The world wanted South Africa’s true, liberated history – and the writing of it – to begin in 1994, but deep contradictions have quickly bubbled to the surface, revealing a society gripped in turmoil.

The results of all this have been, of course, paradoxical: a series of elections since 1994 seemed to confirm the ANC’s hold, both popular and legitimate, on power. Yet, simultaneously, South Africa has found itself with one of the world’s highest rates of protest and dissent, expressed both in the work-place and on township streets, in universities and technicons, clinics and central city squares. 16 August 2014 saw the lives of nearly three dozen platinum mineworkers end prematurely and violently. The premeditated “Marikana Massacre” demonstrated to the world how little Nelson Mandela’s ANC had changed South Africa’s core power relations, notwithstanding the dramatic, heroic victory over racist rule in 1994.

South Africa: The Present as History traces South African history from early days through the long European conquest and into two decades of democracy. The current socio-economic paradox – one that finds inequality, unemployment and poverty worsening since 1994 – reflect Mandela’s early 1990s concessions, choices which reduced the pursuit of genuine socio-economic and political transformation to the mere realisation of what can best be termed ‘low-intensity democracy’.

Analysing tensions exemplified by Marikana, the authors consider potential futures for an increasingly volatile society. Genuine liberatory possibilities could continue to be vanquished – but that is not the only possible results of today’s turmoil.

Although British-born, John Allen lived in South Africa from 1954 to 1990, a 36-year period during which the country experienced its most climactic--and sometimes terrible--events.

Speaking from firsthand knowledge and with an intimate understanding of the situation, the author takes us beyond the media hype that so dominated Western television screens to answer some of the most vital questions concerning the apartheid era: Who originated the system of government the world grew to hate so much?Was South Africa the only 'apartheid' nation?Did economic sanctions have the desired effect?How did Washington's domestic agenda affect US foreign policy?What was the West's real motive in forcing the country to its knees?Why did Nelson Mandela's release from prison exacerbate rather than diminish violence?

"Apartheid South Africa" addresses these and a host of other issues, bringing to light little-known facts concerning historical detail and providing the reader with eyewitness accounts of day-to-day life in one of the most dangerous countries in the world.

The book presents a thorough study of the changing landscape of state-diaspora relations in Africa, as well as a robust analysis of diaspora engagement policies being pursued across the continent. As the Africa diaspora strengthens its socio-economic and political clout, countries of origin in Africa have sought to engage their citizens living abroad. Over the past decade, the role of diaspora in the homeland development has become a core tenet of national strategies and policies. Against the backdrop of expanding globalization and deepening regional integration, the book presents a thorough study of the changing landscape of state-diaspora relations in Africa, as well as a robust analysis of diaspora engagement policies being pursued across the continent as states seek to extend rights to and extract obligations from their global citizens.

Layers of dispossession and disruption are definitive of South African history. Bouncing from Griqua Philippolis (1824-1862) to Afrikaner Orania (1990-2013), this book shows how land rights are prioritised in pre-apartheid and post-apartheid contexts. The result is a new way of looking at the country's history - different to the version of history partially redressed by an idiosyncratic system of restitution and reconciliation during transformation.

As soon as Europeans set foot on African soil, they looked for the equivalents of their kings - and found them. The resulting misunderstandings have lasted until this day. Based on ethnography-driven regional comparison and a critical re-examination of classic monographs on some forty cultural groups, this volume makes the arresting claim that across equatorial Africa the model of rule has been medicine - and not the colonizer's despotic administrator, the missionary's divine king, or Vansina's big man. In a wide area populated by speakers of Bantu and other languages of the Niger-Congo cluster, both cult and dynastic clan draw on the fertility shrine, rainmaking charm and drum they inherit.

The Kariba Dam, stretching across the Zambezi River between today's Zambia and Zimbabwe, was one of the most famous development projects in Africa in the late 1950s. As a producer of abundant and cheap power, Kariba was to boost the economy of the newly established Central African Federation. The book shows how the dam project crystallised both the hopes and the flaws of the Federation, a highly controversial experiment of 'multiracial' nation-building by which the British colonial power meant to appease both settler and African aspirations for independence. The author sketches the perspectives of a great variety of people involved in the Kariba project, including World Bank experts, colonial administrators, the local population, nationalist politicians, and the workers building the dam. By drawing out what these different groups imagined a 'developed nation' to be like and how they tried to put their visions into practice, the study provides a nuanced understanding of one of the most pervasive ideologies of the twentieth century. Refraining from both uncritical praise and blanket condemnations, the author draws out the fundamental ambivalence at the heart of modernisation, oscillating between empowerment and domination.

This book is a comprehensive investigation, discussion, and analysis of the origins and development of the first civil war in the Sudan, which occurred between 1955 and1972. It was the culmination of ethnic, racial, cultural, religious, political, and economic problems that had faced the Sudan since the Turco-Egyptian conquest of the country in 1821. The hostilities between the Northern and Southern regions of the Sudan also involved foreign powers that had their own geopolitical interests in the country. The first Sudanese civil war is a classic example of intra-regional and inter-regional conflicts in Africa in the 20th century.

