Ghana, the former British colony of the Gold Coast, is historically known for being the first country to the south of the Sahara to attain political independence from colonial rule. It is known for its exports of cocoa and a variety of minerals, especially gold, and it is now an oil exporting country. But Ghana's importance to the African continent is not only seen in its natural resources or its potential to expand its agricultural output. Rather the nation's political history of nationalism, the history of military engagement in politics, record of economic depression and the ability to rise from the ashes of political and economic decay is the most unique character of the country. This fourth edition of Historical Dictionary of Ghana covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 900 hundred cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Ghana.

At the turn of the century the regional-global security partnership became a key element of peace and security policy-making. This book investigates the impact of the joint effort made by the African Union (AU) and the United Nations (UN) to keep the peace and protect civilians in Darfur.

This book focuses on the collaboration that takes place in the field of conflict management between the global centre and the African regional level. It moves beyond the dominant framework on regional-global security partnerships, which mainly considers one-sided legal and political factors. Instead, new perspectives on the relationships are presented through the lens of international legitimacy. The book argues that the AU and the UN Security Council fight for legitimacy to ensure their positions of authority and to improve the chances of success of their activities. It demonstrates in regard to the case of Darfur why and how legitimacy matters for states, international organisations, and also for global actors and local populations.

Legitimacy, Peace Operations and Global-Regional Security will be of interest to students and scholars of International Relations, African Security and Global Governance.

This book focuses on Africa's challenges, achievements, and failures over the past several centuries using an interdisciplinary approach that combines theory and fact and evidence-based practices and interventions in public health, and argues that most of the health problems in Africa are not a result of scarce or lack of resources, but of the misconceived and misplaced priorities that have left the continent behind every other on the globe in terms of health, education, and equitable distribution of opportunities and access to (quality) health as agreed by the United Nations member states at Alma-Ata in 1978.

This book contributes to the debate over the culpability of the Trans-Atlantic Slave from various disciplinary perspectives. The general thesis that undergirds the book is that by knowing who was predisposed to benefit the most from the trade and why, prompting them to initiate it, appropriate culpability can be assigned. This approach also allowed for a more in-depth analysis of the issue from many disciplines, making it the first of its kind. For the sake of cohesion and coherence, some of the major questions addressed by every chapter are quite similar, albeit authors were encouraged to fine-tune and add to these questions to meet their disciplinary requirements. By emphasizing the why in some of the questions, a qualitative explanatory case study approach was utilized. Both primary and secondary data sources were also used for each chapter to offer a cogent analysis and new information on the topic.

The 2010 South African World Cup launched African football onto the global stage and its footballers are increasingly present at the best clubs in the world, yet it is rare to find compelling scholarship on the subject of African football. This book brings some of the top scholars on African football together to produce a collection that covers the diverse regions of the continent and diverse football topics. Focussing on aspects of identity, it spans issues of race, radicalization and self-identification, exploring the imagined continuation of war in support of a Nigerian club, the use of songs in support of a club and an ethnic community, and the effects of transnational broadcasting on supporter identification with football in Africa. This collection provides a valuable contribution to debates about African sport and identity and also contains an interview with one of Africa's first migrant footballers, Paul Bonga Bonga.

For centuries, Africa's Upper Guinea Coast region has been the site of regional and global interactions, with societies from different parts of the African continent and beyond engaging in economic trade, cultural exchange, and various forms of conflict. This book provides a wide-ranging look at how such encounters have continued into the present day, identifying the disruptions and continuities in religion, language, economics, and various other social phenomena that have resulted. These accounts show a region that, while still grappling with the legacies of colonialism and the slave trade, is both shaped by and an important actor within ever-denser global networks, exhibiting consistent transformation and creative adaptation.

In 1929, tens of thousands of south eastern Nigerian women rose up against British authority in what is known as the Women's War. This book brings togther, for the first time, the multiple perspectives of the war's colonized and colonial participants and examines its various actions within a single, gendered analytical frame.

In its persistence at maintaining racial inequality, Southern Africa is leaving the door open to widespread racial conflict. Although the world--east and west, communist and capitalist--is generally united in condemning apartheid, in such a dispute it is not unlikely that the two superpowers would become involved. Southern Africa: An American Enigma examines the currents of American involvement with Southern African politics since 1948 to the present Reagan administration.

This book examines the historical and current state of health and the health of the African people, including the Arab North, impacted by such factors as geography and natural elements, cultural and colonial traditions, and competing biomedical and traditional systems. It also looks at technological advances, poverty and health disparities, utilization of resources, and international presence, as reflected by the work of the World Health Organization, and structural adjustments imposed by the IMF and the World Bank.

Mosler and Catley examine the rise of the United States to the status of a great power by the beginning of the 20th century, its maturation as a superpower during the co-dominion of the Cold War, and its emergence as a hegemonic power after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a hegemon it has pursued the globalization of a liberal world order.

The key institutions and characteristics of the United States which enable it to become a hegemonic power, are examined as indicators of its likely behavior as a dominant power in the 21st century. The evolution of the liberal international political and economic order pursued by the United States since World War One and established by the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 is examined in the context of the global meltdown of the late 1990s. The role of the United States in the creation of the system that we now call globalization is scrutinized and its development into the next century is anticipated. In their final section, Mosler and Catley analyze the possible challenges to the United States as a hegemonic power in the 21st century and the prospects for war and peace and social and economic development in the new millennium. This is an important analysis for scholars, researchers, policymakers, and concerned citizens interested in international relations and American foreign policy.

