An attempt to use archaeological materials to investigate the colonization of southeastern Africa during the period 1500 to 1900. Perry demonstrates the usefulness of archaeology in bypassing the biases of the ethnohistorical and documentary record and generating a more comprehensive understanding of history. Special attention is paid to the period of state formation in Swaziland and a critique of the Settler Model', which the author finds to be invalid.

An attempt to use archaeological materials to investigate the colonization of southeastern Africa during the period 1500 to 1900. Perry demonstrates the usefulness of archaeology in bypassing the biases of the ethnohistorical and documentary record and generating a more comprehensive understanding of history. Special attention is paid to the period of state formation in Swaziland and a critique of the 'Settler Model', which the author finds to be invalid.

Marry Me in Africa is an invitation to discuss approaches and processes in African marriage ritual. As one crucial institution in African culture, marriage in its traditional African definition has helped many of the continent's cultures maintain a sense of community and identity. This book invites especially students and researchers into exchanges on some African marriage traditions and their roles in African societies. It concerns those aspects that fascinate me and many other Africans that we believe will interest people in the New World, particularly the Caribbean. Researchers of the African Diaspora might want to use some of the marriage practices for reconstructing models for analysis and interpretation of the formation and transformation of the African heritage in the Diaspora.
Marry Me in Africa is particularly useful for scholars not familiar with the different cultural practices among African societies, their sources of identity and diversity, and the implications of these for understanding African social systems. This book will be a useful companion for other scholars who know about some of the cultural practices but are unable to identify exactly their relationship to specific ethnic groups, traditional concepts, social, political, economic, technological, and other practices that have constituted the patterns of cultural behavior among African societies through marriage.
Individual or local cultural traditions and practices are presented within the context of the general African cultural heritage, leading to cross-cultural comparison and generalizations. The convergence of traditional marriage patterns and continuities in specific aspects of traditional values and behavior of various societies are examined over the common-ground sense of community among Africans that may not be the same today as in the past. For this reason this book takes the liberty to discuss present manifestations of a transformed past in the present.

This book addresses general aspects of the elusive realm of African religious experiences, using selected examples of evidence of how Africans have acted in their encounter with the unknown world from ancient times. Religious concepts and symbolisms such as identifying the "supreme being" the supernatural, spirits and spiritualism, ancestral veneration, ritual and ritual objects and obligations, kinship and community relationships, spirit possession, libation, divination, festivals and festivities, birth, initiation, marriage and death rites, notions of witchcraft and witches, are discussed. The central issue is that in African religious thought and practice, the known and the unknown worlds are not separated; also, science and religion are not in separation - the two worlds must always flow and float together in harmony. Religion and spirituality, as real life with a strong community role, personification of the collective desire and the dual power of a combination of spiritual and physical in healing and God as personal are discussed in a global perspective, acknowledging the African religious experience and associated conceptssuch as behavior and symbolisms, as continuities that reflect the past and represent basic elements of the rich and authentic aspetcts of the African religious heritage. The book takes the liberty to present the material in the ethnographic present although such practices may belong to the past.

Africa and the African Diaspora is the outcome of a symposium held at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon (February 2002), entitled "Symposium on Freedom in Black History," designed to celebrate Black History Month. The major themes of the conference were how Africans both at home on the continent and dispersed abroad, often by forces beyond their control, reacted to oppression and subjugation in seeking freedom from slavery, colonialism, and discrimination. The volume documents the many forms that oppression has taken, the many forms that resistance has taken, and the cultural developments that have allowed Africans to adapt to the new and changing economic, social and environmental conditions to win back their freedom. Oppressive strategies as divide-and-rule could be based on any one of a number of features, such as skin color, place of origin, culture, or social or economic status. People drawn into the vortex of the Atlantic trade and funneled into the sugar fields, the swampy rice lands or the cotton, coffee or tobacco plantations of the new world and elsewhere, had no alternative but to risk their lives for freedom. The plantation provided the context for the dehumanization of disadvantaged groups subjected to exhausting work, frequent punishment and personal injustice of every kind, This book demonstrates that the history and interpretation of these struggles of the oppressed peoples to free themselves have not received proportionate attention and analysis, as have other aspects of that history. For example, although Maroon societies or "runaways," formed colonies of core communities that fought won and preserved freedom in the New World and became the symbol of a special type of nationalism they have never been fully depicted as such in that role in World History and culture. In the discussion of freedom and the activities accompanying it in historical times, we often overlook the minor currents that accompany its attainment either at its initi

As a collection of conference papers (presented at the University of West Indies, Mona, October 18-19, 1991), Maroon Heritage is intended to reinforce a dialogue that is at once intercultural and interdisciplinary. Two Jamaican Maroon Chiefs, Colonel Harris from Moore Town and former Colonel Wright from Accompong, participated with contributions on various aspects of the history and culture of their respective communities.