Originally published in 1921. Leaves from the note-book of a district commissioner in British Somaliland. Author: Major H. Rayne, M.B.E., M.C. Language: English Keywords: Somaliland Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

"Wives of the Leopard" explores power and culture in a pre-colonial West African state whose army of women and practice of human sacrifice earned it notoriety in the racist imagination of late nineteenth-century Europe and America. Tracing two hundred years of the history of Dahomey up to the French colonial conquest in 1894, the book follows change in two central institutions. One was the monarchy, the coalitions of men and women who seized and wielded power in the name of the king. The second was the palace, a household of several thousand wives of the king who supported and managed state functions.

Looking at Dahomey against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave trade and the growth of European imperialism, Edan G. Bay reaches for a distinctly Dahomean perspective as she weaves together evidence drawn from travelers' memoirs and local oral accounts, from the religious practices of vodun, and from ethnographic studies of the twentieth century. Wives of the Leopard thoroughly integrates gender into the political analysis of state systems, effectively creating a social history of power. More broadly, it argues that women as a whole and men of the lower classes were gradually squeezed out of access to power as economic resources contracted with the decline of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. In these and other ways, the book provides an accessible portrait of Dahomey's complex and fascinating culture without exoticizing it.

Routledge Library Editions: Slavery is a collection of previously out-of-print titles that examine various aspects of international slavery. Books analyse the Atlantic slave trade, and its effects on Africa; modern slavery around the world; slave rebellions and resistance; the Abolitionist movements; the suppression of the slave trade; slavery in the ancient world; and more besides. These writings form part of the vital research into slavery through the ages, and together form a succinct overview.

Gustavus Vassa was on the vanguard of the anti-slavery movement in England at the end of the eighteenth century. He provided a voice for people of African descent in the British Atlantic world. His Interesting Narrative has influenced countless works, both fiction and non-fiction.

This long-awaited book is a vivid history of Frelimo, the liberation movement that gained power in Mozambique following the sudden collapse of Portuguese rule in 1974. The leading scholar of the liberation struggle in Portuguese Africa, John Marcum completed this work shortly before his death, after a lifetime of research and close contact with many of the major Mozambican nationalists of the time. Assembled from his rich archive of unpublished letters, diaries, and transcribed conversations with figures such as Eduardo Mondlane, Adelino Gwambe, and Marcelino dos Santos, this book captures the key issues and personalities that shaped the era. With unique insight into the Mozambican struggle and the tragic short-sightedness of U.S. policy, Conceiving Mozambique encourages a dispassionate re-examination of the movement's costs as well as its remarkable accomplishments.

From protest to challenge is a multi-volume chronicle of the struggle to achieve democracy and end racial discrimination in South Africa. Beginning in 1882 during the heyday of European imperialism, these volumes document the history of race conflict, protest, and political mobilisation by South Africa’s black majority. Completely revised and updated, with the inclusion of photographs and with the previous volumes re-formatted to unify the series, this second edition of From protest to challenge revives the classic work of Thomas Karis and Gwendolen Carter and provides an indispensable resource for students and scholars of African history, race and ethnicity, identity politics, democratic transitions and conflict resolution. The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance and generosity of all those who helped to make this book possible. During two extended periods of pioneering field research by Gwendolen Carter, Thomas Karis, and Sheridan Johns in South Africa in 1963 and 1964 – a period of growing political tension – dozens of South Africans gave them documents or loaned them material to photocopy, often in the hope of preventing irreplaceable records from falling into the hands of the police. In addition, lawyers for the defendants in the 1956–61 treason trial contributed a complete set of the trial transcript and the preliminary examination, as well as a set of virtually all the documents assembled by the defence in preparation for the trial. Added to the materials that the team was able to photocopy from archival collections at several South African universities and at the South African institute of race relations, these months of fieldwork provided the initial foundation for what was to become the first four volumes of From protest to challenge.