In examining the intellectual history in contemporary South Africa, Eze engages with the emergence of ubuntu as one discourse that has become a mirror and aftermath of South Africa’s overall historical narrative. This book interrogates a triple socio-political representation of ubuntu as a displacement narrative for South Africa’s colonial consciousness; as offering a new national imaginary through its inclusive consciousness, in which different, competing, and often antagonistic memories and histories are accommodated; and as offering a historicity in which the past is transformed as a symbol of hope for the present and the future. This book offers a model for African intellectual history indignant to polemics but constitutive of creative historicism and healthy humanism.

This exhaustive exploration of the sociocultural, political, and economic roles of African women through history demonstrates how African women have shaped-and continue to shape-their societies. Women play essential, critical roles in every society; African women south of the Sahara are certainly no different. Women's Roles in Sub-Saharan Africa adds significantly to our understanding of the ways in which women contribute to the fabric of human civilization. This book provides an in-depth exploration of African women's roles in society from precolonial periods to the contemporary era. Topical sections describe the roles that women play in family, courtship and marriage, religion, work, literature and arts, and government. Each of the six chapters has been structured to elucidate women's roles and functions in society as partners, as active participants, as defenders of their status and occupations, and as agents of change. Authors Nana Akua Amponsah and Toyin Falola present a thought-provoking work that looks at the complicated victimhood/powerful-female paradigm in women and gender studies in Africa, and challenge ideological interest in African historiography that privilege male representation. Describes chronological events in women's lives covering precolonial to postcolonial Africa Includes photographs of powerful women in colonial Africa; arts such as bead-making, pottery, and basketry; contemporary women in politics; and more Lists significant bibliographical materials from historical, anthropological, ethnographical, and sociological sources

This title uses oral history methodology to record stories of people who experienced the brunt of racist forced removals in the city of Cape Town, South Africa. Through life stories and community case studies, it traces the human impact of this disruptive, often violent feature of apartheid's social engineering.

In Packaging Post/Coloniality, Richard Watts breaks from convention and reads Francophone books by their covers, focusing on the package over the content. Watts looks at the ways that the "paratext"--the covers, illustrations, promotional summaries, epigraphs, dedications, and prefaces or forewords that enclose the text--mediates creative works by writers from sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia whose place in the French literary institution was and remains a source of conflict. In order to be acceptable for French bookstore shelves, the novels, essays, and collections of poetry created in colonial territories were deemed to need explanation and sponsorship by an authority in the field. Watts finds the French mission civilisatrice, or "civilizing mission," manifest in prefaces, introductions, and dedications inserted in the books that appeared in the metropole during the height of French imperialism. In the postcolonial era, book packaging reveals a struggle to reverse the power dynamic: Francophone writers introduced each others' texts, yet books still appeared with covers promoting stereotypical images of the Francophone world. This fascinating journey through a particular cultural history of the book is a unique take on the quest for a literary identity. Watts concludes his study by looking at English mediations of Francophone works, with a chapter on reading and teaching Francophone literature in translation.

The first comprehensive study in English of the earliest and largest 'Third-World' migration into pre-war Europe. Full attention is given to the relationship between the society of emigration, undermined by colonialism, and processes of ethnic organisation in the metropolitan context. Contemporary anti-Algerian racism is shown to have deep roots in moves by colonial elites to control and police the migrants and to segregate them from contact with Communism, nationalist movements and the French working class.

Democratic governance constitutes an enduring challenge for Africa's most populous country, Nigeria. The book reflects on the form, trajectory and content of democratic governance in post-military Nigeria from 1999. Nigeria's democracy remains fragile, conflict sensitive and possibly reversible as the legacy of praetorianism and illiberal political culture constrain the progress and opportunities for democratic growth and consolidation in the country. Progress and expectations are widely disconnected. The policy recommendations contained in the book provides invaluable pathway for reconstituting institutions, politics, power and governance essential for promoting democratic stability and growth in Nigeria.

"Although the Igbo constitute one of the largest ethnic nationalities of Nigeria and the West African sub-region, little is know about their political history before the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. This book is then a pioneer study of the broad changes Igbo political systems have undergone since the prehistoric period"--

The contributors come from a range of backgrounds, but meet one imperative qualification: residence or repeated physical presence in South Africa. By bringing together this notable collection of authors, Kitchen impresses upon readers (especially Americans) that the South Africa that will emerge from today's strife will be determined primarily by internal factors. As this volume notes, recent evidence suggests that externally devised initiatives such as Eminent Persons interlocutors, constructive engagement, disinvestment, and economic sanctions can affect but not mandate how or whether South Africa's fractured society can find a way to avoid a lemmings scenario. Policy makers, policy analysts, and other actors both in the U.S. government and policy community concerned with what is going on inside South Africa today will find South Africa to be provocative reading.

During the Zimbabwean struggle for independence, the settler regime imprisoned numerous activists and others it suspected of being aligned with the guerrillas. This book is the first to look closely at the histories and lived experiences of these political detainees and prisoners, showing how they challenged and negotiated their incarceration.

Mohammed Bashir Salau addresses the neglected literature on Atlantic Slavery in West Africa by looking at the plantation operations at Fanisau in Hausaland, and in the process provides an innovative look at one piece of the historically significant Sokoto Caliphate.