Studies the impact of colonialism on a mountainous region of Tanzania. This work examines the struggle between the Meru and Arusha peoples and their German and British rulers over the issue of land and agricultural development on Mount Meru in northern Tanzania. It shows how the Meru and Arashi, faced with an iron ring of land alienated by European settlers successfully intensified their own irrigated agriculture to bring about what has been termed an indigenous agricultural revolution. Tanzania: Mkuki na Nyota

"The authors, respectively a linguist specializing in Swahili and related Bantu languages and a historian specializing in the history of East Africa, have assembled an impressive array of evidence--linguistic, archaeological, documentary, and oral-traditi

Emphasises the important role of Christianity in contemporary Africa. This history examines, through case studies, the ways in which African chatechists, evangelists and translators have interpreted Christianity for themselves and conveyed it to others. It analyses African prophetic and healing movements which drew on African and Christian traditions. North America: Ohio U Press; Tanzania: Mkuki na Nyota; Kenya: EAEP

In 1963 David P. Sandgren went to Kenya to teach in a small, rural school for boys, where he remained for the next four years. These were heady times for Kenyans, as the nation gained its independence, approved a new constitution, and held its first elections. In the school where Sandgren taught, the sons of Gikuyu farmers rose to the challenges of this post colonial era and, in time, entered Kenyan society as adults, joining Kenya's first generation of post colonial elites. In Mau Mau's Children, Sandgren has reconnected with these former students. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews, he provides readers with a collective biography of the lives of Kenya's first post colonial elite, stretching from their 1940s childhood to the peak of their careers in the 1990s. Through these interviews, Mau Mau's Children shows the trauma of growing up during the Mau Mau Rebellion, the nature of nationalism in Kenya, the new generational conflicts arising, and the significance of education and Gikuyu ethnicity on his students' path to success.

What's in a name? As Osumaka Likaka argues in this illuminating study, the names that Congolese villagers gave to European colonizers reveal much about how Africans experienced and reacted to colonialism. The arrival of explorers, missionaries, administrators, and company agents allowed Africans to observe Westerners' physical appearances, behavior, and cultural practices at close range--often resulting in subtle yet trenchant critiques. By naming Europeans, Africans turned a universal practice into a local mnemonic system, recording and preserving the village's understanding of colonialism in the form of pithy verbal expressions that were easy to remember and transmit across localities, regions, and generations.
Methodologically innovative, "Naming Colonialism" advances a new approach that shows how a cultural process--the naming of Europeans--can provide a point of entry into economic and social histories. Drawing on archival documents and oral interviews, Likaka encounters and analyzes a welter of coded fragments. The vivid epithets Congolese gave to rubber company agents--"the home burner," "Leopard," "Beat, beat," "The hippopotamus-hide whip"--clearly conveyed the violence that underpinned colonial extractive economies. Other names were subtler, hinting at derogatory meaning by way of riddles, metaphors, or symbols to which the Europeans were oblivious. Africans thus emerge from this study as autonomous actors whose capacity to observe, categorize, and evaluate reverses our usual optic, providing a critical window on Central African colonialism in its local and regional dimensions.

A multi-disciplinary approach to studying ethnicity in Africa. Many of the people who identify themselves as Maasai, or who speak the Maa language, are not pastoralist at all, but framers and hunters. Over time many people have 'become' something else, adn what it means to be Maasai has changed radically over the past several centuries and is still changing today. This collection by historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists examines how Maasai identity has been created, evoked, contested and transformed. North America: Ohio U Press; Tanzania: Mkuki na Nyota; Kenya: EAEP

Christianity has been spread in Africa by Africans. It is the story of peoples seizing control of their own spiritual destinies-rather than the commonplace notion that the continent's Christian churches represent colonial and capitalist powers that helped subdue Africans to European domination. In short, once introduced, Christianity took on a powerful life of its own and spun out of the control of those who would retain ownership of doctrine and practice. East African Expressions of Christianity examines the experiences of African Christians as they explored the new faith, interpreted it in the context of their own values, appropriated it for themselves, and forged their own distinctive churches. Prominent Tanzanian and American historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and church people examine the translation of religious meanings across cultural boundaries; the religious and social appeal of the new faith; and the vital roles played by African evangelists, teachers, and translators in the spread of Christianity and the development of an African church.

Everyone "knows" the Maasai as proud pastoralists who once dominated the Rift Valley from northern Kenya to central Tanzania. But many people who identity themselves as Maasai, or who speak Maa, are not pastoralist at all, but farmers and hunters. Over time many different people have "become" something else. And what it means to be Maasai has changed radically over the past several centuries and is still changing today. This collection by historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists examines how Maasai identity has been created, evoked, contested, and transformed from the time of their earliest settlement in Kenya to the present, as well as raising questions about the nature of ethnicity generally.

To understand the genocide and other dramatic events of Rwanda's recent past, one must understand the history of the earlier realm. Jan Vansina provides a critique of the history recorded by early missionaries and court historians and provides a bottom-up view, drawing on hundreds of grassroots narratives. He describes the genesis of the Hutu and Tutsi identities, their growing social and political differences, their bitter feuds, revolts, and massacres, and the relevance of this dramatic history to the post-genocide Rwanda of today.
2001 French edition, Katharla Publishers