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Books > Humanities > History > African history > General
Whether by falling prey to Algerian corsairs or crashing onto the
desert shores of Western Sahara, a handful of Americans in the
first years of the Republic found themselves enslaved in a system
that differed so markedly from nineteenth century U.S. slavery that
some contemporaries and modern scholars hesitate to categorize
their experiences as 'slavery.' Sears uses a comparative approach,
placing African enslavement of Americans and Europeans in the
context of Mediterranean and Ottoman slaveries, while individually
investigating the system of slavery in Algiers and Western Sahara.
This work illuminates the commonalities and peculiarities of these
slaveries, while contributing to a growing body of literature that
showcases the flexibility of slavery as an institution.
The Mummy, A Handbook of Egyptian Funerary Archaeology is linguist
and Orientalist E.A. Wallis Budge's detailed overview of Egyptian
funeral practices and beliefs. Included is a history of Egypt, as
well as the translation of common hieroglyphs, to augment readers'
understanding of Egyptian culture. He describes in detail the
wrapping and burying of mummies, the attendants to the tombs and
the dead, drawings and hieroglyphs found on tomb walls, coffins and
sarcophagi, treasures buried with the dead, and scarabs, among
other things. This book is a beautiful complement to The Book of
the Dead, which describes the Egyptian afterlife and the
motivations for detailed and drawn-out burials. This edition is the
revised and enlarged edition, originally published in 1925. SIR
ERNEST ALFRED THOMPSON WALLIS BUDGE (1857-1934) was born in Bodmin,
Cornwall in the UK and discovered an interest in languages at a
very early age. Budge spent all his free time learning and
discovering Semitic languages, including Assyrian, Syriac, and
Hebrew. Eventually, through a close contact, he was able to acquire
a job working with Egyptian and Iraqi artifacts at the British
Museum. Budge excavated and deciphered numerous cuneiform and
hieroglyphic documents, contributing vastly to the museum's
collection. Eventually, he became the Keeper of his department,
specializing in Egyptology. Budge wrote many books during his
lifetime, most specializing in Egyptian life, religion, and
language.
This personal memoir composed by a medieval scholar reveals an
important discourse with two Ismaili leaders who spearheaded the
Fatimid revolution in North Africa in 909-910. By reporting the
thoughts and activities of Abu 'Abdallah al-Shi'i and his brother
Abu'l-Abbas over a period of seven months, Ibn al-Haytham in his
Kitab al-Munazarat (The Book of Discussions) provides an
unparalleled insider's view to the foundations of the Fatimid
state. As such, it is a unique document in the literature of early
Islamic revolutionary movements as much as it represents one of the
most valuable sources for the history of the medieval Muslim
world.
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.
Ghana has always held a position of primacy in the African
political and historical imagination, due in no small part to the
indelible impression left president Kwame Nkrumah. This study
examines the symbolic strategies he used to construct the Ghanaian
state through currency, stamps, museums, flags, and other public
icons.
One of the outstanding mysteries of the twentieth century, and one
with huge political resonance, is the death of Dag Hammarskjold and
his UN team in a plane crash in central Africa in 1961. Just
minutes after midnight, his aircraft plunged into thick forest in
the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), abruptly ending
his mission to bring peace to the Congo. Across the world, many
suspected sabotage, accusing the multi-nationals and the
governments of Britain, Belgium, the USA and South Africa of
involvement in the disaster. These suspicions have never gone away.
British High Commissioner Lord Alport was waiting at the airport
when the aircraft crashed nearby. He bizarrely insisted to the
airport management that Hammarskjold had flown elsewhere - even
though his aircraft was reported overhead. This postponed a search
for so long that the wreckage of the plane was not found for
fifteen hours. White mercenaries were at the airport that night
too, including the South African pilot Jerry Puren, whose bombing
of Congolese villages led, in his own words, to 'flaming huts . . .
destruction and death'. These soldiers of fortune were backed by
Sir Roy Welensky, Prime Minister of the Rhodesian Federation, who
was ready to stop at nothing to maintain white rule and thought the
United Nations was synonymous with the Nazis. The Rhodesian
government conducted an official inquiry, which blamed pilot error.
