front cover of Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic
Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic
Derek R. Peterson
Ohio University Press, 2010

The abolition of the slave trade is normally understood to be the singular achievement of eighteenth-century British liberalism. Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic expands both the temporal and the geographic framework in which the history of abolitionism is conceived. Abolitionism was a theater in which a variety of actors—slaves, African rulers, Caribbean planters, working-class radicals, British evangelicals, African political entrepreneurs—played a part. The Atlantic was an echo chamber, in which abolitionist symbols, ideas, and evidence were generated from a variety of vantage points. These essays highlight the range of political and moral projects in which the advocates of abolitionism were engaged, and in so doing it joins together geographies that are normally studied in isolation.

Where empires are often understood to involve the government of one people over another, Abolitionism and Imperialism shows that British values were formed, debated, and remade in the space of empire. Africans were not simply objects of British liberals’ benevolence. They played an active role in shaping, and extending, the values that Britain now regards as part of its national character. This book is therefore a contribution to the larger scholarship about the nature of modern empires.

Contributors: Christopher Leslie Brown, Seymour Drescher, Jonathon Glassman, Boyd Hilton, Robin Law, Phillip D. Morgan, Derek R. Peterson, John K. Thornton

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Abolitionists Abroad
American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa
Lamin Sanneh
Harvard University Press, 1999

In 1792, nearly 1,200 freed American slaves crossed the Atlantic and established themselves in Freetown, West Africa, a community dedicated to anti-slavery and opposed to the African chieftain hierarchy that was tied to slavery. Thus began an unprecedented movement with critical long-term effects on the evolution of social, religious, and political institutions in modern Africa.

Lamin Sanneh's engrossing book narrates the story of freed slaves who led efforts to abolish the slave trade by attacking its base operation: the capture and sale of people by African chiefs. Sanneh's protagonists set out to establish in West Africa colonies founded on equal rights and opportunity for personal enterprise, communities that would be havens for ex-slaves and an example to the rest of Africa. Among the most striking of these leaders is the Nigerian Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a recaptured slave who joined a colony in Sierra Leone and subsequently established satellite communities in Nigeria. The ex-slave repatriates brought with them an evangelical Christianity that encouraged individual spirituality--a revolutionary vision in a land where European missionaries had long assumed they could Christianize the whole society by converting chiefs and rulers.

Tracking this potent African American anti-slavery and democratizing movement through the nineteenth century, Lamin Sanneh draws a clear picture of the religious grounding of its conflict with the traditional chieftain authorities. His study recounts a crucial development in the history of West Africa.

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Achieving Peace in Northern Mali
Past Agreements, Local Conflicts, and the Prospects for a Durable Settlement
Stephanie Pezard
RAND Corporation, 2015
This report examines the prospects for stabilization in Mali following the political and military crisis that began in 2012. To this end, it examines Mali’s peace settlements since the early 1990s to identify flaws and successes. The report also explores whether Mali’s neighbor Niger owes its current stability to a more favorable context, shrewd policies, or sheer luck, and whether it might offer a model of resilience for Mali.
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Acholi Intellectuals
Knowledge, Power, and the Making of Colonial Northern Uganda, 1850–1960
Patrick William Otim
Ohio University Press, 2024
Acholi Intellectuals draws on the writings of homespun historians, interviews with elderly men and women who remember the last days of colonial rule, and government and missionary archives to illuminate the intellectual and political history of the colonial transition in northern Uganda. The book focuses on Acholiland, a place that has been chronically understudied in comparison to Uganda’s rich, fertile, and well-documented south. Southerners there—following the depictions of colonial officials and missionaries—have often regarded northerners as uncultured people lacking ideas. Acholi Intellectuals challenges this prejudice, bringing into view a whole category of men (and a few women) who mediated between indigenous and colonial knowledge systems and inaugurated a new kind of politics. Patrick William Otim studies a category of people—known as healers, messengers, war leaders, poet-musicians, and diplomats—who possessed prestige and power in an older Acholi political logic and who, in the dawning days of colonial government, came to occupy positions of power in the British administration. Otim argues that these Acholi intellectuals were not simply creatures of British colonial self-interest; neither was their power invented by the coercive logic of indirect rule. He asserts instead that people who held moral and social power in the older system were able to transform that strength, under colonial administration, into a new form of political legitimacy.
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Adventures in Africa
Gianni Celati
University of Chicago Press, 2000
"In the life of a tourist who travels a bit far, I think that at a certain point, a question necessarily arises: 'But what have I come here for?' A question that sets in motion a great cinema of justification to oneself, so that one doesn't have to seriously say to oneself: 'I'm here doing nothing.'"
In 1997 the celebrated Italian novelist and essayist Gianni Celati accompanied his friend, filmmaker Jean Talon, on a journey to West Africa which took them from Mali to Senegal and Mauritania. The two had been hoping to research a documentary about Dogon priests, but frustrated by red tape, their voyage became instead a touristic adventure. The vulnerable, prickly, insightful Celati kept notebooks of the journey, now translated by Adria Bernardi as Adventures in Africa. Celati is the privileged traveler, overwhelmed by customs he doesn't understand, always at the mercy of others who are trying to sell him something he doesn't want to buy, and aware of himself as the Tourist who is always a little disoriented and at the center of the continual misadventures that are at the heart of travel.
Celati's book is both a travelogue in the European tradition and a trenchant meditation on what it means to be a tourist. Celati learns to surrender to the chaos of West Africa and in the process produces a work of touching and comic descriptions, in the lucid and ironic prose that is his hallmark. Hailed as one of the best travelogues on Africa ever written and awarded the first Zerilli-Marimó prize, Adventures in Africa is a modest yet profound account of the utter discombobulation of travel.
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An Affair with Africa
Expeditions And Adventures Across A Continent
Alzada Carlisle Kistner
Island Press, 1998

In June 1960, a young faculty wife named Alzada Kistner and her husband David, a promising entomologist, left their 18-month old daughter in the care of relatives and began what was to be a four month scientific expedition in the Belgian Congo. Three weeks after their arrival, the country was gripped by a violent revolution trapping the Kistners in its midst. Despite having to find their way out of numerous life-threatening situations, the Kistners were not to be dissuaded. An emergency airlift by the United States Air Force brought them to safety in Kenya where they continued their field work.

Thus began three decades of adventures in science. In An Affair with Africa, Alzada Kistner describes her family's African experience -- the five expeditions they took beginning with the trip to the Belgian Congo in 1960 and ending in 1972-73 with a nine-month excursion across southern Africa. From hunching over columns of ants for hours on end while seven months pregnant to eating dinner next to Idi Amin, Kistner provides a lively and humor-filled account of the human side of scientific discovery. Her wonderfully detailed stories clearly show why, despite hardship and danger -- and contrary to all of society's expectations -- she could not forsake accompanying her husband on his expeditions, and, to this day, continues to find the world "endlessly beckoning, a lively bubbling cauldron of questions and intrigue."

In the spirit of Beryl Markham's West with the Night and Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, An Affair with Africa shares with readers the thoughts and experiences of a remarkable woman, one whose unquenchable thirst for adventure led her into a series of almost unimaginable situations. Readers -- from armchair travelers fascinated by stories of Africa to scientists familiar with the Kistners's work but unaware of the lengths to which they went to gather their data -- will find An Affair with Africa a rare treasure.

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Affective Circuits
African Migrations to Europe and the Pursuit of Social Regeneration
Edited by Jennifer Cole and Christian Groes
University of Chicago Press, 2016
The influx of African migrants into Europe in recent years has raised important issues about changing labor economies, new technologies of border control, and the effects of armed conflict. But attention to such broad questions often obscures a fundamental fact of migration: its effects on ordinary life. Affective Circuits brings together essays by an international group of well-known anthropologists to place the migrant family front and center. Moving between Africa and Europe, the book explores the many ways migrants sustain and rework family ties and intimate relationships at home and abroad. It demonstrates how their quotidian efforts—on such a mass scale—contribute to a broader process of social regeneration.
           
The contributors point to the intersecting streams of goods, people, ideas, and money as they circulate between African migrants and their kin who remain back home. They also show the complex ways that emotions become entangled in these exchanges. Examining how these circuits operate in domains of social life ranging from child fosterage to binational marriages, from coming-of-age to healing and religious rituals, the book also registers the tremendous impact of state officials, laws, and policies on migrant experience. Together these essays paint an especially vivid portrait of new forms of kinship at a time of both intense mobility and ever-tightening borders.
 
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Affective Justice
The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback
Kamari Maxine Clarke
Duke University Press, 2019
Since its inception in 2001, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been met with resistance by various African states and their leaders, who see the court as a new iteration of colonial violence and control. In Affective Justice Kamari Maxine Clarke explores the African Union's pushback against the ICC in order to theorize affect's role in shaping forms of justice in the contemporary period. Drawing on fieldwork in The Hague, the African Union in Addis Ababa, sites of postelection violence in Kenya, and Boko Haram's circuits in Northern Nigeria, Clarke formulates the concept of affective justice—an emotional response to competing interpretations of justice—to trace how affect becomes manifest in judicial practices. By detailing the effects of the ICC’s all-African indictments, she outlines how affective responses to these call into question the "objectivity" of the ICC’s mission to protect those victimized by violence and prosecute perpetrators of those crimes. In analyzing the effects of such cases, Clarke provides a fuller theorization of how people articulate what justice is and the mechanisms through which they do so.
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Affective Trajectories
Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes
Hansjörg Dilger, Astrid Bochow, Marian Burchardt, and Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon, editors
Duke University Press, 2019
The contributors to Affective Trajectories examine the mutual and highly complex entwinements between religion and affect in urban Africa in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on ethnographic research throughout the continent and in African diasporic communities abroad, they trace the myriad ways religious ideas, practices, and materialities interact with affect to configure life in urban spaces. Whether examining the affective force of the built urban environment or how religious practices contribute to new forms of attachment, identification, and place-making, they illustrate the force of affect as it is shaped by temporality and spatiality in the religious lives of individuals and communities. Among other topics, they explore Masowe Apostolic Christianity in relation to experiences of displacement in Harare, Zimbabwe; Muslim identity, belonging, and the global ummah in Ghana; crime, emotions, and conversion to neo-Pentecostalism in Cape Town; and spiritual cleansing in a Congolese branch of a Japanese religious movement. In so doing, the contributors demonstrate how the social and material living conditions of African cities generate diverse affective forms of religious experiences in ways that foster both localized and transnational paths of emotional knowledge.

Contributors. Astrid Bochow, Marian Burchardt, Rafael Cazarin, Hansjörg Dilger, Alessandro Gusman, Murtala Ibrahim, Peter Lambertz, Isabelle L. Lange, Isabel Mukonyora, Benedikt Pontzen, Hanspeter Reihling, Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon
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Africa & Africans in Antiquity
Edwin M. Yamauchi
Michigan State University Press, 2001

Africa and Africans in Antiquity assesses recent historical research and archaeology under way in Egypt, North Africa, the Sudan, and the Horn of Africa. Whereas many European and American scholars of earlier generations believed that Egyptian contacts with Africa to the south were not culturally significant, research contained in this important collection rejects such notions. At the same time, the volume takes issue with Afrocentric scholars who argue that most Egyptians were 'black' and that blacks are the rightful heirs to Egypt's past grandeur. These ten thought-provoking essays demonstrate that this large region was an ethnic and cultural mosaic in antiquity, a place where Phoenicians, Berbers, Greeks, as well as Egyptians and Nubians interacted.

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Africa
A Practical Guide for Global Health Workers
Edited by Laurel A. Spielberg and Lisa V. Adams
Dartmouth College Press, 2011
Written by authors who speak directly from their years of personal and professional experience with health projects in Africa, this book provides an integrated historical, social, political, economic, and health introduction to a series of African countries. It also offers a comprehensive view of major health issues for those aiming to undertake humanitarian and global health work in Africa. In the introductory chapter, the editors discuss the concepts of globalism and humanitarianism, and provide a framework for thinking about global health. They introduce readers to significant aspects of African history and agencies that play major roles in global health work in Africa. The “Tips for Travelers to Africa” chapter provides a wealth of information on preparing for travel to Africa and working successfully and effectively in African cultures. Individual chapters on Botswana, Ghana, The Maghreb, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda focus on key health or environmental issues, projects, and solutions unique to each country. Written jointly by U.S. and African medical personnel participating in major health initiatives, the chapters offer vibrant accounts of work on leading causes of disease and death or environmental problems.
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Africa and Its Explorers
Motives, Methods, and Impact
Robert I. Rotberg
Harvard University Press

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Africa and the Disciplines
The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities
Edited by Robert H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean F. O'Barr
University of Chicago Press, 1993

African Studies, contrary to some accounts, is not a separate continent in the world of American higher education. Its intellectual borders touch those of economics, literature, history, philosophy, and art; its history is the story of the world, both ancient and modern. This is the clear conclusion of Africa and the Disciplines, a book that addresses the question: Why should Africa be studied in the American university?

