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Books > Humanities > History > African history > General
A Commonwealth of Knowledge addresses the relationship between social and scientific thought, colonial identity, and political power in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa. It hinges on the tension between colonial knowledge, conceived of as a universal, modernizing force, and its realization in the context of a society divided along complex ethnic and racial fault-lines. By means of detailed analysis of colonial cultures, literary and scientific institutions, and expert historical thinking about South Africa and its peoples, it demonstrates the ways in which the cultivation of knowledge has served to support white political ascendancy and claims to nationhood. In a sustained commentary on modern South African historiography, the significance of `broad' South Africanism - a political tradition designed to transcend differences between white English- and Afrikaans-speakers - is emphasized. A Commonwealth of Knowledge also engages with wider comparative debates. These include the nature of imperial and colonial knowledge systems; the role of intellectual ideas and concepts in constituting ethnic, racial, and regional identities; the dissemination of ideas between imperial metropole and colonial periphery; the emergence of amateur and professional intellectual communities; and the encounter between imperial and indigenous or local knowledge systems. The book has broad scope. It opens with a discussion of civic institutions (eg. museums, libraries, botanical gardens and scientific societies), and assesses their role in creating a distinctive sense of Cape colonial identity; the book goes on to discuss the ways in which scientific and other forms of knowledge contributed to the development of a capacious South Africanist patriotism compatible with continued membership of the British Commonwealth; it concludes with reflections on the techno-nationalism of the apartheid state and situates contemporary concerns like the `African Renaissance', and responses to HIV/AIDS, in broad historical context.
Drawing on previously inaccessible and overlooked archival sources, The Herero Genocide undertakes a groundbreaking investigation into the war between colonizer and colonized in what was formerly German South-West Africa and is today the nation of Namibia. In addition to its eye-opening depictions of the starvation, disease, mass captivity, and other atrocities suffered by the Herero, it reaches surprising conclusions about the nature of imperial dominion, showing how the colonial state's genocidal posture arose from its own inherent weakness and military failures. The result is an indispensable account of a genocide that has been neglected for too long.
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.
This book opens up histories of childhood and youth in South African historiography. It looks at how childhoods changed during South Africa's industrialisation, and traces the ways in which institutions, first the Dutch Reformed Church and then the Cape government, attempted to shape white childhood to the future benefit of the colony.
Were the Dutch-Africans in southern Africa a brother nation to the Dutch or did they simply represent a lost colony? Connecting primary sources in Dutch and Afrikaans, this work tells the story of the Dutch stamverwantschap (kinship) movement between 1847 and 1900. The white Dutch-Africans were imagined to be the bridgehead to a broader Dutch identity - a 'second Netherlands' in the south. This study explores how the 19th century Dutch identified with and idealised a pastoral community operating within a racially segregated society on the edge of European civilisation. When the stamverwantschap dream collided with British military and economic power, the belief that race, language and religion could sustain a broader Dutch identity proved to be an illusion.
Apartheid and its resistance come to life in this memoir making it a vital historical document of its time and for our own. In 1969, while a student in South Africa, John Schlapobersky was arrested for opposing apartheid and tortured, detained and eventually deported. Interrogated through sleep deprivation, he later wrote secretly in solitary confinement about the struggle for survival. Those writings inform this exquisitely written book in which the author reflects on the singing of the condemned prisoners, the poetry, songs and texts that saw him through his ordeal, and its impact. This sense of hope through which he transformed his life guides his continuing work as a psychotherapist and his focus on the rehabilitation of others. "[T]hetale of an ordinary young man swept one day from his life into hell, testimony to the wickedness a political system let loose in its agents and, above all, an intimate account of how a man became a healer."-Jonny Steinberg, Oxford University From the introduction: I was supposed to be a man by the time I turned 21, by anyone's reckoning. By the apartheid regime's reckoning, I was also old enough to be tortured. Looking back, I can recognize the boy I was. The eldest of my grandchildren is now approaching this age, and I would never want to see her or the others - or indeed anyone else - having to face any such ordeal. At the time my home was in Johannesburg, only some thirty miles from Pretoria, where I was thrown into a world that few would believe existed, populated by creatures from the darkest places, creatures of the night, some in uniform. I was there for fifty-five days, and never went home again.
This book examines French motivations behind the decolonisation of Tunisia and Morocco and the intra-Western Alliance relationships. It argues that changing French policy towards decolonisation brought about the unexpectedly quick process of independence of dependencies in the post-WWII era.
