Home to some of the most impressive monuments of the Islamic world, Cairo's City of the Dead is also home to hundreds of thousands of Egypt's urban poor. This book presents a comprehensive look at this unique informal community, and includes biographies of some of the residents of the cemeteries.

This book presents a comprehensive look at one of the most unusual informal communities in the world. The City of the Dead is a group of vast Islamic cemeteries that have been the primary burial grounds for the city of Cairo for 1200 years. Within its borders are some of the most impressive monuments of the Islamic world. The City of the Dead, however, is also home to the living, as it was always an active part of the community of Cairo.

Qu'ran reciters and tombkeepers have always made their homes among the graves. The cemeteries have also been a popular destination for Islamic pilgrims seeking spiritual blessing, as well as thieves and runaways seeking refuge from the law. In more modern times, given the housing crisis that has plagued Cairo in the 20th century, the cemeteries have become the primary source of shelter for hundreds of thousands of otherwise homeless Egyptians. This community of people includes both rural migrants to Cairo and more established city dwellers. This book takes an in-depth look at these individuals' lives and introduces the reader to the life stories of some residents. The future of this unique community is also explored. An important work for students, scholars, and researchers of Egypt and the Islamic world.

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.

Violent Accounts presents a compelling study of how ordinary people commit extraordinary acts of violence and how perpetrators and victims manage in the aftermath. Grounded in extensive, qualitative analysis of perpetrator testimony, the volume reveals the individual experiences of perpetrators as well as general patterns of influence that lead to collective violence. Drawing on public testimony from the amnesty hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the book interweaves hundreds of hours of testimony from seventy-four violent perpetrators in apartheid South Africa, including twelve major cases that involved direct interactions between victims and perpetrators. The analysis of perpetrator testimony covers all tiers on the hierarchy of organized violence, from executives who translated political doctrine into general strategies, to managers who translated these general strategies into specific plans, to the staff-the foot soldiers-who carried out the destructive plans of these managers. Vivid and accessible, Violent Accounts is a work of innovative scholarship that transcends the particulars of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to reveal broader themes and unexpected insights about perpetrators of collective violence, the confrontations between victims and perpetrators in the aftermath of this violence, the reality of multiple truths, the complexities of reconciliation, and lessons of restorative justice.

A microcosmic study of nineteenth century British imperialism.

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.

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.

Longlisted for South Africa's 2022 Sunday Times Non-fiction Award Definitive and gripping narrative history of the Communist Party of South Africa. Renowned historian Tom Lodge has written an immensely readable and compelling sweep of history, spanning continents and the last hundred years, producing the first comprehensive account of the South African Communist Party in all its intricacies. Taking the story back to the party's pre-history in the early 20th century reveals that it was shaped by a range of socialist traditions and that their influence persisted and were decisive. The party's engagement in popular front politics after 1935 has been largely uncharted: this book supplies fresh detail. In the 1940s the author shows how the party became a key actor in the formation of black working-class politics, and hitherto unused archival materials as well as the insights from an increasingly candid genre of autobiographies make possible a much fuller picture of the secret party of 1952 to 1965. Despite its concealment and tiny numbers, its intellectual impact on black South African mainstream politics was considerable. On the exile period, the author examines the activities of the party's recruits and more informal following inside South Africa, as well as the scope and nature of its broader influence. In 1990, a year in which global politics would change fundamentally, South African communists would return to South Africa to begin the work of reconstructing their party as a legal organisation. Throughout its history, the party had been inspired and supported by the reality of existing socialism, state systems embracing half of Europe and Asia, in which the ruling group was at least notionally committed to the building of communist societies. With the fall of Eastern European regimes and the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, one key set of material foundations for the party's programmatic beliefs crumbled and its most important international alliances in the global socialist community in Eastern Europe and Russia would end. Finally, Lodge brings the story up to date, assessing the degree to which communists both inside and outside government have shaped and influenced policy in successive ANC-led administrations, particularly during the popular resistance to apartheid during the 1950s, which was underpinned by the party's systematic organisation in the localities that supplied the ANC with its strongest bases. Jacana: Africa, India

