This book examines French motivations behind the decolonisation of Tunisia and Morocco and the intra-Western Alliance relationships. It argues that changing French policy towards decolonisation brought about the unexpectedly quick process of independence of dependencies in the post-WWII era.

This book explores British post-colonial foreign policy towards Kenya from 1963 to 1980. It reveals the extent and nature of continued British government influence in Kenya after independence. It argues that this was not simply about neo-colonialism, and Kenya's elite had substantial agency to shape the relationship. The first section addresses how policy was made and the role of High Commissions and diplomacy. It emphasises contingency, with policy produced through shared interests and interaction with leading Kenyans. It argues that British policy-makers helped to create and then reinforced Kenya's neo-patrimonialism. The second part examines the economic, military, personal and diplomatic networks which successive British governments sustained with independent Kenya. A combination of interlinked interests encouraged British officials to place a high value on this relationship, even as their world commitments diminished. This book appeals to those interested in Kenyan history, post-colonial Africa, British foreign policy, and forms of diplomacy and policy-making.

Few societies have faced the difficulties of identity building experienced by Rwanda. This book's introduction reviews literature on the concepts of myth and trauma, and then introduces basic information on Rwanda and how it has been viewed by the outside world. Chapter One describes early Rwanda's political and cultural development, traditional narratives, group migrations, the effects of German and later Belgian colonialism, and the introduction of Christianity. It concludes with a look at how this early history has been interpreted and reinterpreted. The second chapter discusses the end of Tutsi dominance and the 1959 Hutu Revolution. It details Hutu Power ideology, Belgian domestic politics, early acts of genocide, refugee movements, and economic and political stagnation. The text documents the development of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, its 1990 invasion, and the Arusha peace process. An account of the 1994 genocide follows. However, as this has been covered in numerous other works, descriptions are limited to key events and general patterns. The chapter ends with a review of films, books, and other publications that brought Rwanda's plight to a worldwide audience, but that also created new myths. Chapter Three examines the country's post-genocide reconstruction and attempts to bring justice and reconciliation through the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Tanzania and gacaca courts domestically. Rwanda's impressive record of economic progress over the last two decades is detailed. However, prospects for democracy have diminished, as its leaders have become increasingly sensitive to criticism and fearful of renewed divisions. Descriptions of the process of developing school curriculums to explain past atrocities, the new myths it created, and their possible consequences comprise most of Chapter Four. The final chapter offers conclusions on the effects of past mythologies and the trauma they have wrought. It draws comparisons with other divided societies and their approaches to dealing with the past. These include Burundi, Ethiopia, South Africa, the United States, Taiwan, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, and Singapore. An extensive bibliography of books, theses, conference papers, official documents, articles, periodicals, journals, films, websites, other media, and interviews includes translations of titles in Kinyarwanda, French, Dutch, and German.

When Robert McBride was sentenced to death, he turned to the public gallery in court and said: ‘Freedom is just around the corner. I am leaving you at the corner – and you must take that corner to find freedom on the other side.’ As the guard moved in, he raised his fist and shouted: ‘The struggle continues till Babylon falls!’

It was 1987: the time of ‘total onslaught’. The trial of the MK unit that planted the Magoo's bomb on the Durban beachfront dominated the news but few knew the real facts of the brave young people who brought the armed struggle to KwaZulu-Natal.

This is the remarkable story of McBride and his comrades: the substation sabotage spree, rescuing a compatriot from hospital and smuggling him to Botswana, the devastating Why Not and Magoo's car bomb that killed three women, the dramatic trial and McBride’s 1 463 days on Death Row.

Now updated to include McBride’s controversial life after the end of apartheid, this is a thrilling tale of a young South African’s incredible courage, loyalty between friends and falling in love across the race barrier. Today, the struggle continues as McBride fights against corruption and state capture.

This book opens up histories of childhood and youth in South African historiography. It looks at how childhoods changed during South Africa's industrialisation, and traces the ways in which institutions, first the Dutch Reformed Church and then the Cape government, attempted to shape white childhood to the future benefit of the colony.

