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Books > History > African history > General
This is a history of the Kenyan city of Mombasa and its surrounding settlements from the mid-nineteenth century to the height of colonial rule in the 1930s. Justin Willis sets out to place the island and town of Mombasa in its African context, incorporating the findings of recent historical and anthropological research. Dr Willis examines the institutions and social networks which simultaneously united and divided the people of the region before the colonial period, demonstrating both their interdependence and the creation of distinct population categories. He traces the development of these institutions under British rule, when the demands of the colonial economy caused officials to attempt far-reaching changes to the social structure and physically to remake the town of Mombasa. This is a radical re-interpretation of the history of Mombasa and its hinterland, based on thorough archival research. It offers valuable insights into the nature of ethnic identity, and makes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarly work on the African city.
This book tells the story of how White Rhodesians, three-quarters of whom were ill-prepared for revolutionary change, reacted to the "terrorist" war and the onset of black rule in the 1970s. It shows how internal divisions--both old and new--undermined the supposed unity of White Rhodesia, how most Rhodesians begrudgingly accepted the inevitability of black majority rule without adjusting to its implications, and how the self-appointed defenders of Western civilization sometimes adopted uncivilized methods of protecting the "Rhodesian way of life." This is a lively and accessible account, based on careful archival research and numerous personal interviews. It sets out to tell the story from the inside and to incorporate the diverse dimensions of the Rhodesian experience. The authors suggest that the Rhodesians were more differentiated than has often been assumed and that perhaps their greatest fault was an almost infinite capacity for self-delusion.
The nucleus of society is situated at the local level: in the village, the neighborhood, the city district. This is where a community first develops collective rules that are intended to ensure its continued existence. The contributors look at such configurations in geographical areas and time periods that lie outside of the modern Western world with its particular development of society and statehood: in Antiquity and in the Global South of the present. Here states tend to be weak, with obvious challenges and opportunities for local communities. How does governance in this context work? Scholars from various disciplines (Classics, Theology, Political Science, Sociology, Social Anthropology, Human Geography, Sinology) analyze different kinds of local arrangements in case studies, and they do so with a comparative approach. The sixteen papers examine the scope and spatial contingency of forms of self-governance; its legitimization and the collective identity of the groups behind them; the relations to different levels of state governance as well as to other local groups. Overall, this volume makes an interdisciplinary contribution to a better understanding of fundamental elements of local governance and statehood.
The Holocaust is usually understood as a European story. Yet, this pivotal episode unfolded across North Africa and reverberated through politics, literature, memoir, and memory-Muslim as well as Jewish-in the post-war years. The Holocaust and North Africa offers the first English-language study of the unfolding events in North Africa, pushing at the boundaries of Holocaust Studies and North African Studies, and suggesting, powerfully, that neither is complete without the other. The essays in this volume reconstruct the implementation of race laws and forced labor across the Maghreb during World War II and consider the Holocaust as a North African local affair, which took diverse form from town to town and city to city. They explore how the Holocaust ruptured Muslim-Jewish relations, setting the stage for an entirely new post-war reality. Commentaries by leading scholars of Holocaust history complete the picture, reflecting on why the history of the Holocaust and North Africa has been so widely ignored-and what we have to gain by understanding it in all its nuances. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In this new edition of Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, C. L. R. James tells the history of the socialist revolution led by Kwame Nkrumah, the first president and prime minister of Ghana. Although James wrote it in the immediate post-independence period around 1958, he did not publish it until nearly twenty years later, when he added a series of his own letters, speeches, and articles from the 1960s. Although Nkrumah led the revolution, James emphasizes that it was a popular mass movement fundamentally realized by the actions of everyday Ghanaians. Moreover, James shows that Ghana's independence movement was an exceptional moment in global revolutionary history: it moved revolutionary activity to the African continent and employed new tactics not seen in previous revolutions. Featuring a new introduction by Leslie James, an unpublished draft of C. L. R. James's introduction to the 1977 edition, and correspondence, this definitive edition of Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution offers a revised understanding of Africa's shaping of freedom movements and insight into the possibilities for decolonial futures.
This book assesses episcopal cooperation as envisioned by the third-century bishop Cyprian of Carthage. It outlines and assesses the interactions between local bishops, provincial groups of bishops, and the worldwide college. Assessing these interactions sheds light on the relationship between Cyprian's strong sense of local autonomy and the reality that each bishop was responsible to the world-wide college. Episcopal consensus was the sine qua non, for Cyprian, for a major issue of faith or practice to become one that defined membership in the college and, ultimately, the Church. The book brings this assessment into a modern scholarly debate by concluding with an evaluation of the ecclesiology of the Orthodox scholar Nicolas Afanasiev and his critiques of Cyprian. Afanasiev lamented Cyprian as the father of universal ecclesiology and claimed that Cyprian's college wielded authority above that of the local bishop. This book argues that Afanasiev fundamentally misconstrued Cyprian's understanding of collegiality. It is shown that, for Cyprian, collegiality was the framework for the common ministry of the bishops and did not infringe on the sovereignty of the local bishop. Rather, it was the college's collective duty to define the boundaries of acceptable Christian belief and practice.
