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Books > Humanities > History > African history > General
This book is a contribution to the global history of the transfer of political ideas, as exemplified by the case of modern Ethiopia. Like many non-European nation-states, Ethiopia adopted a western model of statehood, that is, the nation-state. Unlike the postcolonial polities that have retained the mode of statehood imposed on them by their colonial powers, Ethiopia was never successfully colonized leaving its ruling elite free to select a model of 'modern' (western) statehood. In 1931, via Japan, they adopted the model of unitary, ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state, in turn copied by Tokyo in 1889 from the German Empire (founded in 1871). Following the Ethiopian Revolution (1974) that overthrew the imperial system, the new revolutionary elite promised to address the 'nationality question' through the marxist-leninist model. The Soviet model of ethnolinguistic federalism (originally derived from Austria-Hungary) was introduced in Ethiopia, first in 1992 and officially with the 1995 Constitution. To this day the politics of modern Ethiopia is marked by the tension between these two opposed models of the essentially central European type of statehood. The late 19th-century 'German-German' quarrel on the 'proper' model of national statehood for Germany - or more broadly, modern central Europe - remains the quarrel of Ethiopian politics nowadays. The book will be useful for scholars of Ethiopian and African history and politics, and also offers a case in comparative studies on the subject of different models of national statehood elsewhere.
Museums and Atlantic Slavery explores how slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and enslaved people are represented through words, visual images, artifacts, and audiovisual materials in museums in Europe and the Americas. Divided into four chapters, the book addresses four recurrent themes: wealth and luxury; victimhood and victimization; resistance and rebellion; and resilience and achievement. Considering the roles of various social actors who have contributed to the introduction of slavery in the museum in the last thirty years, the analysis draws on selected exhibitions, and institutions entirely dedicated to slavery, as well as national, community, plantation, and house museums in the United States, England, France, and Brazil. Engaging with literature from a range of disciplines, including history, anthropology, sociology, art history, tourism and museum studies, Araujo provides an overview of a topic that has not yet been adequately discussed and analysed within the museum studies field. Museums and Atlantic Slavery encourages scholars, students, and museum professionals to critically engage with representations of slavery in museums. The book will help readers to recognize how depictions of human bondage in museums and exhibitions often fail to challenge racism and white supremacy inherited from the period of slavery.
This book investigates the importance of waging jihad for legitimacy in pre-colonial Morocco. It counters colonial interpretations of the pre-colonial Moroccan sultanate as hopelessly divided into territories of 'obedience' and 'dissidence' by suggesting that state-society warfare was one aspect of a constant process of political negotiation. Detailed analysis of state and society interpretations of jihad during the critical period of the French conquest of Algeria clearly shows this process at play and its steady evolution in the context of increasing European pressure, which culminated in the imposition of the French protectorate in 1912.
Rights and Responsibilities in Rural South Africa examines the gendered and generational conflicts surrounding social change in South Africa's rural Eastern Cape roughly twenty years after the end of Apartheid. In post-Aparatheid South Africa, rights-based public discourse and state practices promote liberal, autonomous, and egalitarian notions of personhood, yet widespread unemployment and poverty demand that people rely closely on one another and forge relationships that disrupt the gendered and generational hierarchies framed as traditional and culturally authentic. Kathleen Rice examines the ways these tensions and restructurings lead to uncertainties about how South Africans should live together in their daily lives. Focusing particularly on the women of the village of Mhlambini, Rights and Responsibilities in Rural South Africa offers compelling portraits of how they experience and navigate widespread social and economic change and presents their experiences as a way of understanding how people navigate the moral ambiguities of contemporary South African life.
The Routledge History of Monarchy draws together current research across the field of royal studies, providing a rich understanding of the history of monarchy from a variety of geographical, cultural and temporal contexts. Divided into four parts, this book presents a wide range of case studies relating to different aspects of monarchy throughout a variety of times and places, and uses these case studies to highlight different perspectives of monarchy and enhance understanding of rulership and sovereignty in terms of both concept and practice. Including case studies chosen by specialists in a diverse array of subjects, such as history, art, literature, and gender studies, it offers an extensive global and interdisciplinary approach to the history of monarchy, providing a thorough insight into the workings of monarchies within Europe and beyond, and comparing different cultural concepts of monarchy within a variety of frameworks, including social and religious contexts. Opening up the discussion of important questions surrounding fundamental issues of monarchy and rulership, The Routledge History of Monarchy is the ideal book for students and academics of royal studies, monarchy, or political history.