The first decades of the twentieth century were years of dramatic change in Zanzibar, a time when the social, economic, and political lives of island residents were in incredible flux, framed by the abolition of slavery, the introduction of colonialism, and a tide of urban migration. "Pastimes and Politics" explores the era from the perspective of the urban poor, highlighting the numerous and varied ways that recently freed slaves and other immigrants to town struggled to improve their individual and collective lives and to create a sense of community within this new environment. In this study Laura Fair explores a range of cultural and social practices that gave expression to slaves' ideas of emancipation, as well as how such ideas and practices were gendered.
"Pastimes and Politics" examines the ways in which various cultural practices, including taarab music, dress, football, ethnicity, and sexuality, changed during the early twentieth century in relation to islanders' changing social and political identities. Professor Fair argues that cultural changes were not merely reflections of social and political transformations. Rather, leisure and popular culture were critical practices through which the colonized and former slaves transformed themselves and the society in which they lived.
Methodologically innovative and clearly written, "Pastimes and Politics" is accessible to specialists and general readers alike. It is a book that should find wide use in courses on African history, urbanization, popular culture, gender studies, or emancipation.

This book provides an innovative cultural history of Italian colonialism and its impact on twentieth-century ideas of empire and anti-colonialism. In October 1935, Mussolini's army attacked Ethiopia, defying the League of Nations and other European imperial powers. The book explores the widespread political and literary responses to the invasion, highlighting how Pan-Africanism drew its sustenance from opposition to Italy's late empire-building, and reading the work of George Padmore, Claude McKay, and CLR James alongside the feminist and socialist anti-colonial campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst's broadsheet, New Times and Ethiopia News. Extending into the postwar period, the book examines the fertile connections between anti-colonialism and anti-fascism in Italian literature and art, tracing the emergence of a "resistance aesthetics" in works such as The Battle of Algiers and Giovanni Pirelli's harrowing books of testimony about Algeria's war of independence, both inspired by Frantz Fanon. This book will interest readers passionate about postcolonial studies, the history of Italian imperialism, Pan-Africanism, print cultures, and Italian postwar culture.

This volume investigates alternative epistemological pathways by which knowledge production in Africa can proceed. The contributors, using different intellectual dynamics, explore the existing epistemological dominance of the West-from architecture to gender discourse, from environmental management to democratic governance-and offer distinct and unique arguments that challenge the denigration of the different and differing modes of knowing that the West considered "barbaric" and "primitive." This volume therefore constitutes a minimal gesture that further contributes to the ongoing discourse on alternative modes of knowing in Africa.

Ideal for high school students and undergraduates, this volume explores contemporary life and culture in Libya. Libya is one of Africa's largest nations, but its topography is dominated by a huge southern desert with some of the hottest temperatures recorded anywhere in the world. Culture and Customs of Libya explores the daily lives of the 90 million men, women, and children who struggle to get by in this authoritarian state, where only a fraction of the land is arable and 90 percent of the people live in less than 10 percent of the area, primarily along the Mediterranean coast. In this comprehensive overview of modern Libyan life, readers can explore topics such as religion, contemporary literature, media, art, housing, music, and dance. They will learn about education and employment and will see how traditions and customs of the past-including those from Libya's long domination by the Ottoman Empire and 40 years as an Italian colony-are kept alive or have evolved to fit into today's modern age. Two dozen black-and-white images A glossary of terms

Toda naci n est llamada a vivir un equilibrio entre la cultura y el progreso, a vencer la lucha del Posmodernismo y llegar a una renovaci n de sus estructuras. En este libro describo la historia del Pueblo Angolano partiendo desde su ra z cultural, de su dif cil lucha por su independencia, escurecida por la guerra civil y la llegada de los acuerdos de paz. Identifico algunos de los factores que han sido importantes en la b squeda profunda de realizar sus sue os de llegar a ser un pa?'s prospero y libre.