This question was put to distinguished scholars in the social sciences and humanities, prominent Africanists who are also leaders in their various disciplines. Their responses make a strong and enlightening case for the importance of research on Africa to the academy.

Paul Collier's essay, for example, shows how studies of African economies have clarified our understanding of the small open economies, and contributed to the theory of repressed inflation and to a number of areas in microeconomics as well. Art historian Suzanne Blier uses the terms and concepts that her discipline has applied to Africa to analyze the habits of mind and social practice of her own field. Christopher L. Miller describes the confounding and enriching impact of Africa on European and American literary theory. Political scientist Richard Sklar outlines Africa's contributions to the study of political modernization, pluralism, and rational choice. These essays, together with others from scholars in history, anthropology, philosophy, and comparative literature, attest to the influence of African research throughout the curriculum.

For many, knowledge from Africa seems distant and exotic. These powerful essays suggest the contrary: that such knowledge has shaped the way in which scholars in various disciplines understand their worlds. Eloquent testimony to Africa's necessary place in the mainstream of American education, this book should alter the academy's understanding of the significance of African research, its definition of core and periphery in human knowledge.

"These essays are at once exceptionally thoughtful and remarkably comprehensive. Not only do they offer an unusually interesting overview of African studies; they are also striking for the depth and freshness of their insights. This is the sort of volume from which both seasoned regional experts and students stand to learn an enormous amount."—John Comaroff, University of Chicago

"These essays provide an important perspective on the evolution of African studies and offer insights into what Africa can mean for the different humanistic and social science disciplines. Many show in ingenious and subtle ways the enormous potential that the study of Africa has for confounding the main tenets of established fields. One could only hope that the strictures expressed here would be taken to heart in the scholarly world."—Robert L. Tignor, Princeton University

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Africa and the Olympics
Winning Away from the Podium
Todd Cleveland
Ohio University Press, 2024

At the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games (held in 2021 due to COVID-19), the fifty-four African countries that participated finished the tournament with the lowest medal haul for any continent, continuing a historic trend since the inception of the modern Games in 1896. Reflecting this relative lack of sporting success, African Olympians—aside from elite Kenyan distance runners—rarely register in the minds of even the most dedicated followers of the Games. Yet for all their seeming invisibility on the Olympic landscape, African states, athletes, and officials have long been “winning” at the Olympics, albeit often far removed from the medal podium. Africa and the Olympics shows how African actors have achieved these nonsporting victories and examines how they have used the Olympics to engage in transformative political activity, realize social mobility, and enhance the quality of life for individuals, communities, and entire nations. In tracing these historical and contemporary processes and the motivations that underlie them, the book complicates reductive notions of the Olympics as solely a sporting competition and instead considers Africa’s engagement with the Games as a series of opportunities to improve personal, communal, ethnic, national, and even continental plights. If few sports fans have thought extensively about Africa and the Olympics, scholars have been only slightly more engaged with the subject. Most of this scholarship focuses on the International Olympic Committee’s ban of apartheid South Africa from 1964 to 1988. Other works that consider the Olympics more broadly tend to deal with Africa only summarily, further reducing its already low profile. As a result, the academic literature resembles a patchwork of circumscribed studies dispersed in a range of fields and disciplines. Not since the publication of Africa at the Olympics almost fifty years ago has a single volume featured a comprehensive history of the continent and the Games. This book both updates and expands previous work and, most importantly, reframes the analytical engagement with this topic.

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Africa and the West
Philip D. Curtin
University of Wisconsin Press, 1974

“This book offers some exciting examples of the insights to be gained from studies of the intellectual responses of Africans to the West.  In six case studies, anthropologists, historians, and a literary critic study the impact of the West on African patterns of thought.”—Library Journal

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Africa as a Living Laboratory
Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950
Helen Tilley
University of Chicago Press, 2011

Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research methods. Africa as a Living Laboratory is a far-reaching study of the thorny relationship between imperialism and the role of scientific expertise—environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological—in the colonization of British Africa.

A key source for Helen Tilley’s analysis is the African Research Survey, a project undertaken in the 1930s to explore how modern science was being applied to African problems. This project both embraced and recommended an interdisciplinary approach to research on Africa that, Tilley argues, underscored the heterogeneity of African environments and the interrelations among the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was unquestionably to transform and modernize Africa, their efforts, Tilley contends, were often unexpectedly subverted by scientific concerns with the local and vernacular. Meticulously researched and gracefully argued, Africa as a Living Laboratory transforms our understanding of imperial history, colonial development, and the role science played in both.

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Africa Every Day
Fun, Leisure, and Expressive Culture on the Continent
Oluwakemi M. Balogun
Ohio University Press, 2019
Africa Every Day presents an exuberant, thoughtful, and necessary counterpoint to the prevailing emphasis in introductory African studies classes on war, poverty, corruption, disease, and human rights violations on the continent. These challenges are real and deserve sustained attention, but this volume shows that adverse conditions do not prevent people from making music, falling in love, playing sports, participating in festivals, writing blogs, telling jokes, making videos, playing games, eating delicious food, and finding pleasure in their daily lives. Across seven sections—Celebrations and Rites of Passage; Socializing and Friendship; Love, Sex, and Marriage; Sports and Recreation; Performance, Language, and Creativity; Technology and Media; and Labor and Livelihoods—the accessible, multidisciplinary essays in Africa Every Day address these creative and dynamic elements of daily life, without romanticizing them. Ultimately, the book shows that forms of leisure and popular culture in Africa are best discussed in terms of indigenization, adaptation, and appropriation rather than the static binary of European/foreign/global and African. Most of all, it invites readers to reflect on the crucial similarities, rather than the differences, between their lives and those of their African counterparts. Contributors: Hadeer Aboelnagah, Issahaku Adam, Joseph Osuolale Ayodokun, Victoria Abiola Ayodokun, Omotoyosi Babalola, Martha Bannikov, Mokaya Bosire, Emily Callaci, Deborah Durham, Birgit Englert, Laura Fair, John Fenn, Lara Rosenoff Gauvin, Michael Gennaro, Lisa Gilman, Charlotte Grabli, Joshua Grace, Dorothy L. Hodgson, Akwasi Kumi-Kyereme, Prince F. M. Lamba, Cheikh Tidiane Lo, Bill McCoy, Nginjai Paul Moreto, Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué, James Nindi, Erin Nourse, Eric Debrah Otchere, Alex Perullo, Daniel Jordan Smith, Maya Smith, Steven Van Wolputte, and Scott M. Youngstedt.
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Africa in America
Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831
Michael Mullin
University of Illinois Press, 1992
Extensive archival and anecdotal sources support Michael Mullin's description of slavery as it was practiced in tidewater Virginia, on the rice coast of the Carolinas, and in Jamaica and Barbados. Drawing upon case histories, Mullin offers new and definitive information about how African people met and often overcame the challenges and deprivations of their new lives through religion, family life, and economic strategies.
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Africa in the Indian Imagination
Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation
Antoinette Burton
Duke University Press, 2016
In Africa in the Indian Imagination Antoinette Burton reframes our understanding of the postcolonial Afro-Asian solidarity that emerged from the 1955 Bandung conference. Afro-Asian solidarity is best understood, Burton contends, by using friction as a lens to expose the racial, class, gender, sexuality, caste, and political tensions throughout the postcolonial global South. Focusing on India's imagined relationship with Africa, Burton historicizes Africa's role in the emergence of a coherent postcolonial Indian identity. She shows how—despite Bandung's rhetoric of equality and brotherhood—Indian identity echoed colonial racial hierarchies in its subordination of Africans and blackness. Underscoring Indian anxiety over Africa and challenging the narratives and dearly held assumptions that presume a sentimentalized, nostalgic, and fraternal history of Afro-Asian solidarity, Burton demonstrates the continued need for anti-heroic, vexed, and fractious postcolonial critique. 
 
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Africa in the World
Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State
Frederick Cooper
Harvard University Press, 2014

At the Second World War’s end, it was clear that business as usual in colonized Africa would not resume. W. E. B. Du Bois’s The World and Africa, published in 1946, recognized the depth of the crisis that the war had brought to Europe, and hence to Europe’s domination over much of the globe. Du Bois believed that Africa’s past provided lessons for its future, for international statecraft, and for humanity’s mastery of social relations and commerce. Frederick Cooper revisits a history in which Africans were both empire-builders and the objects of colonization, and participants in the events that gave rise to global capitalism.

Of the many pathways out of empire that African leaders envisioned in the 1940s and 1950s, Cooper asks why they ultimately followed the one that led to the nation-state, a political form whose limitations and dangers were recognized by influential Africans at the time. Cooper takes account of the central fact of Africa’s situation—extreme inequality between Africa and the western world, and extreme inequality within African societies—and considers the implications of this past trajectory for the future. Reflecting on the vast body of research on Africa since Du Bois’s time, Cooper corrects outdated perceptions of a continent often relegated to the margins of world history and integrates its experience into the mainstream of global affairs.

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Africa in Translation
A History of Colonial Linguistics in Germany and Beyond, 1814-1945
Sara Pugach
University of Michigan Press, 2022

The study of African languages in Germany, or Afrikanistik, originated among Protestant missionaries in the early nineteenth century and was incorporated into German universities after Germany entered the “Scramble for Africa” and became a colonial power in the 1880s. Despite its long history, few know about the German literature on African languages or the prominence of Germans in the discipline of African philology. In Africa in Translation: A History of Colonial Linguistics in Germany and Beyond, 1814–1945, Sara Pugach works to fill this gap, arguing that Afrikanistik was essential to the construction of racialist knowledge in Germany. While in other countries biological explanations of African difference were central to African studies, the German approach was essentially linguistic, linking language to culture and national identity. Pugach traces this linguistic focus back to the missionaries’ belief that conversion could not occur unless the “Word” was allowed to touch a person’s heart in his or her native language, as well as to the connection between German missionaries living in Africa and armchair linguists in places like Berlin and Hamburg. Over the years, this resulted in Afrikanistik scholars using language and culture rather than biology to categorize African ethnic and racial groups. Africa in Translation follows the history of Afrikanistik from its roots in the missionaries’ practical linguistic concerns to its development as an academic subject in both Germany and South Africa throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Jacket image: Perthes, Justus. Mittel und Süd-Afrika. Map. Courtesy of the University of Michigan's Stephen S. Clark Library map collection.

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Africa South
Harm J. de Blij
Northwestern University Press, 1962
Africa South presents a history and description of southern Africa from the arrival of Europeans until the creation of the Republic of South Africa in 1961. Harm J. de Blij provides a portrait of the landscape and the internal policies and struggles within the region. The work serves as a historical travel guide and an introduction to the history of southern Africa. All the maps in Africa South were prepared by the author.
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Africa Speaks, America Answers
Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times
Robin D. G. Kelley
Harvard University Press, 2012

In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik celebrated with song the revolutions spreading across Africa. In Ghana and South Africa, drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin fused local musical forms with the dizzying innovations of modern jazz. These four were among hundreds of musicians in the 1950s and ’60s who forged connections between jazz and Africa that definitively reshaped both their music and the world.

Each artist identified in particular ways with Africa’s struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, demands for independence and self-determination. That music was the wild, boundary-breaking exultation of modern jazz. The result was an abundance of conversation, collaboration, and tension between African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization. This collective biography demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered politics and culture on both continents.

In a crucial moment when freedom electrified the African diaspora, these black artists sought one another out to create new modes of expression. Documenting individuals and places, from Lagos to Chicago, from New York to Cape Town, Robin Kelley gives us a meditation on modernity: we see innovation not as an imposition from the West but rather as indigenous, multilingual, and messy, the result of innumerable exchanges across a breadth of cultures.

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Africa Writes Back
The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature
James Currey
Ohio University Press, 2008

June 17, 2008, is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart by Heinemann. This publication provided the impetus for the foundation of the African Writers Series in 1962 with Chinua Achebe as the editorial adviser.

Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature captures the energy of literary publishing in a new and undefined field. Portraits of the leading characters and the many consultants and readers providing reports and advice to new and established writers make Africa Writes Back a stand-out book. James Currey’s voice and insights are an added bonus.