But as this book will show, it was a massive cover-up that
suppressed and dismissed a mass of crucial evidence, especially
that of African eyewitnesses. A subsequent UN inquiry was unable to
rule out foul play - but had no access to the evidence to show how
and why. Now, for the first time, this story can be told. Who
Killed Hammarskjoeld? follows the author on her intriguing and
often frightening journey of research to Zambia, South Africa, the
USA, Sweden, Norway, Britain, France and Belgium, where she
unearthed a mass of new and hitherto secret documentary and
photographic evidence.
Neopatrimonial analysts attribute the failure of development
policies in Nigeria to entirely internal problems emanating from
the personalization of state resources by rulers for their own
benefits and as forms of patronage for securing the loyalty of
clients. Based on elaborate theoretical and empirical analysis of
development policies in Nigeria with special focus on development
planning, this book argues that the neopatrimonial analysis is
one-sided and does not adequately capture the fundamental factors
responsible for the development malaise in the country.
Understanding Nigeria's development problems entails looking beyond
neopatrimonialism. The adverse effects of diffusionism that
underlined development policies, and the associated external
factors that fostered neocolonial dependence and peripheralization
of Nigeria's economy are crucial for understanding and coming to
terms with the development problem. This book makes a strong case
for endogenous formulation of development policies and for the
reformulation of the Nigerian state in order to make it more
developmental.
The history of development has paid only little attention to
cultural projects. This book looks at the development politics that
shaped the UNESCO World Heritage programme, with a case study of
Ethiopian World Heritage sites from the 1960s to the 1980s. In a
large-scale conservation and tourism planning project, selected
sites were set up and promoted as images of the Ethiopian nation.
This story serves to illustrate UNESCO's role in constructing a
"useful past" in many African countries engaged in the process of
nation-building. UNESCO experts and Ethiopian elites had a shared
interest in producing a portfolio of antiquities and national parks
to underwrite Ethiopia's imperial claims to regional hegemony with
ancient history. The key findings of this book highlight a
continuity in Ethiopian history, despite the political ruptures
caused by the 1974 revolution and UNESCO's transformation from
knowledge producer to actual provider of development policies. The
particular focus on the bureaucratic and political practices of
heritage, bridges a gap between cultural heritage studies and the
history of international organisations. The result is a first study
of the global discourse on heritage as it emerged in the 1960s
development decade.
This ground-breaking book offers unique insights into the careers
of Indian doctors in colonial Kenya during the height of British
colonialism, between 1895 and 1940. The story of these important
Indian professionals presents a rare social history of an important
political minority.
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).
Born to an African king in colonial Sierra Leone at the
beginning of the twentieth century, Princess Fatima Massaquoi lived
an extraordinary life that encapsulated the contradictions,
upheavals, and unprecedented opportunities of her time. This
critical edition of her memoirs makes her story available to
readers for the first time. Beginning with her lovingly recounted
memories of growing up in Liberia, it follows her to Hamburg,
Germany, where she pursued an education and forged friendships, but
also experienced the racism, terror, and nationalistic fervor that
accompanied the Nazis' rise to power. In the face of these mounting
dangers, Massaquoi traveled to the United States, where she
furthered her studies, embracing her newfound freedom even as she
observed deteriorating conditions in the segregated American South
in the early years of the civil rights movement. Spanning
continents and cultures, this narrative introduces us to a truly
remarkable woman while offering a fascinating window into the
complex history of the twentieth century.
John Brown Russwurm and African American Settlement in West Africa
examines Russwurm's intellectual accomplishments and significant
contributions to the black civil rights movement in America from
1826 - 1829, and more significantly explores the essential
characteristics that distinguished his thoughts and endeavours from
other black leaders in America, Liberia and Maryland in Liberia.
Not surprisingly, the most controversial of Russwurm's ideas was
his unwavering support of the American Colonization Society (ACS)
and the Maryland State Colonization Society (MSCS), two
organizations that most civil rights activists found racist and
pro-slavery. Beyan probes the social and intellectual sources,
underlying motives and the legacies of Russwurm's thoughts and
endeavours, all in an attempt to dissect why Russwurm acted and
made the choices that he did.
A microcosmic study of nineteenth century British imperialism.
This book transforms our understanding of the recent political
history of Central Africa. It charts the complex life and thought
of Harry Nkumbula (ca. 1917-1983), the first openly nationalist
African politician in Northern Rhodesia and, later, the leader of
parliamentary opposition during Zambia's multi-party First
Republic. Based mainly on his personal papers and the newly opened
archives of UNIP, Zambia's ruling party between 1964 and 1991, the
volume looks at how Nkumbula imagined a Zambian nation for the
first time and, later, presented a liberal alternative to dominant
state-led models of political and economic development. By
exploring the trajectory of Nkumbula's ANC, a minority liberal
party with strong ethnic roots, the book throws new light on the
under-acknowledged fractiousness of Zambian nationalism and warns
against reading African post-colonial politics solely in terms of
clientelism.
