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Books > Humanities > History > African history > General
British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563-1760
provides the first study of British captives in the North African
Atlantic and Mediterranean, from the reign of Elizabeth I to George
II. Based on extensive archival research in the United Kingdom,
Nabil Matar furnishes the names of all captives while examining the
problems that historians face in determining the numbers of early
modern Britons in captivity. Matar also describes the roles which
the monarchy, parliament, trading companies, and churches played
(or did not play) in ransoming captives. He questions the emphasis
on religious polarization in piracy and shows how much financial
constraints, royal indifference, and corruption delayed the return
of captives. As rivarly between Britain and France from 1688 on
dominated the western Mediterranean and Atlantic, Matar concludes
by showing how captives became the casus belli that justified
European expansion.
When Italian forces landed on the shores of Libya in 1911, many in
Italy hailed it as an opportunity to embrace a Catholic national
identity through imperial expansion. After decades of acrimony
between an intransigent Church and the Italian state, enthusiasm
for the imperial adventure helped incorporate Catholic interests in
a new era of mass politics. Others among Italian imperialists -
military officers and civil administrators - were more concerned
with the challenges of governing a Muslim society, one in which the
Sufi brotherhood of the Sanusiyya seemed dominant. Eileen Ryan
illustrates what Italian imperialists thought would be the best
methods to govern in Muslim North Africa and in turn highlights the
contentious connection between religious and political authority in
Italy. Telling this story requires an unraveling of the history of
the Sanusiyya. During the fall of Qaddafi, Libyan protestors took
up the flag of the Libyan Kingdom of Idris al-Sanusi, signaling an
opportunity to reexamine Libya's colonial past. After decades of
historiography discounting the influence of Sanusi elites in Libyan
nationalism, the end of this regime opened up the possibility of
reinterpreting the importance of religion, resistance, and Sanusi
elites in Libya's colonial history. Religion as Resistance provides
new perspectives on the history of collaboration between the
Italian state and Idris al-Sanusi and questions the dichotomy
between resistance and collaboration in the colonial world.
The Facet of Black Culture is a very unique book that talks about
culture of the black people, the birth of a person to his final
departure to our ancestors and how his property will be shared if
he or she has any. This book begins with the brief history of some
ethnic groups in Africa, particularly Ghana. In this chapter you
will learn how some of the ethnic groups moved from their original
geographical locations to present-day Ghana after which you will
move to the next chapter, which talks about birth and naming
ceremony in Africa. Chapter 2 basically talks about how naming
ceremonies are performed in some parts of Africa. One will also
learn about the first religion in Africa in this book; the features
and beliefs of the traditional religion are found in this book.
Marriage is the dream of every young man and woman in Africa; how
marriage rites are performed Africa can also be found this book.
The meals and preparations, the art and craft, music and dance,
celebrations and festivals, death and funeral rites among black
people are all tactically discussed in The Facet of Black Culture.
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.
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.
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.
A new history of the Basotho migrants in Zimbabwe that illuminates
identity politics, African agency and the complexities of social
integration in the colonial period. Tracing the history of the
Basotho, a small mainly Christianised community of evangelists
working for the Dutch Reformed Church, this book examines the
challenges faced by minority ethnic groups in colonial Zimbabwe and
how they tried to strike a balance between particularism and
integration. Maintaining their own language and community farm, the
Basotho used ownership of freehold land, religion and a shared
history to sustain their identity. The author analyses the
challenges they faced in purchasing land and in engaging with
colonial administrators and missionaries, as well as the nature and
impact of internal schisms within the community, and shows how
their "unity in diversity"impacted on their struggles for belonging
and shaped their lives. This detailed account of the experiences
and strategies the Basotho deployed in interactions with the Dutch
Reformed Church missionaries and colonial administrators as well as
with their non-Sotho neighbours will contribute to wider debates
about migration, identity and the politics of belonging, and to our
understanding of African agency in the context of colonial and
missionary encounters. Published in association with the British
Institute in Eastern Africa
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 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.
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.
But then the nightly phone calls from Congo began: static-filled,
hasty reports from Francisca's mother, "Mama Koko," of
gunmen--Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army-- who had infested
Dungu and began launching attacks. Night after night for a year,
Mama Koko delivered the devastating news of Fransisca's cousins,
nieces, nephews, friends, and neighbors, who had been killed,
abducted, burned alive on Christmas Day.
In an unlikely journey, Shannon and Thelin decided to travel from
Portland, Oregon to Dungu, to witness first-hand the devastation
unfolding at Joseph Kony's hands. Masquerading as Francisca's
American sister-in-law, Shannon tucked herself into Mama Koko's raw
cement living room and listened to the stories of Mama Koko and her
husband, Papa Alexander--as well as those from dozens of other
friends and neighbors ("Mama Koko's War Tribunal")--who lined up
outside the house and waited for hours, eager to offer their
testimony.
In "Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen," Shannon weaves together the
family's tragic stories of LRA encounters with tales from the
family's history: we hear of Mama Koko's early life as a
gap-toothed beauty plotting to escape her inevitable fate of wife
and motherhood; Papa Alexander's empire of wives he married because
they cooked and cleaned and made good coffee; and Francisca's
childhood at the family "castle" and coffee plantation. These
lively stories transport Shannon from the chaos of the violence
around her and bring to life Fransisca's kitchen-table stories of
the peaceful Congo.
Yet, as the LRA camp out on the edge of town grew, tensions inside
the house reach a fever pitch and Shannon and Thelin's friendship
was fiercely tested. Shannon was forced to confront her limitations
as an activist and reconcile her vision of what it means to affect
meaningful change in the lives of others.
"Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen" is at once an illuminating piece
of storytelling and an exploration of what it means to truly make a
difference. It is an exquisite testimony to the beauty of human
connection and the strength of the human spirit in times of
unimaginable tragedy.
First comprehensive account of the origins and early history of the
Chewa as revealed by oral tradition and archaeology that allows a
more accurate picture of a pre-literate society. The Chewa are the
largest ethnic group in Malawi, representing a third of the
population of approximately 19 million, and their language -
Chichewa - is Malawi's national language. Yet the last book on the
history of this group was published in 1944, and was based on oral
history, or tradition. As with much African history, oral history
started to be recorded only in the late 19th century. This is the
first book to use not only oral history, but also documents written
by early Portuguese explorers, traders and government officials, as
well as archaeology, to piece together the early history of the
Chewa. The author is an archaeologist, who discovered the first
major Chewa settlement, Mankhamba, near the southern part of Lake
Malawi. His excavations have enabled a more scientific chronology
of the migrations of the Chewa into what is today Malawi and have
provided physical proof of their early history as well as their
material and spiritual culture and way of life. Professor Yusuf
Juwayeyi has written and documented a very readable history and
description of archaeology, which reveals the value of combining
oral tradition together with archaeology to arrive at a more
accurate picture of the history of a pre-literate society. This
book will be of value not only to historians, archaeologists and
anthropologists, but also the general reader interested in
Africanhistory. YUSUF M. JUWAYEYI is an Associate Professor of
Anthropology at Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York. South
Africa: UCT Press
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