One of the outstanding mysteries of the twentieth century, and one with huge political resonance, is the death of Dag Hammarskjold and his UN team in a plane crash in central Africa in 1961. Just minutes after midnight, his aircraft plunged into thick forest in the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), abruptly ending his mission to bring peace to the Congo. Across the world, many suspected sabotage, accusing the multi-nationals and the governments of Britain, Belgium, the USA and South Africa of involvement in the disaster. These suspicions have never gone away. British High Commissioner Lord Alport was waiting at the airport when the aircraft crashed nearby. He bizarrely insisted to the airport management that Hammarskjold had flown elsewhere - even though his aircraft was reported overhead. This postponed a search for so long that the wreckage of the plane was not found for fifteen hours. White mercenaries were at the airport that night too, including the South African pilot Jerry Puren, whose bombing of Congolese villages led, in his own words, to 'flaming huts . . . destruction and death'. These soldiers of fortune were backed by Sir Roy Welensky, Prime Minister of the Rhodesian Federation, who was ready to stop at nothing to maintain white rule and thought the United Nations was synonymous with the Nazis. The Rhodesian government conducted an official inquiry, which blamed pilot error. But as this book will show, it was a massive cover-up that suppressed and dismissed a mass of crucial evidence, especially that of African eyewitnesses. A subsequent UN inquiry was unable to rule out foul play - but had no access to the evidence to show how and why. Now, for the first time, this story can be told. Who Killed Hammarskjoeld? follows the author on her intriguing and often frightening journey of research to Zambia, South Africa, the USA, Sweden, Norway, Britain, France and Belgium, where she unearthed a mass of new and hitherto secret documentary and photographic evidence.

In this intrepid study, noted Nigerian historian Onianwa Oluchukwu Ignatus investigates the air war component of the Nigerian-Biafran War, a crucial postcolonial conflict in Africa. It focuses on the Biafra's air operations against oil installations and facilities owned by multinational oil companies in Nigeria. In addition to exploring global airpower historiography, this study explores the tactical aspects of how the renewed air war changed the military equation of the conflict when both sides were at loggerheads in peace settlement and relief arrangements. This episode was important in postcolonial military history of Africa, when modern air weapons were developed at the local level for offensive military capability. While the air operations of the Biafrans were sporadic yet destructive, they caused considerable damage to public utilities in Nigeria. Internally, the air attacks paved the way for internal disturbances in the oil producing areas by damaging oil companies' activities and the reducing foreign investment. Externally, it caused a loss of confidence in Nigeria. The Biafran air offensive proved to be the key strategy in Nigeria's response to the crisis, which focused on neutralizing Biafran airpower.

"Fragile Hierarchies" deals with the world of the urban elites of third century Roman Egypt. It discusses economic, social and demographic aspects of the position of the elites of the small towns that dotted the Nile. The work combines analysis of Greek papyri with modelling techniques used in ancient history. The first part of the book analyses patterns of urbanisation, property relations and their consequences for elite formation. The second part discusses demographic aspects, patterns of inheritance and their consequences for continuity and discontinuity. The central argument of the book is that a strong social and economic hierarchy occurred side by side with a dynamic pattern of elite renewal.

How did Tunisia succeed in eliminating the threat of militant Islamic fundamentalism? Borowiec examines the actions, which begin with the removal of the senile President Habib Bourguiba in 1987, known in Tunisia as the change. Today, while its next door neighbor, Algeria, is in the midst of an upheaval threatening modernization and a secular government, Tunisia is the only Muslim country to ban polygamy and to introduce state-funded contraception. Borowiec begins by sketching Tunisia's history from the Phoenician era onward. He provides a detailed analysis of the country's Islamic movement, and then examines the efforts of Bourguiba's successor, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, to liberalize the economy, foster a Western orientation, and make education accessible to all. Interviews with leading government officials as well as educators, writers, and average Tunisians puts a human face on a process that may allow Tunisia to make the transition to become a young developed nation at the beginning of the next millennium. This book is important to scholars, researchers, and the general public concerned with events in North Africa and the Arab world.