In the early sixties, South Africa's colonial policies in Namibia served as a testing ground for many key features of its repressive 'Grand Apartheid' infrastructure, including strategies for countering anti-apartheid resistance. Exposing the role that anthropologists played, this book analyses how the knowledge used to justify and implement apartheid was created. Understanding these practices and the ways in which South Africa's experiences in Namibia influenced later policy at home is also critically evaluated, as is the matter of adjudicating the many South African anthropologists who supported the regime.
This book charts the history and influence of the most vitriolic and successful anti-Semitic polemic ever to have been printed in the early modern Hispanic world and offers the first critical edition and translation of the text into English. First printed in Madrid in 1674, the Centinela contra judios ("Sentinel against the Jews") was the work of the Franciscan Francisco de Torrejoncillo, who wrote it to defend the mission of the Spanish Inquisition, to call for the expansion of discriminatory racial statutes and, finally, to advocate in favour of the expulsion of all the descendants of converted Jews from Spain and its empire. Francisco de Torrejoncillo combined the existing racial, theological, social and economic strands within Spanish anti-Semitism to demonize the Jews and their converted descendants in Spain in a manner designed to provoke strong emotional responses from its readership.
International human rights activist Lisa Shannon spent many
afternoons at the kitchen table having tea with her friend
Francisca Thelin, who often spoke of her childhood in Congo. Thelin
would conjure vivid images of lush flower gardens, fish the size of
small children, and of children running barefoot through her
family's coffee plantation, gorging on fruit from the robust and
plentiful mango trees. She urged Shannon to visit her family in
Dungu, to get a taste of "real" Congo, "peaceful" Congo; a place so
different than the conflict-ravaged places Shannon knew from her
activism work.
This book provides a new concept framework for understanding the factors that lead soldiers to challenge civil authority in developing nations. By exploring the causes and effects of the 1964 East African army mutinies, it provides novel insights into the nature of institutional violence, aggression, and military unrest in former colonial societies. The study integrates history and the social sciences by using detailed empirical data on the soldiers' protests in Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya. The roots of the 1964 army mutinies in Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya were firmly rooted in the colonial past when economic and strategic necessity forced the former British territorial governments to rely on Africans for defense and internal security. As the only group in colonial society with access to weapons and military training, the African soldiery was a potential threat to the security of British rule. Colonial authorities maintained control over African soldiers by balancing the significant rewards of military service with social isolation, harsh discipline, and close political surveillance. After independence, civilian pay levels out-paced army wages, thereby tarnishing the prestige of military service. As compensation, veteran African soldiers expected commissions and improved terms of service when the new governments Africanized the civil service. They grew increasingly upset when African politicians proved unwilling and unable to meet their demands. Yet the creation of new democratic societies removed most of the restrictive regulations that had disciplined colonial African soldiers. Lacking the financial resources and military expertise to create new armies, the independent African governments had to retain the basic structure and character of the inherited armies. Soldiers in Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya mutinied in rapid succession during the last week of January 1964 because their governments could no longer maintain the delicate balance of coercion and concessions that had kept the colonial soldiery in check. The East African mutinies demonstrate that the propensity of an African army to challenge civil authority was directly tied to its degree of integration into postcolonial society.
Today, African lives, cultures, and politics remain significantly affected by precolonial and postcolonial configurations of modernity, as well as hegemonic global systems. This project explores Africa's conversation with itself and the rest of the world in terms of the contest between these institutions and a pristine 'nature.' The African continent jostles between these polarities in a turbulent and unpredictable manner as wars, genocide, famine, and other hardships punctuate its history and its struggles to develop. At the same time, this unpredictability is also a manifestation of hope, vigor and dynamism. This dynamic reveals often arresting insights into what humankind has been, what it is presently, and what it could be. In this sense, Africa manifests a sense of life that perpetually strives to escape modern institutions, even if it unavoidably must engage with those institutions.
"Between Sea and Sahara" gives us Algeria in the third decade of
colonization. Written in the 1850s by the gifted painter and
extraordinary writer Eugene Fromentin, the many-faceted work is
travelogue, fiction, stylized memoir, and essay on art. Fromentin
paints a compelling word picture of Algeria and its people,
questioning France's--and his own--role there. He shows French
dynamism tending to arrogance, tinged with malaise, as well as the
complexity of the Algerians and their canny survival tactics. In
his efforts to capture the non-Western world on paper as well as on
canvas, Fromentin reveals much about the roots of a colonial
relationship that continues to affect the Algeria of today. He also
reveals his own development as painter, writer--and human being.