Expanded third edition of this key text on the complex underlying conditions of the civil war from the 1960s to the present day, including a new chapter on the current wars in Sudan's new south and South Sudan. Sudan's post-independence history has been dominated by political and civil strife. Most commentators have attributed the country's recurring civil war either to an age-old racial divide between Arabs and Africans, or to recent colonially constructed inequalities. This book attempts a more complex analysis, briefly examining the historical, political, economic and social factors which have contributed to periodic outbreaks of violence between the state andits peripheries. In tracing historical continuities, it outlines the essential differences between the modern Sudan's first civil war in the 1960s and today, including an analysis of the escalation of the Darfur war, implementation of the 2005 peace agreement and implications of the Southern referendum in 2011 and the new war in Sudan's new south and South Sudan. The author also looks at the series of minor civil wars generated by, and contained within, the major conflict, as well as the regional and international factors - including humanitarian aid - which have exacerbated civil violence. This introduction is aimed at students of North-East Africa, and of conflict and ethnicity. It will be essential reading for those in aid and international organizations who need a straightforward analytical survey which will help them assess the prospects for a lasting peace in Sudan. Douglas H. Johnson isan independent scholar and former international expert on the Abyei Boundaries Commission.
Originally published in 1978 Spirit Possession and Spirit Mediumship in Africa and Afro-America is an incredibly diverse and comprehensive bibliography on published works containing ethnographic data on, and analysis of, spirit possession and spirit mediumship in North and Sub-Saharan Africa and in some Afro-American communities in the Western Hemisphere. The sources on Western Afro-American communities were chosen to shed light on the African continent and the Americas. The bibliography, while not exhaustive, provides extensive research on the area of research in spiritualism in Africa and Afro-America. The bibliography also provides unique sources on spirit cults, ritual or ethnic groups and will be of especial interest to researchers. Although published in the late 70s, this book will still provide an incredibly useful research tool for academics in the area of religion, with a focus on spiritualism and non-western religions.
Initially published in 1943. Akokoaso is a small village in the central province of the Gold Coast Colony, in the heart of the cocoa country. In this study the author presents his survey directed at the Gold Coast 'Middletown' during the period of 1932 to 5. The report covers the village and its inhabitants, their housing, occupations and family economy, moving onto the system of land tenure, the methods of cultivation and the value and yields of cocoa and other crops. The final section gives a statiscal analysis of costs of production and of earnings. Throughout is the emphasis is on the cocoa industry and its effect on every aspect of community life.
Colonial rule shaped the map of Africa like no other event in history. New borders were delineated; explorers and colonial armies were getting into the interior of the continent in order to grab the "magnificent cake of Africa." Colonialism on the Margins of Africa examines less known and smaller or peripheral areas of Africa which played a significant role in the process of colonization of Africa by European powers. Due to diverse socio-economic, religious, ethno-linguistic, as well as political factors, places like the Somali-speaking territories, the Gambia, or Swaziland were divided between or surrounded by various administrative and political systems with different economic opportunities shaping the way to different futures in the post-colonial period. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of African history and colonial and postcolonial politics.
This book applies oral, archival and other interdisciplinary evidence from West Africa and the Americas to analyses of new world Maroons, slaves and free blacks, examining a "Gold Coast" entrepot of Akan, Ga, Guan and other peoples in an Atlantic era of non-linear, mutable intersection of contested history and culture. Combining extant evidence with newer interdisciplinary insights to reconsider under-recognized histories and actors, Identity, Spirit and Freedom in the Atlantic World explores West African cosmologies, regional statecraft and socio-cultural practice, and the way they contributed to Atlantic ideas of freedom, identity and spirituality. Archival researches of British, Dutch and Danish Atlantic thoroughfares bring to light histories of royals, priests and others remade as captive laborers, Maroons and free blacks. Looking at Akwamu's overtaking of Great Accra, Jamaica's Maroon Wars, the 1712 Rebellion in New York and many other examples, this book explores the evolution of identity and spirituality in the diaspora of the Gold Coast and the Atlantic world. Identity, Spirit and Freedom in the Atlantic World will be of interest to scholars and students of African studies, the African diaspora, cultural studies and Atlantic and American history.
