African history Books

9387 products


  • Sports & Modernity in Late Imperial Ethiopia

    James Currey Sports & Modernity in Late Imperial Ethiopia

    Book SynopsisInnovative study of the role of sports in modernity in Africa. Sports in Ethiopia was always more than a means of useful recreation. It was also a way to enjoy and define fun, as new modes of behaviour emerged that showed what it meant to be a modern man or woman. This book is the first academic study of the history of modern sports in Ethiopia during the imperial rule of the twentieth century. Showing how agents, ideas and practices linked societal improvement and bodily improvement, this innovative study argues thatmodern sports offers new possibilities to explore the meanings of modernity in Africa. Drawing on written and oral sources in Amharic, Tigrinya, English, French, German and Italian, Bromber provides an in-depth analysis of the role of sports in modern educational institutions, volunteer organizations and urbanization processes. She examines sports' function as a political propaganda tool during the Italian fascist occupation (1935 - 1941), as well as in representations of successful modernization under Haile Selassie (1930 - 1974). The integration into global networks of ideas about the fit colonized body linked Ethiopia, which was never colonized, to the legacy of colonialism. Institutions such as schools, civilian sports clubs, and volunteer organizations were not only loaded with coercive procedures, but instituted modes of behaviour that developed into certain styles and affirmation of the self as well as their contestation. Examining the locations for practising sports in organized forms, informal leisure and practices consumption in Ethiopia, this book contributes to recent debates on the role of sports in the history of urbanization in Africa, as well as those on global modernity. Ethiopia: AAUPTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Notes on Transliteration, Titles, Currency, and the Ethiopian Calendar Introduction 1. The Emergence of Ethiopia's Modern Sports Scene (1900-1935) 2. Sports and Propaganda during the Fascist Occupation (1935-1941) 3. Muscular Reconstruction: Urban Leisure, Institutionalised Physical Education, and the Re-establishment of Boy Scouting (1940s-1960s) 4. Training Leaders and Athletes: The Ethiopian YMCA (1940s-1970s) 5. Sports' Material Infrastructure and the Production of Space (1910s-1970s) 6. Conclusion and Outlook Bibliography Index

    £71.25

  • Decolonising State & Society in Uganda: The

    James Currey Decolonising State & Society in Uganda: The

    Book SynopsisKey book on the debates surrounding the knowledge economy and decolonialization of African Studies, that brings the subject up to date for the 21st century. Decolonization of knowledge has become a major issue in African Studies in recent years, brought to the fore by social movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter. This timely book explores the politics and disputed character of knowledge production in colonial and postcolonial Uganda, where efforts to generate forms of knowledge and solidarity that transcend colonial epistemologies draw on long histories of resistance and refusal. Bringing together scholars from Africa, Europe and North America, the contributors in this volume analyse how knowledge has been created, mobilized, and contested across a wide range of Ugandan contexts. In so doing, they reveal how Ugandans have built, disputed, and reimagined institutions of authority and knowledge production in ways that disrupt the colonial frames that continue to shape scholarly analyses and state structures. From the politics of language and gender in Bakiga naming practices to ways of knowing among the Acholi, the hampering of critical scholarship by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.Table of Contents1. Introduction, by Edgar C. Taylor, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, Jonathon L. Earle and Nakanyike Musisi PART 1: FRAMING KNOWLEDGE 2. Decolonial Dilemmas and Burdened Epistemic Heritages in Names and Naming among the Bakiga, by Tushabe wa Tushabe 3. Poetic Violence? Intimate Understandings of Cattle Raiding in Karamoja, by David Eaton 4. Spirits of Difference: Religion, Healing, and Decolonisation in Acholi, by Letha Victor 5. Contested Freedoms: Human Rights, Decolonization, and Political Agency in Postcolonial Uganda, by Lydia Boyd 6. The First White Man to See the Nile: Decolonising History Education in Uganda, by Ashley L. Greene PART 2: IMAGINING INSTITUTIONS 7. Militarism and the Dilemmas of Decolonising Knowledge in Uganda, by Moses Khisa 8. Institutional Knowledge and the Ugandan Public Service: From Colonialism and Neocolonialism to the New Public Service, by Genevieve Meyers 9. Local Knowledge and Knowledge of the 'Locals':The Political Ambivalence of Bureaucratic Knowledge in Uganda's Villages, by Florence Brisset-Foucault 10. Coloniality and Power in Uganda's Archives, by Riley Linebaugh and Katherine Bruce-Lockhart 11. Higher Art Education & New Initiatives in Kampala: Potentials and Problems of Decolonising Knowledge, by Margaret Nagawa and Fiona Siegenthaler PART 3: MAKING PUBLICS 12. Repudiating a Liberal Framework for Political Accountability: The Politics of the Whole versus the Politics of the Party in Uganda in the 1940s, by Holly Hanson 13. Decolonising Citizenship and Identity Contestations: Revisiting the Historicity of the Indian Question in Uganda, by Asiimwe B. Godfrey 14. Liberation Ethnology: District Decolonialism, State Knowledge Production, and the Neoliberal Revolution in Uganda, by Adrian Browne 15. Finding Ourselves, Seeing Ourselves: Nationalism and Reclaiming Colonial Spaces in Uganda, by Daniel Kalinaki & Rebecca Rwakabukoza 16. Rudeness/Incivility as Political Strategy: The Poetics and Politics of Stella Nyanzi's Facebook Work, by Danson Sylvester Kahyana

    £90.00

  • The Eritrean National Service: Servitude for  the

    James Currey The Eritrean National Service: Servitude for the

    Book SynopsisGives voice to the conscripts who are forced to serve indefinitely without remuneration under the ENS in a powerful critical survey of its effect from the Liberation Struggle to today. The Eritrean National Service (ENS) lies at the core of the post-independence state, not only supplying its military, but affecting every aspect of the country's economy, its social services, its public sector and its politics. Over half the workforce are forcibly enrolled into it by the government, driving the country's youth to escape national service by seeking employment and asylum elsewhere. Yet how did the ENS, which began during the 1961-91 liberation struggle as part of the idea of the "common good" - in which individual interests were sacrificed in pursuit of the grand scheme of independence and the country's development - degenerate into forced labour and a modern form ofslavery? And why, when Eritrea no longer faces existential threat, does the government continue to demand such service from its citizens? This book provides for the first time an in-depth and critical scrutiny of the ENS'sachievements and failures and its overarching impact on the social fabric of Eritrea. The author discusses the historical backdrop to the ENS and the rationales underlying it; its goals and objectives; its transformative effects,as well as its impact on the country's defence capability, national unity, national identity construction and nation-building. He also analyses the extent to which the national service functions as an effective mechanism of transmitting the core values of the liberation struggle to the conscripts and through them to the rest of country's population. Finally, the book assesses whether the core aims and objectives of the ENS proclaimed by various governmentshave been or are in the process of being accomplished and, drawing on the testimony of the hitherto voiceless conscripts themselves, its impact on their lives and livelihoods.Trade ReviewA detailed and comprehensive assessment of this central instrument of state power in Eritrea...drawing on survey and interview data collected from former ENS conscripts, now living abroad, the book presents a deeply complex picture of the programme and its influence. * AFRICAN AFFAIRS *This book makes a vital contribution to an important and pressing political and social issue that is impacting millions of people in today's Eritrea. . . . I applaud the author for making this timely and important contribution to the current literature on Eritrea migration, refugees, national service, and human rights studies. * AFRICAN STUDIES QUARTERLY *Kibreab deserves praise for raising awareness concerning the predicament faced by an entire generation of Eritrean youth. * AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW *Table of ContentsForeword by Christopher Clapham Introduction National/Military Service in Africa: Theories and Concepts The Government and the Structure of the Eritrean Defence Force The Nature of the ENS and its Effectiveness as a Fighting Force The ENS as a Mechanism for Preserving and Transmitting the Core Values of the Liberation Struggle The Eritrean National Service: A Vehicle for National Unity and Cohesion The Eritrean National Service and Forced Equality The Overarching Impact of the ENS on the Social Fabric of Eritrean Society Impact of the Open-Ended ENS on Families and Conscripts Conclusion

    £23.75

  • Manufacturing in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890-1979:

    James Currey Manufacturing in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890-1979:

    Book SynopsisA key book on Zimbabwe's industrial policy and the relationship between manufacturing, the state, and economic interest groups. Under pressure from local manufacturers, and recognising that industrial policy was a legitimate instrument for development, on 1 July 2016, to boost domestic production, the Government of Zimbabwe passed Statutory Instrument 64 which limited imports and foreign manufactures, allowing local producers satisfy demand. Zimbabwe's neighbours immediately protested that this flouted the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC)'s Protocol on Trade, which aimed to increase trade across borders at regional and national levels. This matter revived the conversation about protectionism as an instrument of industrial policy. Protectionism in Africa is neither limited to Zimbabwe, nor is it a new phenomenon. This book brings a historical perspective to the conversation by exploring the policy proposals and political pressure exerted by manufacturing businesses on the trajectory of industrialisation in colonial Zimbabwe, and reveals that the major point of contention between the state, industry, and other economic interest groups in this period was protection. Tracing changing attitudes to the country's political economy, the author examines the way in which industrialists advanced their interests through the Association of Rhodesian Industries (ARnI) and other trade bodies, and shows how this pitted them not only against the state but other blocs of capital - farmers, miners and commerce. He examines the impact of the post-war Customs Union Agreement with South Africa, manufacturing strategy under UDI, and examines the impact of Southern Rhodesia's development on its trading partners in South Africa, Zambia and Malawi. Casting new light on the continuing debate on regional trade, this important book adds to our understanding of the settler colony's economic, business, and political history.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 The Origins of Secondary Industry: The Teething Years, 1890-1938 2 'To Industrialise or Not': Economic Interest Groups, the State and Secondary Industry, 1939-1948 3 Post-war Industrial Growth, Organised Industry and the Central African Federation, 1949-1957 4 Secondary Industry, Changing Economic Fortunes and Central African Decolonisation, 1957-1965 5 Industrialising under Sanctions: Organised Industry and the State during UDI, 1966-1979 Conclusion Bibliography Index

    £71.25

  • Ethiopian Warriorhood: Defence, Land and Society

    James Currey Ethiopian Warriorhood: Defence, Land and Society

    Book SynopsisThe history of the often-overlooked chewa Ethiopian warriors and their crucial role in defending their homeland against invasion, as well as their strong influence on political identity and the social infrastructure. Today best known for their role in defending Ethiopia from Italian invasion 1935-41, chewa warriors protected Ethiopia for centuries. Yet, depicted by some 19th-century Western observers as little more than "a horde" of warmongers, and later suppressed by Ethiopian monarchs who sought to create a centralized modern state, their contribution has been neglected. Drawing on oral and written sources, as well as the zeraf poetry through which theyexpressed themselves, this book explores for the first time in depth the history, practices and principles of warriorhood of the chewa, and their wider influence on society and state. Often self-trained individuals who began by defending their communities, by the end of the 19th century there were chewa warrior groups from almost all linguistic groups who fought together to resist foreign invaders. Some chewa enrolled in the service of the Ethiopian "kings of kings", who organized them as named corps that supplemented the formal defence of the state. Today, chewa political identity, which transcended social, familial, political and other groupings, remains deeply rooted in Ethiopian society.Trade ReviewIn Ethiopian Warriorhood: Defence, Land and Society, Tsehai Berhane-Selassie provides a nuanced analysis of the role of the chewa - voluntary, community supported warriors - in the evolution of the Ethiopian state. .[F]or historians of the Horn, this book provides a valuable analysis of state formation that shifts the focus from individual monarchs to a misunderstood group of intermediary actors, and adds a new layer to the complicated history of land rights in Ethiopia. * CANADIAN JOURNAL OF AFRICAN STUDIES / REVUE CANADIENNE DES ÉTUDES AFRICAINES *[Tsehai Berhane-Selassie's] book is a thoroughly researched contribution in the growing literature of Ethiopian social history. It is truly an insider view carefully drawn from oral testimonies such as heroic recitals and various written accounts of historical importance. .The study should truly interest academic scholars, policy makers, students, and education experts alike. * AFRICAN STUDIES QUARTERLY *The book (composed of ten chapters) is well written and extensively footnoted. [...] She [the author] should indeed be congratulated for her splendid contribution to Ethiopian studies. * Aethiopica *It is very recently that indigenous thought acquired currency in the scholarly world. Tsehai's current book is pioneering in this regard. [...]Her book is a thoroughly researched contribution in the growing literature of Ethiopian social history. It is truly an insider view carefully drawn from oral testimonies such as heroic recitals and various written accounts of historical importance. * African Studies Quarterly *Ethiopian Warriorhood provides a data-rich historical ethnography of an imperial institution. From a scholarly perspective, it is a very useful book for students of the modern history and anthropology of the Horn of Africa, as well as of comparative studies on conflict, militarism, and empire. * Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute *A vast and remarkable undertaking, Tsehai's book is a recommended reading for any serious student of Ethiopian history and for all who wish to understand Ethiopia's enduring traditions today. * Orientalistische Literaturzeitung *Table of ContentsPreface Introduction: Traditions of hierarchical warriorhood The historical context of emergent warriors Military lands and power politics Ecological roots of local leadership Social localities of emergent warriors Military training in sports, horsemanship and hunting Political authority and military power Zeraf: symbols and rituals of power and rebellion First Italian invasion, 1896 Guerrilla warfare, 1935-41 Conclusion

