Europeans in the
context of Mediterranean and Ottoman slaveries, while individually
investigating the system of slavery in Algiers and Western Sahara.
This work illuminates the commonalities and peculiarities of these
slaveries, while contributing to a growing body of literature that
showcases the flexibility of slavery as an institution.
The history of development has paid only little attention to
cultural projects. This book looks at the development politics that
shaped the UNESCO World Heritage programme, with a case study of
Ethiopian World Heritage sites from the 1960s to the 1980s. In a
large-scale conservation and tourism planning project, selected
sites were set up and promoted as images of the Ethiopian nation.
This story serves to illustrate UNESCO's role in constructing a
"useful past" in many African countries engaged in the process of
nation-building. UNESCO experts and Ethiopian elites had a shared
interest in producing a portfolio of antiquities and national parks
to underwrite Ethiopia's imperial claims to regional hegemony with
ancient history. The key findings of this book highlight a
continuity in Ethiopian history, despite the political ruptures
caused by the 1974 revolution and UNESCO's transformation from
knowledge producer to actual provider of development policies. The
particular focus on the bureaucratic and political practices of
heritage, bridges a gap between cultural heritage studies and the
history of international organisations. The result is a first study
of the global discourse on heritage as it emerged in the 1960s
development decade.
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