An innovative study of labor relations, particularly the interactions of recruitment agents and migrant workers, in the mining concessions of Wassa, Gold Coast Colony, 1879 to 1909. Recent years have seen renewed interest in the historical study of labor in Africa. Unlike those of the past, these new studies are rooted in the recognition of Africa's dynamic, expansive, and productive informal sector. While this book focuses on one of West Africa's earliest large-scale industries, namely the Wassa gold mines in the southwest Gold Coast, it is not solely concerned with the traditional working class. Rather, it explores the plurality oflabor relations that characterized the mining concessions during the period 1879 to 1909, including the presence of migrants from various parts of West Africa as well as casual and tributary laborers, both male and female. In capturing the phenomenon of labor mobility as it played out in Wassa, Mediators, Contract Men, and Colonial Capital presents one of the fullest accounts of the labor agents who regularly brought groups of migrant laborers to the mines. The narrative discusses these agents' means of employment and roles in the informalization and indentureship of labor; in addition, it explores the regional dynamics of the recruitment machinery and confronts issues of coercion and choice. Scholars interested in African history, global labor history, economic history, and women's work in Africa will find much of value in this innovative study. Cassandra Mark-Thiesen is aResearch Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation (Marie-Heim Voegtlin Grant) in the history department of the University of Basel.

South Africa is still the major-player in African diplomacy, its military resources far outstripping those of other nations on the continent. It also has traditionally taken the lead role in Africa's united negotiations with other power blocs. Yet the recent consensus has been that South Africa's diplomacy over the last decades has been a disappointing failure-from appearing to back the controversial Mugabe regime to accusations that it is failing to utilize its position to encourage Chinese investment. John Siko has had insider access to the corridors of power in South Africa, and, with access to the major political players, charts the inability of South Africa to develop a coherent policy over the last four decades. In particular, he reveals the tight grip Mbeki has over foreign policy, to the detriment of SA's standing in the world, and argues South Africa's isolationist style of policy making has not changed enough after Mandela's election in 1994.

During the early years of World War II, Britain devoted immense resources to building military bases in Egypt and Palestine. The political stability of the two countries was of prime concern to avoid diverting troops away from fighting the external enemy to internal security tasks. The paradox of Britain's eventual victory was that it could not perpetuate its political authority. Demands for independence intensified in Egypt and among Palestinian Jewry, and led to postwar struggles.

"Will be welcomed by all interested in African history and anthropology. A valuable contribution and a rich mine of material."
"--Journal of African History"

In many parts of the African Muslim world, slavery still blights the landscape. What are the origins of this terrible institution? Why is it still practiced? How widespread is it and how does it differ from Western chattel slavery?

This book tells the story of how the enslavement of Africans by Berbers, Arabs, and other Africans became institutionalized and legitimized throughout Muslim Africa. A classic, pioneering study, first published in 1971 and extensively updated in this revised edition, Slavery in the History of Black Muslim Africa provides an expansive portrait of domestic slavery from the tenth to the nineteenth century in the context of the religious, social, and economic conditions of the African Islamic world.

Drawing on a host of accounts from contemporary observers such as Leo Africanus and Ibn Battuta, Fisher and Fisher describe the status and rights of slaves in Africa, and their various roles as currency, goods, eunuchs, soldiers, and statesmen, as well as the jarring historical interruption brought on by slave raiders and traders in West and North Africa.

This open access book is about Mozambicans and Angolans who migrated in state-sponsored schemes to East Germany in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. They went to work and to be trained as a vanguard labor force for the intended African industrial revolutions. While they were there, they contributed their labor power to the East German economy. This book draws on more than 260 life history interviews and uncovers complex and contradictory experiences and transnational encounters. What emerges is a series of dualities that exist side by side in the memories of the former migrants: the state and the individual, work and consumption, integration and exclusion, loss and gain, and the past in the past and the past in the present and future. By uncovering these dualities, the book explores the lives of African migrants moving between the Third and Second worlds. Devoted to the memories of worker-trainees, this transnational study comes at a time when historians are uncovering the many varied, complicated, and important connections within the global socialist world.

In a disruptive media landscape characterized by the relentless death of legacy newspapers, Nigeria's Digital Diaspora shows that a country's transnational elite can shake its media ecosystem through distant online citizen journalism. 2021 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Winner. Over a decade ago, when Nigeria's migratory digital elite in the United States pioneered a new fangled form of online citizen journalism that disrupted the certainties of legacy journalism, the country's professional journalists assumed that this amateur insurgency would be transitory. Instead, it was transformative. Diasporic online citizen journalism is now not only an integral part of Nigeria's media ecosystem, it has also inspired successful homeland emulators and is challenging, even in some cases supplanting, traditional media in the nation's democratic discourse. Within the frenetic and deeply engaged social media scene, diasporic citizen journalism, homeland news, and social media activism are merging to create the most energetic moment in Nigeria's media history. Nigeria's Digital Diaspora chronicles the emergence and transformation of this diasporic citizen journalism from the margins to the mainstream of the country's journalistic landscape.