Rick Turner was one of South Africa's most original and powerful thinkers and is remembered today as a remarkable teacher and activist. For almost ten years, from 1968, when he returned to South Africa from his studies at the Sorbonne, to 1978, when he was shot by an unknown assassin, Rick Turner played an important role in the opposition to apartheid, especially by provoking whites to expand their vision of what South Africa could be. Believing in the 'necessity of utopian thinking', he wrote a short book, The eye of the needle (1972), that sought to envision a very different kind of society. It has become a classic of its kind. For the authorities Rick Turner was a constant source of annoyance, a threat and anomaly that had to be dealt with. What was most dangerous about him was that his life and thought failed to fit within the dominant narrative of his time. Never a member of the ANC or the Communist Party or any political party for that matter, he propounded a vision for the transformation of South Africa that was both independent and radical. Although he lived a short life, he nevertheless had a great influence on those around him, including people like Steve Biko, and had a profound effect on people's imagining of what was possible. In the end, he became too much for the apartheid system and was killed. Even today, in the severely compromised political climate after the end of apartheid, the need for the kind of idealist vision that Rick Turner lived and died for is perhaps just as urgent.

Five hundred years before Homer immortalized the Trojan Horse, the ancient Egyptians had already composed a tale of soldiers hiding Ali Baba-like in baskets to capture a besieged city. Shortly after the rise to power of the warrior pharaoh Ramesses II ("the Great"), Egyptian authors began to write stories about battles and conquest. However, these stories were not set in the present, but in the past-they were the world's first works of historical fiction. These literary recreations of past events, which preserve fascinating mixtures of fact and fiction, provide unparalleled information about topics as diverse as ancient Egyptian historiography, religion, and notions of humor and wit. Imagining the Past is the first volume to provide complete translations and commentary for the historical fiction composed during Egypt's New Kingdom. The four tales included here represent a multifaceted approach to history and its actors. The Quarrel of Apepi and Seqenenere, set at the end of the Second Intermediate Period, preserves details of political history and taxation that are attested in contemporaneous sources. In The Capture of Joppa, a historically-attested general Djehuty from the reign of Thutmose III successfully defeats the ruler of Joppa through one of the first attested stratagems in world military history. Royalty takes center stage with Thutmose III in Asia, whose fragmentary narrative may be a fictional presentation of the Battle of Megiddo. The Libyan Battle Story, composed only a generation after the Battle of Perire, contains abundant historical details attested in hieroglyphic and hieratic sources and borders on fictionalized history. A concluding analysis summarizes the audience and function of historical fiction as well as theology and historiography within the tales. An appendix of the hieroglyphic texts, all transliterated with philological commentary, make these texts accessible to a wide audience, while representing the first critical scholarly edition of them available. Colleen Manassa's thorough research into the literary, political, and social context of each tale will further stimulate current discussions of genres and the transmission of texts in Egyptolology and comparative literature studies.

This book takes as its theme the ways in which governments legitimate their rule, both to themselves and to their subjects. Its introduction explores legitimacy and pre-colonial states, but the three sections of the book deal with colonial legitimacy, the question of legitimation in the transition from colonialism to majority rule, and the contemporary debate about accountability.

African research played a major role in transforming the discipline of anthropology in the twentieth century. Ethnographic studies, in turn, had significant effects on the way imperial powers in Africa approached subject peoples. Ordering Africa provides the first comparative history of these processes. With essays exploring metropolitan research institutes, Africans as ethnographers, the transnational features of knowledge production, and the relationship between anthropology and colonial administration, this volume both consolidates and extends a range of new research questions focusing on the politics of imperial knowledge. Specific chapters examine French West Africa, the Belgian and French Congo, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Italian Northeast Africa, Kenya, and Equatorial Africa (Gabon) as well as developments in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. A major collection of essays that will be welcomed by scholars interested in imperial history and the history of Africa. -- .