    £25.64

  • Kenya's and Zambia's Relations with China

    James Currey Kenya's and Zambia's Relations with China

    Book SynopsisExamines the history of post-colonial Kenya's and Zambia's relations with the People's Republic of China from ideological, political, economic and social perspectives. Africa has become a major platform from which to analyse and understand China's growing influence in the global South. Yet, the impact of their historical relationship has been largely overlooked. Through the triangulation of the global Cold War, African history, and Chinese history, this study provides a detailed analysis of China-Africa relations in the second half of the 20th century. Examining the encounters, conflicts, and dynamics of China-Kenya/Zambia relations from the 1950s until the present, as well as the basis on which historical narratives have been constructed, the book presents two contrasting state perspectives underlining the concept of 'African agency'. Driven by a class-based analysis of world revolution, Communist China's foreign policy did not distinguish significantly between Kenya and Zambia. Both countries sought ideological and material support from China in the years after their independence. The Kenya African National Union under both Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Moi pursued a consistently pragmatic foreign agenda, and despite political tensions and ideological rifts with China since the mid-1960s, Sino-Kenyan trade has continued to grow steadily. In contrast, China-Zambia relations under Kenneth Kaunda were cordial despite their political differences. Zambian leaders maintained a relatively high consensus that any alleged Chinese Communist threat would not be allowed to fuel power struggles within their United National Independence Party. Challenging both the widely accepted role of China-Africa's historical lineage, as well as the tendency to assume uniformity in China's relationships across the continent, the author explains the development of these relationships and sheds light on the historical underpinnings - or lack thereof - on contemporary China-Africa relations.Trade ReviewSun's book marks an important and exciting contribution to China-Africa studies. The research presented here is deeply nuanced and feels somehow personal. As a reader, this is a compelling combination, one that really draws me into the narrative in an engaging way. -- Ruodi Duan * H-NET *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Decolonisation, the Cold War and Afro-Asian Solidarity: China, Kenya and Zambia at a Crossroads, 1949-1964 2. Caught in-between: Kenya's Foreign Policy and its Relations with China, 1964-1975 3. 'All-Weather Friendship'?: Zambia's Foreign policy and its Relations with China, 1965-1974 4. Political Transition and Multifaceted Engagements: China, Zambia and Kenya in the late 1970s and 1980s 5. China's 'Return' to Africa and the Past in the Present, 1989-2019 Conclusion

    £75.00

  • Masquerades in African Society: Gender, Power and

    James Currey Masquerades in African Society: Gender, Power and

    Book SynopsisExplores the dynamics of African masquerades and mask performances on the continent, linking performative expressions to societal characteristics. What is the meaning of masks and masquerades in African traditions and how can we understand their role in rituals and performances? Why do we find masks in some African regions and not in others, and what does this 'mask habitat' say about the general dynamics of masquerades in Africa? Though masks are among the most famous art icons of Africa, exploration of their uses and the way in which they articulate social characteristics of African societies has been underexamined. This book takes an anthropological perspective on the phenomenon of masquerades on the African continent to show how mask rituals are an integral part of African indigenous religions and societies, and are informed by and linked to specific types of social and ecological conditions. Having established the commonalities of mask rituals and a mask typology, the authors look at the varieties of mask performances and the types of rituals in which masks function in rites of passage and in rituals of gender, power, and identity. The following chapters focus on different types of rituals featuring masks, from initiation and death ceremonies to secrecy, kingship, law and war. With its broad examination of the use of masks on the continent, from Angola to Burkina Faso, Cameroon, DRC, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, this well illustrated book will stand as an authoritative study of the use of masks, of interest not only to those in African Studies but to anthropologists and ethnographers worldwide.Table of ContentsIntroduction - Enter the mask - The study of masking - Structure of the book The Masking Crescent: Distribution of Masks and Masking in Africa 1. Mask Distribution and Theory - Masking zones - Theoretical approach - Parameters of masking - Profiles of masking societies - The zebu exclusion - Methodology 2. What is a Mask - Explaining masks: The Magritte effect - A basic mask typology - Bush, spirits, ancestors, and other people - Masks and power - Tradition, prototype and invention - Conclusion 3. Masks and Masculinity: Initiation - Chewing the mask - Separation from the mother - Liminal revelation - Mask and circumcision - Symbols of gender: Death and food - Communitas and age - Masks and masculinities - Conclusion 4. Secrecy and Power - Writing on the mask - Dimensions of secrecy - Initiation societies and the empty secret - The sound of secrecy - Ethics, society, and secrecy - Conclusion 5. Death and its Masks - Singing at the mask - Burial and the farewells - Burial by masks - Funeral as initiation - Individual and society in funerals - Masks and the second funeral - Celebrating life - Conclusion 6. Women: Pivot of the Masks - The first mask - Gender domains - Celebrating femininity - Women dancing with masks - The mask of the woman is her body - Conclusion 7. Masks and Politics - Masks for father - Masks and the history of the patriline - Feasting the sultan - The mask as king - Initiation, masks, and regicide - Masquerades and modern politics - Conclusion: The Akan gap 8. Masks and the Order of Things - Masks in the field - Masks and the adjudication of law - The discourse on witchcraft - Masks versus 'witches' - 'Uncovering witchcraft': A mask performance abroad - 'War masks' - Conclusion 9. Masks and Modernity - Playful sharks in the Delta - Theatre at Cross River - The king of masks, the elephant of masks - Masks for new audiences - Masks as icons of ethnic identity - Heritage, icon, and commodity - Conclusion 10. Memories of Power, Power of Memories - Arrest that mask! - Satire, the weapon of the weak - Masquerades and the slaving state - From Africa to the African Diaspora - Conclusion 11. Conclusion - The cultural niche for masquerades - A future for masks? Bibliography Sources for ethnographic cases Picture credits Index

    £90.00

  • The Struggle for Land and Justice in Kenya

    James Currey The Struggle for Land and Justice in Kenya

    Book SynopsisFinalist for the African Studies Association's 2021 Best Book Prize. Explores the limits of law in changing unequal land relations in Kenya. Why, despite the introduction of new land laws beginning in 2012, has there been an increase in land grabbing in Kenya? Why has legislation failed to address long standing grievances about grossly unequal land distribution? This important book suggests that questions of justice should be central to discussions of African land reform. Constitutional reformers in Kenya promised transformative changes in land relations. However, the reality has disappointed. Land law reforms since 2010 have been more concerned with the administration of land and with bureaucratic power than with the real consequences of unequal access to land for ordinary Kenyans. Manji documents this thwarted struggle and surveys the prospects for genuine change. Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa. Ambreena Manji is Professor of Land Law and Development at the School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University. Between 2010 and 2014, she was Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa. Her books include The Politics of Land Reform in Africa (2006). Vita Books: Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan and South Africa.Trade ReviewThe book makes several important contributions to scholarship on land politics in Kenya. -- Canadian Journal of African StudiesBuilding on her own previous work, as well as the work of notable scholars such as Ghai, McAuslan and Harbeson, Manji provides a detailed overview of the history of the land struggle beginning in the colonial era, through the various commissions of inquiry, the formulation of the NLP, and the incorporation of land issues into the Constitution and drafting of the 2012 land laws. -- Journal of Modern African StudiesTable of ContentsForeword by Dr Willy Mutunga Introduction: What We Talk About When We Talk About Land Land Reform in Kenya: The History of an Idea Making Mischief: Land in Modern Kenya Land and Constitutional Change The New Institutional Framework for Land Governance Land Governance Before the Supreme Court Rethinking Historical Land Injustices Taking Justice Seriously

    £23.74

  • Imperialism and Development: The East African

    James Currey Imperialism and Development: The East African

    Book SynopsisA compelling exploration of one of the most ill-advised and calamitous interventions in colonial development history. As colonial development took off after the Second World War, in the context of national food shortages, Britain's Labour Government initiated the Groundnut Scheme, an extraordinarily ambitious project to convert 3 million acres of bush in Tanganyika into the largest mechanized groundnut farm in the world. It was to prove the largest, most expensive and most disastrous development scheme ever undertaken by the British Government. Never previously analysed in depth, the author draws on a wide range of sources to discuss the political dynamics that drove the Groundnut Scheme forward, despite the gravest doubts of agriculturalists and economists, why it went wrong, and what its impact has been since on the practice of economic development. Initially employing the United Africa Company as agent, the government set up an Overseas Food Corporation to manage the Groundnut Scheme as an example of socialist development in Africa. Army surplus kit and demobbed soldiers poured into the country and were sent up the railway line to Kongwa to beat the bush. By the time the effort was abandoned in 1950, costs had risen to a colossal 36 million - equivalent to over 1 billion today - and yet almost no groundnuts had been exported. The prototype of many large-scale, government-run, high-cost development projects that failed to deliver, the Groundnut Scheme was perhaps the first major failure of agricultural development in Africa, and its legacy in development practice still with us today.Trade Review[B]eautifully written and interspersed with interesting observations and amusing anecdotes. The book is also exceedingly well researched, every statement and argument being painstakingly corroborated with primary and secondary resources. [An] important contribution to the historiography of Britain's imperialism and development policy in east Africa. * International Affairs *This is a ripping good read. [...] Nicholas Westcott is well qualified to spin this particular yarn with wit and academic aplomb. * Tanzanian Affairs *This book is a necessary addition to the study of post-war British imperialism, and relies on a remarkable array of primary sources. Its interweaving of the domestic and international aspects of the Scheme, as well as the impressive use of evidence, provide a laudable contribution to the existing research on colonial development and post-war British imperial history. -- English Historical ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction Austerity A Scheme is Born "The Poison of the Official Pen ..." The Groundnut Army Beating about the Bush The Overseas Food Corporation 1949: The Crisis The Last Chance A Sudden Death Legacy and Lessons

    £23.74

  • The Road to Soweto: Resistance and the Uprising

    James Currey The Road to Soweto: Resistance and the Uprising

    Book SynopsisA new history of the 1976 Soweto Uprising and the events leading to it in the preceding decade, that will transform our understanding of the historical evolution of the struggle against apartheid. This revisionary account of the Soweto Uprising of June 1976 and the decade preceding it transforms our understanding of what led to this crucial flashpoint of South Africa's history. Brown argues that far from there being "quiescence" following the Sharpeville Massacre and the suppression of African opposition movements, during which they went underground, this period was marked by experiments in resistance and attempts to develop new forms of politics that prepared the ground for the Uprising. Students at South Africa's segregated universities began to re-organise themselves as a political force; new ideas about race reinvigorated political thought; debates around confrontation shaped the development of new forms of protest. The protest then began to move off university campuses and onto the streets: through the independent actions of workers in Durban, and attempts by students to link their struggles with a broader agenda. These actions made protest public once again, and helped establish the patterns of popular action and state response that would come to shape the events in Soweto on 16 June 1976. Julian Brown is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland & Botswana): Jacana 'throws new light on the background to the Soweto Uprising, providing insight into white and black student politics, worker protest and broader dissent' - William Beinart, University of Oxford 'an extremely important contribution to the historiography on protest in South Africa. It links black and white student protests (too often studied in isolation from one another) to workers' movements by looking at the changing forms of protest during the 1960s and 1970s, and the apartheid government's changing responses.' - Anne Heffernan, University of the Witwatersrand 'By showing how the Soweto Uprising served as a precursor for later historical and political events, the author convincingly shows the continuity from one from one protest and decade to the next.' - Dawne Curry, University of Nebraska-LincolnTrade ReviewJulian Brown's analysis of the pre-history of the Soweto uprising seeks to break new ground. * ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW *Julian Brown's thoughtful book is chock-full of insights while still under 200 pages of text. Important in its own right, a study on student and mass protest in South Africa could not be timelier. On the fortieth anniversary of the legendary Uprising, yet again South Africa finds itself bitterly divided over a student protest movement exploding onto the scene. Brown's book deserves receives wide readership for these reasons and more. * SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORICAL JOURNAL *The strength of Brown's book is that it encapsulates the long build-up of unrest in the black community. He carefully describes the range of events that led to a growing sense of frustration and anger...Situating the uprising in this context is a powerful corrective to previous attempts to consider it in relative isolation. * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *The Road to Soweto is an important, moving, and encouraging book, which revises our understanding of crucial decades of South African history, and puts forward an argument that both emerges from and explains that story. -- African Studies QuarterlyTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Road to Soweto White Student Activism in the 1960s: 'The Choice Between Silence and Protest' The Formation of the South African Students' Organisation: 'Carving Out their Own Destiny' Confrontation, Resistance and Reaction: 'The Minister... Cannot Ban Ideas from Men's Minds' The Durban Strikes: 'Souls of their Own' Reimagining Resistance in the Face of Violence: 'Cast off the Students-only Attitude' The Pro-Frelimo Rallies of 1974: 'Stand up and be Counted' Event and Aftermath: The Soweto Uprising Conclusion: Consequences