Stassen wy o.a. ’n volle hoofstuk aan die aangrypende verhaal van die Dorslandtrekkers en hulle lotgevalle. Tydens hierdie Angola-Boere se verblyf in Angola was daar van boerdery min sprake en probleme was velerlei: ’n problematiese verhouding met die Portugese owerheid, terwyl gebrekkige ekonomiese en opvoedkundige geleenthede, en gevolglike armoede, soms tot ontstellende verval gelei het.

In 1928 is ongeveer 2000 Angola-Boere na Suidwes-Afrika gerepatrieer. Die gemeenskap van 386–471 Afrikaners wat ná 1928 in Angola agtergebly het, is aan die vergetelheid en verwaarlosing oorgelaat en is later as ’n “lewende fossiel” en slagoffers van hulle eie behoudendheid bestempel. Sommige het wel nog ’n lewe uit gemengde boerdery, transportry en jag probeer maak, dekades nadat hierdie lewenswyse elders uitgesterf het. Vanaf 1958 tot 1963 is die meerderheid van die ongeveer 600 Afrikaners in Angola na Suidwes-Afrika en Suid-Afrika gerepatrieer, terwyl slegs enkeles in Angola agtergebly het. Hierdie groepie Afrikaners het hul Afrikanerskap daar onder moeilike omstandighede gehandhaaf.

Met die uitbreek van die burgeroorlog in 1975 in Angola het die laaste Afrikaners uit Angola gevlug en het die verbintenis van die Angola-Boere met Angola ná byna ’n eeu tot ’n einde gekom. Hulle interessante en kleurryke lewe word beskryf en die sogenaamde “trekgees” as ’n moontlike rede vir hulle swerftogte word onder die loep geneem.

The Palgrave Handbook of African Traditional Religion interrogates and presents robust and comprehensive contributions from interdisciplinary experts and scholars. Offering a range of perspectives and opinions through the prism of understanding the past about African Traditional religions and, more importantly, capturing their dynamics in the present and projecting their sustainability and relevance for the future, this volume is an essential resource for knowledge and understanding of African Traditional religions in the global space of religious traditions.

This book provides a contemporary overview of Boko Haram's activities. Since Boko Haram emerged in 2002, media-driven narratives as well as social scientific methodologies have been increasingly applied to draw generalisable conclusions on what goals the groups have pursued, what strategies it has used for these purposes and the counter campaign strategies authorities have pursued. But from 2009 to 2018, Boko Haram has pursued high-intensity violence: assassinations, bombing, kidnappings, beheading or threats of violence, conscriptions and territorial occupation. This makes it imperative to deepen and broaden our understanding of the groups' activities toward a problem-solving and policy-relevant analysis. Previously published in Security Journal Volume 33, issue 3, September 2020

As the Cold War faded, Ambassador Hank Cohen, President George Bush's Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, engaged in aggressive diplomatic intervention in Africa's civil wars. In this revealing book Cohen tells how he and his Africa Bureau team operated in seven countries in crisis--Angola, Ethiopia, Liberia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Somalia and Sudan. He candidly characterizes key personalities and events and provides a treasure trove of lessons learned and basic principles for practitioners of conflict resolution within states.

Analyzes how negotiations between Dutch consuls and North African rulers over the liberation of Dutch sailors helped create a new diplomatic order in the western Mediterranean. This work offers a new perspective on the history of diplomacy in the western Mediterranean, examining how piracy and captivity at sea forced Protestant states from northwest Europe to develop complex relationships with Islamic North Africa. Tracing how Dutch diplomats and North African officials negotiated the liberation of Dutch sailors enslaved in the Maghrib, author Erica Heinsen-Roach argues that captivity and redemption helped shape (rather than undermine) a new diplomatic order in the western Mediterranean. Making use of extensive archival research, Consuls and Captives shows how encounters with North African society led the Protestant North to adjust to the norms and practices of the western Mediterranean. Dutch consuls became state representatives, tasked with claiming the unconditional release of captives from the Netherlands. But caught between these directives and the realities of Maghribi politics, the diplomats consented to pay ransom, participated in what they considered lavish gift-giving practices, and began to pay tribute -- all practices that were departures from the norms the Dutch States General upheld in "doing" diplomacy. In analyzing these adjustments, Heinsen-Roach brings into question earlier interpretations of diplomacy as a progressively evolving institution anchored in the western modern tradition. Consuls and Captives shows instead that early modern diplomacy in the western Mediterranean developed in uneven ways as a product of cultural encounters. With its compelling argument and wide-ranging evidence, this book will have a strong appeal to scholars of early modern diplomacy, slavery, and Mediterranean history, as well as to specialists on the Dutch Republic. Erica Heinsen-Roach is visiting assistant professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.