"Art in the Service of Colonialism" throws new light on how nothing in the Moroccan French Protectorate (1912-1956) escaped the imprints of metropolitan ideology and how the French transformed and dominated Moroccan society by looking at how the arts and crafts were transformed in the colonial period. Hamid Irbouh argues that during the Moroccan Protectorate (1912-1956), the French imposed their domination through a systematic modernisation and regulation of local arts and crafts. They also stewarded Moroccans into industrial life by establishing vocational and fine arts schools. The French archives, Arabic sources, and oral testimonies, which Irbouh used, demonstrate complex relationships between colonial administrators of both genders and their interactions with Moroccan officials, notables, and the poor. The French co-opted some locals into joining these educational institutions, which respected and reinforced familiar pre-Protectorate social structures. The artisans become The Best Workers in the French Empire, and artists exhibited abroad and cultivated a European and American clientele. The contradictions between reformist goals and the old order, nevertheless, added to social dislocations and led to rebellion against French hegemony. Irbouh focuses on how French women infiltrated the feminine Moroccan milieu to buttress colonial ideology, and how, at critical moments, Moroccan women and their daughters rejected traditional passive roles and sabotaged colonial plans. France's legacy in Moroccan arts and crafts provoked a backlash in the postcolonial period. After independence local artists, searching for their own identities, sought to reclaim their authenticity. The struggle to define a pristine visual heritage still rages, and the author, by underlining French contributions to Moroccan artistic and craft production, challenges the conclusions of the artists and critics who have argued for the establishment of an unadulterated art devoid of most or even all foreign influences. As in so many areas of Moroccan society, this book reveals that the weight of colonial history remains heavily present. In this well-conceived book based on original archival sources Hamid Irbouh investigates how French colonial administrators employed French women to inculcate colonial ideology by establishing new craft schools for notable and poor families in Moroccan cities. The French intended not only to teach modernized versions of old Moroccan crafts, but also wanted to instill new work habits and modern concepts of time into the girls and young women who attended their schools. Dr. Irbouh demonstrates how French women administrators took the lead in this effort and also shows how Moroccan women absorbed their lessons, but also resisted the colonial enterprise. His is a novel approach to colonial art history, situating Moroccan art production in large social, political and ideological contexts.

Over the past decade, Africa's center of gravity in world politics has shifted from mere humanitarianism to a strategic view that posits the centrality of the continent as energy and natural resources supplier, in the fight against terrorism and other security threats, and in the globalization of culture. Besides these considerations, this shift is reflective of two defining dynamics. On one hand, political and economic reforms have contributed to the growth of democracy, an improvement in the economic outlook, and the strengthening of regional governance. On the other hand, the ongoing diffusion of global power is setting the stage for a new international order in which Africa will increasingly matter. This book probes the importance and significance of these developments and their implications for Africa's international relations.

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.

This book provides an engaging account of the moral lives of young black South Africans once the struggle against apartheid ended and took away their object of political resistance. It shows how partial-parenting, partial-schooling, and pervasive poverty contributes to how a group of young people construct right and wrong and what rules govern their behavior.

John Ludwig Burckhardt (1784-1817), Swiss by birth, travelled to London in 1806 with an introduction to Sir Joseph Banks, leading member of the African Association. Burckhardt thereafter devoted himself to the exploration of the interior of Africa, acquainting himself with the language and customs of Arabic peoples in order to pass through Islamic countries then hostile to Christians. Indeed, so proficient he became in the vulgar Arabic, and in his knowledge of the Qu'ran, that he was not only accepted as a true believer, but praised as a great Muslim scholar. In 1814 he became one of the first Christians to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1817, while at Cairo, Burckhardt contracted dysentry from which he died. He was buried as a holy pilgrim in the Muslim cemetery there. 'Travels in Nubia' was the first of several works based on Burckhardt's journals to be published by the African Society. First published in 1819, this facsimile edition of a rare work will be greatly welcomed by Arabic scholars.

This book provides a significant history of Italy's brutal occupation of Libya. Using the lens of the life of the iconic resistance fighter Mohamed Fekini, it tells the story of Libya under Ottoman and Italian rule from the point of view of the colonized. The story begins with the onset of Italian occupation in 1911-12, includes the crucial period of the anti-Italian jihad, from 1921 to 1930, and continues through the postwar creation of a united Libya under King Idris in 1947.

Written by two senior scholars, A History of Africa introduces students to the history of the world's second largest continent. While it is not possible to discuss every event that ever happened in African history, the book comprises an historical narrative emphasizing key trends and processes illustrated by detailed examples. It represents a chronological and empirical history based on scholarly research and reconstructions of Africa's past. As a continental history, it seeks to cover all regions of Africa including North Africa, a region often seen as culturally and historically distinct. Furthermore, the narrative summarizes changing views and academic debates concerning aspects of African history. Richly illustrated with numerous maps and photographs, A History of Africa is the most comprehensive story of the place all humans call home. A History of Africa is available in a combined print or eBook volume, or in split eBook volumes (Volume One: to 1880 and Volume Two: since 1870).