    £23.74

  • Archaeology and Oral Tradition in Malawi: Origins

    James Currey Archaeology and Oral Tradition in Malawi: Origins

    Book SynopsisFirst comprehensive account of the origins and early history of the Chewa as revealed by oral tradition and archaeology that allows a more accurate picture of a pre-literate society. The Chewa are the largest ethnic group in Malawi, representing a third of the population of approximately 19 million, and their language - Chichewa - is Malawi's national language. Yet the last book on the history of this group was published in 1944, and was based on oral history, or tradition. As with much African history, oral history started to be recorded only in the late 19th century. This is the first book to use not only oral history, but also documents written by early Portuguese explorers, traders and government officials, as well as archaeology, to piece together the early history of the Chewa. The author is an archaeologist, who discovered the first major Chewa settlement, Mankhamba, near the southern part of Lake Malawi. His excavations have enabled a more scientific chronology of the migrations of the Chewa into what is today Malawi and have provided physical proof of their early history as well as their material and spiritual culture and way of life. Professor Yusuf Juwayeyi has written and documented a very readable history and description of archaeology, which reveals the value of combining oral tradition together with archaeology to arrive at a more accurate picture of the history of a pre-literate society. This book will be of value not only to historians, archaeologists and anthropologists, but also the general reader interested in African history. YUSUF M. JUWAYEYI is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York. South Africa: UCT PressTrade ReviewThe book makes a contribution relevant to both specialist audiences and to Malawian citizens. [...] The volume has much to recommend it. The structure of the chapters includes accessible summaries for nonspecialists. The volume is richly illustrated with some fifty-five black-and-white photographs, maps, figures, and tables. * H-Africa *This book is not a site report; that was published a decade ago (Juwayeyi 2010). It is instead an accessible and well-written introduction for general readers with an interest in the history of Central Africa and it therefore includes a chapter on the aims and methods of archaeology, as well as a section tracing the development of both historical and archaeological studies of the Chewa from the colonial period to the present. * AZANIA *[T]here are many aspects to admire about this volume, including its audacity in intertwining oral traditions and archaeology. * Antiquity *The book's list of cited works is also a gold mine of references. Juwayeyi has provided an immensely multi-purpose text in The Archaeology and Oral Traditions of Malawi that will be of wide interest: for archaeologists looking to utilize Malawian material (and/or oral traditions), for historians looking to incorporate more archaeology into their research, for lecturers looking for accessible readings to bring into syllabi, or simply for readers with a general interest in Malawian/Chewa history. * African Archaeological Review *The multiple illustration figures Juwayeyi presents combine well with the author's easy-to-read language, making it easier to understand the arguments. This book should appeal to college students, scholars, and those working in departments of culture and antiquities. -- African Studies QuarterlyTable of ContentsIntroduction The Bantu Origins of the Chewa The Origins and Migrations of the Chewa According to their Oral Traditions Expansion of the Chewa According to their Oral Traditions The Practice of Archaeology The Iron Age Archaeology of the Southern Lake Malawi Area Discovery and Excavation of the Mankhamba Site Ceramic and Stone Objects Metal Objects and Beads Faunal Remains The Chewa at Mankhamba Long-distance Trade and the Rise of the Maravi Empire The Demise of the Maravi Empire Conclusion

    £24.69

  • Migrants and Masculinity in High-Rise Nairobi:

    James Currey Migrants and Masculinity in High-Rise Nairobi:

    Book SynopsisExamines how young male migrants in urban Nairobi navigate the tension between expectations of success and repetitive failure. Pipeline is a low-income, high-rise-tenement settlement in Nairobi's marginalized East and one of sub-Saharan Africa's most densely populated estates. An aspirational place where fleeting forms of capitalist consumption reassure migrants of an upward trajectory, it is also a place where their ambitions of long-term economic success and stable romantic relationships are routinely thwarted. This book explores how men who migrate to Nairobi from Western Kenya navigate this tension that is generated by the contrast between their view of Pipeline as a launching pad for their personal and professional careers and the fact that they face constant economic, romantic, and personal backlashes. Drawing on over two years of fieldwork, the book reveals that many male migrants design their future on trajectories of personal and economic growth but have to adjust or indefinitely postpone their plans once they arrive in Kenya's capital. Under the pressure to succeed from romantic partners, spouses, rural kin, and children, they create and participate in homosocial spaces where a sense of brotherhood emerges and their experience of pressure is attenuated. Alongside a deep ethnographic exploration of how male migrants model their financial, physical, and mental well-being in three different masculine spaces - an ethnically homogenous investment group, an interethnic gym, and the semi-digital sphere of self-help books, workshops, and motivational trainings on man- and fatherhood - this book brings a new perspective to our understanding of urban African life and the nature of masculinity. This title is available under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND, with funding from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Open Access Fund and the German Research Foundation.Trade ReviewEthnographically rich and revealing, this highly readable book brings alive the experiences of Nairobi's migrant men at home and in the workplace, among family and friends, and with women and male peers. In vivid, accessible prose and with obvious empathy, Mario Schmidt shows how economic constraints and social obstacles constantly frustrate-but never extinguish-his interlocutors' desires to live up to widely shared expectations of manhood. -- Daniel Jordan Smith * Charles C. Tillinghast, Jr. Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology, Brown University and author of To Be a Man Is Not a One-Day Job: Masculinity, Money, and Intimacy in Nigeria (2017) *In this engrossing and highly readable ethnography, Schmidt traces the changing contours of gender relations among migrants to Nairobi. Both theoretically grounded and ethnographically nuanced, the book sheds important light on how men navigate the relentless anxieties and pressures that mark their day to day lives. Few studies offer such an intimate and textured portrayal of urban lives on the continent. -- Catherine Dolan * Professor of Anthropology, SOAS, University of London *Fascinating, thought-provoking, crucial ethnography of masculinity in the context of youth, aspiration, and structural precarity. The details matter and the stories are vivid, sympathetic, and critical. You can feel the pressure of life in Nairobi's high-rise tenement housing. This book charts new territory for masculinity, migration, and urban studies in Africa. -- Bettina Ng'weno * Associate Professor, UC Davis *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction Part 1: Experiencing Pressure 1. The History and Infrastructure of an Aspirational Estate 2. Economic Pressure and the Expectation of Success 3. Romantic Responsibilities and Marital Mistrust Part 2: Evading Pressure 4. Investing in Male Sociality and Wasteful Masculinity 5. Lifting Weights and the Performance of Brotherhood 6. Masculinity Consultants and the Threat of Men's Expendability Conclusion: Pipeline to Nowhere Bibliography Index

    £23.82

  • The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights

    James Currey The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights

    Book SynopsisLandmark study of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights. Documents on one side the international community's inability to foist a human rights system upon Africa and on the other the process within the OAU (now African Union) that eventually brought it into being and determined its content. The African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR), which was proposed in 1979, adopted in 1981 and came into effect in 1986, was the first non-Western declaration of human rights and the first official statement of an African human rights perspective. With Africa largely absent in 1948 when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted, it stands in stark historical reproach to the Western conception of universal human rights as a pivotal document in the decolonisation of the continent. This book, for the first time, presents a comprehensive account of the development of the ACHPR, which is key to a proper understanding of its fundamental nature. Through documenting its process of construction, it becomes possible to understand how Africans themselves understood the process and the issues involved and how the ACHPR became a political text asserted by African leaders and not a continuum of a so-called universal human rights tradition. The result is a radical repositioning of the underlying context of the ACHPR, one of the most important documents in modern African history, of how it came to be and how it should therefore be understood. Volume 2 describes the process through which the ACHPR came into being. Analysing the role of Western governments, the UN and NGOs, it shows that, contrary to the prevailing view of African human rights commentators, their influence was limited and at times counter-productive. That, in fact, the formulation of the ACHPR was a profoundly political process that was primarily a product of an African desire to instigate its own human rights perspective as a counter to the human rights universalism advanced by the Western post-war human rights tradition.Table of ContentsIntroduction PART THREE: THE INFLUENCE OF OUTSIDERS 1. The outsiders - Western governments, the UN and NGOs Western governments - The USA, UK and France The United Nations Non-Governmental Organisations The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) PART FOUR: THE POLITICAL PROCESS 2. The Insiders - the Political Process of the ACHPR The Commonwealth human rights initiative The gestation and birth of Decision 115 The 1979 UN Monrovia Seminar The drafting process Postscript: Ratification, implementation and compliance 3. The Text Title Preamble Part I Rights and Duties Part II Measures of Safeguard Part III General Provisions Conclusion APPENDICES Appendix 1: The OAU Charter Appendix 2: The ACHPR

    £85.50

  • Young Women against Apartheid: Gender, Youth and

    James Currey Young Women against Apartheid: Gender, Youth and

    Book SynopsisProvides a new perspective on the struggle against apartheid, and contributes to key debates in South African history, gender inequality, sexual violence, and the legacies of the liberation struggle. WINNER OF THE RHS GLADSTONE BOOK PRIZE 2022 WINNER OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF CHILDREN AND YOUTH GRACE ABBOTT BOOK PRIZE 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE ASAUK FAGE & OLIVER PRIZE 2022 While there have been many books on South Africa's liberation struggle during the 1980s and early 1990s, the story of the involvement of African girls and young women has been all but missing. This book tells their story, analysing what life was like for African girls under apartheid, why some chose to join the struggle, and how they navigated the benefits and pitfalls of political activism. These were women who, as teenagers and secondary school students, made an unconventional choice to join student organizations, engage in public protest, and take up arms against the state. They did so against their parents' wishes and in contravention of societal norms that confined girls to the home and made township streets dangerous places for female students. They participated in both non-violent and violent forms of political action, including attending marches and rallies, throwing stones or petrol bombs at police, and punishing suspected informers and other offenders, and even joining underground guerrilla armies. Thousands of these young women were eventually detained, interrogated, and tortured by the apartheid state. At the heart of this book lie the life histories of the female comrades themselves, who in interviews construct themselves as decisive actors in South Africa's liberation struggle. Primarily a work of oral history, this book is not only concerned with what female comrades did, but equally with how these women remember and narrate their time as activists: how they reconstruct their pasts; relate their personal experiences to collective histories of the struggle; and insert themselves into a historical narrative from which they have been excluded. Through exploring these women's memories, this book serves as an important corrective to South Africa's male-centric literature on violence, and provides a new gendered perspective on the wider histories of township politics, activism, and conflict.Trade Review"Where were the girls and young women?" asks Emily Bridger in this powerful and timely revision of the historiography of South Africa's liberation struggle. As Bridger shows so vividly, girls and young women were everywhere in the struggle against apartheid. They were at the school, in the home, at the meeting, on the street, and in the prison cell. They were in the struggle. While standard accounts of the struggle for liberation are content to depict it as a male-only affair, with women playing nothing more than a supportive role, Bridger takes the reader past those sterile accounts to show us women as activists, leaders and risk-takers. But this was no easy task for girls and young women. For girls and women to participate in the struggle for freedom, they had to fight against both their elders and apartheid. They had to fight first against their fathers for the right to be involved in the struggle before they could take on the apartheid state. These girls and women, presented here in their own voices, made an unconventional choice. But they needed to do that to fight for their liberation and to be in a position today to help Bridger re-imagine the history of the liberation struggle. As Bridger shows so brilliantly, this book is not yet another account of what happened in the past; it is much more important than that. It is about girls and young women making history in the past and then narrating that history in the present. A truly remarkable book. * Jacob Dlamini *Emily Bridger's Young Women Against Apartheid is a groundbreaking book [...] based on a remarkable series of interviews that the author conducted with 49 former youth activists (mainly women), allowing rich insights into everyday life within these movements. -- Journal of African HistoryTable of ContentsIntroduction African Girlhood under the Apartheid State The School: Becoming a Female Comrade The Home: Negotiating Family, Girlhood and Politics The Meeting: Contesting Gender and Creating a Movement The Street: Gendering Collective Action and Political Violence The Prison Cell: Gender, Trauma and Resistance The Interview: Reflecting on the Struggle Conclusion