CONTENTS
Publishing and selling the African Writers Series
The African Writers Series Portfolio & George Hallett’s covers
Main dates for the African Writers Series

INTRODUCTION: The establishment of African Literature
Publishing Chinua Achebe

1. WRITERS FROM WEST AFRICA
Nigeria: The country where so much started
Negritude from Senegal to Cameroun
Magic & realism from Ghana, The Gambia & Sierra Leone

2. WRITERS FROM EASTERN AFRICA
Towards the oral & the popular in Kenya, Uganda & Tanzania
Publishing Ngugi

3. WRITERS FROM THE HORN & NORTH-EASTERN AFRICA
Emperors in Ethiopia
Publishing Nuruddin Farah
Arab authors in Egypt & Sudan

4. WRITERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA
Resistance in South Africa
Publishing Alex la Guma
Publishing Dennis Brutus
Publishing Bessie Head
Publishing Masizi Kunene

5. WRITERS FROM SOUTHERN AFRICAN
Guns & Guerrillas in Mozambique &Angola
Zambia Shall be Free
Death & detention in Malawi
The struggle to become Zimbabwe
Publishing Dambudzo Marechera

CONCLUSION: Is there still a role for the African Writers Series?

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Africae Munus
Ten Years Later
Agbaw-ebai
St. Augustine's Press, 2022
With great foresight and vision for the Church, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI carefully integrated theological, catechetical and pastoral themes in the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Africae Munus. Maurice A. Agbaw-Ebai and Matthew Levering, in the introduction to this collection of reflections and studies focused on the Pope Emeritus’ themes, affirm the African continent’s status as a global center for the growth of the Catholic Church in the twenty-first century and the future of the international Catholic community.
     Building on the vitality and enthusiasm of the Church in Africa, it is important to lift their faith through scholarly research and academic reflections. We cannot fully appreciate the dedication, commitment and perseverance of the Catholic community throughout the African continent if we do not know the truth of their sufferings and persecution and understand their resilience in the light of faith. This collection, drawn from the halls of academia, provides an important contribution to the understanding and advancement of Catholic Africa, following the insights and enlightenment of Pope Emeritus Benedict. It is my hope that these essays will enrich your understanding and experience of the Catholic faith.

— From the Preface by Seán Patrick Cardinal O’Malley
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African Activists of the Twentieth Century
Hani, Maathai, Mpama/Palmer, Saro-Wiwa
Hugh Macmillan
Ohio University Press, 2022

An omnibus collection of concise and up-to-date biographies of four influential figures from modern African history.

Chris Hani, by Hugh Macmillan
Chris Hani was one of the most highly respected leaders of the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party, and uMkhonto we Sizwe. His assassination in 1993 threatened to upset the country’s transition to democracy and prompted an intervention by Nelson Mandela that ultimately accelerated apartheid’s demise.

Wangari Maathai, by Tabitha Kanogo
This concise biography tells the story of Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner who devoted her life to campaigning for environmental conservation, sustainable development, democracy, human rights, gender equality, and the eradication of poverty.

Josie Mpama/Palmer: Get Up and Get Moving, by Robert R. Edgar
Highly critical of the patriarchal attitudes that hindered Black women’s political activism, South Africa’s Josie Mpama/Palmer was an outspoken advocate for women’s social and political equality, a member of the Communist Party of South Africa, and an antiapartheid activist.

Ken Saro-Wiwa, by Roy Doron and Toyin Falola
A penetrating, accessible portrait of the Nigerian activist whose execution galvanized the world. Ken Saro-Wiwa became a martyr and symbolized modern Africans’ struggle against military dictatorship, corporate power, and environmental exploitation.

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The African AIDS Epidemic
A History
John Iliffe
Ohio University Press, 2006

A Choice Significant University Press Titles for Undergraduates, 2005–2006 

This history of the African AIDS epidemic is a much-needed, accessibly written historical account of the most serious epidemiological catastrophe of modern times. The African AIDS Epidemic: A History answers President Thabo Mbeki’s provocative question as to why Africa has suffered this terrible epidemic.

While Mbeki attributed the causes to poverty and exploitation, others have looked to distinctive sexual systems practiced in African cultures and communities. John Iliffe stresses historical sequence. He argues that Africa has had the worst epidemic because the disease was established in the general population before anyone knew the disease existed. HIV evolved with extraordinary speed and complexity, and because that evolution took place under the eyes of modern medical research scientists, Iliffe has been able to write a history of the virus itself that is probably unique among accounts of human epidemic diseases. In giving the African experience a historical shape, Iliffe has written one of the most important books of our time.

The African experience of AIDS has taught the world much of what it knows about HIV/AIDS, and this fascinating book brings into focus many aspects of the epidemic in the longer context of massive demographic growth, urbanization, and social change in Africa during the latter half of the twentieth century. The African AIDS Epidemic: A History is a brilliant introduction to the many aspects of the epidemic and the distinctive character of the virus.

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An African American in South Africa
The Travel Notes of Ralph J. Bunche 28 September 1937–1 January 1938
Ralph Bunche
Ohio University Press, 2001

Ralph Bunche, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, traveled to South Africa for three months in 1937. His notes, which have been skillfully compiled and annotated by historian Robert R. Edgar, provide unique insights on a segregated society.

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African Apocalypse
The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a Twentieth-Century South African Prophet
Robert R. Edgar, Hilary Sapire
Ohio University Press, 1999
The devastating influenza epidemic of 1918 ripped through southern Africa. In its aftermath, revivalist and millenarian movements sprouted. Prophets appeared bearing messages of resistance, redemption, and renewal. African Apocalypse: The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, A Twentieth-Century Prophet is the remarkable story of one such prophet, a middle-aged Xhosa woman named Nontetha. After surviving the deadly virus, Nontetha proclaimed that a series of dreams revealed to her that the influenza had been a punishment from God. Consequently, she embarked on a mission to reform her society. She imposed numerous prohibitions and rules on her followers. In a parallel movement, in 1919, millenarian Israelites congregated in the holy village of Ntabelanga, 100 miles north of Nontetha’s area, to await the end of the world. In May 1921, police killed nearly 200 Israelites near Queenstown in a showdown over attempts to expel the settlers. Accused of sedition by an alarmed government, Nontetha was committed to Fort Beaufort Mental Hospital in 1922. On Nontetha’s death in 1935, officials buried her in an unmarked pauper’s grave. In 1997, Edgar and Sapire located Nontetha’s grave. Of Edgar’s efforts to return Nontetha to her home, the New York Times said, “One would not expect, perhaps, that a mild-mannered professor from Howard University would turn out to be the Indiana Jones of South Africa.” African Apocalypse touches on a variety of themes, including African Christianity, gender, protest, the social history of madness, and the engagement of professional historians in contemporary issues.
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African Art and Leadership
Edited by Douglas Fraser and Herbert M. Cole
University of Wisconsin Press, 1972
A series of fourteen thought-provoking essays by art historians, anthropologists, and historians analyzes the complex interactions between art and leadership in sub-Saharan Africa. Amply and carefully illustrated throughout.
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African Asylum at a Crossroads
Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights
Iris Berger
Ohio University Press, 2015

African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights examines the emerging trend of requests for expert opinions in asylum hearings or refugee status determinations. This is the first book to explore the role of court-based expertise in relation to African asylum cases and the first to establish a rigorous analytical framework for interpreting the effects of this new reliance on expert testimony.

Over the past two decades, courts in Western countries and beyond have begun demanding expert reports tailored to the experience of the individual claimant. As courts increasingly draw upon such testimony in their deliberations, expertise in matters of asylum and refugee status is emerging as an academic area with its own standards, protocols, and guidelines. This deeply thoughtful book explores these developments and their effects on both asylum seekers and the experts whose influence may determine their fate.

Contributors: Iris Berger, Carol Bohmer, John Campbell, Katherine Luongo, E. Ann McDougall, Karen Musalo, Tricia Redeker Hepner, Amy Shuman, Joanna T. Tague, Meredith Terretta, and Charlotte Walker-Said.

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African Catholic
Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church
Elizabeth A. Foster
Harvard University Press, 2019

Winner of the John Gilmary Shea Prize

A groundbreaking history of how Africans in the French Empire embraced both African independence and their Catholic faith during the upheaval of decolonization, leading to a fundamental reorientation of the Catholic Church.

African Catholic examines how French imperialists and the Africans they ruled imagined the religious future of French sub-Saharan Africa in the years just before and after decolonization. The story encompasses the political transition to independence, Catholic contributions to black intellectual currents, and efforts to alter the church hierarchy to create an authentically “African” church.

Elizabeth Foster recreates a Franco-African world forged by conquest, colonization, missions, and conversions—one that still exists today. We meet missionaries in Africa and their superiors in France, African Catholic students abroad destined to become leaders in their home countries, African Catholic intellectuals and young clergymen, along with French and African lay activists. All of these men and women were preoccupied with the future of France’s colonies, the place of Catholicism in a postcolonial Africa, and the struggle over their personal loyalties to the Vatican, France, and the new African states.

Having served as the nuncio to France and the Vatican’s liaison to UNESCO in the 1950s, Pope John XXIII understood as few others did the central questions that arose in the postwar Franco-African Catholic world. Was the church truly universal? Was Catholicism a conservative pillar of order or a force to liberate subjugated and exploited peoples? Could the church change with the times? He was thinking of Africa on the eve of Vatican II, declaring in a radio address shortly before the council opened, “Vis-à-vis the underdeveloped countries, the church presents itself as it is and as it wants to be: the church of all.”

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African Democracies and African Politics
M. A. Mohamed Salih
Pluto Press, 2001

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African Diasporic Cinema
Aesthetics of Reconstruction
Daniela Ricci
Michigan State University Press, 2020
African Diasporic Cinema: Aesthetics of Reconstruction analyzes the aesthetic strategies adopted by contemporary African diasporic filmmakers to express the reconstruction of identity. Having left the continent, these filmmakers see Africa as a site of representation and cultural circulation. The diasporic experience displaces the center and forges new syncretic identities. Through migratory movement, people become foreigners, Others—and in this instance, black. The African diasporic condition in the Western world is characterized by the intersection of various factors: being African and bearing the historical memory of the continent; belonging to a black minority in majority-white societies; and finally, having historically been the object of negative, stereotyped representation. As a result, quests for the self and self-reconstruction are frequent themes in the films of the African diaspora, and yet the filmmakers refuse to remain trapped in the confines of an assigned, rigid identity. Reflecting these complex circumstances, this book analyzes the contemporary diaspora through the prism of cultural hybridization and the processes of recomposing fragmented identities, out of which new identities emerge.
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African Ecomedia
Network Forms, Planetary Politics
Cajetan Iheka
Duke University Press, 2021
In African Ecomedia, Cajetan Iheka examines the ecological footprint of media in Africa alongside the representation of environmental issues in visual culture. Iheka shows how, through visual media such as film, photography, and sculpture, African artists deliver a unique perspective on the socioecological costs of media production, from mineral and oil extraction to the politics of animal conservation. Among other works, he examines Pieter Hugo's photography of electronic waste recycling in Ghana and Idrissou Mora-Kpai's documentary on the deleterious consequences of uranium mining in Niger. These works highlight not only the exploitation of African workers and the vast scope of environmental degradation but also the resourcefulness and creativity of African media makers. They point to the unsustainability of current practices while acknowledging our planet's finite natural resources. In foregrounding Africa's centrality to the production and disposal of media technology, Iheka shows the important place visual media has in raising awareness of and documenting ecological disaster even as it remains complicit in it.
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African Encounters with Domesticity
Hansen, Karen Tranberg
Rutgers University Press, 1992

 Anthropologists usually think of domesticity as the activities related to the home and the family. Such activities have complex meanings associated with the sense of space, work, gender, and power. The contributors to this interdisciplinary collection of papers examine how indigenous African notions of domesticity interact with Western notions to transform the meaning of such activities. They explore the interactions of notions of domesticity in a number of settings in the twentieth century and the kinds of personal troubles and public issues these interactions have provoked. They also demonstrate that domesticity, as it emerged in Africa through the colonial encounter, was culturally constructed, and they show how ideologies of work, space, and gender interact with broader political-economic processes.

In her introduction, Hansen explains how the meaning of domesticity has changed and been contested in the West, specifies which of these shifting meanings are relevant in the African context, and summarizes the historical processes that have affected African ideologies of domesticity.
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African Entrepreneurship
Muslim Fula Merchants in Sierra Leone
Alusine Jalloh
Ohio University Press, 1999
Between 1961 and 1978, Muslim Fula immigrants from different West African countries became one of the most successful mercantile groups in Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone. African Entrepreneurship, published by Ohio University Press on December 31, 1999, examines the commercial activities of Fula immigrants and their offspring in Sierra Leone. Author Alusine Jalloh explores the role of Islam in Fula commercial organizations and social relationships, as well as the connection between Fula merchants and politics.