This book, first published in 1991, analyses the role of women in the Eritrean struggle for independence. Emerging from a semi-feudal world, these women - peasants and pastoralists, student activists and workers from the cities - participated fully in the Eritrean revolution. They have organized cells, gathered intelligence, carried out clandestine missions, set up and ran health and education systems and fought on the front line, and in transforming themselves they have transformed Eritrea.
For decades the global gaze on South African society invariably focused on it as a symbol of the inevitable excesses of social engineering, racism and violence under the apartheid dispensation; with astonishment at the apparent exceptionalism of the 'miracle' transition that occurred to democratic rule and the dismantling of apartheid; and more recently, on the resurgence of newer manifestations of racialisation and violence in post-apartheid South Africa. Race, Memory and the Apartheid Archive: Towards a Transformative Psychosocial Praxis recognises and confronts this complex history of racialised oppression, as well as the future possibilities and impossibilities of transforming South African society through a re-engagement with the apartheid archive - an archive that holds the promise of not only revisiting and augmenting our history through the storied lives of ordinary citizens, but also allows us to understand the continued impact of this past on our present social, subjective and psychological realities. Located within a psychosocial approach that is uniquely suited to the socio-historical and psychical analysis of racism, this book relies mainly on the memories, stories and narratives of ordinary people, submitted to the Apartheid Archive Project, as its source material. It provokes us into thinking about racism as grounded as much in affective as in macro-political means, in the functioning of both intrapsychic and material forms, perpetuated as much in private as in institutional domains, and the ways in which these understandings can contribute to social transformation.
In 1856 and 1857, in response to a prophet's command, the Xhosa people of southern Africa killed their cattle and ceased planting crops; the resulting famine cost tens of thousands of lives. Much like other millenarian, anticolonial movements - such as the Ghost Dance in North America and the Birsa Munda uprising in India - these actions were meant to transform the world and liberate the Xhosa from oppression. Despite the movement's momentous failure to achieve that goal, the event has continued to exert a powerful pull on the South African imagination ever since. It is these afterlives of the prophecy that Jennifer Wenzel explores in Bulletproof. Wenzel examines literary and historical texts to show how writers have manipulated images and ideas associated with the cattle killing-harvest, sacrifice, rebirth, devastation - to speak to their contemporary predicaments. Widening her lens, Wenzel also looks at how past failure can both inspire and constrain movements for justice in the present, and her brilliant insights into the cultural implications of prophecy will fascinate readers across a wide variety of disciplines.
You Can't Go to War without Song explores the role of public performance in political activism in contemporary South Africa. Weaving together detailed ethnographic fieldwork and an astute theoretical framework, Omotayo Jolaosho examines the cohesive power of protest songs and dances within the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), one of many social movements that emerged in the wake of South Africa's democratic transition after 1994. Jolaosho demonstrates the ways APF members adapted anti-apartheid songs and dance to create new expressive forms that informed and commented on their struggles for access to water, electricity, housing, education, and health facilities, the costs of which had been made prohibitive by privatization. You Can't Go to War without Song offers profiles of individual activists to amplify its central point: social movements like the APF are best understood as the coming together of individuals, and it is the songs and dances of the movement that bind these individual together and create opportunity for community organization. Chapters on women and youth complicate such understandings of community, however, showing how activist live and experiences are shaped by gender and generation.
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 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.
Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations-a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building-obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this important new account of decolonization reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world. Adom Getachew shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal, political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and creating the New International Economic Order. Using archival sources from Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, Worldmaking after Empire recasts the history of decolonization, reconsiders the failure of anticolonial nationalism, and offers a new perspective on debates about today's international order.
Congolese logging camps are places where mud, rain, fuel smugglers, and village roadblocks slow down multinational timber firms; where workers wage wars against trees while evading company surveillance deep in the forest; where labor compounds trigger disturbing colonial memories; and where blunt racism, logger machismo, and homoerotic desires reproduce violence. In Rainforest Capitalism Thomas Hendriks examines the rowdy world of industrial timber production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to theorize racialized and gendered power dynamics in capitalist extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Congolese workers and European company managers as well as traders, farmers, smugglers, and barkeepers, Hendriks shows how logging is deeply tied to feelings of existential vulnerability in the face of larger forces, structures, and histories. These feelings, Hendriks contends, reveal a precarious side of power in an environment where companies, workers, and local residents frequently find themselves out of control. An ethnography of complicity, ecstasis, and paranoia, Rainforest Capitalism queers assumptions of corporate strength and opens up new ways to understand the complexities and contradictions of capitalist extraction.