The African Red Sea Littoral, currently divided between Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Djibouti, is one of the poorest regions in the world. But the pastoralist communities indigenous to this region were not always poor-historically, they had access to a variety of resources that allowed them to prosper in the harsh, arid environment. This access was mediated by a robust moral economy of pastoralism that acted as a social safety net. Steven Serels charts the erosion of this moral economy, a slow-moving process that began during the Little Ice Age mega-drought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and continued through the devastating famines of the twentieth century. By examining mass sedentarization after the Second World War as merely the latest manifestation of an inter-generational environmental and economic crisis, this book offers an innovative lens for understanding poverty in northeastern Africa.

International human rights activist Lisa Shannon spent many afternoons at the kitchen table having tea with her friend Francisca Thelin, who often spoke of her childhood in Congo. Thelin would conjure vivid images of lush flower gardens, fish the size of small children, and of children running barefoot through her family's coffee plantation, gorging on fruit from the robust and plentiful mango trees. She urged Shannon to visit her family in Dungu, to get a taste of "real" Congo, "peaceful" Congo; a place so different than the conflict-ravaged places Shannon knew from her activism work.
But then the nightly phone calls from Congo began: static-filled, hasty reports from Francisca's mother, "Mama Koko," of gunmen--Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army-- who had infested Dungu and began launching attacks. Night after night for a year, Mama Koko delivered the devastating news of Fransisca's cousins, nieces, nephews, friends, and neighbors, who had been killed, abducted, burned alive on Christmas Day.
In an unlikely journey, Shannon and Thelin decided to travel from Portland, Oregon to Dungu, to witness first-hand the devastation unfolding at Joseph Kony's hands. Masquerading as Francisca's American sister-in-law, Shannon tucked herself into Mama Koko's raw cement living room and listened to the stories of Mama Koko and her husband, Papa Alexander--as well as those from dozens of other friends and neighbors ("Mama Koko's War Tribunal")--who lined up outside the house and waited for hours, eager to offer their testimony.
In "Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen," Shannon weaves together the family's tragic stories of LRA encounters with tales from the family's history: we hear of Mama Koko's early life as a gap-toothed beauty plotting to escape her inevitable fate of wife and motherhood; Papa Alexander's empire of wives he married because they cooked and cleaned and made good coffee; and Francisca's childhood at the family "castle" and coffee plantation. These lively stories transport Shannon from the chaos of the violence around her and bring to life Fransisca's kitchen-table stories of the peaceful Congo.
Yet, as the LRA camp out on the edge of town grew, tensions inside the house reach a fever pitch and Shannon and Thelin's friendship was fiercely tested. Shannon was forced to confront her limitations as an activist and reconcile her vision of what it means to affect meaningful change in the lives of others.
"Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen" is at once an illuminating piece of storytelling and an exploration of what it means to truly make a difference. It is an exquisite testimony to the beauty of human connection and the strength of the human spirit in times of unimaginable tragedy.

The future of mining in South Africa is hotly contested. Wide-ranging views from multiple quarters rarely seem to intersect, placing emphasis on different questions without engaging in holistic debate.

This book aims to catalyse change by gathering together fragmented views into unifying conversations. It highlights the importance of debating the future of mining in South Africa and for reaching consensus in other countries across the mineral-dependent globe.

It covers issues such as the potential of platinum to spur industrialisation, land and dispossession on the platinum belt, the roles of the state and capital in mineral development, mining in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the experiences of women in and affected by mining since the late 19th century and mine worker organising: history and lessons and how post-mine rehabilitation can be tackled.

It was inspired not only by an appreciation of South Africa’s extensive mineral endowments, but also by a realisation that, while the South African mining industry performs relatively well on many technical indicators, its management of broader social issues leaves much to be desired. It needs to be deliberated whether the mining industry can play as critical a role going forward as it did in the evolution of the country’s economy.

According to some estimates, Africa will soon have the highest concentration of Christians in the world. But African Christianity has had a long and conflicted history. Even today, modern misinterpretations of Scripture argue for God's curse upon the dark-skinned peoples of Africa. In this comprehensive study, Keith Burton traces the story of biblical Africa and the place of the Bible in the land of Ham. Beginning with the Old Testament, he explores the geography of biblical Africa and moves beyond stereotypical discussions of African ethnicity and identity. He then chronicles the African presence in the church from the New Testament onward, paying particular attention to the growth of Islam in Africa as well as the impact of European colonialism and the slave trade. Coming to the modern era, he examines the achievements of African Christianity and visionary efforts to adapt and reclaim Christianity for the African context. Burton invites readers to discover anew the relevance of the biblical narrative for African Christians as well as Scripture's influence on African Christianity. This invigorating work places the story of the Bible and African Christianity in a wider global context and challenges readers to think differently about history and the biblical world.