Departing from the prevailing scholarship, Jalloh characterizes the Fula businesses as independent, rather than appendages of Western expatriate commerce. In addition to establishing successful businesses, Fula merchants established Islamic educational institutions for propogating the Muslim faith and promoting Islamic scholarship.

This study also examines the evolution of Fula chieftaincy from the colonial era to the postcolonial period and documents the importance of mercantile wealth and networks in the election of Fula chiefs in Freetown. African Entrepreneurship makes an important contribution to the understudied role of African business in Sierra Leone.
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African Exodus
Migration and the Future of Europe
Asfa-Wossen Asserate
Haus Publishing, 2018
In 2015, an unprecedented number of people from Africa and the Near East took flight and sought refuge in Europe. By the end of that year, some 1.8 million migrants had arrived in the EU, the vast majority having come across the Mediterranean. Since then, despite measures to host some of the people fleeing the Syrian war in Turkey and concurrent attempts to physically seal off some borders in Eastern Europe, the numbers of refugees traveling to Europe has continued to top half a million annually.  A mass migration on a scale not witnessed in modern times is underway, and it has presented Europe with its greatest challenge of the twenty-first century.

Asfa-Wossen Asserate argues here that building higher fences or finding more effective methods of integration will only, in the long term, perpetuate rather than solve the problems associated with these large numbers of displaced refugees. We need to realize that we are only treating the symptoms of an oncoming catastrophe and that, if we are to respond to mass migration, we will ultimately have to understand its causes. African Exodus places its emphasis firmly on the causes of the refugee crisis, which are to be found not least in Europe itself, and charts ways in which we might deal with it effectively in the long term.

In the course of this analysis, Asserate asks why our view of Africa—a troubled continent, but rich in so many ways—is so distorted. How can we combat the corrupt, authoritarian regimes that stymie progress and development? Why are millions fleeing to Europe? How is the EU complicit in the migration crisis? And finally, in practical terms: what can be done, and what prospects does the future hold?
 
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The African Experience with Higher Education
J. F. Ade Ajayi
Ohio University Press, 1996

There have been institutions of higher learning for centuries in Africa, but the phenomenal growth has taken place in the last fifty years, first in the later days of colonialism and then in the heady days of independence and commodity boom. Without them, there would have been no development.

The three highly distinguished authors have written the first comprehensive assessment of universities and higher education in Africa south of the Sahara. As can be seen from their biographies, they draw on experience from both francophone and anglophone Africa and from teaching in both the sciences and the arts.

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African Filmmaking
Five Formations
Kenneth W. Harrow
Michigan State University Press, 2017
This volume attempts to join the disparate worlds of Egyptian, Maghrebian, South African, Francophone, and Anglophone African cinema—that is, five “formations” of African cinema. These five areas are of particular significance—each in its own way. The history of South Africa, heavily marked by apartheid and its struggles, differs considerably from that of Egypt, which early on developed its own “Hollywood on the Nile.” The history of French colonialism impacted the three countries of the Maghreb—Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco—differently than those in sub-Saharan Africa, where Senegal and Sembène had their own great effect on the Sahelian region. Anglophone Africa, particularly the films of Ghana and Nigeria, has dramatically altered the ways people have perceived African cinema for decades. History, geography, production, distribution, and exhibition are considered alongside film studies concerns about ideology and genre. This volume provides essential information for all those interested in the vital worlds of cinema in Africa since the time of the Lumière brothers.
 
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African Fractals
Modern Computing and Indigenous Design
Eglash, Ron
Rutgers University Press, 1999
Fractals are characterized by the repetition of similar patterns at ever-diminishing scales. Fractal geometry has emerged as one of the most exciting frontiers on the border between mathematics and information technology and can be seen in many of the swirling patterns produced by computer graphics. It has become a new tool for modeling in biology, geology, and other natural sciences.

Anthropologists have observed that the patterns produced in different cultures can be characterized by specific design themes. In Europe and America, we often see cities laid out in a grid pattern of straight streets and right-angle corners. In contrast, traditional African settlements tend to use fractal structures-circles of circles of circular dwellings, rectangular walls enclosing ever-smaller rectangles, and streets in which broad avenues branch down to tiny footpaths with striking geometric repetition. These indigenous fractals are not limited to architecture; their recursive patterns echo throughout many disparate African designs and knowledge systems.

Drawing on interviews with African designers, artists, and scientists, Ron Eglash investigates fractals in African architecture, traditional hairstyling, textiles, sculpture, painting, carving, metalwork, religion, games, practical craft, quantitative techniques, and symbolic systems. He also examines the political and social implications of the existence of African fractal geometry. His book makes a unique contribution to the study of mathematics, African culture, anthropology, and computer simulations.
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African Futures
Essays on Crisis, Emergence, and Possibility
Edited by Brian Goldstone and Juan Obarrio
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Civil wars, corporate exploitation, AIDS, and Ebola—but also democracy, burgeoning cities, and unprecedented communication and mobility: the future of Africa has never been more uncertain. Indeed, that future is one of the most complex issues in contemporary anthropology, as evidenced by the incredible wealth of ideas offered in this landmark volume. A consortium comprised of some of the most important scholars of Africa today, this book surveys an intellectual landscape of opposed perspectives in order to think within the contradictions that characterize this central question: Where is Africa headed?
           
The experts in this book address Africa’s future as it is embedded within various social and cultural forms emerging on the continent today: the reconfiguration of the urban, the efflorescence of signs and wonders and gospels of prosperity, the assorted techniques of legality and illegality, lotteries and Ponzi schemes, apocalyptic visions, a yearning for exile, and many other phenomena. Bringing together social, political, religious, and economic viewpoints, the book reveals not one but multiple prospects for the future of Africa. In doing so, it offers a pathbreaking model of pluralistic and open-ended thinking and a powerful tool for addressing the vexing uncertainties that underlie so many futures around the world.  
 
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The African Genius
Basil Davidson
Ohio University Press, 2004

The African Genius presents the ideas, social systems, religions, moral values, arts, and metaphysics of a range of African peoples. Basil Davidson points toward the Africa that might emerge from an ancient civilization that was overlaid and battered by colonialism, then torn apart by the upheaval of colonialism’s dismantlement. Davidson disputes the notion that Africa gained under colonialism by entering the modern world. He sees, instead, an ancient order replaced by modern dysfunction. Davidson’s depiction of the sophisticated “native genius” that has carried Africans through centuries of change is vital to an understanding of modern Africa as well.

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An African in Paris
Bernard Binlin Dadié; Translated by Karen C. Hatch
University of Illinois Press, 1994
Writing in an informal and episodic style, Bernard Dadié recounts a West African man's first journey to France, from the exhilarating moment when he obtains his ticket through a humorous and fascinating tour across the City of Light.

In 1959, when Un Negre a Paris first appeared, the French still held West Africa under colonial rule. Dadié's subtle parodies draw on intimate knowledge obtained over decades spent observing the colonizers abroad and now, suddenly, on their own home terrain. His remarks on Parisian living conditions, wordplay, manners, and and morals are entertaining and poignant, charming yet profound.

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African Intellectual Heritage
Molefi Asante
Temple University Press, 1996

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African Intellectuals and Decolonization
Nicholas M. Creary
Ohio University Press, 2012
Decades after independence for most African states, the struggle for decolonization is still incomplete, as demonstrated by the fact that Africa remains associated in many Western minds with chaos, illness, and disorder. African and non-African scholars alike still struggle to establish the idea of African humanity, in all its diversity, and to move Africa beyond its historical role as the foil to the West. As this book shows, Africa’s decolonization is an ongoing process across a range of fronts, and intellectuals—both African and non-African—have significant roles to play in that process. The essays collected here examine issues such as representation and retrospection; the roles of intellectuals in the public sphere; and the fundamental question of how to decolonize African knowledges. African Intellectuals and Decolonization outlines ways in which intellectual practice can serve to de-link Africa from its global representation as a debased, subordinated, deviant, and inferior entity. ContributorsLesley Cowling, University of the Witwatersrand Nicholas M. Creary, University at Albany Marlene De La Cruz, Ohio University Carolyn Hamilton, University of Cape Town George Hartley, Ohio University Janet Hess, Sonoma State University T. Spreelin McDonald, Ohio University Ebenezer Adebisi Olawuyi, University of Ibadan Steve Odero Ouma, University of Nairobi Oyeronke Oyewumi, State University of New York at Stony Brook Tsenay Serequeberhan, Morgan State University
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African Intimacies
Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization
Neville Hoad
University of Minnesota Press, 2007
There have been few book-length engagements with the question of sexuality in Africa, let alone African homosexuality. African Intimacies simultaneously responds to the public debate on the “Africanness” of homosexuality and interrogates the meaningfulness of the terms “sexuality” and “homosexuality” outside Euro-American discourse. Speculating on cultural practices interpreted by missionaries as sodomy and resistance to colonialism, Neville Hoad begins by analyzing the 1886 Bugandan martyrs incident—the execution of thirty men in the royal court. Then, in a series of close readings, he addresses questions of race, sex, and globalization in the 1965 Wole Soyinka novel The Interpreters, examines the emblematic 1998 Lambeth conference of Anglican bishops, considers the imperial legacy in depictions of the HIV/AIDS crisis, and reveals how South African writer Phaswane Mpe’s contemporary novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow problematizes notions of African identity and cosmopolitanism.Hoad’s assessment of the historical valence of homosexuality in Africa shows how the category has served a key role in a larger story, one in which sexuality has been made in line with a vision of white Western truth, limiting an understanding of intimacy that could imagine an African universalism.Neville Hoad is assistant professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin.
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African Leaders of the Twentieth Century
Biko, Selassie, Lumumba, Sankara
Lindy Wilson
Ohio University Press, 2015
This omnibus edition brings together concise and up-to-date biographies of Steve Biko, Emperor Haile Selassie, Patrice Lumumba, and Thomas Sankara. African Leaders of the Twentieth Century will complement courses in history and political science and serve as a useful collection for the general reader. Steve Biko, by Lindy Wilson Steve Biko inspired a generation of black South Africans to claim their true identity and refuse to be a part of their own oppression. This short biography shows how fundamental he was to the reawakening and transformation of South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century and just how relevant he remains. Emperor Haile Selassie, by Bereket Habte Selassie Emperor Haile Selassie was an iconic figure of the twentieth century, a progressive monarch who ruled Ethiopia from 1916 to 1974. The fascinating story of the emperor¹s life is also the story of modern Ethiopia. Patrice Lumumba, by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja Patrice Lumumba was a leader of the independence struggle in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Decades after his assassination, Lumumba remains one of the heroes of the twentieth-century Africanindependence movement. Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary, by Ernest Harsch Thomas Sankara, often called the African Che Guevara, was president of Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa, until his assassination during the military coup that brought down his government. This is the first English-language book to tell the story of Sankara’s life and struggles.
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African Leaders of the Twentieth Century, Volume 2
Cabral, Machel, Mugabe, Sirleaf
Allen F. Isaacman
Ohio University Press, 2022

This omnibus edition brings together concise and up-to-date biographies of Amílcar Cabral, Samora Machel, Robert Mugabe, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. African Leaders of the Twentieth Century, Volume 2 complements courses in history and political science and is an informative collection for general readers.

Amílcar Cabral: A Nationalist and Pan-Africanist Revolutionary, by Peter Karibe Mendy
Amílcar Cabral’s charismatic and visionary leadership, his pan-Africanist solidarity and internationalist commitment to “every just cause in the world,” remain relevant to contemporary struggles for emancipation and self-determination. This concise biography is an ideal introduction to his life and legacy.

Mozambique’s Samora Machel: A Life Cut Short, by Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman
From his anti-colonial military leadership to the presidency of independent Mozambique, Samora Machel held a reputation as a revolutionary hero to the oppressed. Although killed in a 1987 plane crash, for many Mozambicans his memory lives on as a beacon of hope for the future.

Robert Mugabe, by Sue Onslow and Martin Plaut
For some, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe was a liberation hero who confronted white rule and oversaw the radical redistribution of land. For others, he was a murderous dictator who drove his country to poverty. This concise biography reveals the complexity of the man who led Zimbabwe for its first decades of independence.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, by Pamela Scully
Nobel Peace Prize–winner and two-time Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf speaks to many of the key themes of the twenty-first century. Among these are the growing power of women in the arenas of international politics and human rights; the ravaging civil wars of the post–Cold War era in which sexual violence is used as a weapon; and the challenges of transitional justice in building postconflict societies.

