We all know the colonial and stereotypical images of the African continent and of the people living there. Especially older comics such as The Adventures of Tintin or Mickey Mouse have taken up the image of the “untamed” continent with its “wild” inhabitants. Moreover, modern superhero comics mirror the western view of Africa.

What about the African point of view, though? The true African comic?

The editors of this catalogue present a wide range of African comics: superhero and underground comics as well as comics with propaganda content or an educational focus.

Africa Reimagined is a passionately argued appeal for a rediscovery of our African identity. Going beyond the problems of a single country, Hlumelo Biko calls for a reorientation of values, on a continental scale, to suit the needs and priorities of Africans. Building on the premise that slavery, colonialism, imperialism and apartheid fundamentally unbalanced the values and indeed the very self-concept of Africans, he offers realistic steps to return to a more balanced Afro-centric identity.

Historically, African values were shaped by a sense of abundance, in material and mental terms, and by strong ties of community. The intrusion of religious, economic and legal systems imposed by conquerors, traders and missionaries upset this balance, and the African identity was subsumed by the values of the newcomers. Biko shows how a reimagining of Africa can restore the sense of abundance and possibility, and what a rebirth of the continent on Pan-African lines might look like. This is not about the churn of the news cycle or party politics – although he identifies the political party as one of the most pernicious legacies of colonialism. Instead, drawing on latest research, he offers a practical, pragmatic vision anchored in the here and now.

By looking beyond identities and values imposed from outside, and transcending the divisions and frontiers imposed under colonialism, it should be possible for Africans to develop fully their skills, values and ingenuity, to build institutions that reflect African values, and to create wealth for the benefit of the continent as a whole.

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.

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.

On Pietermaritzburg station in 1893 a young Indian lawyer, newly arrived in South Africa, was ejected from a train to Pretoria for insisting on his right to travel first class. It was to the cold night hours spent in the waiting-room that Gandhi himself traced the genesis of his great resolve - to fight injustice by non-violent means. Crucial as this episode was, it was but one of the manifold influences which shaped the Gandhi-to-be during his sojourn in South Africa. This title arose from a conference held a century later, in 1993, at the Universtiy of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, to reaffirm the South African Gandhi. It traces some of the influences which effected his transformation from an unsuccessful and insecure young man to a mature political and spiritual leader ready to carve his niche in history after his return to Indian in 1914. The Mahatma's moral vision, of a way to resolve conflict and right injustice without resorting to violence, remains relevant to post-apartheid South Africa and to the world. It also remains a difficult vision to grasp; but a better understanding of his vital formative years will perhaps help to make it more accessible.

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.

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.