Winner of the Sunday Times Literary Award for non-fiction.
‘A truly stunning book.’ - Jacob Dlamini Sunday, 9 November 1952. It should be remembered as a day of infamy in South Africa’s history but few know of a brutal massacre when police opened fire on people at an ANC Youth League-organised event in Duncan Village in East London. The official death toll was eight people killed by police gunfire and bayonet and two killed in retaliation, including an Irish nun and medical doctor, Sister Aidan Quinlan, who lived and worked in Duncan Village. Today it is believed that between 80 and 200 died that day, most buried quietly by their families, who feared arrest if they sought help at hospitals. In the cover-ups and long silences that followed, the real facts of this tragedy at the height of the ANC’s Defiance Campaign were almost lost to history. Bloody Sunday follows the trail of the remarkable Sister Aidan into the heart of a missing chapter in our country’s past – and what was one of the most devastating massacres of the apartheid era.
In 1820 John Bailie, a member of an Anglo-Irish landowning family
and former lieutenant in the Royal Navy, led a large party of
British immigrants to South Africa as part of a group later to be
known as the 1820 Settlers. His party soon dissolved, but Bailie
became extensively involved not only in the affairs of the Eastern
Cape, but also those of the Transorange in the early stages of
European settlement, and the colony of Natal.
Combining the insights of archaeology, history and anthropology, this account ranges from the origins of the Khoikhoi to the contemporary politics of the Namaqualand 'reserves'. It explores the stereotype of the 'Hottentot', the conception that the Khoikhoi are a vanished people. "The Cape Herders" provides the first picture of the Khoikhoi people. In doing so, it fills a long-standing gap in the resources of Southern African studies, and at a time when interest in the indigenous populations of South Africa is growing daily. Combining the insights of archaeology, history and anthropology, this account ranges from the origins of the Khoikhoi in Southern Africa to the contemporary politics of the Namaqualand 'reserves'. The Cape Herders explodes a variety of South African myths - not least those surrounding the negative stereotype of the 'Hottentot', and those which contribute to the idea that the Khoikhoi are by now 'a vanished people'.;The story it tells instead is one of enduring interest - the history of a herding people in Southern Africa, its society, economy and culture, its relationship to the indigenous hunters of the Cape, its encounters with European expeditions, and its subsequent exposure to the first effects of colonisation. It is a story of change and adaptation, and it confirms the Khoikhoi's central role in the making of today's South Africa.
Coming fifteen years after South Africa's achievement of majority rule, this book takes a critical and searching look at the country's past. It presents South Africa's past in an objective, clear, and refreshing manner. With chapters contributed by ten of the best historians of the country, the book elaborately weaves together new data, interpretations, and perspectives on the South African past, from the Early Iron Age to the eve of the mineral revolution on the Rand. Its findings incorporate new sources, methods, and concepts, for example providing new data on the relations between Africans and colonial invaders and rethinking crucial issues of identity and consciousness. This book represents an important reassessment of all the major historical events, developments, and records of South Africa - written, oral, and archaeological - and will be an important new tool for students and professors of African history worldwide.
In this timely and very readable new work, Walvin focuses not on abolitionism or the brutality and suffering of slavery, but on resistance, the resistance of the enslaved themselves - from sabotage and absconding to full-blown uprisings - and its impact in overthrowing slavery. He also looks that whole Atlantic world, including the Spanish Empire and Brazil. In doing so, he casts new light on one of the major shifts in Western history in the past five centuries. In the three centuries following Columbus's landfall in the Americas, slavery became a critical institution across swathes of both North and South America. It saw twelve million Africans forced onto slave ships, and had seismic consequences for Africa. It led to the transformation of the Americas and to the material enrichment of the Western world. It was also largely unquestioned. Yet within a mere seventy-five years during the nineteenth century slavery had vanished from the Americas: it declined, collapsed and was destroyed by a complexity of forces that, to this day, remains disputed, but there is no doubting that it was in large part defeated by those it had enslaved. Slavery itself came in many shapes and sizes. It is perhaps best remembered on the plantations - though even those can deceive. Slavery varied enormously from one crop to another- sugar, tobacco, rice, coffee, cotton. And there was in addition myriad tasks for the enslaved to do, from shipboard and dockside labour, to cattlemen on the frontier, through to domestic labour and child-care duties. Slavery was, then, both ubiquitous and varied. But if all these millions of diverse, enslaved people had one thing in common it was a universal detestation of their bondage. They wanted an end to it: they wanted to be like the free people around them. Most of these enslaved peoples did not live to see freedom. But an old freed man or woman in, say Cuba or Brazil in the 1880s, had lived through its destruction clean across the Americas. The collapse of slavery and the triumph of black freedom constitutes an extraordinary historical upheaval - and this book explains how that happened.
