Search results for ""james currey""

Examines a new aspect of one of the highest profile issues facing Africa today-land-grabbing-and shows the widespread impact of small-scale dispossession. Dispossession of land on a small scale can have as great an impact on living conditions as large-scale land-grabs. With the increasing commodification of land, new forms of dispossession, in urban as well as rural districts, are also gaining in importance. This book looks at this largely uninvestigated issue through case studies in the Eastern DRC, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda: here the loss of land often represents the loss of people's livelihoods inthese areas of extreme land scarcity in highly populated regions. In the post-conflict states of the Great Lakes, governance challenges increase the risk of dispossession of the already poor and vulnerable: formal institutions are weak or biased; customary authorities have lost some of their moral authority. The cases in this book show in particular how local power dynamics, often rooted in history, bear upon the processes of land competition, dispossession and land grabbing. This timely volume will be important not only for those in African Studies, but for those in development studies, as well as practitioners and policy-makers worldwide. An Ansoms is assistant professor in development studies at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium); Thea Hilhorst is a senior advisor at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam.

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Demonstrates shortcomings in Western feminist conceptualizations, and shows how insights from African feminist thinking may enhance understandings of gender, both in and beyond Africa. Winner of the 2012 gender research award KRAKA-prisen. This book is about gender politics in Mozambique over three decades from 1975 to 2005. The book is also about different ways of understanding gender and sexuality. Gender policies from Portuguese colonialism, through Frelimo socialism to later neo-liberal economic regimes share certain basic assumptions about men, women and gender relations. But to what extent do such assumptions fit the ways in which rural Mozambican men and women see themselves? A major line of argument in the book is that gender relations should be investigated, not assumed, and that policies not matching people's lives are not likely to succeed. The empirical data, on which the argument is based, are first a unique body of data material collected 1982-1984 by the national women's organization, the OMM [when the author was employed as a sociologist in the organization] andsecondly data resulting from more recent fieldwork in northern Mozambique. Importantly inspired by African post-colonial feminist lines of thinking, the book engages in a project of re-mapping and re-interpreting 'culture andtradition'. In this context, the book investigates in particular matriliny [c. 40 per cent of Mozambique's population live under conditions of matriliny] and female initiation. The findings open new avenues for gender politics, and for rethinking sexuality and gender - in Africa and beyond. Signe Arnfred is Associate Professor, Dept of Society & Globalization, and Centre for Gender, Power & Diversity, Roskilde University

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Spanning the period from the cold war to the 'war on terror', examines the political economy dynamics of security and insecurity on the continent, as well as its implications for political actions. More than any other part of the globe, Africa has become associated with conflict, insecurity and human rights atrocities. In the popular imagination and the media, overpopulation, environmental degradation and ethnic hatred dominate accounts of African violence, while in academic and policy-making circles, conflict and insecurity have also come to occupy centre stage, with resource-hungry warlords and notions of 'greed' and 'grievance' playing key explanatory roles. Since the attacks of 9/11, there has also been mounting concern that the continent's so-called 'ungoverned spaces' will provide safe havens for terrorists intent on destroying Western civilization. The Review of African Political Economy has engaged extensively with issues of conflict and security, both analysing on-going conflicts and often challenging predominant modes of explanation and interpretation. This Review of African Political Economy Reader provides a timely, comprehensive and critical contribution to contemporary debates about conflict and security on the continent. The first section, covers some of the continent's main post-Cold War conflicts and demonstrates their global connections. The articles also discuss the so-called 'resource curse', as well as the global arms trade, and reveal the complexities of the relationship between the economic and the political. The second section focuses on security as part of post-Cold War global governance, and discusses the effects of liberal peace-building as well as the link between development assistance and the 'war on terror'. The final section examines life as it continues in conditions of war and shows how insecurity reconfigures urban space, transforms social order, identities and authority. Rita Abrahamsen is Professor in the Graduate School of Publicand International Affairs, University of Ottawa, Canada Published in association with ROAPE ROAPE African Readers Series Editors: Tunde Zack-Williams & Ray Bush