    £23.82

  • The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe 2000-2020:

    James Currey The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe 2000-2020:

    Book SynopsisInnovative and challenging study that provides fresh insights on the anthropology of death and postcolonial politics. In 1898, just before she was hanged for rebelling against colonial rule, Charwe Nyakasikana, spirit medium of the legendary ancestor Ambuya Nehanda, famously prophesised that "my bones will rise again". A century later bones, bodies and human remains have come to occupy an increasingly complex place in Zimbabwe's postcolonial milieu. From ancestral "bones" rising again in the struggle for independence, and later land, to resurfacing bones of unsettled wardead; and from the troubling decaying remains of post-independence gukurahundi massacres to the leaky, tortured bodies of recent election violence, human materials are intertwined in postcolonial politics in ways that go far beyond, yet necessarily implicate, contests over memory, commemoration and the representation of the past. In this book Joost Fontein examines the complexities of human remains in Zimbabwe's 'politics of the dead'. Challenging and innovative, he takes us beyond current scholarship on memory, commemoration and the changing significance of 'traditional' death practices, to examine the political implications of human remains as material substances, as duplicitous rumours, and as returning spirits. Linking the indeterminacy of human substances to the productive but precarious uncertainties of rumours and spirits, the book points to how the incompleteness of death is politically productive and ultimately derives from the problematic, entangled excessivities of human material and immaterial existence, and is deeply intertwined with the stylistics of postcolonial power and politics. Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology, University of Johannesburg. He was previously Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging (James Currey, 2015), shortlisted for the African Studies Association 2016 Herskovits Prize. Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg PressTrade ReviewAn innovative and challenging study that provides fresh insights on the anthropology of death and post-colonial politics. * Zimbabwe Review *This very important book offers valuable contributions to our understanding of the everyday politics of the dead in Zimbabwe. The author's theorization and discussion of the typologies of death, bones, and human remains are useful to a wider audience, within and beyond Zimbabwe, including academics and graduate students within the field of anthropology and sociology of death, political and contemporary history of Zimbabwe, and spirituality and religious studies. -- Death StudiesBeyond doubt, this is a 'must-have' work for all interested in the relationship between death and the broader, intriguing Zimbabwean past. -- Journal of Southern African StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction Changing death and human corporeality across Africa and beyond The politics of the dead in Zimbabwe The power of uncertainty Sources and structure of the book 1 Liberation Heritage: Bones and the politics of commemoration The burial of Gift Tandare Heritage and commemoration Heritage and commemoration in Zimbabwe Liberation heritage Unsettling Bones 2 Bones & Tortured Bodies: Corporealities of violence and post-violence Resurfacing bones Emotive materiality, affective presence and transforming materials Tortured bodies Towards 'healing' and 'reconciliation' during the GNU 2009-2013 Conclusions 3 Chibondo: Exhumations, uncertainty and the excessivity of human materials The Chibondo exhumations Too 'fresh', 'intact', fleshy, leaky and stinky? The torque of materiality and the excessive potentiality of human remains The politics of uncertainty Conclusions 4 Political Accidents: Rumours, death and the politics of uncertainty The death of Solomon Mujuru Factionalism, rivalries and murky business dealings The inquest A particular kind of death Conclusions 5 Precarious Possession: Rotina Mavhunga, politics and the uncertainties of mediumship Rotina Mavhunga - the diesel n'anga Precarious occupation 6 Mai Melissa: Towards the alterity of spirit and the incompleteness of death Towards the alterity of spirit Conclusions 7 After Mugabe Burying Bob Conclusions Bodies and spirits, change and continuity AIDS, cholera, Congo, prisons, Chiadzwa, diaspora, FTLR, and charismatic Pentecostalisms New directions for liberation heritage Ambuya Nehanda returns? Exhuming Bob?

    £30.24

  • The Vaal Uprising of 1984 & the Struggle for

    James Currey The Vaal Uprising of 1984 & the Struggle for

    Book SynopsisOffers new insights into the struggle against Apartheid, and the poverty and inequality that instigated political resistance. On 3 September 1984 a bloody uprising set the African townships of the Vaal Triangle aflame. Triggered by dissatisfaction over rent increases and a local government that was failing to provide any meaningful political power or social transformation to the black majority, it heralded the insurrectionary period that was to profoundly challenge the administrative and coercive capacities of the apartheid state and greatly contribute towards its demise. Led by a broad coalition of civic organisations, student bodies and trade unions, nationwide protests followed demanding a new political and social order. By the mid-1980s the ideological influence of the African National Congress (ANC) had established its hegemony among township activists and was regarded as the main force in the liberation struggle. Arguing that liberation from poverty and inequality played as significant role in driving the struggle against apartheid as political rights, Rueedi shows how the enactment of the ideals of the 1955 Freedom Charter during the insurrectionary period shaped how communities understood liberation and freedom, both during and after apartheid. She explores the ways in which the establishment and subsequent failure of the model townships was intertwined with struggles for social transformation and dignity; investigates the links between underground networks of the ANC and above ground community structures; and examines how increasing state repression fuelled militancy and political violence, leading to an impasse that signalled the beginning of the end of the apartheid regime.Trade ReviewFor anyone wanting to understand protests and political violence, including the most recent events, this book should be compulsory reading. Rueedi's book makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on the history of the liberation struggle in South Africa and, crucially, the Vaal's role in the insurrection that ended apartheid. -- South African Historical JournalThis book is a welcome contribution and will undoubtedly enrich our understanding about the insurrectionary politics in South Africa during this period. ... clearly demonstrates the influence of the African National Congress (ANC) on local politics and mass mobilization in the Vaal Triangle townships in the 1980s. ... Fascinating and compelling. -- American Historical ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Struggle for Freedom and Emancipation Urbanisation and the Making of the Home "When it rains, the roof leaks": Reforms and the Housing Crisis "Quite a fertile soil": Civic Protest and the Ascendancy of Charterism "Like people having been enclosed suddenly exploding": 3 September 1984 Turning the Tide: The Uprising and its Aftermath "Instigators and agitators": The State Responds "And then you begin to push harder and harder": People's Power and the Dawn of the New Conclusion: Dream Deferred Bibliography

    £23.74

  • Labour & Christianity in the Mission: African

    James Currey Labour & Christianity in the Mission: African

    Out of stock

    Book SynopsisImportant and broadening study of the way Africans engaged with missions, not as beneficiaries of humanitarian philanthropy, but as workers. The important role missions played as places of work has been underexplored, yet missionaries were some of the earliest Europeans who tried to control African labour. African mission workers' roles were not just religious and educational, as they were actively involved, not always voluntarily, in building and domestic work. Focusing on the Anglican Universities' Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) in Tanganyika and Zanzibar in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Michelle Liebst shows how missionaries both supported and undermined the livelihood trajectories of Africans. Revealing the changing nature of relations over time between missionaries - who referred to themselves as "workers" - and the African mission workers, including teachers and priests - whom missionaries referred to as "helpers" - reflected broader political transformations, and this innovative study of missions' role in society adds a critical dimension to our understanding of their function and socio-economic impact and the history of Christianity in Africa.Trade ReviewThe book contributes significantly to historical knowledge of mission activities in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century eastern Africa. -- African Studies QuarterlyTable of ContentsIntroduction: Rethinking Missions as Places of Work Missionary Authority in Late Precolonial Magila, 1867 - 1887 Building the Slave Market Church in Zanzibar, 1864 - 1900 Slave Status and the Mission Boys' School in Zanzibar, 1864 - c.1930 "Mbweni girls" and Slave Status in Zanzibar, 1864 - c.1930 Domestic Service in Magila and Zanzibar, 1864 - c.1930 Conclusion

    Out of stock

    £999.99

  • Namib: The archaeology of an African desert

    James Currey Namib: The archaeology of an African desert

    Book SynopsisWINNER SAfA BOOK PRIZE 2023 The first full-length examination of the archaeology and history of the Namib Desert. This is a story of human survival over the last one million years in the Namib Desert - one of the most hostile environments on Earth. Namib reveals the resilience and ingenuity of desert communities and provides a vivid picture of our species' response to climate change, and ancient strategies to counter ever-present risk. Dusty fragments of stone, pottery and bone tell a history of perpetual transition, of shifting and temporary states of balance. Namib digs beneath the usual evidence of archaeology to uncover a world of arcane rituals, of travelling rain-makers, of intricate social networks which maintained vital systems of negotiated access to scarce resources. Ranging from the earliest evidence of human occupation, through colonial rule and genocide, to the invasion of the desert by South African troops during the First World War, this is the first comprehensive archaeology of the Namib. Among its important contributions are the reclaiming of the indigenous perspective during the brutal colonial occupation, and establishing new material links between the imperialist project in German South West Africa during 1885-1915 and the Third Reich, and between Nazi ideology and Apartheid. Southern Africa: University of Namibia Press/JacanaTrade ReviewNamib is an archaeological page-turner. John Kinahan's writing clearly shows a deep knowledge and mastery of his subject born from many decades of tireless and meticulous research in what is a truly massive study area. * Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa *The book ... is informed by an imaginative and reasoned evocation of pre-history and a close reading of the written record. The author maintains a remarkable balance between close focus and humane vision in his ability to sustain "a story of human survival over the last one million years in one of the most hostile environments on earth". -- Tony Voss * African Studies Quarterly *This book represents a near-lifetime of detailed research .... [it] represents a major contribution to our knowledge of the Deep History of one of the great deserts of the Southern Hemisphere. -- Peter Veth * Canadian Journal of African Studies *Namib is exceptionally well-written. Those who are not archaeological initiates will welcome the opportunity to get an insight into the craft of the archaeologist and appreciate the requisite for presenting well-researched and analysed evidence. -- Eckhard Schleberger * Journal of Namibian Studies *Table of Contents1. INTRODUCTION: A radical new approach 2. FIRST FOOTSTEPS: Early human ancestors 3. TIMES ARROW: Desert survival strategies 4. MOUNTAIN REFUGE: Isolated refugia & ritual practice 5. ELEPHANTS AND RAIN: Rain-making and initiation 6. DESERT GARDEN: Pottery & tending desert food plants 7. THE FAMILY HERD: Ovahimba desert pastoralists 8. THE BLACK SWAN: Indigenous views on colonial penetration 9. MEN IN HATS: Missionaries, traders, prospectors, hunters 10. THE DEATH OF MEMORY: Lifting the veil on colonial Genocide EPILOGUE: Critical reappraisal: desert as natural wilderness or - the familiar home of people now banished?

