In the first book to explore the cultural politics of Cuba's epic military engagement in the Angolan civil war, Christabelle Peters shows how the internationalist mission profoundly influenced Cuban thinking on the African cultural element in national identity. Drawing from multiple sources, including films, political speeches, literature, and autoethnography, Cuban Identity and the Angolan Experience reveals the underlying mythological context for Operation Carlota. By tracing the evolution of slave iconology during the first five--most ideological--years of the intervention, Peters reveals a parallel shift in Cuba's regional identification from Latin American to Caribbean.

Four overarching themes underscore the essays in this book. These are the creation of African diaspora community and institutional structures; the structured and shared relationships among African immigrants, host, and homeland societies; the construction and negotiation of diaspora spaces, and domains (racial, ethnic, class consciousness, including identity politics; and finally African migrant economic integration, occupational, and labor force roles and statuses and impact on host societies. Each of the thematic themes has been chosen with one specific goal in mind: to depict and represent the critical components in the reconstitution of the African diaspora in international migration. We contextualized the themes in the African diaspora as a dynamic process involving what Paul Zeleza called the "diasporization" of African immigrant settlement communities in global transnational spaces. These themes also reflect the diversities inherent in the diaspora communities and call attention to the fluid and dynamic boundaries within which Africans create, diffuse, and engage host and home societies. In this context, the themes outlined in this book embody the diaspora tapestries woven by the immigrants to center African social and cultural forms in their host societies and communities. Collectively, the themes represent pathways for the elucidation of understanding African immigrant territorialization. Our purpose is to map out and identify the sources and sites for the contestations of the myriad of cultural manifestations of the new African diaspora and its depictions within the totality of the shared meanings and appropriations of the essences of African-ness or African blackness. The vulnerabilities, struggles, threats (internal or external to the immigrant community), and opportunities emanating from the diasporic relationships that these immigrants create are accentuated within the nexus of African global migrations. We view the African diaspora in terms of spatial and geographic constructions and propagations of African cultural identities and institutional forms in global domains whose boundaries are not static but rather dynamic, complex, and multidimensional. Simply stated, we approach the African diaspora from a perspective that incorporates the historical, as well as contemporary postmodern constructions of the Africa's dispersed communities and their associated transnational identity forms.

Photography and History in Colonial Southern Africa is a rich and in-depth study of the relationship between photography and colonial history at the turn of the 20th century. Lorena Rizzo highlights the ways in which photographic images cut across conventional institutional boundaries and complicates rigid distinctions between the private and the public, the political and the aesthetic, the colonial and the vernacular, and the subject and the object.

Rizzo argues that rather than understanding photographs primarily as a means of preserving and recreating the past in the present, we can also value them for how they evoke at once the need for and the limits of historical reconstruction.

The work is rich in detail. Readers will encounter photographs that range from prison albums from late 19th century Cape Town; police photographs from German Southwest Africa (Namibia) in the early 20th century; studio portraits commissioned by African women and men who applied for identity documents, travel permits and passports in the 1920s and 1930s; South African dompas photographs from the 1950s and 1960s; to African women collections assembled in the locations of Windhoek and Usakos in central Namibia, and aerial photography in the Eastern Cape in the mid-20th century.

It is an important contribution to the area of photography and history. It will enhance further study into constructions of whiteness and blackness and the different modes in which the imperial project operated across borders.

Today, the East African state of Tanzania is renowned for wildlife preserves such as the Serengeti National Park, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and the Selous Game Reserve. Yet few know that most of these initiatives emerged from decades of German colonial rule. This book gives the first full account of Tanzanian wildlife conservation up until World War I, focusing upon elephant hunting and the ivory trade as vital factors in a shift from exploitation to preservation that increasingly excluded indigenous Africans. Analyzing the formative interactions between colonial governance and the natural world, The Nature of German Imperialism situates East African wildlife policies within the global emergence of conservationist sensibilities around 1900.