The history of the modern world can be described through the
history of the commodities that were produced, traded and consumed,
on an increasingly global scale. The papers presented in this book
show how in this process borders were transgressed, local agents
combined with metropolitan representatives, power relations were
contested and frontiers expanded. Including cases from Asia, Africa
and the Americas, as well as a number of global commodities (sugar,
tobacco, rubber, cotton, cassava, tea and beer), this collection
presents a sample of the range of innovative research taking place
today into commodity history. Together they cover the last two
centuries, in which commodities have led the consolidation of a
globalised economy and society - forging this out of distinctive
local experiences of cultivation and production, and regional
circuits of trade.
This handbook provides an overview of the society, culture,
geography, history, and politics of contemporary Egypt. While such
historic monuments as the pyramids at Giza, the Karnak Temple, and
the Valley of the Kings draw visitors to Egypt each year, the
country is today a large and varied collection of some 79 million
people. An important political and cultural force in the Middle
East and home to one of Africa's most advanced economies, Egypt is
rapidly becoming a major player in the 21st-century world. This
comprehensive text examines all facets of life in Egypt, including
its land, history, politics, and culture. It is written in a manner
that makes the subject accessible and engaging for readers with
little prior knowledge about the country, but also provides a
critical analysis of the latest research for students and scholars
familiar with Egypt and its people. Special attention is given to
the historical period following the rise of Islam to enable a
greater understanding of Egypt's contemporary government, religious
practices, popular culture, and current events. Includes
informative sections on Egyptian art, literature, music, economy,
politics, geography, and much more Provides a detailed, historical
chronology of Egypt from ancient times to present day Contains a
bibliography, glossary, and index to facilitate further research
Since 1997, the war in the east of the Democratic Republic of the
Congo has taken more than 6 million lives and shapes the daily
existence of the nation's residents. While the DRC is often
portrayed in international media as an unproductive failed state,
the Congolese have turned increasingly to art-making to express
their experience to external eyes. Author Cherie Rivers Ndaliko
argues that cultural activism and the enthusiasm to produce art
exists in Congo as a remedy for the social ills of war and as a way
to communicate a positive vision of the country. Ndaliko introduces
a memorable cast of artists, activists, and ordinary people from
the North-Kivu province, whose artistic and cultural interventions
are routinely excluded from global debates that prioritize
economics, politics, and development as the basis of policy
decision about Congo. Rivers also shows how art has been mobilized
by external humanitarian and charitable organizations, becoming the
vehicle through which to inflict new kinds of imperial domination.
Written by a scholar and activist in the center of the current
public policy debate, Necessary Noise examines the uneasy balance
of accomplishing change through art against the unsteady background
of civil war. At the heart of this book is the Yole!Africa cultural
center, which is the oldest independent cultural center in the east
of Congo. Established in the aftermath of volcano Nyiragongo's 2002
eruption and sustained through a series of armed conflicts, the
cultural activities organized by Yole!Africa have shaped a
generation of Congolese youth into socially and politically engaged
citizens. By juxtaposing intimate ethnographic, aesthetic, and
theoretical analyses of this thriving local initiative with case
studies that expose the often destructive underbelly of charitable
action, Necessary Noise introduces into heated international
debates on aid and sustainable development a compelling case for
the necessity of arts and culture in negotiating sustained peace.
Through vivid descriptions of a community of young people
transforming their lives through art, Ndaliko humanizes a dire
humanitarian disaster. In so doing, she invites readers to reflect
on the urgent choices we must navigate as globally responsible
citizens. The only study of music or film culture in the east of
Congo, Necessary Noise raises an impassioned and vibrantly
interdisciplinary voice that speaks to the theory and practice of
socially engaged scholarship.
This exciting new book marks a major shift in the study of the South African War. It turns attention from the war's much debated causes onto its more neglected consequences. An international team of scholars explores the myriad legacies of the war - for South Africa, for Britain, for the Empire and beyond. The extensive introduction sets the contributions in context, and the elegant afterword offers thought-provoking reflections on their cumulative significance.
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