The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus is a critical account of the history of Andalusian music in Iberia from the Islamic conquest of 711 to the final expulsion of the Moriscos (Spanish Muslims converted to Christianity) in the early 17th century. This volume presents the documentation that has come down to us, accompanied by critical and detailed analyses of the sources written in Arabic, Old Catalan, Castilian, Hebrew, and Latin. It is also informed by research the author has conducted on modern Andalusian musical traditions in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. While the cultural achievements of medieval Muslim Spain have been the topic of a large number of scholarly and popular publications in recent decades, what may arguably be its most enduring contribution - music - has been almost entirely neglected. The overarching purpose of this work is to elucidate as clearly as possible the many different types of musical interactions that took place in medieval Iberia and the complexity of the various borrowings, adaptations, hybridizations, and appropriations involved.
Despite increasingly hardened visions of racial difference in colonial governance in French Africa after World War I, interracial sexual relationships persisted, resulting in the births of thousands of children. These children, mostly born to African women and European men, sparked significant debate in French society about the status of multiracial people, debates historians have termed 'the metis problem.' Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research in Gabon, Republic of Congo, Senegal, and France, Rachel Jean-Baptiste investigates the fluctuating identities of metis. Crucially, she centres claims by metis themselves to access French social and citizenship rights amidst the refusal by fathers to recognize their lineage, and in the context of changing African racial thought and practice. In this original history of race-making, belonging, and rights, Jean-Baptiste demonstrates the diverse ways in which metis individuals and collectives carved out visions of racial belonging as children and citizens in Africa, Europe, and internationally.
In January 2003, Kenya was hailed as a model of democracy after the peaceful election of its new president, Mwai Kibaki. By appointing respected longtime reformer John Githongo as anticorruption czar, the new Kikuyu government signaled its determination to end the corrupt practices that had tainted the previous regime. Yet only two years later, Githongo himself was on the run, having secretly compiled evidence of official malfeasance throughout the new administration. Unable to remain silent, Githongo, at great personal risk, made the painful choice to go public. The result was a Kenyan Watergate. Michela Wrong's account of how a pillar of the establishment turned whistle-blower--becoming simultaneously one of the most hated and admired men in Kenya--grips like a political thriller while probing the very roots of the continent's predicament.
In many parts of the world, oppositional publishing has emerged in contexts of state oppression. In South Africa, censorship laws were enacted in the 1960s, and the next decade saw increased pressure on freedom of speech and publishing. With growing restrictions on information, activist publishing emerged. These highly politicised publishers had a social responsibility, to contribute to social change. In spite of their cultural, political and social importance, no academic study of their history has yet been undertaken. This Element aims to fill that gap by examining the history of the most vocal and arguably the most radical of this group, Ravan Press. Using archival material, interviews and the books themselves, this Element examines what the history of Ravan reveals about the role of oppositional print culture.
Carthage tells the life story of the city, both as one of the Mediterranean's great seafaring powers before 146 BC, and after its refounding in the first century BC. It provides a comprehensive history of the city and its unique culture, and offers students an insight into Rome's greatest enemy. Hoyos explores the history of Carthage from its foundation, traditionally claimed to have been by political exiles from Phoenicia in 813 BC, through to its final desertion in AD 698 at the hands of fresh eastern arrivals, the Arabs. In these 1500 years, Carthage had two distinct lives, separated by a hundred-year silence. In the first and most famous life, the city traded and warred on equal terms with Greeks and then with Rome, which ultimately led to Rome utterly destroying the city after the Third Punic War. A second Carthage, Roman in form, was founded by Julius Caesar in 44 BC and flourished, both as a centre for Christianity and as capital of the Vandal kingdom, until the seventh-century expansion of the Umayyad Caliphate. Carthage is a comprehensive study of this fascinating city across 15 centuries that provides a fascinating insight into Punic history and culture for students and scholars of Carthaginian, Roman, and Late Antique history. Written in an accessible style, this volume is also suitable for the general reader.