Mining the future is about a resilient people and their visionary leadership - a remarkable story of how Bafokeng people acquired and held onto their land and heritage through 150 years of political upheaval in South Africa. It also tells the story of what the Royal Bafokeng Nation is doing with the platinum wealth it currently enjoys, including serving as the only rural community ever to host world cup soccer in the history of FIFA. This illustrated volume features the vivid voices of members of the Bafokeng community, both past and present, as well as those who played a major role in shaping Bafokeng society, including Paul Kruger, Hans Merensky, and Christoph Penzhorn from the German Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission. The history and lineage of the 40 recorded Bafokeng dikgosi (kings) is presented, leading up to the present day leader of the Royal Bafokeng Nation, Kgosi Leruo Molotlegi. Culture, economic development, environmental management, and generational change are some of the themes addressed in the title, which is written for a general audience.

The 2010 South African World Cup launched African football onto the global stage and its footballers are increasingly present at the best clubs in the world, yet it is rare to find compelling scholarship on the subject of African football. This book brings some of the top scholars on African football together to produce a collection that covers the diverse regions of the continent and diverse football topics. Focussing on aspects of identity, it spans issues of race, radicalization and self-identification, exploring the imagined continuation of war in support of a Nigerian club, the use of songs in support of a club and an ethnic community, and the effects of transnational broadcasting on supporter identification with football in Africa. This collection provides a valuable contribution to debates about African sport and identity and also contains an interview with one of Africa's first migrant footballers, Paul Bonga Bonga.

In 1929, tens of thousands of south eastern Nigerian women rose up against British authority in what is known as the Women's War. This book brings togther, for the first time, the multiple perspectives of the war's colonized and colonial participants and examines its various actions within a single, gendered analytical frame.

This book examines the historical and current state of health and the health of the African people, including the Arab North, impacted by such factors as geography and natural elements, cultural and colonial traditions, and competing biomedical and traditional systems. It also looks at technological advances, poverty and health disparities, utilization of resources, and international presence, as reflected by the work of the World Health Organization, and structural adjustments imposed by the IMF and the World Bank.

Ruth was four years old when her father was arrested for high treason and her world was turned upside-down. She grew up in constant fear of Special Branch policemen knocking on the door to arrest her mother or father, prominent South African communist. Ruth learned how to keep her mouth shut, to look out for microphones in the walls and to beware of friends who could betray her trust.

At fourteen, Ruth left South Africa, clutching her teddy bear in one hand and her drawings in the other. A plan to England carried her into exile, a new world where she struggled to reconstruct a life fractured by fear.

With an artist’s eye for detail and colour, Ruth recalls her life with unflinching honesty: the Treason Trial; her struggle to conform; Friern Barnet Asylum for the ‘hopeless insane’; LSD, protests, and free love in London, art school and motherhood; communes and camping- all steps in a journey that finally brought her home to South Africa on the brink of change.

Heart- wrenchingly sad one minute, bursting with life and vigour the next, seamed throughout by strength and courage, girl on the edge allows us to look deep into one woman’s life and travel with her to the brink and back again.

Development has remained elusive in Africa. Through theoretical contributions and case studies focusing on Southern Africa's former white settler states, South Africa and Zimbabwe, this volume responds to the current need to rethink (and unthink) development in the region. The authors explore how Africa can adapt Western development models suited to its political, economic, social and cultural circumstances, while rejecting development practices and discourses based on exploitative capitalist and colonial tendencies. Beyond the legacies of colonialism, the volume also explores other factors impacting development, including regional politics, corruption, poor policies on empowerment and indigenization, and socio-economic and cultural barriers.

This title uses oral history methodology to record stories of people who experienced the brunt of racist forced removals in the city of Cape Town, South Africa. Through life stories and community case studies, it traces the human impact of this disruptive, often violent feature of apartheid's social engineering.

In its persistence at maintaining racial inequality, Southern Africa is leaving the door open to widespread racial conflict. Although the world--east and west, communist and capitalist--is generally united in condemning apartheid, in such a dispute it is not unlikely that the two superpowers would become involved. Southern Africa: An American Enigma examines the currents of American involvement with Southern African politics since 1948 to the present Reagan administration.

