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Books > History > African history
The dark years of European fascism left their indelible mark on
Africa. As late as the 1970s, Angola was still ruled by white
autocrats, whose dictatorship was eventually overthrown by black
nationalists who had never experienced either the rule of law or
participatory democracy. Empire in Africa takes the long view of
history and asks whether the colonizing ventures of the Portuguese
can bear comparison with those of the Mediterranean Ottomans or
those experienced by Angola' s neighbors in the Belgian Congo,
French Equatorial Africa, or the Dutch colonies at the Cape of Good
Hope and in the Transvaal. David Birmingham takes the reader
through Angola' s troubled past, which included endemic warfare for
the first twenty-five years of independence, and examines the fact
that in the absence of a viable neocolonial referee such as Britain
or France, the warring parties turned to Cold War superpowers for a
supply of guns. For a decade Angola replaced Vietnam as a field in
which an international war by proxy was conducted. Empire in Africa
explains how this African nation went from colony to independence,
how in the 1990s the Cold War legacy turned to civil war, and how
peace finally dawned in 2002.
WINNER OF THE 2017 MARTIN A. KLEIN PRIZE In his in-depth and
compelling study of perhaps the most famous of Portuguese colonial
massacres, Mustafah Dhada explores why the massacre took place,
what Wiriyamu was like prior to the massacre, how events unfolded,
how we came to know about it and what the impact of the massacre
was, particularly for the Portuguese empire. Spanning the period
from 1964 to 2013 and complete with a foreword from Peter Pringle,
this chronologically arranged book covers the liberation war in
Mozambique and uses fieldwork, interviews and archival sources to
place the massacre firmly in its historical context. The Portuguese
Massacre of Wiriyamu in Colonial Mozambique, 1964-2013 is an
important text for anyone interested in the 20th-century history of
Africa, European colonialism and the modern history of war.
South Africa is the most industrialized power in Africa. It was
rated the continent's largest economy in 2016 and is the only
African member of the G20. It is also the only strategic partner of
the EU in Africa. Yet despite being so strategically and
economically significant, there is little scholarship that focuses
on South Africa as a regional hegemon. This book provides the first
comprehensive assessment of South Africa's post-Apartheid foreign
policy. Over its 23 chapters - -and with contributions from
established Africa, Western, Asian and American scholars, as well
as diplomats and analysts - the book examines the current pattern
of the country's foreign relations in impressive detail. The
geographic and thematic coverage is extensive, including chapters
on: the domestic imperatives of South Africa's foreign policy;
peace-making; defence and security; bilateral relations in
Southern, Central, West, Eastern and North Africa; bilateral
relations with the US, China, Britain, France and Japan; the
country's key external multilateral relations with the UN; the
BRICS economic grouping; the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group
(ACP); as well as the EU and the World Trade Organization (WTO). An
essential resource for researchers, the book will be relevant to
the fields of area studies, foreign policy, history, international
relations, international law, security studies, political economy
and development studies.
Muslims beyond the Arab World explores the tradition of writing
African languages using the Arabic script 'Ajami and the rise of
the Muridiyya order of Islamic Sufi in Senegal, founded by Shaykh
Ahmadu Bamba Mbakke (1853-1927). The book demonstrates how the
development of the 'Ajami literary tradition and the flourishing of
the Muridiyya into one of sub-Saharan Africa's most powerful and
dynamic Sufi organizations are entwined. It offers a close reading
of the rich hagiographic and didactic written, recited, and chanted
'Ajami texts of the Muridiyya, works largely unknown to scholars.
The texts describe the life and Sufi odyssey of the order's
founder, his conflicts with local rulers and Muslim clerics and the
French colonial administration, and the traditions and teachings he
championed that shaped the identity and practices of his followers.
In analyzing these Murid 'Ajami texts, Fallou Ngom evaluates
prevailing representations of the movement and offers alternative
perspectives. He demonstrates how, without the knowledge of the
French colonial administration, the Murids were able to use their
written, recited, and chanted 'Ajami materials as an effective
means of mass communication to convey the personal journey of
Shaykh Ahamadu Bamba, his doctrine, the virtues he stood for and
cultivated among his followers: self-reliance, strong faith, the
pursuit of excellence, nonviolence, and optimism in the face of
adversity. This, according to Muslims beyond the Arab World, is the
source of the surprising resilience, appeal, and expansion of
Muridiyya.
In Modern Architecture, Empire, and Race in Fascist Italy, Brian L.
McLaren examines the architecture of the late-Fascist era in
relation to the various racial constructs that emerged following
the occupation of Ethiopia in 1936 and intensified during the
wartime. This study is conducted through a wide-ranging
investigation of two highly significant state-sponsored
exhibitions, the 1942 Esposizione Universale di Roma and 1940
Mostra Triennale delle Terre Italiane d'Oltremare. These
exhibitions and other related imperial displays are examined over
an extended span of time to better understand how architecture,
art, and urban space, the politics and culture that encompassed
them, the processes that formed them, and the society that
experienced them, were racialized in varying and complex ways.
This fascinating book, originally published in 1971, had it origins
in daily journalism: a series of feature articles for the Pretoria
News written between 1968 and 1970. Since then much has changed and
that era now seems as remote as Kruger’s did in 1970. The original
text is reprinted here with minimal editing. Though happily some
still survive, many of the buildings pictured in this book have
disappeared, such as the old Town Hall and the first Opera House.
Gone too are many of the original pictures, some burnt in the fire
that destroyed the main part of Munitoria and the city’s priceless
archive. Kruger’s Pretoria provides the memory of a town long gone.
The Innocence of Roast Chicken focuses on an Afrikaans/English family in the Eastern Cape and their idyllic life on their grandparents’ farm, seen through the eyes of the little girl, Kate, and the subtle web of relationships that is shattered by a horrifying incident in the mid-1960s.
Scenes from Kate’s early life are juxtaposed with Johannesburg in 1989 when Kate, now married to Joe, a human rights lawyer, stands aside from the general euphoria that is gripping the nation. Her despair, both with her marriage and with the national situation, resolutely returns to a brutal incident one Christmas day when Kate was thrust into an awareness of what lay beneath her blissful childhood.
Beautifully constructed, The Innocence of Roast Chicken is painful, evocative, beautifully drawn and utterly absorbing.
This historical account of the transatlantic slave trade between
Africa and the United States is filled with a wealth of records,
details and analyses of its attempted suppression. The various
moral, economic and religious arguments against slavery were clear
from the outset of the practice in the early 16th century. The
ownership of a human life as an economic commodity was decried from
religious circles from the earliest days as an immoral affront to
basic human dignity. However the practice of gaining lifelong labor
in exchange only for a basic degree of care meant slavery persisted
for centuries across the New World as a lucrative endeavor. The
colonial United States would, from the early 17th century, receive
many thousands of slaves from Africa. Many of the slaves
transported were sent to work on plantations and farms which
steadily spread across the warmer southern states of the nation.
Others would do manual work on the docks, for instance moving goods
in the fledgling trading colonies.
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