Muhidin Maalim Gurumo and Hassan Rehani Bitchuka are two of Tanzania's most well-known singers in the popular music genre known as muziki wa dansi (literally, 'music for dancing'), a variation of the Cuban-based rhumba idiom that has been enormously impactful throughout central, eastern, and western Africa in the contemporary era. This interview-based dual biography investigates the lives and careers of these two men from an ethnomusicological and historical perspective. Gurumo had a career spanning fifty years before his death in 2014. Bitchuka has been singing professionally for forty-five years. The two singers, affectionately called mapacha ("the twins") by their colleagues, worked together as partners for thirty years from 1973-2003. This study situates these exemplary individuals as creative agents in a local cultural context, showcasing interviews, narratives, and nostalgic reminiscences about musical life lived under Colonialism, state Socialism, and current politics in the global neoliberal democratic milieu. The book adds to a growing body of work about popular music in Dar es Salaam and shines a light on these artists' creative processes, the choices they have made regarding rare resources, their styles and efficacy in conflict resolution, and their own memories regarding the musical art they have created.

Emerging African Voices is an excellent compendium of literary scholarship offering an assessment of the literary endeavors of the latest generation of select African writers. There exists an abundance of deft scholarship and critical analyses, even in the most recent publications by African and Western theorists, of the works of recognized African authors. However, it is sometimes difficult to access a variety of criticism for some more recent writers, those born just before, at, or just after the independence of many African nations. It seems that either almost all of the recent monographs continue to focus almost entirely on the well-established writers or they focus on one newer writer exclusively. This volume offers insightful general analysis and critical evaluation of new writers' works in order to showcase their contributions to the body of African literature. It examines nine contemporary writers whose works (written almost entirely in the colonial languages of English and French) in some way update and refocus African literature for the new century. The writers whose works are under discussion tackle some of the long-standing difficulties of the colonial project-assimilation, Manicheanism, and othering-in new ways while exposing the challenges and dysfunctions of a locale affected by globalization. During the last 60 years, African literature has been dynamically shaped by African history, especially the colonial exploits of Western nations. A clear and irrefutable raison d'etre for this volume is to probe the aims and intentions of these new voices. Seven chapters are devoted to writers of Nigerian descent with the balance dedicated to writers from Senegal and South Africa. Because of the multiplicity of experiences in their geographic locations in Africa and across the Diaspora as well as their encounters and capabilities related to their place in the contemporary world, these writers continue to break new ground in African literature. Their work reflects the times and places where they live and interact, and it is for this reason that their work will permanently occupy at key place in the evolution of African literature here at the beginning of a new century almost fifty years after independence.

In this study John Yoder chronicles the history of the Kanyok, a people from the southern savanna of Zaire, from before 1500 until their incorporation into the Congo Free State in the 1890s. By analyzing their oral histories, myths and legends, the author describes the political and cultural development of a people who, before 1891, had no written records, and accounts of whose past had previously been confined to the sketchy recitation of wars and succession struggles that characterize many existing books on pre-colonial African states. Yoder sets his work firmly within the larger context of the southern savanna by extending his investigations to the traditions of neighboring peoples, in particular to the Luba and the Lunda, whose empires once dominated the region. In this way he demonstrates how the same stories and ideas circulated over a vast area but were continually adapted to local circumstances. Yoder's history of the Kanyok of Zaire thereby forms the nucleus for a broader and more composite understanding of the entire region.

This book examines the active role played by Africans in the pre-colonial production of historical knowledge in South Africa, focusing on perspectives of the second king of amaZulu, King Dingane. It draws upon a wealth of oral traditions, izibongo, and the work of public intellectuals such as Magolwane kaMkhathini Jiyane and Mshongweni to present African perspectives of King Dingane as multifaceted, and in some cases, constructed according to socio-political formations and aimed at particular audiences. By bringing African perspectives to the fore, this innovative historiography centralizes indigenous African languages in the production of historical knowledge.

The beauty and fashion world attracts enormous interest. Everybody knows who Naomi Campbell is, but few know who South Africa's local Naomi Campbells were (and are)!

This title is an extraordinary mix of glamour, nostalgia and social analysis. It takes the reader on a journey through our South African history and politics from the unusual perspective of the beauty industry. Backed by a photo gallery of classic icons from the 50s, 60s and 70s to the present, it celebrates the inspirational role of beautiful and courageous Black women, especially models and beauty queens. It also looks at the business of beauty and recounts the struggles and successes of Black practitioners trying to make it in this competitive sector.

The author is someone who herself was a leading model of the 1980s. Nakedi Ribane co-owned one of the very few Black modeling agencies of note in South Africa. She is ideally placed to offer a fascinating 'behind-the-scenes' look at one of the most under-rated yet influential industries of our time.