This exhaustive exploration of the sociocultural, political, and economic roles of African women through history demonstrates how African women have shaped-and continue to shape-their societies. Women play essential, critical roles in every society; African women south of the Sahara are certainly no different. Women's Roles in Sub-Saharan Africa adds significantly to our understanding of the ways in which women contribute to the fabric of human civilization. This book provides an in-depth exploration of African women's roles in society from precolonial periods to the contemporary era. Topical sections describe the roles that women play in family, courtship and marriage, religion, work, literature and arts, and government. Each of the six chapters has been structured to elucidate women's roles and functions in society as partners, as active participants, as defenders of their status and occupations, and as agents of change. Authors Nana Akua Amponsah and Toyin Falola present a thought-provoking work that looks at the complicated victimhood/powerful-female paradigm in women and gender studies in Africa, and challenge ideological interest in African historiography that privilege male representation. Describes chronological events in women's lives covering precolonial to postcolonial Africa Includes photographs of powerful women in colonial Africa; arts such as bead-making, pottery, and basketry; contemporary women in politics; and more Lists significant bibliographical materials from historical, anthropological, ethnographical, and sociological sources

In examining the intellectual history in contemporary South Africa, Eze engages with the emergence of ubuntu as one discourse that has become a mirror and aftermath of South Africa’s overall historical narrative. This book interrogates a triple socio-political representation of ubuntu as a displacement narrative for South Africa’s colonial consciousness; as offering a new national imaginary through its inclusive consciousness, in which different, competing, and often antagonistic memories and histories are accommodated; and as offering a historicity in which the past is transformed as a symbol of hope for the present and the future. This book offers a model for African intellectual history indignant to polemics but constitutive of creative historicism and healthy humanism.

A bold and innovative social history, The Seed Is Mine concerns the disenfranchised blacks who did so much to shape the destiny of South Africa. After years of interviews with Kas Maine and his neighbors, employers, friends, and family - a rare triumph of collaborative courage and dedication - Charles van Onselen has recreated the entire life of a man who struggled to maintain his family in a world dedicated to enriching whites and impoverishing blacks, while South Africa was tearing them apart.

“If ever one wondered whether the life of a single man could illuminate a century, [this] brilliant biography … proves the point.” — Carmel Schrire, The Boston Globe

“An epic … [that] tells of the loss of human potential generated by a politics that surrendered generosity and openness to self-interest and bigotry. It reveals the way an ordinary man can survive with dignity in such a world.” — Vincent Crapanzano, the New York Times

“A magnificent book [with] implications beyond its modest claims … This remarkable story compels foreboding but also kindles hope, for it shows the extraordinary courage of 'ordinary' men under severe difficulties.” — Eugene Genovese, Emory University

“[Van Onselen] teases out the subtleties of the paternalistic relationships between rural whites and blacks which gave rise to real friendships but also to much betrayal, anger, and humiliation . . . It is a monumental masterpiece of research, and a poetic evocation of the human spirit to survive … ” — Linda Ensor, Business Day

This book is the first to tackle the difficult and complex politics of transition in Zimbabwe, with deep historical analysis. Its focus is on a very problematic political culture that is proving very hard to transcend. At the center of this culture is an unstable but resilient 'nationalist-military' alliance crafted during the anti-colonial liberation struggle in the 1970s. Inevitably, violence, misogyny and masculinity are constitutive of the political culture. Economically speaking, the culture is that of a bureaucratic, parasitic, primitive accumulation and corruption, which include invasion and emptying of state coffers by a self-styled 'Chimurenga aristocracy.' However, this Chimurenga aristocracy is not cohesive, as the politics that led to Robert Mugabe's ousting from power was preceded by dirty and protracted internal factionalism. At the center of the factional politics was the 'first family':Robert Mugabe and his wife, Grace Mugabe. This book offers a multidisciplinary examination of the complex contemporary politics in Zimbabwe, taking seriously such issues as gender, misogyny, militarism, violence, media, identity, modes of accumulation, the ethnicization of politics, attempts to open lines of credit and FDI, national healing, and the national question as key variables not only of a complete political culture but also of difficult transitional politics.