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Books > History > African history > General
In the wake of the Great Depression, economic recovery and nutritional improvement in Britain simultaneously occurred with their decline in British Africa. While histories of science, medicine and British Empire have provided fertile analytical ground for decades, the field of nutrition science has received comparatively little attention. Widespread malnutrition between the World Wars called into question the role of the British state in preserving the welfare of both its citizens and its subjects, especially women, given their role in feeding their families. International organizations such as the League of Nations, empire- wide projects such as nutrition surveys conducted by the Committee for Nutrition in the Colonial Empire (CNCE), sub-imperial networks of medical and teaching professionals, and individuals on-the-spot wove a dense web of ideas on nutrition. Women, especially of the working class, bore the brunt of the struggle to access nutritious food as a wave of interest in the new science of nutrition swept the globe between the wars, with imperial Britain in the lead. The British state buoyed the economic slump of the Great Depression in the metropole by importing more colonial goods more cheaply, feeding metropolitan Brits on the back of the colonial empire, particularly in Africa. This book stands apart for the way it places nutrition science in both Britain and Africa under a single analytic lens of economics, gender and empire, contributing to research on British and African history, British Empire, women’s history and the history of science, medicine and health.
After the abolition of slavery in 1897, Islamic courts in Zanzibar (East Africa) became central institutions where former slaves negotiated socioeconomic participation. By using difficult-to-read Islamic court records in Arabic, Elke E. Stockreiter reassesses the workings of these courts as well as gender and social relations in Zanzibar Town during British colonial rule (1890-1963). She shows how Muslim judges maintained their autonomy within the sphere of family law and describes how they helped advance the rights of women, ex-slaves, and other marginalised groups. As was common in other parts of the Muslim world, women usually had to buy their divorce. Thus, Muslim judges played important roles as litigants negotiated moving up the social hierarchy, with ethnicisation increasingly influencing all actors. Drawing on these previously unexplored sources, this study investigates how Muslim judges both mediated and generated discourses of inclusion and exclusion based on social status rather than gender.
This book aims to analyze the making of a pivotal moment in Somali history. It charts new ground in the study of the dissolution of a state at all levels, shuttling back and forth between micro and macro frames, historical and everyday practices, and expatriate and Somali experiences. .
The Gordonia region of the Northern Cape province has received relatively little attention from historians. In Hidden Histories of Gordonia: Land dispossession and resistance in the Northern Cape, 1800-1990, Martin Legassick explores aspects of the generally unknown 'brown' and 'black' history of the region. Emphasising the lives of ordinary people, his writing is also in part an exercise in 'applied history' - historical writing with a direct application to people's lives in the present. Tracing the indigenous history of Gordonia as well as the northward movement of Basters and whites from the western Cape through Bushmanland to the Orange River, the book presents accounts of family histories, episodes of indigenous resistance to colonisation, and studies of the ultimate imposition of racial segregation and land dispossession on the inhabitants of the region. A recurrent theme is the question of identity and how the extreme ethnic fluidity and social mixing apparent in earlier times crystallised in the colonial period into racial identities, until with final conquest came imposed racial classification.
In most accounts of warfare, civilians suffer cruelties and make sacrifices silently and anonymously. Finally, historians turn their attention to those who are usually caught up in events beyond their control or understanding. This volume details the dismal impact war has had on the African people over the past five hundred years, from slavery days, the Zulu War, World Wars I and II, to the horrific civil wars following decolonization and the genocide in Rwanda. Chapters provide a representative range of civilian experiences during wartime in Africa extending from the late eighteenth century to the present, representing every region of Africa except North Africa. Timelines, glossaries, suggested further readings and maps are included, and the work is fully indexed.
Although it lasted only thirty years, German colonial rule dramatically transformed South West Africa. The colonial government not only committed the first genocide of the twentieth century against the Herero and Nama, but in their efforts to establish a "model colony" and "racial state," they brought about even more destructive and long-lasting consequences. In this now-classic study-available here for the first time in English-the author provides an indispensable account of Germany's colonial utopia in what is present-day Namibia, showing how the highly rationalized planning of Wilhelmine authorities ultimately failed even as it added to the profound immiseration of the African population.
The book examines popular fiction columns, a dominant feature in Kenyan newspapers, published in the twentieth century and examines their historical and cultural impact on Kenyan politics. The book interrogates how popular cultural forms such as popular fiction engage with and subject the polity to constant critique through informal but widely recognized cultural forms of censure. The book further explores the ways we see and experience how the African subaltern, through the everyday, negotiate their rights and obligations with the self, society and the state. Through these columns and their writers, the book examines the tensions that characterize such relationships, how the formal and informal interpenetrate, how the past and present are reconciled, and how the local and transnational collide but also collude in the making of the Kenyan identity.