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A deeply felt and engaging personal account of Zimbabwe's political awakening by one of its best-known historians. I did not set out for Rhodesia as a radical' writes Terence Ranger. This memoir of the years between 1957, when he first went to Southern Rhodesia, and 1967 when he published his first book, is both an intimate record of the African awakening which Ranger witnessed during those ten years, and of the process which led him to write Revolt in Southern Rhodesia. Intended as both history and as historiography, Writing Revolt is also about the ways in which politics and history interacted. The men with whom Ranger discussed Zimbabwean history were the leaders of African nationalism; his seminar papers were sent to prisons and into restricted areas. Both they and he were making political as well as intellectual discoveries. The book also includes a brief account of Ranger's life before he went to Africa. TERENCE RANGER was Emeritus Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, University of Oxfordand author of many books including Are we not also Men? (1995), Voices from the Rocks (1999) and Bulawayo Burning (2010), and co-editor of Violence and Memory (2000). Zimbabwe & Southern Africa (South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Namibia): Weaver Press

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Investigates development practice, civil organization formation and the increase of ethnically motivated conflicts over the past two decades in Western Africa. Through richly detailed anthropological case studies of the rural economics and administrative policies in Burkina Faso, and reassessment of current models of conflict, resource management and modern administration, this book explores the current political, economic and social transformation of Western Africa. Ethnic tensions, the case studies suggest, are a strategic part of social and economic local relations - a pattern that is repeated whenethnic stereotyping finds its way into the higher echelons of national administration and of international development cooperation. Conflicts are shown to be ethnicized by local and administrative elites, creating screens impenetrable to those involved in the states' formal administration, and behind which informal local economies thrive. In these 'concealed economies' individuals exploit the ethnic divide by hiding friendly and profitable inter-ethnic relations behind a rhetoric of ethnic tensions and staged conflict. Cultivating ties across ethnic divides is not limited, however, to rural relations but becomes common practice at almost all levels of national and civil administration. Andreas Dafinger is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the Central European University, Budapest. He has worked on Burkina Faso for almost twenty years.

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Explores how the conception of Africa and its history has changed over time and narrates the story of this vast continent over the past 10,000 years. Africa is a huge continent, as large as the more habitable areas of Europe and Asia put together. It has a history immensely long, yet the study of that history as an academic discipline in its own right is little more than fiftyyears old. Since then the subject has grown enormously, but the question of what this history is and how it has been approached still needs to be asked, not least to answer the question of why should we study it. This book takes as its subject the last 10,000 years of African history, and traces the way in which human society on the continent has evolved from communities of hunters and gatherers to the complex populations of today. Approaching that history through its various dimensions: archaeological, ethnographic, written, scriptural, European and contemporary, it looks at how the history of such a vast region over such a length of time has been conceived and presented, and how it is to be investigated. The problem itself is historical, and an integral part of the history with which it is concerned, beginning with the changing awareness over the centuries of what Africa might be. MichaelBrett thus traces the history of Africa not only on the ground, but also in the mind, in order to make his own historical contribution to the debate. Michael Brett is Emeritus Reader in the History of North Africa at SOAS.

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Examines how regional integration can resolve the crises of the Greater Horn of Africa, exploring how it can be used as a mechanism for conflict resolution, promoting the economy and tackling issues of identity and citizenship. The Greater Horn of Africa (GHA) is engulfed by three interrelated crises: various inter-state wars, civil wars, and inter-communal conflicts; an economic crisis manifested in widespread debilitating poverty, chronic food insecurity and famines; and environmental degradation that is ravaging the region. While it is apparent that the countries of the region are unlikely to be able to deal with the crises individually, there is consensus that their chances of doing so improve markedly with collective regional action. The contributors to this volume address the need for regional integration in the GHA. They identify those factors that can foster integration, such as the proper management of equitable citizenship rights, as well as examining those that impede it, including the region's largely ineffective integration scheme, IGAD, and explore how the former can be strengthened and the latter transformed; explain how regional integration can mitigate the conflicts; and examine how integration can help to energise the region's economy. Kidane Mengisteab is Professor of African Studies and Political Science at Penn State University; Redie Bereketeab is a researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute, Sweden.

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Gives an ethnographic account of the complexities of the use of photography in Africa, both historically and in contemporary practice. This collection of studies in African photography examines, through a series of empirically rich historical and ethnographic cases, the variety of ways in which photographs are produced, circulated, and engaged across a range of social contexts. In so doing, it elucidates the distinctive characteristics of African photographic practices and cultures, vis-à-vis those of other forms of 'vernacular photography' worldwide. In addition, these studies develop areflexive turn, examining the history of academic engagement with these African photographic cultures, and reflecting on the distinctive qualities of the ethnographic method as a means for studying such phenomena. The volumecritically engages current debates in African photography and visual anthropology. First, it extends our understanding of the variety of ways in which both colonial and post-colonial states in Africa have used photography as a means for establishing, and projecting, their authority. Second, it moves discussion of African photography away from an exclusive focus on the role of the 'the studio' and looks at the circulations through which the studios' products - the photographs themselves - later pass as artefacts of material culture. Last, it makes an important contribution to our understanding of the relationship between photography and ethnographic research methods, as these have been employed in Africa. RICHARD VOKES is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and author of Ghosts of Kanungu