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.

This edited collection is the first book-length project to undertake a multidisciplinary study of democratization and human security in the post war nation of Sierra Leone. The overarching theme is there is synergy of democratization and human security which makes it imperative for the state to foster and enhance the realization of these concepts in postwar Sierra Leone. The book is divided into two broad thematic sections. The first section deals with democratization with a critical examination of the creation and instrumentality of institutions largely considered a necessity for democracy to take hold in a country. The second section delineates human security or the lack thereof in key areas of political, social and economic life. Though the book is specific to Sierra Leone, African countries and indeed countries transitioning to democracy around the world, scholars and practitioners of postwar or democratic transition studies would benefit from the concepts expounded in this collection.

This collection gathers together 31 previously out-of-print titles focusing on revolution - the political, economic, military and social aspects of the overthrow of state power. Ranging from nineteenth-century France to late-twentieth-century Caribbean, these books analyse the forms of revolt and the aftermaths of revolution, examining the types of government that result and the reactions of international opinion.

This book provides a new concept framework for understanding the factors that lead soldiers to challenge civil authority in developing nations. By exploring the causes and effects of the 1964 East African army mutinies, it provides novel insights into the nature of institutional violence, aggression, and military unrest in former colonial societies. The study integrates history and the social sciences by using detailed empirical data on the soldiers' protests in Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya.

The roots of the 1964 army mutinies in Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya were firmly rooted in the colonial past when economic and strategic necessity forced the former British territorial governments to rely on Africans for defense and internal security. As the only group in colonial society with access to weapons and military training, the African soldiery was a potential threat to the security of British rule. Colonial authorities maintained control over African soldiers by balancing the significant rewards of military service with social isolation, harsh discipline, and close political surveillance. After independence, civilian pay levels out-paced army wages, thereby tarnishing the prestige of military service. As compensation, veteran African soldiers expected commissions and improved terms of service when the new governments Africanized the civil service. They grew increasingly upset when African politicians proved unwilling and unable to meet their demands. Yet the creation of new democratic societies removed most of the restrictive regulations that had disciplined colonial African soldiers.

Lacking the financial resources and military expertise to create new armies, the independent African governments had to retain the basic structure and character of the inherited armies. Soldiers in Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya mutinied in rapid succession during the last week of January 1964 because their governments could no longer maintain the delicate balance of coercion and concessions that had kept the colonial soldiery in check. The East African mutinies demonstrate that the propensity of an African army to challenge civil authority was directly tied to its degree of integration into postcolonial society.

This book rethinks the Armenian people as significant actors in the context of Mediterranean and global history. Spanning a millennium of cross-cultural interaction and exchange across the Mediterranean world, essays move between connected histories, frontier studies, comparative literature, and discussions of trauma, memory, diaspora, and visual culture. Contributors dismantle narrow, national ways of understanding Armenian literature; propose new frameworks for mapping the post-Ottoman Mediterranean world; and navigate the challenges of writing national history in a globalized age. A century after the Armenian genocide, this book reimagines the borders of the "Armenian," pointing to a fresh vision for the field of Armenian studies that is omnivorously comparative, deeply interconnected, and rich with possibility.

This comprehensive analytical biography is the definitive work on the life and writings of history's most significant counterinsurgency doctrinaire, David Galula, elucidating the context for his reflections and examining the present and future applicability of his treatise for scholars and practitioners alike. The product of years of extensive research made possible by exclusive access to Galula's personal papers as well as first-hand accounts from colleagues, family members, and friends, this book traces Galula's life from early childhood until death, describing his upbringing, education, and military career in the tumultuous historical context of his era. The author-a former counterinsurgency practitioner himself-pays particular attention to how the Chinese Revolution and the Algerian War affected Galula's views, and identifies Galula's mentors and the schools of thought within the French military that greatly influenced his writings. A conclusion illuminates the contemporary and likely future validity of his works. In the epilogue, the author speaks to Galula's influence over modern military thought and U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine. This book is essential reading for individuals with an interest in counterinsurgency, Galula's writings, or Galula himself, such as military officers and civilian administrators undertaking counterinsurgency courses and training.