A seven-year-old English girl, washed up on the Wild Coast in about 1736, is adopted by the amaMpondo, grows up to become a woman of surpassing beauty, marries the chief of the clan and becomes an ancestor of many of the Xhosa royal families in the nineteenth century. It sounds like the stuff of romance, but this is verified, documented fact. Although her surname is unknown, in spite of a persistent 19th-century story that she was the daughter of a General Campbell, we do know that her name was Bessie. The amaMpondo named her Gquma - 'The Roar of the Sea' - and she won their affection for her compassion and generosity, and became famous for her love of ornament, covering herself with necklaces, beadwork, seashells and bangles. But she was no mere fashion-plate, winning renown for her wisdom, becoming involved in the politics of her adopted people and wielding an influence virtually unprecedented among women of her time and place. Inspired by the story of Bessie, in Sunburnt Queen, Hazel Crampton has delved deep into the history of the castaways from the many ships wrecked on this beautiful but perilous shore.;In a highly entertaining way she tells their story, which became inextricably interwoven with those of the people of the Wild Coast: whole clans, such the abeLungu ('the White People') trace their ancestry to castaways. The book traces the lives of Bessie's descendants and those of some of the other castaways whose names are known. Their stories are intimately, often tragically intertwined in the sad history of contact between the Xhosa-speaking peoples and the white settlers. The author, although obviously a person of strong opinions, like all the best historiographers, she presents people and events in a non-judgmental way, allowing contemporary voices to pronounce on the actions, good and bad, of the actors in this drama. If there is a message to be gleaned from the story of Bessie it is this: South Africans are far more alike than we are different, and we all have so much more to gain by emphasizing our similarities rather than our differences, and by cherishing our common heritage.

A Prospect Best Book of 2021 'A fascinating and timely book.' William Boyd 'Gripping...a must read.' FT 'Compelling...humane, reasonable, and ultimately optimistic.' Evening Standard '[A] valuable guide to a complex narrative.' The Times In 1897, Britain sent a punitive expedition to the Kingdom of Benin, in what is today Nigeria, in retaliation for the killing of seven British officials and traders. British soldiers and sailors captured Benin, exiled its king and annexed the territory. They also made off with some of Africa's greatest works of art. The 'Benin Bronzes' are now amongst the most admired and valuable artworks in the world. But seeing them in the British Museum today is, in the words of one Benin City artist, like 'visiting relatives behind bars'. In a time of huge controversy about the legacy of empire, racial justice and the future of museums, what does the future hold for the Bronzes?

The book examines South African history and society from a variety of comparative perspectives. It brings together work by scholars based in South Africa, USA and the UK to reflect on the nature and evolution of what was considered for a long time a unique society. Drawing on studies of social, political and intellectual processes elsewhere, the authors seek to place South African developments in a broader context that sheds light on their specific features as well as global relevance.

"A strength of the volume is its coverage of the "applied" aspects of knowledge, from Anthropology through to Eugenics and state and social planning. There is also a commendable sensitivity to the unique ethnic dynamics of southern Africa, not least, for example, the complications of an "indigenized" and powerful Afrikaner nationalism." Donal Lowry, Oxford Brookes University This collection, dealing with case studies drawn from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Mauritius, examines the relationship between scientific claims and practices on the one hand and the exercise of colonial power on the other. It challenges conventional views that portray science as a detached mode of reasoning with the capacity to confer benefits in a more or less even-handed manner. That science has the potential to further the collective good is not fundamentally at issue, but science can also be seen as complicit in processes of colonial domination. Not only did science assist in bolstering aspects of colonial power and exploitation, it also possessed a significant ideological component: it offered a means of legitimating colonial authority by counter-poising Western rationality to native superstition and it served to enhance the self-image of colonial or settler elites in important respects. This innovative volume ranges broadly through topics such as statistics, medicine, eugenics, agriculture, entomology and botany. Its interdisciplinary approach will find a readership amongst historians, sociologists, anthropologists and historians of science and medicine, both at an undergraduate and at a specialist level. Contributions are drawn from South Africa, Britain and North America.

The French North African Crisis analyzes the postwar breakdown in French imperial rule in North West Africa, concentrating primarily upon the Algerian war of independence. This book highlights the human tragedy involved and the divisive consequences within French metropolitan politics of intractable colonial conflict. It further examines how far the protracted crisis of colonial control in North Africa shaped French foreign and security policy and this impacted upon Anglo-French relations, the western alliance and the wider process of decolonization.

When Peterhouse School opened in 1955, the British Empire in Africa was still intact and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland had just come into being. It was a boarding school founded on the British model, but with the intention that it would 'adapt all that is best in the Public School tradition to African conditions'. The story of Peterhouse is not only about work and sport, music and drama, chapel and syllabus changes. It is set in the context of educational development and political changes in a Southern Africa country. The school became a pioneering multi-racial institution in 'white Rhodesia'; shared the sufferings of the country during the 'bush war'; expanded greatly in the new Zimbabwe, survived the contradictions of a black 'Marxist' government, and has kept its firm commitment to being a 'Church School'. Despite the uncertainties and challenges of the new century, this is a story of faith and vision.