This book brings together the newest and the most innovative scholarship on Nigerian children-one of the least researched groups in African colonial history. It engages the changing conceptions of childhood, relating it to the broader themes about modernity, power, agency, and social transformation under imperial rule.

This book is a historical narrative covering various periods in Sierra Leone's history from the fifteenth century to the end of its civil war in 2002. It entails the history of Sierra Leone from its days as a slave harbor through to its founding as a home for free slaves, and toward its political independence and civil war. In 1462, the country was discovered by a Portuguese explorer, Pedro de Sintra, who named it Serra Lyoa (Lion Mountains). Sierra Leone later became a lucrative hub for the Transatlantic Slave Trade. At the end of slavery in England, Freetown was selected as a home for the Black Poor, free slaves in England after the Somerset ruling. The Black Poor were joined by the Nova Scotians, American slaves who supported or fought with the British during the American Revolution. The Maroons, rebellious slaves from Jamaica, arrived in 1800. The Recaptives, freed in enforcement of British antislavery laws, were also taken to Freetown. Freetown became a British colony in 1808 and Sierra Leone obtained political independence from Britain in 1961. The development of the country was derailed by the death of its first Prime Minister, Sir Milton Margai, and thirty years after independence the country collapsed into a brutal civil war.

In the 1980s South Africa's urban townships exploded into insurrection led by youth and residents' organizations that collectively became known as the civics movement. Ironically the movement has been unable to adapt to the role of a voluntary association in the liberal polity it helped create, and has great difficulty defining any alternative role. This volume charts the rise and fall of the movement in the transition to and consolidation of democracy in South Africa.

Berenice II Euergetis (267/6-221 BCE), the daughter of King Magas of Cyrene (Libya) and wife of King Ptolemy III of Egypt, was queen at an important juncture in Hellenistic history. This collection of four essays focuses on aspects of chronology, genealogy and marital practices, royal ideology and queenship.

South Africa's current political upheavals are the most significant since the transition from apartheid. Its powerful trade unions are playing a central role, and the political direction they take will have huge significance for how we understand the role of labour movements in struggles for social justice in the twenty-first century.

In this transnational account of black protest, Nicholas Grant examines how African Americans engaged with, supported, and were inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement. Bringing black activism into conversation with the foreign policy of both the U.S. and South African governments, this study questions the dominant perception that U.S.-centered anticommunism decimated black international activism. Instead, by tracing the considerable amount of time, money, and effort the state invested into responding to black international criticism, Grant outlines the extent to which the U.S. and South African governments were forced to reshape and occasionally reconsider their racial policies in the Cold War world. This study shows how African Americans and black South Africans navigated transnationally organized state repression in ways that challenged white supremacy on both sides of the Atlantic. The political and cultural ties that they forged during the 1940s and 1950s are testament to the insistence of black activists in both countries that the struggle against apartheid and Jim Crow were intimately interconnected.

Bart de Graaff is ’n Nederlandse historikus en joernalis wat ’n besonderse belangstelling in die Suid-Afrikaanse politiek en kultuur het. In 2015 en 2016 het hy verskeie besoeke aan Suid-Afrika en Namibie gebring. Sy oogmerk was om die nasate van die Khoi-Khoin, synde die eerste “ware mense” van die subkontinent, op te spoor, en aan die woord te stel. Hierdie boek is die resultaat van sy onderhoude. De Graaff kontekstualiseer nie net die geskiedenis van die Khoi-Khoin en haar vele vertakkings nie, maar stel ook bepaalde eietydse leiersfigure in die onderskeie gemeenskappe aan die woord. Daarvolgens word die historiese kyk na legendariese kapteins soos die Korannas se Goliat Yzerbek, die Griekwas se Adam Kok, die Basters se Dirk Vilander, Abraham Swartbooi van die Namas en Frederik Vleermuis van die Oorlams afgewissel met De Graaff se persoonlike reisindrukke en die talle gesprekke wat hy met die waarskynlike nasate van bogenoemde leiers gehad het. In sy onopgesmukte skryfstyl, vol deernis en humor, vertel De Graaff van hierdie ontmoetings en gesprekke en algaande kom die leser onder die indruk van die sistemiese geweld wat teen die Khoi-Khoin oor soveel eeue heen gepleeg is. Dit is ’n belangrike boek wat die geskiedenis en huidige stand van die bruin mense onder hulle landsgenote se aandag bring.

Post-colonial South Asia and Africa invite comparison: along with their political boundaries, they inherited from colonial regimes administrative languages, a cluster of sovereign state institutions and modern economic nuclei. When they became independent, South Asian and African states were - for all their diversity - thrust into a common position in the international system, and embarked on a common history as 'emergent', 'non-aligned', 'developing nations'. This is the first book to offer a single-volume comparative history of postcolonial South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa in the first generation since independence. South Asia and Africa After Independence draws together the political and economic history of these two regions, assessing the colonial impact, establishing breaks and continuities, and highlighting their diversity and interplay. Waites sets out a framework for analysing the first generation of post-colonial history, offering an interpretation of 'post-colonialism' as a historical phenomenon, and provocatively challenging us to re-think this term in relation to South Asian and African history. This book is an important reference for the study of global, world, African and South Asian history.