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African Miracle, African Mirage
Transnational Politics and the Paradox of Modernization in Ivory Coast
Abou B. Bamba
Ohio University Press, 2016

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Ivory Coast was touted as an African miracle, a poster child for modernization and the ways that Western aid and multinational corporations would develop the continent. At the same time, Marxist scholars—most notably Samir Amin—described the capitalist activity in Ivory Coast as empty, unsustainable, and incapable of bringing real change to the lives of ordinary people. To some extent, Amin’s criticisms were validated when, in the 1980s, the Ivorian economy collapsed.

In African Miracle, African Mirage, Abou B. Bamba incorporates economics, political science, and history to craft a bold, transnational study of the development practices and intersecting colonial cultures that continue to shape Ivory Coast today. He considers French, American, and Ivorian development discourses in examining the roles of hydroelectric projects and the sugar, coffee, and cocoa industries in the country’s boom and bust. In so doing, he brings the agency of Ivorians themselves to the fore in a way not often seen in histories of development. Ultimately, he concludes that the “maldevelopment” evident by the mid-1970s had less to do with the Ivory Coast’s “insufficiently modern” citizens than with the conflicting missions of French and American interests within the context of an ever-globalizing world.

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African Motors
Technology, Gender, and the History of Development
Joshua Grace
Duke University Press, 2021
In African Motors, Joshua Grace examines how Tanzanian drivers, mechanics, and passengers reconstituted the automobile into a uniquely African form between the late 1800s and the early 2000s. Drawing on hundreds of oral histories, extensive archival research, and his ethnographic fieldwork as an apprentice in Dar es Salaam's network of garages, Grace counters the pervasive narratives that Africa is incompatible with technology and that the African use of cars is merely an appropriation of technology created elsewhere. Although automobiles were invented in Europe and introduced as part of colonial rule, Grace shows how Tanzanians transformed them, increasingly associating their own car use with maendeleo, the Kiswahili word for progress or development. Focusing on the formation of masculinities based in automotive cultures, Grace also outlines the process through which African men remade themselves and their communities by adapting technological objects and systems for local purposes. Ultimately, African Motors is an African-centered story of development featuring everyday examples of Africans forging both individual and collective cultures of social and technological wellbeing through movement, making, and repair.
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African Performance Arts and Political Acts
Naomi André, Yolanda Covington-Ward, and Jendele Hungbo, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2021

African Performance Arts and Political Actspresents innovative formulations for how African performance and the arts shape the narratives of cultural history and politics. This collection, edited by Naomi André, Yolanda Covington-Ward, and Jendele Hungbo, engages with a breadth of African countries and art forms, bringing together speech, hip hop, religious healing and gesture, theater and social justice, opera, radio announcements, protest songs, and migrant workers’ dances. The spaces include village communities, city landscapes, prisons, urban hostels, Township theaters, opera houses, and broadcasts through the airwaves on television and radio as well as in cyberspace. Essays focus on case studies from Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania.

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An African Perspective on the Thought of Benedict XVI
Agbaw-ebai
St. Augustine's Press, 2023
Catholicism continues to experience an exponential growth in Africa. Going by the figures and the intensity of religious practice, Africa can unarguably be described as the new center of the Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular. With over 236 million Catholics, Africa considers itself as having come of age and capable of making its voice heard on matters pertaining to global Catholicism/Christianity. And if there is a contemporary theologian greatly loved and admired by African scholars, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI ranks premium on that list. His convening a second synod on Africa on the theme of justice, peace and reconciliation, further endeared him to the African theologians. This book is a testimony to the affection that the Church in Africa has for Benedict XVI. In effect, as Africa finds its voice on the stage of global Catholicism, the theology of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI provides a fruitful space for Africa's engagement with the wider Church. Benedict XVI described Africa as the spiritual lung of the world. This volume testifies to the vitality and healthiness of that lung, a must read for all interested in African Catholicism and its definite impact on global Christianity as a whole. 
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African Political Parties
Evolution, Institutionalisation and Governance
Edited by M. A. Mohamed Salih
Pluto Press, 2003
The authors of this collection interrogate the political health of African political parties and evaluate the theory and practice of party functions, ideology and structure. Through fresh analysis using a variety of case studies, they question the democratic credentials of African political parties and propose new methods for achieving inclusive, broad-based representation.

Themes include the evolution and institutionalisation of African political parties; the unique historical, political and social circumstances that shaped their structures and functions.Morten Bøås In the governance trajectory, the authors question the relationship between African political parties and government; political parties and representation; political parties and electoral systems; and political parties and parliament. Case studies include Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and many others.
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African Print Cultures
Newspapers and Their Publics in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Derek R. Peterson, Emma Hunter, and Stephanie Newell
University of Michigan Press, 2016

The essays collected in African Print Cultures claim African newspapers as subjects of historical and literary study. Newspapers were not only vehicles for anticolonial nationalism. They were also incubators of literary experimentation and networks by which new solidarities came into being. By focusing on the creative work that African editors and contributors did, this volume brings an infrastructure of African public culture into view.

The first of four thematic sections, “African Newspaper Networks,” considers the work that newspaper editors did to relate events within their locality to happenings in far-off places. This work of correlation and juxtaposition made it possible for distant people to see themselves as fellow travellers. “Experiments with Genre” explores how newspapers nurtured the development of new literary genres, such as poetry, realist fiction, photoplays, and travel writing in African languages and in English. “Newspapers and Their Publics” looks at the ways in which African newspapers fostered the creation of new kinds of communities and served as networks for public interaction, political and otherwise. The final section, “Afterlives, ” is about the longue durée of history that newspapers helped to structure, and how, throughout the twentieth century, print allowed contributors to view their writing as material meant for posterity.


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The African Renaissance and the Afro-Arab Spring
A Season of Rebirth?
Charles Villa-Vicencio, Erik Doxtader, and Ebrahim Moosa, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 2015

The African Renaissance and the Afro-Arab Spring addresses the often unspoken connection between the powerful call for a political-cultural renaissance that emerged with the end of South African apartheid and the popular revolts of 2011 that dramatically remade the landscape in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia. Looking between southern and northern Africa, the transcontinental line from Cape to Cairo that for so long supported colonialism, its chapters explore the deep roots of these two decisive events and demonstrate how they are linked by shared opposition to legacies of political, economic, and cultural subjugation. As they work from African, Islamic, and Western perspectives, the book’s contributors shed important light on a continent’s difficult history and undertake a critical conversation about whether and how the desire for radical change holds the possibility of a new beginning for Africa, a beginning that may well reshape the contours of global affairs.

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African Rhythm and African Sensibility
Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms
John Miller Chernoff
University of Chicago Press, 1981
"We have in this book a Rosetta stone for mediating, or translating, African musical behavior and aesthetics."—Andrew Tracey, African Music

"John Miller Chernoff, who spent 10 years studying African drumming, has a flair for descriptive writing, and his first-person narratives should be easily understood by any reader, while ringing unmistakably true for the reader who has also been to West Africa."—Roderick Knight, Washington Post Book World

"Ethnomusicologists must be proud that their discipline has produced a book that will, beyond doubt, rank as a classic of African studies."—Peter Fryer, Research in Literatures

"A marvelous book. . . . Not many scholars will ever be able to achieve the kind of synthesis of 'doing' and 'writing about' their subject matter that Chernoff has achieved, but he has given us an excellent illustration of what is possible."—Chet Creider, Culture

"Chernoff develops a brilliant and penetrating musicological essay that is, at the same time, an intensely personal and even touching account of musical and cultural discovery that anyone with an interest in Africa can and should read. . . . No other writing comes close to approaching Chernoff's ability to convey a feeling of how African music 'works'"—James Koetting, Africana Journal

"Four stars. One of the few books I know of that talks of the political, social, and spiritual meanings of music. I was moved. It was so nice I read it twice."—David Byrne of "Talking Heads"

The companion cassette tape has 44 examples of the music discussed in the book. It consists of field recordings illustrating cross-rhythms, multiple meters, call and response forms, etc.
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The African Roots of Marijuana
Chris S. Duvall
Duke University Press, 2019
After arriving from South Asia approximately a thousand years ago, cannabis quickly spread throughout the African continent. European accounts of cannabis in Africa—often fictionalized and reliant upon racial stereotypes—shaped widespread myths about the plant and were used to depict the continent as a cultural backwater and Africans as predisposed to drug use. These myths continue to influence contemporary thinking about cannabis. In The African Roots of Marijuana, Chris S. Duvall corrects common misconceptions while providing an authoritative history of cannabis as it flowed into, throughout, and out of Africa. Duvall shows how preexisting smoking cultures in Africa transformed the plant into a fast-acting and easily dosed drug and how it later became linked with global capitalism and the slave trade. People often used cannabis to cope with oppressive working conditions under colonialism, as a recreational drug, and in religious and political movements. This expansive look at Africa's importance to the development of human knowledge about marijuana will challenge everything readers thought they knew about one of the world's most ubiquitous plants.
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African Science
Witchcraft, Vodun, and Healing in Southern Benin
Douglas J. Falen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
In this sensitive and personal investigation into Benin's occult world, Douglas J. Falen wrestles with the challenges of encountering a reality in which magic, science, and the Vodun religion converge into a single universal force. He takes seriously his Beninese interlocutors' insistence that the indigenous phenomenon known as àze ("witchcraft") is an African science, credited with fantastic and productive deeds, such as teleportation and supernatural healing.

Although the Beninese understanding of àze reflects positive scientific properties in its use of specialized knowledge to harness nature's energy and realize economic success, its boundless power is inherently ambivalent because it can corrupt its users, who dispense death and destruction. Witches and healers are equivalent to supervillains and superheroes, locked in epic battles over malevolent and benevolent human desires. Beninese people's discourse about such mystical confrontations expresses a philosophy of moral duality and cosmic balance. Falen demonstrates how a deep engagement with another lived reality opens our minds and contributes to understanding across cultural difference.
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African Security
Local Issues and Global Connections
Abu Bakarr Bah
Ohio University Press, 2024
African Security: Local Issues and Global Connections provokes new ways of thinking about solutions to African security—solutions that consider the eclectic and sometimes disparate natures of African conflicts and that address both their domestic and their external dimensions. The book centers on the concept of glocalized security, which draws from sociological critiques that point to localization within globalization. This edited collection brings the concept of glocalization into African security studies by examining the fusion of domestic and external drivers of conflicts and how that relationship creates a glocalized security situation across Africa. The chapters in this volume engage the literature on domestic and external causes of conflicts in Africa, most notably issues of patrimonialism, ethnicity, natural resources, climate change, and geopolitics. These conflict drivers are woven in with known theories on security, such as neocolonialism, liberal peace, responsibility to protect (R2P), and collective security. The book presents rich qualitative and historical data, convincingly analyzed and theorized. Contributors: Folahanmi Aina, Alfred Babo, Abu Bakarr Bah, Noamane Cherkaoui, Nikolas Emmanuel, Tenley K. Erickson, John Mwangi Githigaro, Michael Nwankpa, Norman Sempijja, and Akram Zaoui
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African Soccerscapes
How a Continent Changed the World’s Game
Peter Alegi
Ohio University Press, 2010
From Accra and Algiers to Zanzibar and Zululand, Africans have wrested control of soccer from the hands of Europeans, and through the rise of different playing styles, the rituals of spectatorship, and the presence of magicians and healers, have turned soccer into a distinctively African activity. African Soccerscapes explores how Africans adopted soccer for their own reasons and on their own terms. Soccer was a rare form of “national culture” in postcolonial Africa, where stadiums and clubhouses became arenas in which Africans challenged colonial power and expressed a commitment to racial equality and self-determination. New nations staged matches as part of their independence celexadbrations and joined the world body, FIFA. The Confédération africaine de football democratized the global game through antiapartheid sanctions and increased the number of African teams in the World Cup finals. In this compact, highly readable book Alegi shows that the result of this success has been the departure of huge numbers of players to overseas clubs and the growing influence of private commercial interests on the African game. But the growth of women’s soccer and South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 World Cup also challenge the one-dimensional notion of Africa as a backward, “tribal” continent populated by victims of war, corruption, famine, and disease.
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African Students in East Germany, 1949-1975
Sara Pugach
University of Michigan Press, 2022
This book explores the largely unexamined history of Africans who lived, studied, and worked in the German Democratic Republic. African students started coming to the East in 1951 as invited guests who were offered scholarships by the East German government to prepare them for primarily technical and scientific careers once they returned home to their own countries. Drawn from previously unexplored archives in Germany, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, and the United Kingdom, African Students in East Germany, 1949–1975 uncovers individual stories and reconstructs the pathways that African students took in their journeys to the GDR and what happened once they got there. The book places these experiences within the larger context of German history, questioning how ideas of African racial difference that developed from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries impacted East German attitudes toward the students.