A merchant's account of his travels through an independent African state Muhammad ibn 'Umar al-Tunisi (d. 1274/1857) belonged to a family of Tunisian merchants trading with Egypt and what is now Sudan. Al-Tunisi was raised in Cairo and a graduate of al-Azhar. In 1803, at the age of fourteen, al-Tunisi set off for the Sultanate of Darfur, where his father had decamped ten years earlier. He followed the Forty Days Road, was reunited with his father, and eventually took over the management of the considerable estates granted to his father by the sultan of Darfur. In Darfur is al-Tunisi's remarkable account of his ten-year sojourn in this independent state. In Volume One, al-Tunisi relates the history of his much-traveled family, his journey from Egypt to Darfur, and the reign of the noted sultan 'Abd al-Rahman al-Rashid. In Darfur combines literature, history, ethnography, linguistics, and travel adventure, and most unusually for its time, includes fifty-two illustrations, all drawn by the author. In Darfur is a rare example of an Arab description of Africa on the eve of Western colonization and vividly evokes a world in which travel was untrammeled by bureaucracy, borders were fluid, and startling coincidences appear almost mundane. A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

This book offers a comprehensive political biography of Kingsley Ozuomba Mbadiwe, (1915-1990), a central figure in Nigerian political history for more than forty years. Starting in 1936 as a protege of Nnamdi Azikiwe, then Nigeria's most renowned nationalist, Mbadiwe himself by the 1950s became a frontline nationalist. And next to Tafawa Balewa from the North who became Prime Minster in 1957, he was the most important figure in the Nigerian Federal Government between 1952 and Nigeria's first military coup in 1966. During this time he held a succession of important Cabinet positions and was Parliamentary Leader of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), which was in a ruling alliance with the Northern People's Congress (NPC). In contrast, his older prominent political contemporaries, Azikiwe of the Eastern Region, Igbo Leader of the NCNC; Obafemi Awolowo of the Western Region, Yoruba Leader of the Action Group (AG); and Ahmadu Bello of the Northern Region, Fulani Leader of the NPC, all carved out their political careers totally or largely at the regional level. Throughout his political career Mbadiwe's focus was always at the national level. Truly, it has been stated that Mbadiwe was one of the founding fathers of the Nigerian State. Nonetheless, Mbadiwe's ambition for himself to lead Nigeria and for his nation to set it on the path to greatness faced insuperable difficulties. In a country of widespread poverty, high illiteracy, and a grossly underdeveloped private sector, there were fierce ethnic and regional conflicts for the control of governments and resources, leading to massive corruption and serious instability. This in turn led to prolonged military rule twenty years in Mbadiwe's lifetime which was often more corrupt and repressive than civilian rule, and was bitterly deprecated by Mbadiwe.

I have tried to give the public some idea of what was done by Boer women, during the great Anglo-Boer war, to keep their men in the field and to support them in what proved to be a hopeless struggle for independence and liberty.

As far as I was able I have also described the perils and hardships connected with the Secret Service of the Boers and the heroism and resource displayed by the men.

Although it is with the knowledge and consent of the Boer leaders that I give publicity to what is known to me of the methods employed in the Secret Service of the Boers, I do not wish to convey the impression that these events of the war at any time bore an official character.

It is a purely personal narrative and has only been written at the repeated request, during the last ten years, of the many friends associated with the experiences of the diarist and of the principal characters appearing in this book. In order to preserve the historical value of the book no fictitious names have been employed.

There are, as far as we know, very few records of this nature in existence, owing to the dangers connected with keeping a diary under martial law, and it seemed a pity, therefore, to withhold from the public materials which may be of use to those who are interested in studying or writing the history of those critical years.

I cannot vouch for the truth of every war rumour related here, nor for the accuracy of the information which I have obtained from other people, but the experiences of the diarist, as they were recorded from day to day, are correct in every detail.