West African societies were transformed by the slave trade, even in regions where few slaves were exported. While many books have been written on the import and export trade and on warrior predation, Dr Searing's concern is with the effects of the Atlantic slave trade on the societies of the Senegal river valley in the eighteenth century. He shows that the growth of the Atlantic trade stimulated the development of slavery within West Africa. Slaves worked as seamen in the river and coasting trades, produced surplus grain to feed slaves in transit, and sometimes came to hold pivotal positions in the political structure of the coastal kingdoms of Senegambia. This local slave system had far-reaching consequences, leading to religious protest and slave rebellions. The changes in agricultural production fostered an ecological crisis.

This is the book that Alex Boraine never wanted to write. As a native South African and a witness to the worst years of apartheid, he has known many of the leaders of the African National Congress in exile. He shared the jubilation of millions of South Africans when the ANC won the first democratic elections in 1994 and took up the reins of government under the presidency of Nelson Mandela.

Now, two decades later, he is forced to wonder what exactly has gone wrong in South Africa. Intolerance and corruption are the hallmarks of the governing party, while the worsening state of education, health, safety and security and employment strengthen the claim that South Africa is a failing state. Boraine explores this urgent and critical issue from the vantage point of wide experience as a minister, parliamentarian, co-founder of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA) and Vice Chairperson of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Committee. He digs deep into the history of the ANC and concludes that both in exile and today, the ANC is slavishly committed to one party as the dominant ruling factor. All else - the Executive, Parliament, the Judiciary, civil society and the media - take second and third place. The ANC, Boraine claims, seeks to control every institution.

What's Gone Wrong? pulls no punches, but it also goes beyond strong criticism and offers a number of constructive proposals, including the re-alignment of politics as a way of preventing South Africa becoming a failed state. As South Africa mourns the loss of Mandela and embarks on another national election, with the ANC likely to begin a third decade of rule, this incisive, detailed critique is required reading for all who are interested in the fate of this young nation.

Today, African lives, cultures, and politics remain significantly affected by precolonial and postcolonial configurations of modernity, as well as hegemonic global systems. This project explores Africa's conversation with itself and the rest of the world in terms of the contest between these institutions and a pristine 'nature.' The African continent jostles between these polarities in a turbulent and unpredictable manner as wars, genocide, famine, and other hardships punctuate its history and its struggles to develop. At the same time, this unpredictability is also a manifestation of hope, vigor and dynamism. This dynamic reveals often arresting insights into what humankind has been, what it is presently, and what it could be. In this sense, Africa manifests a sense of life that perpetually strives to escape modern institutions, even if it unavoidably must engage with those institutions.

A magisterial history of South Africa, from the earliest known human inhabitation of the region to the present.

Leonard Thompson, a leading scholar in southern African history and politics, provides a fresh and penetrating exploration of the country's history, from the earliest known human inhabitation of the region to the present, focusing primarily on experiences of its black inhabitants.

The Fourth Edition of this classic text brings South Africa's history up to date with a new chapter chronicling the first presidential term of Mbeki and ending with the funeral of Nelson Mandela.

This book answers two related questions concerning civil war peace agreements. First, it explains why some peace agreements get signed while others do not get signed, and second, why do some of those agreements that get signed not hold to ultimately bring an end to protracted civil wars. In spite of the fact that most mediated settlements of civil wars are not durable, it is still important that we understand why some civil war agreements reach initial steps towards settlement, without which full and durable end of conflict is not possible. To improve our understanding of the process through which civil war agreements are concluded and why some settlements hold while others do not, this study looks at empirical evidence from three mediated sets of peace agreements. The focus is first a series of fourteen agreements that finally ended the first civil war in Liberia in 1997; second, the 1993 Arusha peace accord that failed to prevent the escalation of conflict into genocide in Rwanda; and third, a series of three agreements that were signed but did not initially hold to end the conflict in Sierra Leone. An excellent and thorough study, this book will be a welcome reference for collections in African studies, international peace studies, and political science.

60 years after independence, African nations still find it difficult to face a number of challenges, from establishing meaningful democratic institutions to establish social structures centered on the advancement of gender equality. This volume approaches these contemporary African challenges while combating a reflexive and facile Afro-Pessimism.