The book additionally situates African experiences in the overlapping contexts of the Cold War and decolonization. During this time, nations across the Western and Soviet blocs were inviting Africans to attend universities and vocational schools as part of a drive to offer development aid to newly independent countries and encourage them to side with either the United States or Soviet Union in the Cold War. African leaders recognized their significance to both Soviet and American blocs, and played on the desire of each to bring newly independent nations into their folds. Students also recognized their importance to Cold War competition, and used it to make demands of the East German state. The book is thus located at the juncture of many different histories, including those of modern Germany, modern Africa, the Global Cold War, and decolonization.
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African Successes, Volume I
Government and Institutions
Edited by Sebastian Edwards, Simon Johnson, and David N. Weil
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Studies of African economic development frequently focus on the daunting challenges the continent faces. From recurrent crises to ethnic conflicts and long-standing corruption, a raft of deep-rooted problems has led many to regard the continent as facing many hurdles to raise living standards. Yet Africa has made considerable progress in the past decade, with a GDP growth rate exceeding five percent in some regions. The African Successes series looks at recent improvements in living standards and other measures of development in many African countries with an eye toward identifying what shaped them and the extent to which lessons learned are transferable and can guide policy in other nations and at the international level.
           
The first volume in the series, African Successes: Governments and Institutions considers the role governments and institutions have played in recent developments and identifies the factors that enable economists to predict the way institutions will function.
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African Successes, Volume II
Human Capital
Edited by Sebastian Edwards, Simon Johnson, and David N. Weil
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Studies of African economic development frequently focus on the daunting challenges the continent faces. From recurrent crises to ethnic conflicts and long-standing corruption, a raft of deep-rooted problems has led many to regard the continent as facing many hurdles to raise living standards. Yet Africa has made considerable progress in the past decade, with a GDP growth rate exceeding five percent in some regions. The African Successes series looks at recent improvements in living standards and other measures of development in many African countries with an eye toward identifying what shaped them and the extent to which lessons learned are transferable and can guide policy in other nations and at the international level.
           
The second volume in the series, African Successes: Human Capital turns the focus toward Africa’s human capital deficit, measured in terms of health and schooling. It offers a close look at the continent’s biggest challenges, including tropical disease and the spread of HIV.
         
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African Successes, Volume III
Modernization and Development
Edited by Sebastian Edwards, Simon Johnson, and David N. Weil
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Studies of African economic development frequently focus on the daunting challenges the continent faces. From recurrent crises to ethnic conflicts and long-standing corruption, a raft of deep-rooted problems has led many to regard the continent as facing many hurdles to raise living standards. Yet Africa has made considerable progress in the past decade, with a GDP growth rate exceeding five percent in some regions. The African Successes series looks at recent improvements in living standards and other measures of development in many African countries with an eye toward identifying what shaped them and the extent to which lessons learned are transferable and can guide policy in other nations and at the international level.
           
The third volume in the series, African Successes: Modernization and Development looks at the rise in private production in spite of difficult institutional and physical environments. The volume emphasizes the ways that technologies, including mobile phones, have made growth in some areas especially dynamic.
       
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African Successes, Volume IV
Sustainable Growth
Edited by Sebastian Edwards, Simon Johnson, and David N. Weil
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Studies of African economic development frequently focus on the daunting challenges the continent faces. From recurrent crises to ethnic conflicts and long-standing corruption, a raft of deep-rooted problems has led many to regard the continent as facing many hurdles to raise living standards. Yet Africa has made considerable progress in the past decade, with a GDP growth rate exceeding five percent in some regions. The African Successes series looks at recent improvements in living standards and other measures of development in many African countries with an eye toward identifying what shaped them and the extent to which lessons learned are transferable and can guide policy in other nations and at the international level.
           
The fourth volume in the series, African Successes: Sustainable Growth combines informative case studies with careful empirical analysis to consider the prospects for future African growth.
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African Tales
Compiled by Harold Scheub
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005
The latest work from Harold Scheub, one of the world's leading scholars of African folktales, is the broadest collection yet assembled with tales from the entire continent of Africa, north to south. It brings together mythic, fantastic, and coming-of-age tales, some transcribed more than a hundred years ago, others dating to modern-day Africa. Scheub includes the work of storytellers from major African language groups, as well as many storytellers whose work is not often heard outside of Africa. This anthology offers a classroom-ready collection that should appeal to any scholar of African literature and culture. Realizing that these tales are part of a dying art, Scheub writes for the inner ear in everyone, bringing an oral tradition to life in written form.
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African Theatre for Development
Edited by Kamal Salhi
Intellect Books, 1998
African Theatre for Development acts as a forum for investigating how African Theatre works and what its place is in this postmodern society. It provides the subject with a degree of detail unmatched in previous books, reflecting a new approach to the study of the performing arts in this region. The collection:

• reveals the dynamic position of the arts and culture in post-independent countries as well as changes in influences and audiences,
• shows African theatre to be about aesthetics and rituals, the sociological and the political, the anthropological and the historical,
• examines theatre's role as a performing art throughout the continent, representing ethnic identities and defining intercultural relationships,
• investigates African theatre's capacity to combine contemporary cultural issues into the whole artistic fabric of performing arts, and
• considers the variety of voices, forms and practices through which contemporary African intellectual circles are negotiating the forces of tradition and modernity.

The book provides an opportunity to discover contemporary material from experts, critics and artists from across the world. The contributions are in a language and style that allow them to be read either as aids to formal study or as elements of discussion to interest the general reader.
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The African Transformation of Western Medicine and the Dynamics of Global Cultural Exchange
David Baronov
Temple University Press, 2010
Beginning with the colonial era, Western biomedicine has radically transformed African medical beliefs and practices. Conversely, in using Western biomedicine, Africans have also transformed it. The African Transformation of Western Medicine and the Dynamics of Global Cultural Exchange contends that contemporary African medical systems—no less “biomedical” than Western medicine—in fact greatly enrich and expand the notion of biomedicine, reframing it as a global cultural form deployed across global networks of cultural exchange.

The book analyzes biomedicine as a complex and dynamic sociocultural form, the conceptual premises of which make it necessarily subject to ongoing change and development as it travels the globe. David Baronov captures the complexities of this cultural exchange by using world-systems analysis in a way that places global cultural processes on equal footing with political and economic processes. In doing so, he both allows the story of Africa’s transformation of “Western” biomedicine to be told and offers new insights into the capitalist world system.
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African Underclass
Urbanization, Crime & Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam 1919-61
Andrew Burton
Ohio University Press, 2005
African Underclass examines the social, political, and administrative repercussions of rapid urbanization in colonial Dar es Salaam, and the evolution of official policy that viewed urbanization as inextricably linked with social disorder. This policy marginalized numbers of young Africans entering the town---and thus, paradoxically, the policy itself subverted the colonial order. "Well researched and sharply written---one of the best and most stimulating accounts of urbanization in Eastern Africa to have been produced in recent years."---John McCracken, emeritus professor of history, University of StirlingAndrew Burton is assistant director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa.
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The African Union's Africa
New Pan-African Initiatives in Global Governance
Rita Kiki Edozie
Michigan State University Press, 2014
The African Union’s Africa: New Pan-African Initiatives in Global Governance examines the initiatives of the Pan-African global governance institution the African Union (AU) as the organization and its precursor commemorate their Jubilee as international actors. Taking a unique approach, the book seeks to explain the AU through a theoretical framework referred to as “the African Union phenomenon,” capturing the international organization’s efforts to transform the national politics of Africa as well as to globalize the practice of African politics. The authors examine Africa’s self-determined international norms and values such as Pan-Africanism, African Solutions to African Problems, Hybrid Democracy, Pax Africana, and the African Economic Community to demonstrate that Africa—the world’s least developed region—is composed of crucial values, institutions, agents, actors, and forces that are, through the AU, contributing to the advancement of contemporary global development. The book reveals how in the areas of cultural identity, democracy, security, and economic development Africans are infusing new politics, economics, and cultures into globalization representing the collective will and imprint of African agency, decisions, ideas, identities, practices, and contexts. Via a Pan-African vision, the AU is having both regional and global impact, generating exciting possibilities and complicated challenges.
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An African Voice
The Role of the Humanities in African Independence
Robert W. July
Duke University Press, 1987
Through the work of leading African writers, artists, musicians and educators—from Nobel prizewinner Wole Soyinka to names hardly known outside their native lands—An African Voice describes the contributions of the humanities to the achievement of independence for the peoples of black Africa following the Second World War. While concentrating on cultural independence, these leading humanists also demonstrate the intimate connection between cultural freedom and genuine political economic liberty.
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African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900–1950
1900-1950
Tabitha Kanogo
Ohio University Press, 2000

This book explores the history of African womanhood in colonial Kenya. By focussing on key sociocultural institutions and practices around which the lives of women were organized, and on the protracted debates that surrounded these institutions and practices during the colonial period, it investigates the nature of indigenous, mission, and colonial control of African women.

The pertinent institutions and practices include the legal and cultural status of women, clitoridectomy, dowry, marriage, maternity and motherhood, and formal education. By following the effects of the all-pervasive ideological shifts that colonialism produced in the lives of women, the study investigates the diverse ways in which a woman’s personhood was enhanced, diminished, or placed in ambiguous predicaments by the consequences, intended and unintended, of colonial rule as administered by both the colonizers and the colonized. The study thus tries to historicize the reworkings of women’s lives under colonial rule. The transformations that resulted from these reworkings involved the negotiation and redefinition of the meaning of individual liberties and of women’s agency, along with the reconceptualization of kinship relations and of community.

These changes resulted in—and often resulted from—increased mobility for Kenyan women, who were enabled to cross physical, cultural, economic, social, and psychological frontiers that had been closed to them prior to colonial rule. The conclusion to which the experiences of women in colonial Kenya points again and again is that for these women, the exercise of individual agency, whether it was newly acquired or repeatedly thwarted, depended in large measure on the unleashing of forces over which no one involved had control. Over and over, women found opportunities to act amid the conflicting policies, unintended consequences, and inconsistent compromises that characterized colonial rule.

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African Women Playwrights
Edited and with an Introduction by Kathy A. Perkins. Foreword by Amandina Lihamb
University of Illinois Press, 2008

This anthology consists of nine plays by a diverse group of women from throughout the African continent. The plays focus on a wide range of issues, such as cultural differences, AIDS, female circumcision, women's rights to higher education, racial and skin color identity, prostitution as a form of survival for young girls, and nonconformist women resisting old traditions. In addition to the plays themselves, this collection includes commentaries by the playwrights on their own plays, and editor Kathy A. Perkins provides additional commentary and a bibliography of published and unpublished plays by African women.

The playwrights featured are Ama Ata Aidoo, Violet R. Barungi, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nathalie Etoke, Dania Gurira, Andiah Kisia, Sindiwe Magona, Malika Ndlovu (Lueen Conning), Juliana Okoh, and Nikkole Salter.

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African Women Writing Resistance
An Anthology of Contemporary Voices
Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010
African Women Writing Resistance is the first transnational anthology to focus on women’s strategies of resistance to the challenges they face in Africa today.  The anthology brings together personal narratives, testimony, interviews, short stories, poetry, performance scripts, folktales, and lyrics. Thematically organized, it presents women’s writing on such issues as intertribal and interethnic conflicts, the degradation of the environment, polygamy, domestic abuse, the controversial traditional practice of female genital cutting, Sharia law, intergenerational tensions, and emigration and exile.
    Contributors include internationally recognized authors and activists such as Wangari Maathai and Nawal El Saadawi, as well as a host of vibrant new voices from all over the African continent and from the African diaspora. Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection provides an excellent introduction to contemporary African women’s literature and highlights social issues that are particular to Africa but are also of worldwide concern.  It is an essential reference for students of African studies, world literature, anthropology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and women’s studies.
 