Deneys Schreiner was one of an illustrious family that produced a world-famous author (his great-aunt Olive); a prime minister of the Cape Colony (his grandfather, W.P, who also defended a Zulu prince against specious charges in a colonial court); and Appellate Justice O.D. Schreiner, his father, who fought against National Party efforts to remove coloured people from the common voters' roll. Deneys was an academic, a scientist and a man of strong liberal principles, with a good sense of humour and widespread interests in the sciences, arts and public affairs. These qualities enabled him, in his quiet, steady way, to transform what was then the University of Natal and the society around it. Between the 1960s and 1980s, he supported and initiated several important endeavours to promote constitutional futures other than those imposed by the apartheid government. One of the most significant of these was the Buthelezi Commission, which he chaired. This biography sets out the contexts of Deneys's forebears, his youth, wartime service, studies in Britain and America, family life, and tenure as vice principal, as well as the context of the times in which he lived. It is based on extensive archival research, supported by interviews with family members, former colleagues, friends and journalists. The picture that emerges is of a man who made a great contribution to the struggle for democracy in South Africa. And then there is the story of his beard, once described as a potent symbol of his presence and implacable integrity.

Boko Haram is the major threat to the Nigerian state, and has emerged as a destabilizing factor across sub-Saharan Africa. This is now a major focus of global policy-making, as between 2013 and 2014 insurgency-related deaths in Nigeria exceeded those in Iraq and Afghanistan. This book is the first to focus on the military nature of Boko Haram, the reasons for its success in those specific regions of the Chad basin it operates in and a detailed history of the Nigerian army's counter-insurgency - with whom, uniquely, the author has spent research time. The book identifies and analyses the battles and skirmishes on the front line, as well as unearthing a wider explanation for Boko Haram's military success and the causes of the instability in the region.

The author, interviews some South Africans of different hues, about the idea of race, what it has meant to them and how they envision a future South Africa, steeped as the country and its people are in a highly charged and often unacknowledged world of racial sensitivity. Amongst the interviewees are Naledi Pandor, Minister of Education; Wilmot James, executive director of the African Genome Education Institute; Rhoda Kadalie, journalist and human rights activist; Melanie Verwoerd, former South African ambassador to Ireland; Phatekile Holomisa, president of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (Contralesa); and Carel Boshoff, the founder of Orania, an Afrikaner homeland established in 1991 in the Northern Cape.

Even leaving aside the vast death and suffering that it wrought on indigenous populations, German ambitions to transform Southwest Africa in the early part of the twentieth century were futile for most. For years colonists wrestled ocean waters, desert landscapes, and widespread aridity as they tried to reach inland in their effort of turning outwardly barren lands into a profitable settler colony. In his innovative environmental history, Martin Kalb outlines the development of the colony up to World War I, deconstructing the common settler narrative, all to reveal the importance of natural forces and the Kaisereich's everyday violence.

Ideal for high school and undergraduate students, this addition to the Culture and Customs of Africa series examines the contemporary cultures and traditions of modern Gambia, from religious customs to literature to cuisine and much more. This title in the Culture and Customs of Africa series examines the traditions and customs of contemporary Gambia, a geographically tiny nation in the vast landscape of Africa that is home to a large number of various ethnic groups, each with its own distinctive way of life. It is a country that has been largely unknown in Western culture, with the exception of Alex Haley's book Roots and subsequent TV series, which highlights Gambia's historic significance in the slave trade. This book illuminates Gambian religion and worldview; literature and media; arts and architecture/housing; gender roles, marriage, and family; social customs, traditional dress, cuisine, and lifestyle; and music and dance. The author has successfully encapsulated both long-ago history and contemporary Gambia to provide students with a complete look at life in Gambia today. Information on past traditions and historic events is discussed in the context of how they pertain to life today and their influence on the constant evolution of Gambian life and culture. A map of Gambia Photographs depicting places in Gambia and people engaging in traditional activities and customs A bibliography of sources and additional reading