My Dutch edition of this book, Die Kappie Kommando, is now appearing in the Dutch South African bi-monthly journal, Die Brandwag, and will, when completed, be published in book form in Holland.

--The Author

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

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.

After many years of research, award-winning historian Hugh Thomas portrays, in a balanced account, the complete history of the slave trade. Beginning with the first Portuguese slaving expeditions, he describes and analyzes the rise of one of the largest and most elaborate maritime and commercial ventures in all of history. Between 1492 and 1870, approximately eleven million black slaves were carried from Africa to the Americas to work on plantations, in mines, or as servants in houses. The Slave Trade is alive with villains and heroes and illuminated by eyewitness accounts. Hugh Thomas's achievement is not only to present a compelling history of the time but to answer as well such controversial questions as who the traders were, the extent of the profits, and why so many African rulers and peoples willingly collaborated. Thomas also movingly describes such accounts as are available from the slaves themselves.

This book provides a rare opportunity to follow the daily life on and around plantations and towns in the first years of the German colonial presence in East Africa, as seen through the eyes of a Danish master farmer working for the German East Africa Company. There are few memoirs and personal letters from these years, and existent letters are primarily by explorers, colonial officials, missionaries or the occasional settler. Lautherborn's material provides one of the very few entry points into the daily business of colonial expansion and consolidation in the early years of German East Africa as seen through the eyes of a practical man trying to do a job in a complex and changing world.

Primary source documents are valuable learning resources preferred by many teachers because they give student the chance to decipher and interpret the history themselves. "Africa and the West" presents a range of hard-to-find primary source documents on Africa from the slave trade that started in the early part of the fifteenth century to independence and the problems of the post-colonial period.

In the period between the outbreak of World War II in 1939 and the enactment of university apartheid by the Nationalist Government in 1959, the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits) developed as an ‘open university’, admitting students of all races. This, the second volume of the history of Wits by historian Bruce Murray, has as its central theme the process by which Wits became ‘open’, the compromises this process entailed, and the defence the University mounted to preserve its ‘open’ status in the face of the challenges posed by the Nationalist Government.

The University’s institutional autonomy is highlighted by Yunus Ballim in his preface to the centenary edition of WITS: The ‘Open’ Years. He writes: ‘The emerging posture of a university willing to rise in defence of academic freedom was important because this was to become infused into the institutional culture of Wits.’

The book looks at the University’s role in South Africa’s war effort, its contribution to the education of ex-volunteers after the war, its leading role in training job-seeking professionals required by a rapidly expanding economy, and the rise of research and postgraduate study. Students feature prominently through their political activities, the flourishing of a student intelligentsia, the heyday of the Remember and Give (Rag) parade, rugby intervarsity, and the stunning success of Wits sportsmen and women. Wits: The ‘Open’ Years paints a vivid picture of the range of personalities who enlivened the campus – among them some well-known figures in the new South Africa.

The book includes chapters by Alf Stadler, who was Professor of Political Studies at Wits and the author of The Political Economy of Modern South Africa, and Jonty Winch, former Sports Officer at Wits and the author of Wits Sport.

In this book, Pascal Buresi and Hicham El Aallaoui edit, translate, and study an Arabic manuscript of the Royal Library of Rabat, containing 77 appointments of provincial officials. The Almohad Caliphs were the first Berbers to unite the whole Maghrib and the Iberian Peninsula under an imperial ideology elaborated at the end of the 12th C.E. by the most famous scholars, such as Averroes. This peripheral Islamic dynasty produced a pragmatic documentation that provides exceptional information about the administrative, political, ideological, and religious organisation of the largest medieval European-African Empire. Buresi and El Aallaoui convincingly stress the importance of the literature of the Chancellery in renewing the history of power and authority in medieval Islamic lands.