South Africa was born in war, has been cursed by crises and ruptures, and today stands on a precipice once again. This book explores the country's tumultuous journey from the Second Anglo-Boer War to 2021. Drawing on diaries, letters, oral testimony and diplomatic reports, Thula Simpson follows the South African people through the battles, elections, repression, resistance, strikes, insurrections, massacres, crashes and epidemics that have shaped the nation. Tracking South Africa's path from colony to Union and from apartheid to democracy, Simpson documents the influence of key figures including Jan Smuts, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, P.W. Botha, Thabo Mbeki and Cyril Ramaphosa. He offers detailed accounts of watershed events like the 1922 Rand Revolt, the Defiance Campaign, Sharpeville, the Soweto uprising and the Marikana massacre. He sheds light on the roles of Gandhi, Churchill, Castro and Thatcher, and explores the impact of the World Wars, the armed struggle and the Border War. Simpson's history charts the post-apartheid transition and the phases of ANC rule, from Rainbow Nation to transformation; state capture to 'New Dawn'. Along the way, it reveals the divisions and solidarities of sport; the nation's economic travails; and painful pandemics, from the Spanish flu to AIDS and Covid-19.

Victims of political persecution since 2000, Zimbabwe's whites have never overcome the problem of belonging. In North America and Australia, Europeans became the majority and "normal" partially through the genocide of native peoples. Settlers to Zimbabwe, however, only comprised a tiny minority. They monopolized the territory but struggled to assimilate culturally. Rather than integrating with African societies, many adopted a strategy of social escape. In this arresting and powerful study, David McDermott Hughes shows how they became emotionally and artistically invested in the non-human environment surrounding them. He traces how writers, artists, and farmers crafted a white identity focused on ecological conservation and how, emerging from state terror, some are now groping toward a whiteness of uncommon humanity and humility.

The Algerian War 1954-62 was one of the most prolonged and violent examples of decolonization. Bringing to an end 132 years of French rule, the Algerian struggle caused the fall of six French prime ministers, the collapse of the Fourth Republic, and expulsion of one million French settlers. This volume, bringing together leading experts in the field, focuses on one of the key actors in the drama - the French army. They show that the Algerian War was just as much about conflicts of ideas, beliefs and loyalties as it was about simple military operations. In this way, the collection goes beyond polemic and recrimination to explore the many and varied nuances of what was one of the historically most important of the grand style colonial wars.

This book is the first comprehensive study of the history of French medicine in nineteenth-century Algeria. It argues that the medicalization of Algerian was a priority for colonial regimes across the century, but that this goal was thwarted by gaps which lay between the imagined capacity of French medicine and its actual efficacy, by institutional rivalries, and by the manner in which medicine became a focus for the resistance of French domination and rule.

The Women of Cairo: Scenes of Life in the Orient, first published in 1929, describes the trip to Egypt and other locations in the Ottoman Empire taken by French Romanticist Gerard de Nerval. The book focuses on both reinforcing and dispelling the old ways in which people saw the Orient, as well as examining their old and new customs. This book is perfect for those studying history and travel.

The collective inquiries in this volume address ethnicity in ancient Africa as social fact and political artifact along numerous dimensions. Is ethnicity a useful analytic? What can archaeology say about the kinds of deeper time questions which scholars have asked of identities in Africa? Eleven authors engage with contemporary anthropological, historical and archaeological perspectives to examine how ideas of self-understanding, belonging, and difference in Africa were made and unmade. They examine how these intersect with other salient domains of social experience: states, landscapes, discourses, memory, technology, politics, and power. The various chapters cover broad geographic and temporal ground, following an arc across Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and East Africa, spanning from prehistory to the colonial period.

This collection offers comprehensive insights into pivotal areas of concern regarding developments in Zimbabwe since its independence. By disclosing the intra-elite competition, assessing the performance of Zimbabwe's economy and explaining how the country's natural resources have been managed, we can better understand the ruling ZANU-PF's increasing reliance on the so-called war veterans and the land reform issue for its political survival.