"A theoretically sound, gender-specific legal history through the reading of civil and criminal court records on marriage disputes in Sikasso, Mali...The book echoes the original contribution of Nkiru Nzegwu (in Family Matters, 2006) that the oppression and exploitation of women were at the center of colonial policy. Burrill analyzes this history of legalized oppression at the local, national, and transnational levels...Summing up: Recommended." -CHOICEStates of Marriage shows how throughout the colonial period in French Sudan (present-day Mali) the institution of marriage played a central role in how the empire defined its colonial subjects as gendered persons with certain attendant rights and privileges. The book is a modern history of the ideological debates surrounding the meaning of marriage, as well as the associated legal and sociopolitical practices in colonial and postcolonial Mali. It is also the first to use declassified court records regarding colonialist attempts to classify and categorize traditional marriage conventions in the southern region of the country. In French Sudan, as elsewhere in colonial Africa, the first stage of marriage reform consisted of efforts to codify African marriages, bridewealth transfers, and divorce proceedings in public records, rendering these social arrangements "legible" to the colonial administration. Once this essential legibility was achieved, other, more forceful interventions to control and reframe marriage became possible. This second stage of marriage reform can be traced through transformations in and by the colonial court system, African engagements with state-making processes, and formations of "gender justice." The latter refers to gender-based notions of justice and legal rights, typically as defined by governing and administrative bodies as well as by sociopolitical communities. Gender justice went through a period of favoring the rights of women, to a period of favoring patriarchs, to a period of emphasizing the power of the individual - but all within the context of a paternalistic and restrictive colonial state.
60 years after independence, African nations still find it difficult to face a number of challenges, from establishing meaningful democratic institutions to establish social structures centered on the advancement of gender equality. This volume approaches these contemporary African challenges while combating a reflexive and facile Afro-Pessimism.
This comprehensive analytical biography is the definitive work on the life and writings of history's most significant counterinsurgency doctrinaire, David Galula, elucidating the context for his reflections and examining the present and future applicability of his treatise for scholars and practitioners alike. The product of years of extensive research made possible by exclusive access to Galula's personal papers as well as first-hand accounts from colleagues, family members, and friends, this book traces Galula's life from early childhood until death, describing his upbringing, education, and military career in the tumultuous historical context of his era. The author-a former counterinsurgency practitioner himself-pays particular attention to how the Chinese Revolution and the Algerian War affected Galula's views, and identifies Galula's mentors and the schools of thought within the French military that greatly influenced his writings. A conclusion illuminates the contemporary and likely future validity of his works. In the epilogue, the author speaks to Galula's influence over modern military thought and U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine. This book is essential reading for individuals with an interest in counterinsurgency, Galula's writings, or Galula himself, such as military officers and civilian administrators undertaking counterinsurgency courses and training.
In 1807 the British "Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade" received the Royal Assent. The Act represented the first significant attempt by a Great Power to exert global influence over the development of human rights, and, relatedly, labor conditions worldwide. The essays presented in this book by an international panel of historians and social scientists aim to shed light specifically on the changes which the legal abolition of the slave trade brought about - directly and indirectly - in the labor relations of different regions and continents. The sixteen essays discuss the connected developments in the Americas (Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States), Africa (Cameroon, the Cape Colony, the Belgian Congo) and the Netherlands Indies (Java).
Routledge Library Editions: Immigration and Migration, a collection of 20 previously out-of-print titles, features some key research on a multitude of subject areas. Integration, assimilation, multi-culturalism, historical and modern migration, questions on culture, language, labour and law - all are covered here, forming a snapshot of the immigrant experience across the world.
Colonial powers and Ethiopian frontiers 1880-1884 is the fourth volume of Acta Aethiopica, a series that presents original Ethiopian documents of nineteenth-century Ethiopian history with English translations and scholarly notes. The documents have been collected from dozens of archives in Africa and Europe to recover and present the Ethiopian voice in the history of Ethiopia in the nineteenth century. The present book, the first Acta Aethiopica volume to appear from Lund University Press, deals with how Ethiopian rulers related to colonial powers in their attempts to open Ethiopia for trade and technological development while preserving the integrity and independence of their country. In addition to the correspondence and treatises with the rulers and representatives of Italy, Egypt and Great Britain, the volume also presents letters dealing with ecclesiastical issues, including the Ethiopian community in Jerusalem. An electronic version of this book is available under a creative commons licence: www.manchesteropenhive.com/view/9789198469974/9789198469974.xml -- . |
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