Apartheid and Beyond is a major contribution to the study of South African literary culture. It offers elegant readings of Coetzee, Gordimer, Fugard, Tlali, Dike, Magona, and Mda, focusing on the intimate relationship between place, subjectivity, and literary form revealed in their work. It also explores the way apartheid functioned in its day-to-day operations as a geographical system of control, exerting its power through such spatial mechanisms as residential segregation, bantustans, passes, and prisons. Though in the first instance concerned with literary texts, Apartheid and Beyond also meditates on crucial historical processes like colonial occupation, the creation of black townships, migration, forced removals, the emergence of informal settlements, the gradual integration of white cities, and efforts at land reform. Cumulatively, the six essays in this book tell the story of the transformation of apartheid's landscapes of oppression into the more ambiguous landscapes of contemporary South Africa: landscapes of tourism and leisure, of crime and privatized security, of uncontrolled urbanization and persistent poverty. Barnard's methodologically eclectic writing draws on the work of major European and U.S. theorists like Foucault, De Certeau, and Jameson, as well as important African intellectuals like Mbembe, Ramphele, and Ndebele. It also takes literary figures seriously as theorists of space in their own right. Apartheid and Beyond is both an innovative account of an important body of politically-inflected literature and an imaginative reflection on the socio-spatial aspects of the transition from apartheid to democracy.

Ebenezer Obadare examines the overriding impact of Nigerian Pentecostal pastors on their churches, and how they have shaped the dynamics of state-society relations during the Fourth Republic. Pentecostal pastors enjoy an unprecedented authority in contemporary Nigerian society, exerting significant influence on politics, public policy, popular culture, and the moral imagination. In Pastoral Power, Clerical State, Ebenezer Obadare investigates the social origins of clerical authority in modern-day Nigeria with an eye to parallel developments and patterns within the broader African society. Obadare focuses on the figure of the pastor as a bearer of political power, thaumaturgical expertise, and sexual attractiveness who wields significant influence on his church members. This study makes an important contribution to the literature on global Pentecostalism. Obadare situates the figure of the pastor within the wider context of national politics and culture and as a beneficiary of the dislocations of the postcolonial society in Africa's most populous country. Obadare calls our attention to the creative ways in which Nigeria's Pentecostal pastors utilize religious doctrines, beckon spiritual forces, and manipulate their alliances with national powerbrokers to consolidate their influence and authority. In contrast to rapidly eroding pastoral authority in the West, pastoral authority is increasing in Nigeria. This engaging book will appeal to those who want to understand the far-reaching political and social implications of religious movements-especially Christian charismatic and evangelical movements-in contemporary African societies. It will be of interest to scholars and students of sociology, religion, political science, and African studies.

The past is brought to life in this historical epic about a South African family whose lives collided with the biggest event in history: The First World War. The central theme is the largely forgotten east Africa campaign, but by definition a world war has a wide reach. Five members of one family with deep roots in all four corners of the country, served in three different theatres of war. Their lives on active service are all interwoven and inseparable from the home front. Global events are juxtaposed with everyday life on a farm in the eastern Orange Free State. Appropriately, the author constructs linkages that span generations, uncovering individual experiences of an earlier conflict which had engulfed South Africa barely a decade before the eruption of the 1914-18 war. As the sons of early pioneers, this generation witnessed history in the making before writing their own. Riding into action on horseback or in a flying machine, their paths led from the south west African desert, through disease-infested jungles in east Africa to some of the great battles on the western front. Only one of the five came home unscathed although he crash-landed his aircraft behind enemy lines and only made it back through his audacity and brute strength. Another, an intellectual priest, was left for dead at Delville Wood, and his brother was wounded on Messines Ridge. The remaining two suffered from debilitating tropical illnesses. Hazard and hardship lingered on in the form of Spanish in influenza, mining strikes and the Great Depression. The war cast a long shadow. Between them, these consciously literate men left substantial documentary legacies. Using extracts of their letters from the front, the story is to a large extent told in the words of those who were there. Context is provided by referencing existing literature, unpublished memoirs and archival material. It could be called a military history or a social history, but it is a truly South African story which contains much new material for historians, while for the general reader it offers an accessible insight into an unparalleled period of history.