Rhodesia's illegal Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965 is an act that not only shaped regional politics but also had a profound effect on Britain's attempt to retreat from its empire. This edited collection brings together leading voices in the field, whose contributions - on the role of finance, 'big business', and the regional and international actors involved in the country's negotiated independence - update long-held historiographical wisdoms, signalling a revival in economic and diplomatic explanations for the country's decolonisation. In particular, they shed fresh light on the role(s) played in the decolonisation of Zimbabwe by economic (private business) and political (liberation movements, Western and Southern African governments) actors that until now have been studied with very limited access to primary sources. As scholarship on Zimbabwe is currently dominated by studies that seek to understand the 'crisis' in which the country has recently found itself, this collection acts as a clarion call that reinforces the importance of studies of earlier historical processes. In doing so, the book provides a more nuanced understanding of the continuities and discontinuities between Zimbabwe's colonial and postcolonial history, and examines the roles played by external governments and individuals in the decolonisation of Zimbabwe. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.
Exploring the multifaceted history of dispossession, consumption, and inequality in West Central Africa, Mariana P. Candido presents a bold revisionist history of Angola from the sixteenth century until the Berlin Conference of 1884-5. Synthesising disparate strands of scholarship, including the histories of slavery, land tenure, and gender in West Central Africa, Candido makes a significant contribution to ongoing historical debates. She demonstrates how ideas about dominion and land rights eventually came to inform the appropriation and enslavement of free people and their labour. By centring the experiences of West Central Africans, and especially African women, this book challenges dominant historical narratives, and shows that securing property was a gendered process. Drawing attention to how archives obscure African forms of knowledge and normalize conquest, Candido interrogates simplistic interpretations of ownership and pushes for the decolonization of African history.
Already a classic of war reporting and now reissued as a Grove Press paperback, Black Hawk Down is Mark Bowden's brilliant account of the longest sustained firefight involving American troops since the Vietnam War. On October 3, 1993, about a hundred elite U.S. soldiers were dropped by helicopter into the teeming market in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take an hour. Instead, they found themselves pinned down through a long and terrible night fighting against thousands of heavily-armed Somalis. The following morning, eighteen Americans were dead and more than seventy had been badly wounded. Drawing on interviews from both sides, army records, audiotapes, and videos (some of the material is still classified), Bowden's minute-by-minute narrative is one of the most exciting accounts of modern combat ever written--a riveting story that captures the heroism, courage, and brutality of battle.
In The Center Cannot Hold Jenna N. Hanchey examines the decolonial potential emerging from processes of ruination and collapse. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Tanzania at an internationally funded NGO as it underwent dissolution, Hanchey traces the conflicts between local leadership and Western paternalism as well as the unstable subjectivity of Western volunteers—including the author—who are unable to withstand the contradictions of playing the dual roles of decolonializing ally and white savior. She argues that Western institutional and mental structures must be allowed to fall apart to make possible the emergence of decolonial justice. Hanchey shows how, through ruination, privileged subjects come to critical awareness through repeated encounters with their own complicity, providing an opportunity to delink from and oppose epistemologies of coloniality. After things fall apart, Hanchey posits, the creation of decolonial futures depends on the labor required to imagine impossible futures into being.
Lords of the Atlas is a classic story of Morocco and the rise and
spectacular fall of the House of Glaoua. Madini and T'hami El
Glaoui, sons of a Moroccan Caid by an Ethiopian concubine, rose
meteorically to power in the almost medieval state of Morocco at
the end of the nineteenth Century. This is the epic story of the
more than fifty years in which they governed the country in
barbaric, ostentatious splendor, until their spectacular downfall
in 1956. Out of the intriguing and dramatic lives of Madair and
T'hami, Gavin Maxwell has fashioned an epic story set against the
superb background of Marrakesh and the pinnacled castles of the
High Atlas, still magnificent as crumbling ruins. A dramatic
history of intrigue, action, and exotic places, and illustrated
with over one hundred color illustrations and photographs, Lords of
the Atlas is a stunning look at the rise and fall of one of the
twentieth century's most fascinating rulers. (8 X 9 3/4, 276 pages,
color photos, b&w photos, map, illustrations) |
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