    £39.08

  • Marikana: A People's History

    James Currey Marikana: A People's History

    Book SynopsisIn-depth account of the Marikana massacre, based on the voices of the miners and their families themselves, from the build up to the strike to attempts to hold the state to account and its lasting significance. In August 2012 the South African police - at the encouragement of mining capital, and with the support of the political state - intervened to end a week-long strike at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana, in South Africa's NorthWest Province. On the afternoon of Thursday, 16 August, the police shot and killed 34 men. Hundreds more were injured, some shot as they fled. None posed a threat to any police officer. Recognised by many as an event of international significance in stories of global politics and labour relations, the perspectives of the miners has however been almost missing from published accounts. This book, for the first time, brings into focus the mens' lives - and deaths - telling the stories of those who embarked on the strike, those who were killed, and of the family members who have survived to fight for the memories of their loved ones. It places the strike in the context of South Africa's long history of racial and economic exclusion, explaining how the miners came to be in Marikana, how their lives were ordinarily lived, and the substance of their complaints. It shows how the strike developed from an initial gathering into a mass movement of more than 3,000 workers. It discusses the violence of the strike and explores the political context of the state's response, and the eagerness of the police to collaborate in suppressing the strike. Recounting the events of the massacre in unprecedented detail, the book sets out how each miner died and everything we know about the police operation. Finally, Brown traces the aftermath: the attempts of the families of the deceased to identify and bury their dead, and then the state's attempts to spin a narrative that placed all blame on the miners; the subsequent Commission of Inquiry - and its failure to resolve any real issues; and the solidarity politics that have emerged since. Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): Jacana.Trade ReviewIn Marikana: A People's History, Julian Brown, a political studies professor at Wits University, has crafted what is probably the most comprehensive account to date of the Marikana massacre and its aftermath. * DAILY MAVERICK *Table of ContentsAcknowledgements List of Abbreviations and Acronyms Introduction PART I: THE LIVES OF WORKERS 1. Migrant Lives 2. A Company Town 3. Politics Underground PART II: THE STRIKE AND THE MASSACRE 4. The Strike Begins 5. Monday, 13 August 2012 6. Tightening the Screws 7. The Massacre at Scene One 8. The Massacre at Scene Two PART III: AFTER THE MASSACRE 9. Burying the Dead 10. The Farlam Commission 11. Communities of Resistance 12. 'Let us Not Lose Hope' Conclusion: The Work of Mourning Sources and Interpretation Bibliography

    £23.74

  • Competing Catholicisms

    James Currey Competing Catholicisms

    Book SynopsisExplores the impact of Jesuit missions on the development of Christianity in postcolonial French Africa.

    £25.64

  • Forest Politics in Kenyas Tugen Hills

    James Currey Forest Politics in Kenyas Tugen Hills

    Book SynopsisExplores the ways in which human and forest futures are interdependent, and the need to recognize its multiple meanings equally with its wealth of natural resources.

    £85.50

  • Newsprint Literature and Local Literary

    James Currey Newsprint Literature and Local Literary

    Book SynopsisGroundbreaking examination of literary production in West African newspapers and local printing presses in the first half of the 20th century, which adds an African perspective to transatlantic Black studies, and shows how African newsprint creativity has shaped readers' ways of imagining subjectivity and society under colonialism. From their inception in the 1880s, African-owned newspapers in 'British West Africa' carried an abundance of creative writing by local authors, largely in English. Yet to date this rich and vast array of work has largely been ignored in critical discussion of African literature and cultural history. This book, for the first time, explores this under-studied archive of ephemeral writing - from serialised fiction to poetry and short stories, philosophical essays, articles on local history, travelogues and reviews, and letters - and argues for its inclusion in literary genres and anglophone world literatures. Combining in-depth case studies of creative writing in the Ghana and Nigeria press with a major reappraisal of the Nigerian pamphlets known as 'Onitsha market literature', and focusing on non-elite authors, the author examines hitherto neglected genres, styles, languages, and, crucially, readerships. She shows how local print cultures permeated African literary production, charting changes in literary tastes and transformations to genres and styles, as they absorbed elements of globally circulating English texts into formats for local consumption. Offering fresh trajectories for thinking about local and transnational African literary networks while remaining attuned to local textual cultures in contexts of colonial power relations, anticolonial nationalism, the Cold War and global circuits of cultural exchange, this important book reveals new insights into ephemeral literature as significant sites of literary production, and contributes to filling a gap in scholarship on colonial West Africa.Trade ReviewThis book is one of the best I've ever read about African book history and African literary production. ... It's gripping and wonderful work, and an important contribution to the field. The scholarship is impeccable - rich and detailed ... It wonderfully combines an account of little-known facts about the history of West African newspapers with analysis of the implications, via reflection on coloniality, capitalism, class, and gender. * Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University *This book stands to expand the scope of discussion about neglected aspects of Anglophone literary culture. ... A work of serious, dedicated and painstaking scholarship, written with admirable cultural fluency. ... The argument is compelling, and the scholarly context of the project is rigorously described. On the evidence of its archival interest alone, the manuscript is an excellent achievement, and the way it draws attention to overlooked or neglected areas of creative output is a commendable model of revisionist literary history. * Akin Adesokan, Indiana University *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Anglo-Scribes and Anglo-Literates in West African Newspaper History 2. The Time of Letters: Epistolarity and Nigerian Newsprint Cultures 3. 'Shameless Thefts' vs Local Literatures: Dusé Mohamed Ali's Comet 4. Onitsha Pamphlets: Youth Literature for the Modern World 5. The Work of Repetition in Nigerian Epistolary Pamphlets 6. English Romantic Discourse: Women vs Men 7. Female Critical Communities in Nigerian Pamphlet Literature: 'Beware of Women' 8. Writing Time: African Cold War Aesthetics and Nigerian Political Dramas of the 1960s 9. Romances from the Nigerian Civil War: Veronica's End Conclusion: Local Aesthetics

    £66.50

  • Newsprint Literature and Local Literary Creativity in West Africa 1900s  1960s

    Boydell & Brewer Ltd Newsprint Literature and Local Literary Creativity in West Africa 1900s 1960s

    Book SynopsisGroundbreaking examination of literary production in West African newspapers and local printing presses in the first half of the 20th century.From their inception in the 1880s, African-owned newspapers in 'British West Africa' carried an abundance of creative writing by local authors, largely in English. Yet to date this rich and vast array of work has largely been ignored in critical discussion of African literature and cultural history. This book, for the first time, explores this under-studied archive of ephemeral writing - from serialised fiction to poetry and short stories, philosophical essays, articles on local history, travelogues and reviews, and letters - and argues for its inclusion in literary genres and anglophone world literatures. Combining in-depth case studies of creative writing in the Ghana and Nigeria press with a major reappraisal of the Nigerian pamphlets known as 'Onitsha market literature', and focusing on non-elite authors, the author examines hitherto neglected genres, styles, languages, and, crucially, readerships. She shows how local print cultures permeated African literary production, charting changes in literary tastes and transformations to genres and styles, as they absorbed elements of globally circulating English texts into formats for local consumption. Offering fresh trajectories for thinking about local and transnational African literary networks while remaining attuned to local textual cultures in contexts of colonial power relations, anticolonial nationalism, the Cold War and global circuits of cultural exchange, this important book reveals new insights into ephemeral literature as significant sites of literary production, and contributes to filling a gap in scholarship on colonial West Africa.Winner: 2024 Gustav Ranis International Book Prize

    £23.74

  • ALT  42 Oral and Written African Poetry and

    James Currey ALT 42 Oral and Written African Poetry and

    Book SynopsisExamines the state of African poetry today, the continuing influence of Africa's pioneer poets, today's new generation and their work in written poetry and in spoken word, continuing oral indigenous traditions.Almost half a century after ALT 6 and thirty-three years after ALT 16, what is the state of poetry and poetics in Africa? This volume of ALT highlights major developments and continuities in the practice of the art of poetry in the continent. Contributions analyse new frontiers in the traditional African epic and the Yoruba oríkì genre and innovations in form and theme, such as 'spoken word poetry' shared on digital media and pandemic poetry in the wake of COVID-19. They compare and contrast the work of Romeo Oriogun, Christopher Okigbo, and Gabriel Okara and of T.S. Eliot and Kofi Anyidoho. Other essays examine the complexities of translation from Ewe into English and the development of oral African poetry, underscoring its dynamism and the centrality of performance. The volume also includes interviews with poets Kofi Anyidoho, Kwame Dawes, and Kehinde Akano and tributes to Ama Ata Aidoo. Altogether, it highlights the richness and vibrancy of contemporary praxis and points to future directions in the field.

    £76.00

  • Iimbali zamandulo

    James Currey Iimbali zamandulo

    Book SynopsisRecollections of ordinary people, in isiXhosa and English translation, of daily life and historical events in the nineteenth centuryIimbali zamandulo - 'Stories of the Past' - is a selection of historical testimonies produced by Xhosa-speaking residents of the Eastern Cape between 1838 and 1910. These narratives offer fresh insights into the history of the Xhosa-speaking peoples, providing their own perspectives on their own past.The volume contains recollections reaching back to seventeenth-century dynastic disputes, to a period preceding the southward migrations in the early nineteenth century into territories settled by Xhosa-speaking peoples. It passes on through those migrations, the clashes and resettlement of peoples and of individuals, the contest for land throughout the century, and on to the struggle for social control and the assertion of cultural identity by the century's end.To a remarkable extent, we are lent intimate access here to the lives of ordinary people, seeking better pastures for themselves, their families and their livestock; hunting, fighting and, above all, confronting personal conflict in their choices between mission Christianity and ancestral beliefs; between support for their chiefs or the colonial authorities; between active or passive resistance to encroachment on their territory; and between colonial distortions purveyed in the schools and their receding grasp of their own sustaining histories.University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community

    £117.00

  • Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in

    Wits University Press Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in

    Book SynopsisWas the ""mfecane"" a figment of historians' imagination as Julian Cobbing contends? How large a responsibility do Shaka and the Zulu people bear for the social turbulence in South-central and South-east Africa in the early decades of the 19th century? These are some of the issues explored in this collection, which is designed as a response to the radical critique of Dr Cobbing and other scholars. The ""mfecane"", suggests Cobbing, must be seen as a myth lying at the root of a set of interlinked assumptions and distortions that have seriously twisted our understanding of the main historical processes of late 18th- and early 19th-century Southern Africa. Contributors to this collection assess the implications of this critique for scholars from a range of disciplines, notably history, anthropology, archaeology, history of art and African languages. But the book is not only about the debate over Cobbing's work; it is also an indicator of the state of current scholarship in Southern Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries and, because it raises questions about the nature of sources and, indeed, about the nature of historical debate itself, it is also about historiography. This book should provide a useful guide for students starting out in this field, as well as a resource for established scholars seeking their way through the textual intricacies of varied editions and secondary texts that become the primary sources for historiographical debate.Table of ContentsPreface Acknowledgements Notes on Orthography and Names Contributors Introduction Part One: Historiography and Methodology Putting the Mfecane Controversy into Historiographical Context Chapter 1. Pre-Cobbing Mfecane Historiography Chapter 2. Old Wine in New Bottles The Persistence of Narrative Structures in the Historiography of the Mfecane and the Great Trek Chapter 3. Hunter-Gatherers, Traders and Slaves The ‘Mfecane’ Impact on Bushmen, Their Ritual and Their Art Chapter 4. Language and Assassination Cutural Negationas in White Writers’ Portrayal of Shaka and the Zulu Part Two: The South-Eastern Coastal Region Beyond the concept of the ‘Zulu Explosion’ Comments on the Current Debate Chapter 5. Sources of Conflict in Southern Africa c. 1800-1830 The ‘Mfecane’ Reconsidered Chapter 6. Political Transformations in the Thukela-Mzimkhulu Region in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries Chapter 7. ‘The Character and Objects of Chaka’ A Reconsideration of the Making of Shaka as Mfecane Motor Chapter 8. Matiwane’s Road to Mbholompo A Reprieve for the Mfecane? Chapter 9. Unmasking the Fingo The War of 1835 Revisted Chapter 10. The Mfecane Survives its Critics Part Three: The Interior ‘The time of troubles’ Difaqane in the Interior Chapter 11. Archaeological Indicators of Stress in the Western Transvaal Region between the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries Chapter 12. Prelude to Difaqane in the Interior of the Southern Africa c.1600-c. 1822 Chapter 13. Conflict in the Western Highveld/Southern Kalahari c.1750-1820 Chapter 14. ‘Hungry Wolves’ The Impact of Violence on Rolong Life, 1823-1836 Chapter 15. The Battle of Dithakong and ‘Mfecane’ Theory Chapter 16. Untapped Sources Slave Exports from Southern and Central Namibia up to c.1850 Glossary Abbreviations Bibliographer’s Note Bibliography Complete List of Papers Presented at the Colloquium Index