This is the first full study of the Turkana people of north-western Kenya and their armed resistance of the Turkana people of north-western Kenya to British colonial administration in the early twentieth century. From their first encounters with the colonial vanguard in the 1890s to the final surrender of the Great Diviner, Loolel Kokoi, in 1926, the Turkana resisted imperial conquest. Even after the imposition of colonial rule, they continued to oppose the administration through a variety of strategies. John Lamphear explores their responses to European colonialism and examines the nature of their resistance, making extensive use of oral sources, as well as archival and published material. His analysis takes full account of the military history of the period, and addresses the fundamental question of why some African societies met the European advance with armed resistance while others did not. In doing so, he makes an important contribution to the historiography of the imperial conquest of Kenya. This book is intended for scholars and students of modern African history; imperial and colonial historians; military historians; specialists in East African societies; historians of Ken
Catholic and Protestant missionaries followed their own, competing agendas rather than those of the colonial state. This volume unravels these agendas and challenges received wisdom on the histories of Rwanda and Burundi, as well as the colonial relationship between state and mission. The archives of the White Fathers Catholic missionary order in Rome and Paris are read alongside primary sources produced by the British Protestant Church Missionary Society to analyse their impact between 1900 and 1972 in Rwanda and Burundi. The colonial state was weaker than often assumed, and permeable by external radical influences. Denominational competition between Catholic and Protestant missionaries was a key motor of this radicalism. The colonial state in both kingdoms was a weak, reactive agent rather than a structuring form of power. This volume shows that missionaries were more committed and influential actors, but their inability to manage the mass demand for the education that they sought and delivered finally undermined the achievement of their aims. Missionaries and the Colonial State is a resource for historians of Christianity, Belgian Africa specialists, and scholars of colonialism.
Travel and the Pan African Imagination explores the African Atlantic world as a productive theater or space where modernity, racialized dominance, and racialized resistance took form. The book stresses the importance of placing three Atlantic figures-the Charleston, South Carolina-based armed resistance leader Denmark Vesey; the West African emigration advocate Edward Wilmot Blyden, and the Christian missionary and teacher in Liberia as well as the United States, Alexander Crummell-within an Atlantic context and as African world community figures between the late-eighteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The book also examines the religious origins of Black Power ideology and modern Pan Africanism as products of the intense dialogue within the African world community about concepts of modernity, progress, and civilization. Tracy Keith Flemming identifies how travel and social mobility led to the generation of an ever more complex and dynamic Atlantic world and of a fluid and adaptive African world community imagination for those figures who were forced to operate within and against a racially framed universe. The vexing social position and symbolic figure of "the African" was central to the dilemmas facing the racialized imagination of African world community figures and the discipline of Africology.
For much of its recent history, Sudan has been beset by devastating famines that have killed countless people and powerfully reshaped its society. However, as this historical study of food insecurity in the region shows, there was no necessary correlation between natural disasters, decreased crop yields, and famine in Sudan. Rather, repeated food crises since the late nineteenth century were the result of inter-generational, exploitative processes that transferred the resources of victim communities to the state and to a small group of non-state elites. This dynamic fundamentally transformed the social, political, and economic structures underpinning Sudanese society and prevented many communities from securing necessary subsistence. On one hand, food crises facilitated the British-led conquest of Sudan and subsequently allowed British imperial agents, acting through the Anglo-Egyptian government, to seize control of many of Sudan's natural resources. At the same time, however, a number of indigenous elites were also able to position themselves so as to further augment their prestige and economic wealth. At independence, these elites were handed control of the state and, in the years that followed, they continued many of the policies that had impoverished their countrymen.
This book explores the global history of anti-apartheid and international solidarity with southern African freedom struggles from the 1960s. It examines the institutions, campaigns and ideological frameworks that defined the globalization of anti-apartheid, the ways in which the concept of solidarity was mediated by individuals, organizations and states, and considers the multiplicity of actors and interactions involved in generating and sustaining anti-apartheid around the world. It includes detailed accounts of key case studies from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, which illustrate the complex relationships between local and global agendas, as well as the diverse political cultures embodied in anti-apartheid. Taken together, these examples reveal the tensions and synergies, transnational webs and local contingencies that helped to create the sense of 'being global' that united worldwide anti-apartheid campaigns.