 
A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

Outstanding Book, selected by the Public Library Association

Best Books for High Schools, Best Books for Special Interests, and Best Books for Professional Use, selected by the American Association of School Libraries
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African-Asian Encounters
New Cooperations and New Dependencies
Edited by Arndt Graf and Azirah Hashim
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
In recent decades, ties between Africa and Asia have greatly increased. And while most of the scholarly attention to the phenomenon has focused on China, often with an emphasis on asymmetric power relations in both politics and economics, this book takes a much broader view, looking at various small and medium-sized actors in Asia and Africa in a wide range of fields. It will be essential for scholars working on Asian-African studies and will also offer insights for policymakers working in this fast-changing field.
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Africanizing Oncology
Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda
Marissa Mika
Ohio University Press, 2021
An innovative contemporary history that blends insights from a variety of disciplines to highlight how a storied African cancer institute has shaped lives and identities in postcolonial Uganda. Over the past decade, an increasingly visible crisis of cancer in Uganda has made local and international headlines. Based on transcontinental research and public engagement with the Uganda Cancer Institute that began in 2010, Africanizing Oncology frames the cancer hospital as a microcosm of the Ugandan state, as a space where one can trace the lived experiences of Ugandans in the twentieth century. Ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, patient records, oral histories, private papers from US oncologists, American National Cancer Institute records, British colonial office reports, and even the architecture of the institute itself show how Ugandans understood and continue to shape ideas about national identity, political violence, epidemics, and economic life. Africanizing Oncology describes the political, social, technological, and biomedical dimensions of how Ugandans created, sustained, and transformed this institute over the past half century. With insights from science and technology studies and contemporary African history, Marissa Mika’s work joins a new wave of contemporary histories of the political, technological, moral, and intellectual aspirations and actions of Africans after independence. It contributes to a growing body of work on chronic disease and situates the contemporary urgency of the mounting cancer crisis on the continent in a longer history of global cancer research and care. With its creative integration of African studies, science and technology studies, and medical anthropology, Africanizing Oncology speaks to multiple scholarly communities.
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Africans in Europe
The Culture of Exile and Emigration from Equatorial Guinea to Spain
Michael Ugarte
University of Illinois Press, 2013
What differentiates emigration from exile? This book delves theoretically and practically into this core question of population movements. Tracing the shifts of Africans into and out of Equatorial Guinea, it explores a small former Spanish colony in central Africa. Michael Ugarte examines the writings of Equatorial Guinean exiles and migrants, considering the underlying causes of such moves and arguing that the example of Equatorial Guinea is emblematic of broader dynamics of cultural exchange in a postcolonial world.

Based on personal stories of people forced to leave and those who left of their own accord, Africans in Europe captures the nuanced realities and widespread impact of mobile populations. By focusing on the geographical, emotional, and intellectual dynamics of Equatorial Guinea's human movements, readers gain an inroad to "the consciousness of an age" and an understanding of the global realities that will define the cultural, economic, and political currents of the twenty-first century.

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Africa's Last Colonial Currency
The CFA Franc Story
Fanny Pigeaud
Pluto Press, 2021
Colonialism persists in many African countries due to the continuation of imperial monetary policy. This is the little-known account of the CFA Franc and economic imperialism. The CFA Franc was created in 1945, binding fourteen African states and split into two monetary zones. Why did French colonial authorities create it and how does it work? Why was independence not extended to monetary sovereignty for former French colonies? Through an exploration of the genesis of the currency and an examination of how the economic system works, the authors seek to answer these questions and more. As protests against the colonial currency grow, the need for myth-busting on the CFA Franc is vital and this exposé of colonial infrastructure proves that decolonization is unfinished business.
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Africa's World Cup
Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, and Space
Edited by Peter Alegi and Chris Bolsmann
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Africa’s World Cup: Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, and Space focuses on a remarkable month in the modern history of Africa and in the global history of football. Peter Alegi and Chris Bolsmann are well-known experts on South African football, and they have assembled an impressive team of local and international journalists, academics, and football experts to reflect on the 2010 World Cup and its broader significance, its meanings, complexities, and contradictions.

The World Cup’s sounds, sights, and aesthetics are explored, along with questions of patriotism, nationalism, and spectatorship in Africa and around the world. Experts on urban design and communities write on how the presence of the World Cup worked to refashion urban spaces and negotiate the local struggles in the hosting cities. The volume is richly illustrated by authors’ photographs, and the essays in this volume feature chronicles of match day experiences; travelogues; ethnographies of fan cultures; analyses of print, broadcast, and electronic media coverage of the tournament; reflections on the World Cup’s private and public spaces; football exhibits in South African museums; and critiques of the World Cup’s processes of inclusion and exclusion, as well as its political and economic legacies.

The volume concludes with a forum on the World Cup, including Thabo Dladla, Director of Soccer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Mohlomi Kekeletso Maubane, a well-known Soweto-based writer and a soccer researcher, and Rodney Reiners, former professional footballer and current chief soccer writer for the Cape Argus newspaper in Cape Town. This collection will appeal to students, scholars, journalists, and fans.

Cover illustration: South African fan blowing his vuvuzela at South Africa vs. France, Free State Stadium, Bloemfontein, June 22, 2010. Photo by Chris Bolsmann.

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The Afro-Asian Century, Volume 11
Andrew F. Jones and Nikhil Pal Singh, eds.
Duke University Press
The Afro-Asian Century begins the task of excavating a multitude of Afro-Asian connections and collaborations in the twentieth century. With few exceptions, area studies and cultural studies have neglected or underestimated the significance of transethnic and transnational exchanges between African and Asian peoples.

By bringing instances of Afro-Asian traffic in the realms of politics, economics, and culture to the foreground, this collection maps an alternative global circuit. The issue examines the non-Eurocentric form of cosmopolitanism that emerged from creative encounters of racialized people in Jazz Age Paris, the Harlem Renaissance, and colonial Shanghai. It reconceptualizes the Indian Ocean as a crucial site for Afro-Asian cross-pollination and investigates the cinematic culture of kung fu as a global discourse of Afro-Asian anti-imperialism.

Contributors. Brent Edwards, Andrew F. Jones, Yukiko Koshiro, Bill Mullen, Vijay Prashad, William Schaefer, Nikhil Pal Singh, Françoise Vergès, Daniel Widener

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After Genocide
Memory and Reconciliation in Rwanda
Nicole Fox
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

In the wake of unthinkable atrocities, it is reasonable to ask how any population can move on from the experience of genocide. Simply remembering the past can, in the shadow of mass death, be retraumatizing. So how can such momentous events be memorialized in a way that is productive and even healing for survivors? Genocide memorials tell a story about the past, preserve evidence of the violence that occurred, and provide emotional support to survivors. But the goal of amplifying survivors’ voices can fade amid larger narratives entrenched in political motivations.

In After Genocide,Nicole Fox investigates the ways memorials can shape the experiences of survivors decades after mass violence has ended. She examines how memorializations can both heal and hurt, especially when they fail to represent all genders, ethnicities, and classes of those afflicted. Drawing on extensive interviews with Rwandans, Fox reveals their relationships to these spaces and uncovers those voices silenced by the dominant narrative—arguing that the erasure of such stories is an act of violence itself. The book probes the ongoing question of how to fit survivors in to the dominant narrative of healing and importantly demonstrates how memorials can shape possibilities for growth, national cohesion, reconciliation, and hope for the future.

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After the Fact
Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist
Clifford Geertz
Harvard University Press, 1995

"Suppose," Clifford Geertz suggests, "having entangled yourself every now and again over four decades or so in the goings-on in two provincial towns, one a Southeast Asian bend in the road, one a North African outpost and passage point, you wished to say something about how those goings-on had changed." A narrative presents itself, a tour of indices and trends, perhaps a memoir? None, however, will suffice, because in forty years more has changed than those two towns--the anthropologist, for instance, anthropology itself, even the intellectual and moral world in which the discipline exists. And so, in looking back on four decades of anthropology in the field, Geertz has created a work that is characteristically unclassifiable, a personal history that is also a retrospective reflection on developments in the human sciences amid political, social, and cultural changes in the world. An elegant summation of one of the most remarkable careers in anthropology, it is at the same time an eloquent statement of the purposes and possibilities of anthropology's interpretive powers.

To view his two towns in time, Pare in Indonesia and Sefrou in Morocco, Geertz adopts various perspectives on anthropological research and analysis during the post-colonial period, the Cold War, and the emergence of the new states of Asia and Africa. Throughout, he clarifies his own position on a broad series of issues at once empirical, methodological, theoretical, and personal. The result is a truly original book, one that displays a particular way of practicing the human sciences and thus a particular--and particularly efficacious--view of what these sciences are, have been, and should become.

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After the Thrill Is Gone
A Decade of Post-Apartheid South Africa, Volume 103
Grant Farred and Rita Barnard, eds.
Duke University Press
After the Thrill Is Gone is a serious appraisal of what South African democracy has yielded and has failed to yield in the era following the heady expectations of liberation from apartheid’s multiple repressions. Since that time, South Africa has revealed itself as a turbulent, dynamic nation. After the release of black political prisoners in 1990 and the first national democratic election in 1994, its citizens have witnessed a massive increase in crime, unemployment, and poverty and an educational system in chaos.

In a range of politically inflected essays by philosophers, community activists, political scientists, sociologists, literary scholars, and cultural and postcolonial theorists—many of whom are diasporic or resident South Africans—this special issue of SAQ provides a critical look at the realities of black majority governance, at the African National Congress, and at the costs of ANC rule to the populace. One essay draws a condemning sketch of poverty and violence in the townships and the growing communities of squatters that continue despite the emergence of democracy. A philosophical piece contemplates the practice of human rights in a South African society grappling with the memory of apartheid abuses. The fiction and poetry in the collection explore sexual identity, including issues created by the AIDS epidemic, and offer critiques of government policies. Using comic strips, another contributor demonstrates the ability of South African popular culture to satirize the nation’s political status quo. Taken together, the essays in After the Thrill Is Gone open a sobering perspective on South Africa’s recent history, its present, and its future.

Contributors. Rita Barnard, Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Grant Fared, Michiel Heyns, Shaun Irlam, Neil Lazarus, Michael MacDonald, Zine Magubane, Richard Pithouse, Lesego Rampolokeng, Adam Sitze

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After the TRC
Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation
Wilmot James
Ohio University Press, 2001

Has South Africa dealt effectively with the past, and is the country ready to face the future? What are the challenges facing both government and civil society in the years ahead? These and other questions are explored in this collection of essays by international and local commentators on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

A range of perspectives on whether the TRC met its objectives of truth and reconciliation is presented. The areas of particular contention-the payment of reparation, the granting of amnesty, and memorialization-are also examined.

Finally, the major challenges facing South Africa are identified, and ways of meeting these challenges and developing the assets of the nation are explored.

Contributors: Haribert Adam, Kanya Adam, Alex Boraine, Colin Bundy, Mary Burton, John de Gruchy, Richard Goldstone, Willem Heath, Wilmot James, Jeffrey Lever, Mahmood Mamdani, Gary Minkley, Njabulo Ndebele, Dumisa Ntsebeza, Kaizer Nyatsumba, Grace Naledi Pandor, Mamphela Ramphele, Ciraj Rassool, Albie Sachs, Patricia Valdez, Linda van de Vijver, Jan van Eck, Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, Charles Villa-Vicencio, Francis Wilson, and Leslie Witz

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The Afterlife Is Where We Come From
Alma Gottlieb
University of Chicago Press, 2003
When a new baby arrives among the Beng people of West Africa, they see it not as being born, but as being reincarnated after a rich life in a previous world. Far from being a tabula rasa, a Beng infant is thought to begin its life filled with spiritual knowledge. How do these beliefs affect the way the Beng rear their children?

In this unique and engaging ethnography of babies, Alma Gottlieb explores how religious ideology affects every aspect of Beng childrearing practices—from bathing infants to protecting them from disease to teaching them how to crawl and walk—and how widespread poverty limits these practices. A mother of two, Gottlieb includes moving discussions of how her experiences among the Beng changed the way she saw her own parenting. Throughout the book she also draws telling comparisons between Beng and Euro-American parenting, bringing home just how deeply culture matters to the way we all rear our children.

All parents and anyone interested in the place of culture in the lives of infants, and vice versa, will enjoy The Afterlife Is Where We Come From.

"This wonderfully reflective text should provide the impetus for formulating research possibilities about infancy and toddlerhood for this century." — Caren J. Frost, Medical Anthropology Quarterly
 
“Alma Gottlieb’s careful and thought-provoking account of infancy sheds spectacular light upon a much neglected topic. . . . [It] makes a strong case for the central place of babies in anthropological accounts of religion.  Gottlieb’s remarkably rich account, delivered after a long and reflective period of gestation, deserves a wide audience across a range of disciplines.”—Anthony Simpson, Critique of Anthropology
 
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Age of Concrete
Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique
David Morton
Ohio University Press, 2019

Age of Concrete is a history of the making of houses and homes in the subúrbios of Maputo (Lourenço Marques), Mozambique, from the late 1940s to the present. Often dismissed as undifferentiated, ahistorical “slums,” these neighborhoods are in fact an open-air archive that reveals some of people’s highest aspirations. At first people built in reeds. Then they built in wood and zinc panels. And finally, even when it was illegal, they risked building in concrete block, making permanent homes in a place where their presence was often excruciatingly precarious.