    £33.25

  • Young Warriors: Youth politics, identity and

    Wits University Press Young Warriors: Youth politics, identity and

    Book SynopsisMuch has been written about South Africa‘s ‘lost generation’ – the generation of politicised youth who dedicated their lives to the liberation of a nation, and who ‘lost’ everything in the process. Young Warriors is about this generation, but it is also a critique of the very concept of ‘lost generation’. While focussing on the lives of the men and women who lived in Diepkloof, a black township in South Africa, it is a narrative of many young black South Africans who ‘grew up’ in the organisations of the ANC-led liberation movement. It is also the story of activists who became leaders, provincial premiers and national ministers in our democratic society. Through extensive interviews and time spent in Diepkloof, Monique Marks documents the tales of a group of Charterist youth during the mid-eighties to early nineties. During this period participating in the Charterist youth movement fundamentally shaped these individuals’ lives and the future of their society. Marks revisits their lives at the beginning of the third millennium in a new democratic South Africa characterised by a radical decline in this social movement. Marks explores, from the point of view of the youths themselves, how and why township youth joined mass-based political organisations and how, through their involvement in these organisations, their lives and identities were shaped in significant ways. She examines in fascinating detail how youth planned and executed acts of political violence, who participated in these acts, and what justifications they offered for their involvement in collective violence. The involvement of politicised youth in acts of collective violence has led to speculation as to whether or not former activist youth are responsible for the increase in violent crime in contemporary South Africa. Young Warriors provides some tentative answers to questions about youth and crime.Table of ContentsDedication Acknowledgements Foreword by Makgane Thobejane List of abbreviations Dramatis personae Chapter 1 Why did Comrade Vuyani Mabaxa have to die? Chapter 2 White woman in 'Little Beirut' Chapter 3 Children of the forced removals: Diepkloof and its youth Chapter 4 'Organise and mobilise': The emergence of youth organisations in Diepkloof Chapter 5 Becoming a comrade Chapter 6 'There is nothing left for the youth': Youth organisations in the early '90s Chapter 7 'We cannot die alone': Engaging in collective violence Chapter 8 'We are fighting for the liberation of our people': Justifications of violence Chapter 9 Did Vuyani Mabaxa die in vain? Appendix 1 Theorising Diepkloof youth Appendix 2 The Freedom Charter Bibliography Index

    £23.76

  • We Write What We Like: Celebrating Steve Biko

    Wits University Press We Write What We Like: Celebrating Steve Biko

    Book SynopsisSteve Biko, father of the black consciousness philosophy, was killed in prison on 12 September 1977. Biko was only 30 years old, but his ideas and political activities changed the course of South African history and helped hasten the end of apartheid. This year, 2007, saw the 30th anniversary of Biko's death. To mark the occasion, the Minister of Science and Technology and President of Azapo, Dr. Mosibudi Mangena, commissioned Chris van Wyk to compile an anthology of essays as a tribute to the great South African son. Among the contributors are Minister Mangena himself, President Thabo Mbeki, writer Darryl Accone, journalists Lizeka Mda and Bokwe Mafuna, academics Jonathan Jansen, Achille Mbembe, Mandla Seleoane and Saths Cooper, a friend of Biko's and former president of Azapo. The essays cover a wide range of key moments in a significant time in South African history, both personal and public - being on trial with Biko, talking with him about his philosophy and his vision, listening to him speak from a podium. Some of the contributors never met Biko face to face but their accounts are nevertheless interesting as they describe the moment when Biko's philosophy captured their imaginations, as it swept through a generation hungry and eager for a new and dynamic way to fight oppression. We write what we like proudly echoes the title of Biko's seminal I write what I like. It is a gift to a new generation which enjoys freedom, from one that was there when this freedom was being fought for. And it celebrates the man whose legacy is the freedom to think and say and write what we like.

    £25.65

  • Five Hundred Years Rediscovered: Southern African

    Wits University Press Five Hundred Years Rediscovered: Southern African

    Book SynopsisIn the age of the African Renaissance, southern Africa has needed to reinterpret the past in fresh and more appropriate ways. The last 500 years represent a strikingly unexplored and misrepresented period which remains disfigured by colonial/apartheid assumptions, most notably in the way that African societies are seen as fixed, passive, isolated, un-enterprising and unenlightened.This period is one of the most formative in relation to southern Africa's past while remaining, in many ways, the least known. Key cultural contours took shape, while in a jagged and uneven fashion some of the features of modern identities emerged. Enormous internal economic innovation and political experimentation was taking place at the same time as expanding European mercantile forces started to press upon southern African shores and its hinterlands. This suggests that interaction, flux and mixing were a strong feature of the period, rather than the homogeneity and fixity proposed in standard historical and archaeological writings."" Five Hundred Years Rediscovered: Southern African Precedents and Prospects"" represents the first step, by a group of archaeologists and historians, to collectively reframe, revitalise and re-examine the last 500 years. By integrating research and developing trans-frontier research networks, the group hopes to challenge thinking about the region's expanding internal and colonial frontiers, and to extend current perceptions about southern Africa's colonial past.Table of ContentsPreface 1 Introduction Section 1 Disciplinary Identities: Methodological Considerations 2 Historical archaeologies of southern Africa: precedents and prospects J. Behrens and N. Swanepoel 3 South Africa in Africa more than five hundred years ago: some questions N. Parsons 4 Towards an outline of the oral geography, historical identity and political economy of the Late Precolonial Tswana in the Rustenburg region S. Hall, M. Anderson, J. Boeyens and F. Coetzee 5 Metals beyond frontiers: exploring the production, distribution and use of metals in the Free State grasslands, South Africa S. Chirikure, S. Hall and T. Maggs 6 deTuin, a 19th-century mission station in the Northern Cape A.G. Morris 7 Reinterpreting the origins of Dzata: archaeology and legends E. Hanisch Section 2 Material Identities 8 Revisiting Bokoni: populating the stone ruins of the Mpumalanga Escarpment P. Delius and M.H. Schoeman 9 The Mpumalanga Escarpment settlements: some answers, many questions T. Maggs 10 Post-European contact glass beads from the southern African interior: a tentative look at trade, consumption and identities M. Wood 11 Ceramic alliances: pottery and the history of the Kekana Ndebele in the old Transvaal A.B. Esterhuysen Section 3 ‘Troubled Times’: Warfare, State Formation and Migration in the Interior 12 Rediscovering the Ndwandwe kingdom J. Wright 13 Swazi oral tradition and Northern Nguni historical archaeology P. Bonner 14 Mfecane mutation in Central Africa: a comparison of the Makololo and the Ngoni in Zambia, 1830s-1898 A. Kanduza List of contributors Index

    £25.65

  • Entanglement: Literary and cultural reflections

    Wits University Press Entanglement: Literary and cultural reflections

    Book SynopsisThis original book is a much needed and far reaching exploration of post-apartheid South African life worlds. ""Entanglement"" aims to capture the contradictory mixture of innovation and inertia, of loss, violence and xenophobia as well as experimentation and desegregation, which characterises the present. The author explores the concept of entanglement in relation to readings of literature, new media forms and painting. In the process, she moves away from a persistent apartheid optic, drawing on ideas of sameness and difference, and their limits, in order to elicit ways of living and imagining that are just starting to take shape and for which we might not yet have a name. In the background of her investigations lies a preoccupation with a future-oriented politics, one that builds on largely unexplored terrains of mutuality while being attentive to a historical experience of confrontation and injury. This book works with the idea of entanglement - a rubric within which we can begin to meet the challenge of the 'after apartheid'. Entanglement offers a means by which to draw into our analyses those sites in which what was once thought of as separate come together or find points of intersection in unexpected ways. It is an idea which signals largely unexplored terrains of mutuality, wrought from a common, though often coercive and confrontational, experience. It points away from a time of resistance towards a more ambivalent moment, in which the time of potential, both latent and actively surfacing in South Africa, exists in complex tandem with new kinds of closure and opposition.Trade Review"... a finger-on-the-pulse report from the cultural frontline of contemporary South Africa. Elegantly and lucidly written, it offers a penetrating and unique analysis of the complex and paradoxical forms of culture emerging in South Africa now. -Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg"

    £23.75

  • Alexandra: A history

    Wits University Press Alexandra: A history

    Book SynopsisAlexandra - A History is a social history of one of South Africa's oldest townships. It covers the period from the township's founding in 1912, when it was perceived as a peri-urban out-post, through to its growth as a centre of black working class life in the heart of Johannesburg, to the post-apartheid era. Declared as a location for 'natives and coloureds', Alexandra became home to a diverse population where home-owners, tenants, squatters, hostel-dwellers, workers and migrants drawn from every corner of the country converged to make a life in the city. The stories of ordinary people are at the core of the township's history. Based on scores of life history interviews, the book portrays in vivid detail the daily struggles and tribulation of Alexandrans. A focus point is the rich history of political resistance, in which civic movements and political organisations - such as the ANC, Communist Party and socialist organisations like the Movement for Democracy of Content - organised bus boycotts, anti-removal and anti-pass campaigns, and mobilised for housing and a better life for residents. But the book is not only about politics. It tells the stories of daily life, of the making of urban cultures and of the infamous Spoilers and Msomi gangs. Over weekends Alexandra came alive as soccer matches, church services and shebeens vied for the attention of residents. ""Alexandra - A History"" highlights the social complexities of the township, which at times caused tension between different segments of the population, such as between the 'bona fides' and amagoduka, stand-owners and tenants, or hostel-dwellers and township residents. Above all else the community spirit of Alexandrans, expressed in an enduring love for the place, has repeatedly triumphed in the face of untold misery and adversity.

    £30.00

  • The Origins of Non-Racialism: White opposition to

    Wits University Press The Origins of Non-Racialism: White opposition to

    Book SynopsisThe Constitution of post-apartheid South Africa declares the Republic to be 'a sovereign, democratic state' founded on 'human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms; non-racialism and non-sexism'. After centuries of white domination and decades of increasingly savage repression, freedom came to South Africa far later than elsewhere in the continent - and yet was marked by a commitment to non-racialism. Nelson Mandela's Cabinet and government were made up of women and men of all races, and many spoke of the birth of a new 'Rainbow Nation'. How did this come about? How did an African nationalist liberation movement resisting apartheid - a universally denounced violent expression of white supremacy - open its doors to other races, and whites, in particular? At what cost to itself? And what did non-racialism mean - why could whites, coloureds and Indians not join the African National Congress (ANC) until after 1990, when the ANC was unbanned, but had to remain racially discrete 'partners' - while fighting for a non-racial future? Why could members of all races join the Communist Party and the Liberal Party - but not the ANC? This book uncovers some of the stories and hidden histories that help explain our past. It focuses on a talented, brave, but tiny minority of whites - liberals, radicals, communists, Trotskyists, humanists, Christians, idealists - who rejected the growing racism of post-war South Africa and worked to breach the dividing line between black and white. From the Torch Commando, which could mobilise tens of thousands of whites at the beginning of the 1950s, to the Liberal Party and Congress of Democrats, which could boast only a few hundred members by the end of the decade, white activists fought to maintain the vision of racial equality in an increasingly divided society. Their African nationalist allies fought a harder battle within the ANC and other organisations, under growing pressure from Africanists and others, to keep alive the notion that black and white could struggle together and could live peacefully side by side. Together, black and white activists developed a theory of struggle and ways of mobilising that somehow kept alive the ideal of a non-racial South Africa. The democratic state ushered in after 1994 can be traced back directly to the work they undertook in the 1950s and after.Trade ReviewThis book is a path-breaking study of the emergence of non-racialism, considering a range of strands: some pursing liberal paths, others working for national liberation or communism. It is a painstaking insight into the Congress Movement and the Communist Party, then operating underground, as well as the Liberal Party, drawing on widespread oral and archival material. - Raymond Suttner, UNISA, author of The ANC UndergroundTable of ContentsWhites and the ANC 1945-1950; the emergence of white opposition to apartheid, 1950-1952; multiracialism - communist plot or anti-communist ploy?; From CPSA to SACP via CST: Socialist responses to African Nationalism, 1952-1954; The South African congress of democrats; the liberal party of South Africa; overhauling liberalisml whites and the congress of the people; the freedom charter and the politics of non-racialism, 1956-1960.