This book is a vivid history of Madagascar from the pre-colonial era to decolonization, examining a set of French colonial projects and perceptions that revolve around issues of power, vulnerability, health, conflict, control and identity. It focuses on three lines of inquiry: the relationship between domination and health fears, the island's role during the two world wars, and the mystery of Malagasy origins. The Madagascar that emerges is plural and fractured. It is the site of colonial dystopias, grand schemes gone awry, and diverse indigenous reactions. Bringing together deep archival research and recent scholarship, Jennings sheds light on the colonial project in Madagascar, and more broadly, on the ideas which underpin colonialism.
As a boy in Rwanda, Pie-Pacifique Kabalira-Uwase survived war atrocities, but he had to leave home if he wanted to stay safe. Pie-Pacifique now recounts his childhood and his experiences of the genocide. He prepares to flee and ends up in South Africa. He works as a car guard in Durban, dreaming of university. Despite obstacles, he enrols at university and receives the Mandela-Rhodes Scholarship. In this rewarding journey of self-discovery, we witness Pie-Pacifique reach for his dreams.
This work explores the long-term evolutionary implications of the "Mobility Imperative:" the foundational nature of mobility for human beings and their societies. The author puts forward a parsimonious but comprehensive model based on Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) rationales. The selected case studies range from the emergence and expansion of humans to cattle domestication and beyond.
Cameroon-Nigeria Relations: Trends and Perspectives, edited by Osita Agbu and C. Nna-Emeka Okereke, examines various aspects of Cameroon-Nigeria relations since their attainment of independence in 1960. The Cameroon and Nigerian contributors contextualize core topical issues that have featured prominently in the course of bilateral relations between both countries, ranging from theoretical underpinnings to understanding the dynamics of Cameroon-Nigeria relations, to contending issues and areas of mutual interests driving diplomatic relations between them. The book reveals trends and dynamics while also accommodating divergent perspectives that demonstrate how theories can be applied to achieve real results. Of significant import is the prognosis that stimulates concerns for the future of Cameroon-Nigeria relations bearing in mind the strategic position of both countries in West and Central Africa. This book is an indispensable resource for scholars, diplomats, and foreign policy actors that will enrich understanding and inform opinions on charting future courses for healthy bilateral relations between Cameroon and Nigeria.
To either achieve or resist domination, some postcolonial and post slavery societies appropriate and contest the current memories on slavery. This occurs more often where the sites of slavery are tourist attractions that positively empower the communities through economic benefits, resulting in an emergence of 'new' memories of the past and a constant construction and reconstruction of identity. In The Legacy of Slavery in Coastal Kenya: Memory, Identity, and Heritage, Herman Ogoti Kiriama examines how two communities in coastal Kenya, one whose identity is contested by the community members and another one who are seeking recognition, have tried to remember their past and the role that tourism has played in the process of remembering and or forgetting. Kiriama argues that heritage, memory, and identity are fluid and individuals can claim several identities depending on their socio-politico-economic contexts.
As far too many intellectual histories and theoretical contributions from the 'global South' remain under-explored, this volume works towards redressing such imbalance. Experienced authors, from the regions concerned, along different disciplinary lines, and with a focus on different historical timeframes, sketch out their perspectives of envisaged transformations. This includes specific case studies and reflexive accounts from African, South Asian, and Middle Eastern contexts. Taking a critical stance on the ongoing dominance of Eurocentrism in academia, the authors present their contributions in relation to current decolonial challenges. Hereby, they consider intellectual, practical and structural aspects and dimensions, to mark and build their respective positions. From their particular vantage points of (trans)disciplinary and transregional engagement, they sketch out potential pathways for addressing the unfinished business of conceptual decolonization. The specific individual positionalities of the contributors, which are shaped by location and regional perspective as much as in disciplinary, biographical, linguistic, religious, and other terms, are hereby kept in view. Drawing on their significant experiences and insights gained in both the global north and global south, the contributors offer original and innovative models of engagement and theorizing frames that seek to restore and critically engage with intellectual practices from particular regions and transregional contexts in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. This volume builds on a lecture series held at ZMO in the winter 2019-2020
This book explores Lucan's highly original deployment of contradictory Greco-Roman stereotypes about Egypt (utopian vs. xenophobic) as a means of reflecting on the violent tensions within his own society (conservatism vs. Caesarism). Lucan shows the two distinct facets of first-century BC Egypt, namely its ancient Pharaonic heritage and its latter-day Hellenistic culture under the Ptolemies, not only in spiritual conflict with one another (via the opposed characters of Acoreus, priest of old Memphis, and the Alexandrian courtier Pothinus) but also inextricably entangled with the corresponding factions of the Roman civil war and of Nero's Rome. Dr Tracy also connects Lucan's portrayal of Egypt and the Nile to his critical engagement with Greco-Roman discourse on natural science, particularly the Naturales Quaestiones of his uncle Seneca the Younger. Lastly, he examines Lucan's attitude toward the value of cultural diversity within the increasingly monocultural environment of the Roman Mediterranean.