The socio-political context of Egypt is full of the affectual burdens of history. The revolutions of both 1952 and 2011 proclaimed that the oppressive, colonial past had been overthrown decisively. So why has the oppression perpetrated by previous regimes been repeated? What impact has this had on the lives of 'ordinary' citizens? Egyptian Revolutions looks at the impact of the current events in Egypt on citizens in relation to matters of belonging, identification and repetition. It contests the tendency within postcolonial theory to understand these events as resistance to Western imperialism and the positioning of activists as agents of sustainable change. Instead, it pays close attention to the continuities from the past and the contradictions at work in relation to identification, repetition and conflict. Combining postcolonial theory with a psychosocial studies framework it explores the complexities of inhabiting a society in a state of conflict and offers a careful analysis of current theories of gender, religion and secularism, agency, resistance and compliance, in a society riven with divisions and conflicts.
Although Africa seems to most people a remote and impoverished place remembered for the suffering of its people, it has played an important role in recent history, and it will play a significant role in the future of America and the West in general. This volume of the ANNALS, Perspectives on Africa and the World, provides a unique opportunity for fresh insight into the continent's past, present, and future by examining crucial historical turning points in African history over the past 75 years. The distinguished authors emphasize that understanding the reality of Africa in the twenty-first century requires viewing the continent within a broader context of recent world history. Through the lens of four watershed events-World War II, the end of colonialism, the cold war, and the new global interconnections- they show how much of what happens on the African continent has its origins in Washington, London, Paris, Moscow, or Beijing, just as events in Africa can shape the politics and economies of the world, and that we ignore Africa to our own peril.
It was the British victory at the Battle of El Alamein in November 1942 that inspired one of Winston Churchill's most famous aphorisms: 'This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning'. And yet the significance of this episode remains unrecognised. In this thrilling historical account, Jonathan Dimbleby describes the political and strategic realities that lay behind the battle, charting the nail-biting months that led to the victory at El Alamein in November 1942. It is a story of high drama, played out both in the war capitals of London, Washington, Berlin, Rome and Moscow, and at the front in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Morrocco and Algeria and in the command posts and foxholes in the desert. Destiny in the Desert is about politicians and generals, diplomats, civil servants and soldiers. It is about forceful characters and the tensions and rivalries between them. Drawing on official records and the personal insights of those involved at every level, Dimbleby creates a vivid portrait of a struggle which for Churchill marked the turn of the tide - and which for the soldiers on the ground involved fighting and dying in a foreign land. Now available in paperback in time, Destiny in the Desert, which was shortlisted for the Hessell-Tiltman prize 2012-13, is required reading for anyone with an interest in the Desert War.
Upon their independence, Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian governments turned to the Global South and offered military and financial aid to Black liberation struggles. Tangier and Algiers attracted Black American and Caribbean artists eager to escape American white supremacy; Tunis hosted African filmmakers for the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage; and young freedom fighters from across the African continent established military training camps in Morocco. North Africa became a haven for militant-artists, and the region reshaped postcolonial cultural discourse through the 1960s and 1970s. Maghreb Noir dives into the personal and political lives of these militant-artists, who collectively challenged the neo-colonialist structures and the authoritarianism of African states. Drawing on Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English sources, as well as interviews with the artists themselves, Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik expands our understanding of Pan-Africanism geographically, linguistically, and temporally. This network of militant-artists departed from the racial solidarity extolled by many of their nationalist forefathers, instead following in the footsteps of their intellectual mentor, Frantz Fanon. They argued for the creation of a new ideology of continued revolution—one that was transnational, trans-racial, and in defiance of the emerging nation-states. Maghreb Noir establishes the importance of North Africa in nurturing these global connections—and uncovers a lost history of grassroots collaboration among militant-artists from across the globe.
In African Motors, Joshua Grace examines how Tanzanian drivers, mechanics, and passengers reconstituted the automobile into a uniquely African form between the late 1800s and the early 2000s. Drawing on hundreds of oral histories, extensive archival research, and his ethnographic fieldwork as an apprentice in Dar es Salaam's network of garages, Grace counters the pervasive narratives that Africa is incompatible with technology and that the African use of cars is merely an appropriation of technology created elsewhere. Although automobiles were invented in Europe and introduced as part of colonial rule, Grace shows how Tanzanians transformed them, increasingly associating their own car use with maendeleo, the Kiswahili word for progress or development. Focusing on the formation of masculinities based in automotive cultures, Grace also outlines the process through which African men remade themselves and their communities by adapting technological objects and systems for local purposes. Ultimately, African Motors is an African-centered story of development featuring everyday examples of Africans forging both individual and collective cultures of social and technological wellbeing through movement, making, and repair. |
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