    £25.65

  • Mbeki and After: Reflections on the Legacy of

    Wits University Press Mbeki and After: Reflections on the Legacy of

    Book SynopsisFor nearly ten years - indeed more if we include his period of influence under Mandela's presidency - Thabo Mbeki bestrode South Africa's political stage. Despite attempts by some in the new ANC leadership to airbrush out his role, there can be little doubt that Mbeki was a seminal figure in South Africa's new democracy, one who left a huge mark in many fields, perhaps most controversially in state and party management, economic policy, public health intervention, foreign affairs and race relations. If we wish to understand the character and fate of post-1994 South Africa, we must therefore ask: What kind of political system, economy and society has the former President bequeathed to the government of Jacob Zuma and to the citizens of South Africa generally? This Question is addressed head-on here by a diverse range of analysts, commentators and participants in the political process. Amongst the specific questions they seek to answer: What is Mbeki's legacy for patterns of inclusion and exclusion based on race, class and gender? How, if at all, did his presidency reshape relations within the state, between the state and the ruling party and between the state and society? How did he reposition South Africa on the continent and in the world? This book will be of interest to anyone wishing to understand the current political landscape in South Africa, and Mbeki's role in shaping it.Table of ContentsChapter 1: MBEKI AND HIS LEGACY: A critical introduction DARYL GLASER Chapter 2 MBEKI’S LEGACY: Some conceptual markers PETER HUDSON Chapter 3 WHY IS THABO MBEKI A ‘NITEMARE’? MARK GEVISSER Chapter 4 MACHIAVELLI MEETS THE CONSTITUTION: Mbeki and the law RICHARD CALLAND AND CHRIS OXTOBY Chapter 5 THABO MBEKI AND DISSENT 105 JANE DUNCAN Chapter 6 CIVIL SOCIETY AND UNCIVIL GOVERNMENT: The Treatment Action Campaign versus Thabo Mbeki, 1998-2008 MARK HEYWOOD Chapter 7 SEEING OURSELVES AS OTHERS SEE US: Racism, technique and the Mbeki administration STEVEN FRIEDMAN Chapter 8 TOWARDS A COMMON NATIONAL IDENTITY: Did Thabo Mbeki help or hinder? EUSEBIUS MCKAISER Chapter 9 THABO MBEKI’S LEGACY OF TRANSFORMATIONAL DIPLOMACY CHRIS LANDSBERG Chapter 10 THABO MBEKI AND THE GREAT FOREIGN POLICY RIDDLE PETER VALE

    £25.65

  • Bushman Letters: Interpreting  Xam Narrative

    Wits University Press Bushman Letters: Interpreting Xam Narrative

    Book SynopsisThe Bleek and Lloyd Collection consists of the notebooks in which William Bleek and Lucy Lloyd transcribed and translated the narratives, cultural information and personal histories told to them in the 1870’s by a number of ǀXam informants. It represents a rare and rich record of an indigenous language and culture that no longer exists. The ǀXam materials have exerted a fascination for anthropologists and poets alike. They are compromised, mysterious, and yet essential. How does one begin reading texts that are at once so compromised and so unique? Bushman Letters: Interpreting ǀXam Narrative is an unusual and important book for it examines not only the ǀXam archive but also, and in the first instance, the critical tradition that has grown up around the archive as well as the hermeneutic principles that inform that tradition. It critiques these principles and offers not so much alternative readings as alternative modes of reading. The book accomplishes two things: it shows the problems with the ways that the materials in the Bleek and Lloyd Collection have been approached by previous critics, and it suggests what their interpretations have left out in the course of its own detailed and poetic readings of a number of narratives. The book must be described as metacritical: it is criticism about the critical tradition that has grown up around the ǀXam archive and in the fields of folklore and mythology more widely. Bushman Letters addresses a curiously neglected area in the burgeoning literature on the Bleek and Lloyd collection: the texts themselves. In doing so, the book makes a substantial contribution to the study of oral narratives in general and to the theoretical discourse that informs such studies.Table of ContentsCHAPTER 1: READING NARRATIVE: Some Theoretical Considerations CHAPTER 2: TEXT OR PRESENCE? On Re-reading the |Xam and the Interpretation of their Narratives CHAPTER 3: WHOSE MYTHS ARE THE |XAM NARRATIVES? CHAPTER 4: THE QUESTION OF THE TRICKSTER: Interpreting |Kaggen CHAPTER 5: READING THE HARTEBEEST: A Critical Appraisal of Roger Hewitt’s Interpretation of the |Xam Narratives CHAPTER 6: FORAGING, TALKING AND TRICKSTERS: An Examination of the Contribution of Mathias Guenther’s Tricksters and Trancers to Reading the |Xam Narratives CHAPTER 7: HISTORY AND INTERPRETATION: Some of the Implications of Andrew Bank’s Bushmen in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore for Reading the |Xam Narratives CHAPTER 8: HARE’S LIP AND CROWS’ NECKS: The Question of Origins and Versions in the |Xam Stories CHAPTER 9: THE STORY IN WHICH ‘THE CHILDREN ARE SENT TO THROW THE SLEEPING SUN INTO THE SKY’: Power, Identity and Difference in a |Xam Narrative CHAPTER 10: THE STORY OF ‘THE GIRL OF THE EARLY RACE WHO MADE STARS’: The Discursive Character of the |Xam Texts CHAPTER 11: RELIGION IN A |XAM NARRATIVE CHAPTER 12: ANTJIE KROG, STEPHEN WATSON AND THE METAPHYSICS OF PRESENCE

    £23.75

  • What is slavery to me?: Postcolonial memory and

    Wits University Press What is slavery to me?: Postcolonial memory and

    Book SynopsisMuch has been made about South Africa's transition from histories of colonialism, slavery and apartheid. ""Memory"" features prominently in the country's reckoning with its pasts. While there has been an outpouring of academic essays, anthologies and other full-length texts which study this transition, most have focused on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Pumla Dineo Gqola's What is slavery to me? links with that research in its concern with South Africa's past and the meaning-making processes attendant to it, but reads specifically memory activity which pertains to colonial slavery as practiced predominantly in the Western Cape for three centuries by the British and Dutch. What is slavery to me? is the first full-length study of slave memory in the South African context, and examines the relevance and effects of slave memory for contemporary negotiations of South African gendered and radicalised identities. It draws from feminist, postcolonial and memory studies and is therefore interdisciplinary in approach. It reads memory as one way of processing this past, and interprets a variety of cultural, literary and filmic texts to ascertain the particular experiences in relation to slave pasts being fashioned, processed and disseminated. Much of the material surveyed across disciplines attributes to memory, or ""popular history making"", a dialogue between past and present whilst ascribing sense to both the eras and their relationship. In this sense then, memory is active, entailing a personal relationship with the past which acts as mediator of reality on a day to day basis. The projects studies various negotiations of raced and gendered identities in creative and other public spaces in contemporary South Africa, by being particularly attentive to the encoding of consciousness about the country's slave past. This book extends memory studies in South Africa, provokes new lines of inquiry, and develops new frameworks through which to think about slavery and memory in South Africa.

    £23.75

  • Riding High: Horses, Humans and History in South

    Wits University Press Riding High: Horses, Humans and History in South

    Book Synopsis0 The aim of this volume is to examine nascent movements, genre shifts, developing authors/playwrights and controversial themes as they emerged in both drama and theatre. The editors have focused on the essence of creative nexus of London from the end of the nineteenth century up to the beginning of the Great War (1914). The resultant study discusses Gordon Craig and production design, Wilde, Shaw, Synge, Pinero, Strindberg,Harley Granville Barker,Jones, Archer, Ford Madox Ford, D.H.Lawrence,Galsworthy, Sims, women playwrights, popular theatre among other topics. The work complements J.L.Styan s 3 volume Modern Drama in Theory and Practice and is more focused on late 19th/early 20th c transitions and dramatic breakthroughs than Modern British Drama of Christopher Innes.Table of ContentsChapter 1: ‘But where’s the bloody horse?’ Humans, Horses and Historiography Chapter 2: The Reins of Power: Equine Ecological Imperialism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Chapter 3: Blood Horses: Equine Breeding, Lineage and Purity in Nineteenth-century South Africa Chapter 4: The Empire Rides Back: An African Response to the Horse in Southern Africa Chapter 5: ‘The last of the old campaigners’: Horses in the South African War, c.1899–1902 Chapter 6: ‘The Cinderella of the livestock industry’: The Changing Role of Horses in the First Half of the Twentieth Century Chapter 7: High Horses: Horses, Class and Socio-economic Change in South Africa Chapter 8: The World the Horses Made

    £23.75

  • South Africa and India: Shaping the Global South

    Wits University Press South Africa and India: Shaping the Global South

    Book SynopsisSouth Africa’s future is increasingly tied up with that of India. While trade and investment between the two countries is intensifying, they share long-standing historical ties and have much in common: both countries are important players in the global South. As India emerges as a major economic power, the need to understand these links becomes ever more pressing. Can the two countries enter balanced forms of exchange or will India inevitably dominate? What forms of transnational political community between these two regions have yet to be researched and understood? South Africa and India addresses these questions and offers new approaches for researching transnational histories.Trade Review... makes a significant and innovative contribution by establishing a new field of research. -Preben Kaarsholm, Roskilde University, Denmark In recent years, relations between South Africa and India have burgeoned in bilateral and multilateral contexts, but comparative analyses of their histories, visions and developmental trajectories have barely started. ... Hofmeyr and Williams have assembled an impressive interdisciplinary group of scholars to lend insights into various historical and contemporary facets of India-South Africa relations in ways that enrich the comparative enterprise. -Gilbert M. Khadiagala. University of the Witwatersrand, JohannesburgTable of ContentsHistorical connections : Gandhi's printing press: Indian Ocean print cultures and Cosmopolitanisms; steamship empire - Asian, African and British sailors in the Merchant Marine c. 1880-1945; the interlocking worlds of the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa and India Pradip; the disquieting of history - Portuguese (De)colonisation and Goan Migration in the Indian Ocean; Monty ... Meets Gandhi ... Meets Mandela - the dilemma of non-violent resisters in South Africa, 1940-60. Socio-political comparisons: Renaissances, African and modern - Gandhi as a resource?; Democratic deepening in India and South Africa; local democracy in Indian and South African cities - a comparative literature review; reimagining socialist futures in South Africa and Kerala, India; labour, migrancy and urbanisation in South Africa and India, 1900-60.

    £25.65

  • Ekurhuleni: The making of an urban region

    Wits University Press Ekurhuleni: The making of an urban region

    Book SynopsisEkurhuleni - The Making of an Urban Region is the first academic work to provide an historical account and explanation of the development of this extended region to the east of Johannesburg since its origins at the end of the nineteenth century. From the time of the discovery of gold and coal until the turn of the twenty-first century, the region comprised a number of distinctive towns, all with their own histories. In 2000, these towns were amalgamated into a single metropolitan area, but, unlike its counterparts across the country, it does not cohere around a single identity. Drawing on a significant body of academic work as well as original research by the authors, the book traces and examines some of the salient historical strands that constituted what was formerly known as the East Rand and suggests that, notwithstanding important differences between towns and the racial fragmentation generated by apartheid, the region’s history contains significant common features. Arguably, its centrality as a major mining area and then as the country’s engineering heartland gave Ekurhuleni an overarching distinctive economic character.Table of ContentsOrigins and early days; Class struggle; Black Ekurhuleni, 1890-1927; Ekurhuleni's insubordinate women, 1918-1945; Social worlds and social strains in industrialising Ekurhuleni; Squatter camps and immigrant culture; Politics; Consolidating apartheid and the black response; Making of a modern economy; Reshaping the urban landscape; The student movement of 1976; Ekurhuleni and the struggle against apartheid; A time of insurrection; Politics of the stalemate; The politics of transition; City of fragments; Informal and contentious city.

    £25.65

  • Orlando West, Soweto: An illustrated history

    Wits University Press Orlando West, Soweto: An illustrated history

    Book SynopsisUntil the end of the First World War, urban growth in Johannesburg proceeded unevenly and haphazardly, but under the impact of a wave of militant struggles by black workers and in the context of the devastating impact of the 1918 influenza epidemic, the state became determined to better manage the movement of Africans into the urban areas and to place them in properly controlled locations. The promulgation of the Native (Urban) Areas Act of 1923 was intended to meet these objectives. The Act was a hybrid piece of legislation. On the one hand, it espoused the principles enunciated by the Stallard Commission of 1922, which had infamously declared that an African 'should only be allowed into the urban areas, which are essentially the white man's creation, when he is willing to enter and minister to the needs of the white man, and should depart therefrom when he ceases so to minister'. On the other hand, when it empowered local authorities to set aside land for black residential purposes, it recognised the need to create conditions for the settlement of an urban African population in order to provide a reliable supply of labour to secondary industry. The growing demand for housing led the government to establish Orlando (named after the chairman of the Native Affairs Committee, Edwin Orlando Leake) in 1931, when thousands of African families were evicted from urban slums in and around the city centre and moved there. The authorities described this as a 'model native township' that was supposedly planned along the lines of a garden city. The new location, it promised, would be characterised by tree-lined streets, business opportunities and recreation facilities. Reflecting the views of a somewhat conservative section of the African urban elite, the popular African newspaper Bantu World predicted on 14 May 1932 that the new township 'will undoubtedly be somewhat of a paradise [that] will enhance the status of the Bantu within the ambit of progress and civilisation.' Orlando West, Soweto illuminates the genesis of Orlando township and its well-known subsequent history, which is inextricably linked with the lives of prominent South Africans such as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, amongst many others. A beautiful photographic essay complements the testimony from residents, who describe the way things were, and the way they are now, in the heart of Soweto, South Africa's most iconic African township.Table of ContentsOrigins; Right to the City; place of defiance; uncertain times; good times; work and education; inspired by black consciousness; the students uprising; making of a middle class; making a revolution; photo essay on Vilakazi street.