The "enlightening" (The Guardian) true story of the last ship to carry enslaved people to America, the remarkable town its survivors' founded after emancipation, and the complicated legacy their descendants carry with them to this day-by the journalist who discovered the ship's remains. Fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, the Clotilda became the last ship in history to bring enslaved Africans to the United States. The ship was scuttled and burned on arrival to hide the wealthy perpetrators to escape prosecution. Despite numerous efforts to find the sunken wreck, Clotilda remained hidden for the next 160 years. But in 2019, journalist Ben Raines made international news when he successfully concluded his obsessive quest through the swamps of Alabama to uncover one of our nation's most important historical artifacts. Traveling from Alabama to the ancient African kingdom of Dahomey in modern-day Benin, Raines recounts the ship's perilous journey, the story of its rediscovery, and its complex legacy. Against all odds, Africatown, the Alabama community founded by the captives of the Clotilda, prospered in the Jim Crow South. Zora Neale Hurston visited in 1927 to interview Cudjo Lewis, telling the story of his enslavement in the New York Times bestseller Barracoon. And yet the haunting memory of bondage has been passed on through generations. Clotilda is a ghost haunting three communities-the descendants of those transported into slavery, the descendants of their fellow Africans who sold them, and the descendants of their fellow American enslavers. This connection binds these groups together to this day. At the turn of the century, descendants of the captain who financed the Clotilda's journey lived nearby-where, as significant players in the local real estate market, they disenfranchised and impoverished residents of Africatown. From these parallel stories emerges a profound depiction of America as it struggles to grapple with the traumatic past of slavery and the ways in which racial oppression continues to this day. And yet, at its heart, The Last Slave Ship remains optimistic-an epic tale of one community's triumphs over great adversity and a celebration of the power of human curiosity to uncover the truth about our past and heal its wounds.
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.
Originally published in 1937 and written by de Kiewiet who in his lifetime was recognized as one of the premier historians of British imperial policy and African history, this book covers the years 1871-1885 in South Africa's history, discussing racial, social and economic issues. These cover the initiation and collapse of Lord Carnarvon's confederation policy, the annexation and the retrocession of the Transvaal, the Sekukuni, Zulu and Cape-Bastuto wars, the last of the nine Kaffir wars on the Eastern frontier of the Cape, the creation of the (then) Basutoland Protectorate and the development of the Kimberley diamond mines. Using original source material such as the Colonial Office Departmental minutes, he considers and explains the British policy.
Originally published in 1976, this book is a sociological and historical study of class and race relations in a crucial sector of South Africa - the gold mining industry, during and following the First World War. The author develops a Marxist structuralist explanation of the system of racial discrimination, and then goes in to examine the significant historical events of this formative period, notably those surrounding the strike and uprising of the white workers in 1922. The book explains a system of racial domination essentially in terms of the class positions and problems of the dominating groups, and examines historical developments concerning race in terms of class.
Originally published in 1988, this book describes and analyses the factors that were operative in South Africa during the 1980s, at a time when Apartheid was under intense pressure. It focuses not only on the central arenas of political action, but also on the non-institutional arenas which were increasingly the central forums of political action. Organised around the three linked themes of state action, popular opposition and possible alternatives, the work examines the manner in which such key institutions such as government, business and the military responded to Apartheid in its crisis as well as the role of the ANC, the black trade unions, Inkatha and community movements in the townships. The final section deals with the South African left and the Freedom Charter.
Originally published in 1981, this book took a position which was unpopular within the academic establishment at the time of its publication. It argued that the extraordinary social and economic changes that came over South Africa in the 20th Century gave the country great stability. The authors believed that change would come from within the ruling white oligarchy rather than from Liberation Movements and that the greatest solvent of apartheid was to be found in the working of a free market economy. The book provided novel data for sociological, political and strategic reassessment of South Africa. The approach was unusual in that the book represented neither a conventional defence of apartheid nor one of the customary attacks on South Africa.
Originally published in 1982 and based on the 1969 Oxford History of South Africa, this book discusses some of the trends in the historiography of South Africa before the beginning of large-scale mining operations in Kimberley in 1870. A deliberate attempt was made to look at the roots of South African society and to take due account of all its peoples. The book includes a survey of archaeological data, emphasizing the links between South Africa and the rest of the continent, and between the more remote and more recent past in South Africa. The lives of the hunting, herding and cultivating peoples who lived in South Africa before the advent of the Europeans. The foundation of a colonial society is described, and the expansion of that society until the 1770s. The final chapters review the relations between the peoples of the Cape Colony and the Nguni cultivators from their first meetings until about 1870 and the growth of the plural society in the Cape Colony until 1970.
Originally published in 1994, Homelands, Harlem & Hollywood examines the anti-colonialist struggle against apartheid, and the ways in which American and South African culture have been fascinated with and influenced by one another. Rob Nixon's wide-ranging analysis looks at Hollywood representations of the struggle for liberation, the impact of the Harlem Renaissance on the Sophiatown writers, the banning and censorship of television under apartheid, Mandela and messianic politics, the sports and cultural boycotts, ethnic nationalism, and the culture of violence. Nixon concludes with an investigation of how the collapse of communism and anti-communism and the rise of ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union had powerful implications for the shape of post-apartheid South Africa. |
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