A great writer's take on the war of his time
Several famous British novelists at the turn of nineteenth and twentieth centuries departed from the kinds of books that had brought them fame to write factual accounts of the momentous events of their own times. Most were writers of historical fiction and some were enthusiastic collectors of military history and staunch supporters of British imperialism, so it was perhaps inevitable that they would write of the unfolding events of empire. Notable among these authors were Rudyard Kipling, John Buchan and the author of this Boer War history, the famous creator of Sherlock Holmes and Brigadier Gerard, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. One might expect that Doyle would show a jingoistic bias towards all matters British and there certainly is an element of that within these pages, but in the main he took his role as historian seriously and produced a comparatively well balanced work on the Boer political position and their abilities as a military force. However, irrespective of perspective, Conan Doyle's book displays a reliable skill in penmanship that is both distinctive and entertaining. He began this substantial book while the war was being fought, but this edition represents its fourth and final edition completed in 1904 some time after the last shot had been fired. It comprehensively covers the entire conflict and the text includes five useful campaign maps. This is an essential addition to the library of the history of the Boer War as well as for those who simply enjoy Conan Doyle's craft. Available in softcover and hardcover with dust jacket.

NIGERIAN WOMEN OF DISTINCTION, HONOUR AND EXEMPLARY PRESIDENTIAL QUALITIES; EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR ALL GENDERS The book identifies scores of Nigerian revered women who match the most dignified women world-wide. Their wonderful attributes can lead Nigeria to the 'Promised Land' sooner than expected if given equal leadership opportunities. They abound in all professions including those exclusively left for men and they perform with excellence. It highlights socio-political activism of Chief Abigail Olufunmilayo Ransom-Kuti (25/10/1900-13/4/1978); Chief Hannah Awolowo's successes and unflinching support for her husband's course, Chief Obufemi Awolowo, first Premier of Western Nigeria, her revered Yorubaland eldership; and unparalleled antecedents of Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; Professor Dora Akunyili; Chief Olubunmi Etteh, first female Nigerian House Speaker; Chief Farida Waziri, EFCC ex-Chairperson and many others comprising 190 Nigerian women (past and present) with great and wonderful antecedents. Behind successful men are great women. When women are trained, knowledge spreads and impacts entire community. Women have inherent powers of accomplishments, invincibility and indispensability. Ironically, physically and economically powerful male chauvinists think they control everything, but their wives or girl-friends really take charge and control everything remotely including the powerful men. Imagine the world without women; it will be dull, boring, wifeless, motherless, childless and uninteresting without love, care, romance, beauty, affection, attractiveness, happiness and child production. It condemns discrimination, domestic violence, women and child abuse world-wide. Women can lead exemplarily if given equal opportunities as men. GOD BLESS NIGERIAN WOMEN

Whispers from the depths is more than just the story of the building of the Kariba Dam in the mid-1950s. Built in just five years against overwhelming odds, the dam is a monument to engineering excellence. Shrouded in political undertones, the construction of the dam was vital for the hydro-electric power it would provide for Zambia’s burgeoning copper industry. Little thought, however, appears to have been given to the future of the human and animal populations who lived in the valley that would be inundated when the dam was completed. The question has to be asked: Was this awe-inspiring man-made creation achieved at too high a cost in terms of the human suffering and environmental devastation it caused? Central to the story of Kariba was the fate of the Tonga people who had for centuries lived in the Gwembe valley, due to be flooded when the sluice gates were finally closed to halt the flow of the mighty Zambezi River. Approximately 57 000 people were forced to move from their ancestral homes, abandoning family graves and spiritual sites to the depths of Kariba's water. They became a dispersed people who have never been able to reunite as a cohesive society, never again been able to live peacefully on the banks of the river which gave them life. Animals, too, perished in their thousands despite the gallant efforts of wildlife personnel who mounted a hastily planned rescue mission known as Operation Noah. Whispers from the depths gives a voice to the all but forgotten BaTonga. It celebrates their unique culture but deplores the price they paid for progress – a price from which they themselves derived no benefit whatsoever.