    £25.65

  • The People’s Paper: A centenary history and

    Wits University Press The People’s Paper: A centenary history and

    Book SynopsisThis much-awaited volume uncovers the long-lost pages of the major African multi-lingual newspaper, Abantu-Batho. Founded in 1912 by African National Congress convener Pixley Seme, with assistance from the Swazi Queen, it was published until 1931, attracting the cream of African politicians, journalists, and poets S.E.K Mqhayi, Nontsizi Mgqwetho and Robert Grendon. In its pages burning issues of the day were articulated alongside cultural by-ways. Comprising both essays on and texts from the paper, it explores the complex movements and individuals that emerged. The essays contribute rich, new material to provide clearer insights into South African politics and intellectual life. The Anthology unveils a judicious selection of never-before-published columns from the paper spanning every year of its life, drawn from repositories on three continents. Abantu-Batho also had a regional and international focus, and by examining all these dynamics across boundaries and disciplines the book transcends established historiographical frontiers to fill a lacuna that scholars have long lamented.Distinguished historians and literary scholars, together with exciting young scholars, plumb the lives and ideas of editors, writers, readers and allied movements. Sharing the considerable interest in the ANC centenary, this unique book will have a strong appeal and secure audience among all interested in history, politics, culture, literature, gender, biography and journalism studies, from academics and students to a general public interested in knowing about this early ANC newspaper, its people and the stories that once captivated South Africans.Table of ContentsIntroduction: A Centenary History of Abantu-Batho, the People’s Paper Peter Limb Chapter 1 ‘Only the Bolder Spirits’: Politics, Racism, Solidarity and War in Abantu-Batho Peter Limb Chapter 2 ‘They Must Go to the Bantu Batho’: Economics and Education, Religion and Gender, Love and Leisure in the People’s Paper Peter Limb Chapter 3 Pixley Seme and Abantu-Batho Chris Saunders Chapter 4 Queen Labotsibeni and Abantu-Batho Sarah Mkhonza Chapter 5 ‘We of Abantu Batho’: Robert Grendon’s Brief and Controversial Editorship Grant Christison Chapter 6 The Swazi Royalty and the Founding of Abantu-Batho in a Regional Context 174 Chris Lowe Chapter 7 Abantu-Batho and the Xhosa Poets 201 Jeff Opland Chapter 8 African Royalty, Popular History and Abantu-Batho Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu and Peter Limb Chapter 9 ‘Johannesburg in Flames’: The 1918 Shilling Campaign, Abantu-Batho and Early African Nationalism in South Africa Paul Landau Chapter 10 Garveyism, Abantu-Batho and the Radicalisation of the African National Congress during the 1920s Robert Trent Vinson Chapter 11 An African Newspaper in Central Johannesburg: The Journalistic and Associational Context of Abantu-Batho Peter Limb Conclusion Assessing the Decline and Legacy of Abantu-Batho Peter Limb

    £33.25

  • Land, Chiefs, Mining: South Africa's North West

    Wits University Press Land, Chiefs, Mining: South Africa's North West

    Book SynopsisLand, Chiefs, Mining explores aspects of the experience of the Batswana in the thornveld and bushveld regions of the North-West Province, shedding light on defi ning issues, moments and individuals in this lesser known region of South Africa. Some of the focuses are: an important Tswana kgosi (chief ), Moiloa II of the Bahurutshe; responses to and participation in the South African War and its aftermath, 1899-1907; land acquisition; economic and political conditions in the reserves; resistance to Mangope’s Bophuthatswana; the impact of game parks and the Sun City resort; rural resistance and the liberation struggle; and African reaction to the platinum mining revolution.Written in a direct and accessible style, and illustrated with photographs and maps, the book provides an understanding, for a general reader ship, of the region and its recent history. At the same time it opens up avenues for further research.Table of Contents'The dog of the boers'? Moila I of the Bahurutshe c1795-1875; The South African War and its aftermath 1899-1908; Land, leaders and dissent 1900-1940; Away in the locations': Life in the Bechuanaland reserves 1910-1958; Rural resistance: The Bahurutshe revolt of 1957-58; Blunting the prickly pear': Bophuthatswana and its consequences 1977-1994; Modernity in the Bushveld: Mining, national parks and casinos.

    £25.65

  • Dominance and Decline: The ANC in the time of

    Wits University Press Dominance and Decline: The ANC in the time of

    Book SynopsisDominance and Decline takes stock of the Zuma-led administration and its impact on the African national Congress (AnC). Combining hard-hitting arguments with astute analysis Booysen shows how the ANC has become centered on the personage of Zuma, and how defense of his flawed leadership undermines the party’s capacity to govern competently and protect its long-term future. Following on from her first book, The African National Congress and the Regeneration of Power (2011), Booysen’s principle argument is that the state is failing as the president’s interests supersede those of party and state. Organisationally, the ANC has become a hegemon riven by faction, while the Zuma ANC oversees the implosion of the tripartite alliance and decimation of the youth, women’s and veterans’ leagues. Electorally, the ANC has been ceding ground to increasingly assertive opposition parties. The ANC falters on the policy front as it regurgitates old ideas and renews and implements these insufficiently. As Zuma’s replacements start competing and succession politics take shape, the book considers whether the ANC will be able to recover from the damage wrought under Zuma’s reign. Ultimately, Booysen asserts, the damage is irrevocable though the electorate may still reward the ANC for transcending the Zuma years. This is a must-have reference book on the development of the modern ANC. With rigour and incisive ness, Booysen persuasively analyses the cataclysmic period under Zuma and offers scholars and researchers a coherent framework for considering future patterns in the ANC.Trade Review...a useful contribution to the debate around the ANC...and the party's travails, strategies, tactics, triumphs and challenges. It will make a good reference work. - Roger Southall, Research Professor, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and co-editor of the New South Africa review. There is no shortage of books about the modern ANC. However this one provides evidence-based answers to two key questions that are frequently asked but seldom answered persuasively. The questions are what is the current basis of the ANC's support and how likely is this support to endure. - Tom Lodge, Professor of peace and conflict studies in the department of politics and public administration at the University of Limerick, IrelandTable of ContentsIntroduction; The ANC party-state digging in; Configuring Zuma's presidency; Constructing the ANC's compliant state; Desperately seeking 'radical' policy; Wake-up calls of election 2014; The DA's long, encroaching march; EFF and the left -on track or derailed?; ANC in the cauldron of protest and 'new opposition'; Conclusion - 'The ANC is in trouble'; Acronyms; Appendices; Select bibliography.

    £23.75

  • Unisa Press The Road to Democracy in South Africa - Abridged

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisUnlike the bulky academic versions of SADET’s Road to Democracy, the Abridged Edition series is much shorter; it is quicker and easier to read. The footnotes, the lengthy quotations, and overwhelmingly intricate detail have been removed. What remains is the stark truth; an outline of how, in a myriad of ways, African states helped the South African struggle for freedom.The names of authors of the Road to Democracy in South Africa Abridged Edition series have been removed from each chapter but theirs is the credit for researching and creating them. SADET acknowledges the sterling work by all these international scholars.This Abridged Editions series should be read by every South African. The hope is that others on the African continent and elsewhere in the world will find much of interest in its pages. After all, the history of the liberation struggle in South Africa is one of Africa’s greatest success stories.

    3 in stock

    £28.45

  • Beauty: A Black Perspective

    University of KwaZulu-Natal Press Beauty: A Black Perspective

    Book SynopsisThe beauty and fashion world attracts enormous interest. Everybody knows who Naomi Campbell is, but few know who South Africa's local Naomi Campbells were (and are)! This title is an extraordinary mix of glamour, nostalgia and social analysis. It takes the reader on a journey through our South African history and politics from the unusual perspective of the beauty industry. Backed by a photo gallery of classic icons from the 50s, 60s and 70s to the present, it celebrates the inspirational role of beautiful and courageous Black women, especially models and beauty queens. It also looks at the business of beauty and recounts the struggles and successes of Black practitioners trying to make it in this competitive sector. The author is someone who herself was a leading model of the 1980s. Nakedi Ribane co-owned one of the very few Black modeling agencies of note in South Africa. She is ideally placed to offer a fascinating 'behind-the-scenes' look at one of the most under-rated yet influential industries of our time.

    £27.96

  • States of Mind Searching for Mental Health in Natal and Zululand 18681918

    University of KwaZulu-Natal Press States of Mind Searching for Mental Health in Natal and Zululand 18681918

    Book SynopsisThis study of mental illness and its cures in colonial and immediately post-Union Natal and Zululand investigates Westernised treatments of insanity at the Natal Government Asylum, as well as less well-known routes back to health via African and Indian modes of healing.

    £31.96

  • Remembering the Rebellion The Zulu Uprising 1906

    University of KwaZulu-Natal Press Remembering the Rebellion The Zulu Uprising 1906

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisRemembering the rebellion narrates and commemorates the Zulu or Bhambatha rebellion of 1906 with riveting anecdotes, maps and illustrations, many of them previously unpublished.

    2 in stock

    £28.76

  • isiShweshwe: A history of the indigenisation of

    University of KwaZulu-Natal Press isiShweshwe: A history of the indigenisation of

    4 in stock

    Book SynopsisThe cross-cultural usage of a particular cloth type – blueprint – is central to South African cultural history. Known locally as seshoeshoe or isishweshwe, among many other localised names, South African blueprint originated in the Far East and East Asia. Adapted and absorbed by the West, blueprint in Africa was originally associated with trade, coercion, colonisation, Westernisation, religious conversion and even slavery, but residing within its hues and patterns was a resonance that endured. The cloth came to reflect histories of hardship, courage and survival, but it also conveyed the taste and aesthetic predilections of its users, preferences often shared across racial and cultural divides. In its indigenisation, isishweshwe has subverted its former history and alien origins and has come to reflect the authority of its users and their culture, conveying resilience, innovation and adaptation and above all a distinctive South Africanness.In this beautifully illustrated book Juliette Leeb-du Toit traces the origins of the cloth, its early usage and cultural adaptations, and its emerging regional, cultural and aesthetic significance. In examining its usage and current national significance, she highlights some of the salient features associated with histories of indigenisation.

    4 in stock

    £48.75

  • Tennis, Apartheid and Social Justice: The First

    University of KwaZulu-Natal Press Tennis, Apartheid and Social Justice: The First

    Book SynopsisIn 1971, the non-racial Southern African Lawn Tennis Union sent six promising young players on a historic tour to play tournaments in Europe. The team was known as the 'Dhiraj' squad, after national champion Jasmat Dhiraj. Apartheid South Africa in the 1970s was a racist and repressive society, based on white supremacy and privilege and black oppression. Black tennis players were denied proper facilities, coaching, opportunities to excel, and the chance to represent their country and play international tournaments. They could not belong to the same clubs as whites or compete in competitions with or against white players. Despite the barriers and constraints, many black sportspersons and sports administrators courageously and determinedly pursued the ideals of non-racialism in sport and in the wider society, often at great personal cost to themselves. Tennis, Apartheid and Social Justice records the political, social and sporting conditions associated with the 1971 tour, the adventures of the talented young black tennis players, the impact of the tour on them and the lessons learned. It documents the collusion of international tennis associations with the racist white-only South African tennis body that prevented a Dhiraj squad member, Hoosen Bobat, the opportunity to play in the Junior Wimbledon championships. The book contends that there has been neither recognition of nor reparations for outstanding apartheid-era black sportspersons and that the apartheid legacy continues to impinge powerfully on tennis today.Table of Contents Foreword by Professor Paulus Zulu Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations 1971 Tennis Tour Timeline Introduction PART ONE 1 Fifty-Two Years Ago 2 Sport and Social Justice 3 Reclaiming the Narrative on Tennis History 4 From Colonialism to Apartheid in Sport 5 Tennis under Apartheid 6 International Collusion with Apartheid Sport 7 The Historic 1971 Tour 8 UK Tournaments: April to June 1971 9 The Rest of the Tour 10 Lighter Moments and Tour Lessons 11 Conclusion PART TWO 12 The Dhiraj Squad 13 Jasmat (Dhiraj) Soma 14 Hiralal (Dhiraj) Soma 15 Alwyn Solomon 16 Oscar Woodman 17 Hoosen Bobat 18 Cavan Bergman Notes Bibliography Index

    £27.96

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