Unlike many histories of the built environment in African cities, Age of Concrete focuses on ordinary homebuilders and dwellers. David Morton thus models a different way of thinking about urban politics during the era of decolonization, when one of the central dramas was the construction of the urban stage itself. It shaped how people related not only to each other but also to the colonial state and later to the independent state as it stumbled into being.

Original, deeply researched, and beautifully composed, this book speaks in innovative ways to scholarship on urban history, colonialism and decolonization, and the postcolonial state. Replete with rare photographs and other materials from private collections, Age of Concrete establishes Morton as one of a handful of scholars breaking new ground on how we understand Africa’s cities.

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Aid to Africa
So Much To Do, So Little Done
Carol Lancaster
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Why, despite decades of high levels of foreign aid, has development been so disappointing in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, leading to rising numbers of poor and fueling political instabilities? While not ignoring the culpability of Africans in these problems, Carol Lancaster finds that much of the responsibility is in the hands of the governments and international aid agencies that provide assistance to the region. The first examination of its kind, Aid to Africa investigates the impact of bureaucratic politics, special interest groups, and public opinion in aid-giving countries and agencies. She finds that aid agencies in Africa often misdiagnosed problems, had difficulty designing appropriate programs that addressed the local political environment, and failed to coordinate their efforts effectively.

This balanced but tough-minded analysis does not reject the potential usefulness of foreign aid but does offer recommendations for fundamental changes in how governments and multilateral aid agencies can operate more effectively.

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AIDS Doesn't Show Its Face
Inequality, Morality, and Social Change in Nigeria
Daniel Jordan Smith
University of Chicago Press, 2014
AIDS and Africa are indelibly linked in popular consciousness, but despite widespread awareness of the epidemic, much of the story remains hidden beneath a superficial focus on condoms, sex workers, and antiretrovirals. Africa gets lost in this equation, Daniel Jordan Smith argues, transformed into a mere vehicle to explain AIDS, and in AIDS Doesn’t Show Its Face, he offers a powerful reversal, using AIDS as a lens through which to view Africa.

Drawing on twenty years of fieldwork in Nigeria, Smith tells a story of dramatic social changes, ones implicated in the same inequalities that also factor into local perceptions about AIDS—inequalities of gender, generation, and social class. Nigerians, he shows, view both social inequality and the presence of AIDS in moral terms, as kinds of ethical failure. Mixing ethnographies that describe everyday life with pointed analyses of public health interventions, he demonstrates just how powerful these paired anxieties—medical and social—are, and how the world might better alleviate them through a more sensitive understanding of their relationship.
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Al Qaeda Declares War
The African Embassy Bombings and America’s Search for Justice
Tod Hoffman
University Press of New England, 2014
Three years before the events of 9/11, Osama bin Laden sent al Qaeda suicide bombers on a coordinated attack to destroy the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. That day, August 7, 1998, more than two hundred people were killed and thousands were wounded. Responding immediately, the FBI launched the largest international investigation in its history. Within months, suspects were arrested in six countries. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York indicted twenty-two individuals, including the elusive bin Laden. In February 2001 a landmark trial of four of the accused was held in Manhattan in the shadow of the World Trade Center. Al Qaeda Declares War: The African Embassy Bombings and America’s Search for Justice explores the step-by-step procedures the United States employed in analyzing these attacks, identifying the suspects, tracking down and apprehending them, building a case, and prosecuting them. It is this case that established the legal basis for hunting down bin Laden, and the trial makes for a gripping courtroom drama, in which the robust principles of American justice confront the fanaticism of true believers. Tod Hoffman argues forcefully that the process after the 1998 incident stands in marked contrast to the illegal detention, torture, and abrogation of rights that followed 9/11. Indeed, reverberations from the African embassy bombings continue in the ongoing hunt for perpetrators still at large, and in targeted killings by drones. Al Qaeda Declares War dramatically recounts the terror and bloodshed of that day in Africa and shows that America’s search for justice afterward offers important lessons for today.
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Albert Luthuli
Robert Trent Vinson
Ohio University Press, 2018

In an excellent addition to the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series, Robert Trent Vinson recovers the important but largely forgotten story of Albert Luthuli, Africa’s first Nobel Peace Prize winner and president of the African National Congress from 1952 to 1967. One of the most respected African leaders, Luthuli linked South African antiapartheid politics with other movements, becoming South Africa’s leading advocate of Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent civil disobedience techniques. He also framed apartheid as a crime against humanity and thus linked South African antiapartheid struggles with international human rights campaigns.

Unlike previous studies, this book places Luthuli and the South African antiapartheid struggle in new global contexts, and aspects of Luthuli’s leadership that were not previously publicly known: Vinson is the first to use new archival evidence, numerous oral interviews, and personal memoirs to reveal that Luthuli privately supported sabotage as an additional strategy to end apartheid. This multifaceted portrait will be indispensable to students of African history and politics and nonviolence movements worldwide.

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Algerian Chronicles
Albert Camus
Harvard University Press, 2013

More than fifty years after Algerian independence, Albert Camus’ Algerian Chronicles appears here in English for the first time. Published in France in 1958, the same year the Algerian War brought about the collapse of the Fourth French Republic, it is one of Camus’ most political works—an exploration of his commitments to Algeria. Dismissed or disdained at publication, today Algerian Chronicles, with its prescient analysis of the dead end of terrorism, enjoys a new life in Arthur Goldhammer’s elegant translation.

“Believe me when I tell you that Algeria is where I hurt at this moment,” Camus, who was the most visible symbol of France’s troubled relationship with Algeria, writes, “as others feel pain in their lungs.” Gathered here are Camus’ strongest statements on Algeria from the 1930s through the 1950s, revised and supplemented by the author for publication in book form.

In her introduction, Alice Kaplan illuminates the dilemma faced by Camus: he was committed to the defense of those who suffered colonial injustices, yet was unable to support Algerian national sovereignty apart from France. An appendix of lesser-known texts that did not appear in the French edition complements the picture of a moralist who posed questions about violence and counter-violence, national identity, terrorism, and justice that continue to illuminate our contemporary world.

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Algerian Diary
Frank Kearns and the "Impossible Assignment" for CBS News
Gerald Davis
West Virginia University Press, 2016

Frank Kearns was the go-to guy at CBS News for danger- ous stories in Africa and the Middle East in the 1950s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s. By his own account, he was nearly killed 114 times. He took stories that nobody else wanted to cover and was challenged to get them on the air when nobody cared about this part of the world. But his stories were warning shots for conflicts that play out in the headlines today.

In 1957, Senator John Kennedy described America’s view of the Algerian war for independence as the Eisenhower Administration’s “head in the sand policy.” So CBS News decided to find out what was really happening there and to determine where Algeria’s war for independence fit into the game plan for the Cold War. They sent Frank Kearns to find out.

Kearns took with him cameraman Yousef (“Joe”) Masraff and 400 pounds of gear, some of which they shed, and they hiked with FLN escorts from Tunisia, across a wide “no-man’s land,” and into the Aures Mountains of eastern Algeria, where the war was bloodiest. They carried no passports or visas. They dressed as Algerians. They refused to bear weapons. And they knew that if captured, they would be executed and left in unmarked graves. But their job as journalists was to seek the truth whatever it might turn out to be.

This is Frank Kearns’s diary. 

 
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The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania
Peter Markoe
Westholme Publishing, 2008

An Important Book in America’s Early Encounter with the Arab World 

“A pungent satire on American affairs.” —Samuel Eliot Morison

In 1787, while American sailors languished in a Barbary prison, delegates debated the Constitution in Philadelphia. Despite America’s desire to respond to the crisis, without a central government, the new republic had no means to create a naval force. Enter an anonymously published book, The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania: or, Letters Written by a Native of Algiers on the Affairs of the United States in America, which began circulating among the delegates. Consisting of a series of letters ostensibly written by an Algerian agent “Mehmet” back to his leader, the spy predicted that the former colonies would never be able to resolve their differences and be “ruined by disunion.” The book created a sensation and it helped tip the balance for those in favor of adopting the new Constitution. Following the Constitution’s final ratification in 1789, the United States created a navy and began asserting its power overseas. With its commentary about men and women, business and pleasure, and historical and religious comparisons between nations, The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania provides both a contemporary snapshot of early American life and the political ideas of the period. Never before reprinted, and recently rated one of the five best works in the history of America’s encounter with the Arab world, this new edition is edited by historian Timothy Marr, who reconsiders the importance of this early work in the political and literary history of the United States.

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Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits
War in Northern Uganda, 1985–97
Heike Behrend
Ohio University Press, 1999

In August 1986, Alice Auma, a young Acholi woman in northern Uganda, proclaiming herself under the orders of a Christian spirit named Lakwena, raised an army called the “Holy Spirit Mobile Forces.” With it she waged a war against perceived evil, not only an external enemy represented by the National Resistance Army of the government, but internal enemies in the form of “impure” soldiers, witches, and sorcerers. She came very close to her goal of overthrowing the government but was defeated and fled to Kenya.

This book provides a unique view of Alice’s movement, based on interviews with its members and including their own writings, examining their perceptions of the threat of external and internal evil. It concludes with an account of the successor movements into which Alice’s forces fragmented and which still are active in the civil wars of the Sudan and Uganda.

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Al-Idrisi’s Norman Kingdom in the South
The Book of Roger in Translation
Katherine Jacka
Arc Humanities Press, 2024

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All the Roads Are Open
The Afghan Journey
Annemarie Schwarzenbach
Seagull Books, 2011
In June 1939 Annemarie Schwarzenbach and fellow writer Ella Maillart set out from Geneva in a Ford, heading for Afghanistan. The first women to travel Afghanistan’s Northern Road, they fled the storm brewing in Europe to seek a place untouched by what they considered to be Western neuroses.
 
The Afghan journey documented in All the Roads Are Open is one of the most important episodes of Schwarzenbach’s turbulent life. Her incisive, lyrical essays offer a unique glimpse of an Afghanistan already touched by the “fateful laws known as progress,” a remote yet “sensitive nerve centre of world politics” caught amid great powers in upheaval. In her writings, Schwarzenbach conjures up the desolate beauty of landscapes both internal and external, reflecting on the longings and loneliness of travel as well as its grace.
 
Maillart’s account of their trip, The Cruel Way, stands as a classic of travel literature, and, now available for the first time in English, Schwarzenbach’s memoir rounds out the story of the adventure.
 
Praise for the German Edition
 “Above all, [Schwarzenbach’s] discovery of the Orient was a personal one. But the author never loses sight of the historical and social context. . . . She shows no trace of colonialist arrogance. In fact, the pieces also reflect the experience of crisis, the loss of confidence which, in that decade, seized the long-arrogant culture of the West.”—Süddeutsche Zeitung
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Allies In Adversity
The Frontline States In Southern
Gilbert M. Khadiagala
Ohio University Press, 1994

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The Almoravid Maghrib
Camilo Gómez-Rivas
Arc Humanities Press, 2023
The Almoravid Maghrib uncovers the richness and complexity of a neglected past. A pivotal moment in the history of North Africa, the rise of the Almoravids brought a corner of the Maghrib into closer contact with the world around. From the Cid to the Seljuqs, the Almoravids impressed contemporaries in ways no Maghribi regime had, signalling a transformation of western North Africa through burgeoning trans-Saharan and trans-Mediterranean commerce, urbanization (two of Morocco's four imperial cities were founded), and the epic encounter with the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures of Iberia. The Almoravids witnessed a series of key transformations and beginnings, including the introduction of one of the area's most successful gold currencies, the formulation of a new religious orthodoxy, the parallel rise of counter-movements (popular, messianic, and spiritual), and the inception of pan-Maghribi-Andalusi artistic, literary, and architectural styles.
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Amakomiti
Grassroots Democracy in South African Shack Settlements
Trevor Ngwane
Pluto Press, 2021
Can people who live in shantytowns, shacks and favelas teach us anything about democracy? About how to govern society in a way that is inclusive, participatory and addresses popular needs? This book argues that they can. In a study conducted in dozens of South Africa's shack settlements, where more than 9 million people live, Trevor Ngwane finds thriving shack dwellers' committees that govern local life, are responsive to popular needs and provide a voice for the community. These committees, called 'amakomiti' in the Zulu language, organize the provision of basic services such as water, sanitation, public works and crime prevention. Democracy on the Margins argues that, contrary to common perception, slum dwellers are in fact an essential part of the urban population, whose political agency must be recognized and respected. In a world searching for democratic alternatives that serve the many and not the few, it is to the shantytowns, rather than the seats of political power, that we should turn.
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