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Exposes the 'blind spot' in popular and academic histories about the role of African soldiers in the creation of Britain's empire, through a re-telling of one of the best known episodes in British imperial military history. The Anglo-Egyptian re-conquest of Sudan - Churchill's 'River War' - has been well chronicled from the British point of view, but we still know little about its front line troops, the Sudanese soldiers of the Egyptian Army, the menwho fought in all the battles, served as interpreters, military recruiters, and ethnic ambassadors throughout the campaign, and who were the real victors at the Battle of Omdurman. Making use of both published contemporary accounts and unpublished primary sources located in the United Kingdom and Sudan, Slaves of Fortune provides an historiographic correction. It argues that nineteenth-century Sudanese slave soldiers were social beings and historical actors, shaping both European and African destinies, just as their own lives were being transformed by imperial forces. Ronald M. Lamothe is Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

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Demonstrates shortcomings in Western feminist conceptualizations, and shows how insights from African feminist thinking may enhance understandings of gender, both in and beyond Africa. Winner of the 2012 gender research award KRAKA-prisen. This book is about gender politics in Mozambique over three decades from 1975 to 2005. The book is also about different ways of understanding gender and sexuality. Gender policies from Portuguese colonialism, through Frelimo socialism to later neo-liberal economic regimes share certain basic assumptions about men, women and gender relations. But to what extent do such assumptions fit the ways in which rural Mozambican men and women see themselves? A major line of argument in the book is that gender relations should be investigated, not assumed, and that policies not matching people's lives are not likely to succeed. The empirical data, on which the argument is based, are first a unique body of data material collected 1982-1984 by the national women's organization, the OMM [when the author was employed as a sociologist in the organization] and secondly data resulting from more recent fieldwork in northern Mozambique. Importantly inspired by African post-colonial feminist lines of thinking, the book engages in a project of re-mapping and re-interpreting 'cultureand tradition'. In this context, the book investigates in particular matriliny [c. 40% of Mozambique's population live under conditions of matriliny] and female initiation. The findings open new avenues for gender politics, and for re-thinking sexuality and gender - in Africa and beyond. Signe Arnfred is Associate Professor, Dept of Society & Globalization, and Centre for Gender, Power & Diversity, Roskilde University

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A compact and useable introduction to the understanding of contemporary Sudan, and a convenient reference work. The Sudan Handbook, based on the Rift Valley Institute's successful Sudan Field Course, is an authoritative and accessible introduction to Sudan, vividly written and edited by leading Sudanese and international specialists. The handbook offers a concise introduction to all aspects of the country, rooted in a broad historical account of the development of the Sudanese state. It consists of eighteen self-contained, cross-referenced chapters, covering essential topics in the geography, history, sociology, culture and politics of the country, written by outstanding Sudanese scholars and recognized international experts. It includes numerous purpose-drawn maps and diagrams,glossaries of key terms, capsule biographies of key figures, a chronology and a bibliography. John Ryle, Rift Valley Institute and Division of Social Sciences, Bard College, USA; Justin Willis, Department of History, Durham University, UK and former Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa; Suliman Baldo, International Center for Transitional Justice, New York, International Crisis Group; Jok Madut Jok, Department of History, LoyolaMarymount University, USA. Published in association with the Rift Valley Institute

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This study recounts the reasons why the order for the Herero genocide was very likely issued by the Kaiser himself, and why proof of this has not emerged before now. In 1904, the indigenous Herero people of German South West Africa (now Namibia) rebelled against their German occupiers. In the following four years, the German army retaliated, killing between 60,000 and 100,000 Herero people, one of the worst atrocities ever. The history of the Herero genocide remains a key issue for many around the world partly because the German policy not to pay reparations for the Namibian genocide contrasts with its long-standing Holocaust reparations policy. The Herero case bears not only on transitional justice issues throughout Africa, but also on legal issues elsewhere in the world where reparations for colonial injustices have been called for. This book explores the events within the context of German South West Africa (GSWA) as the only German colony where settlement was actually attempted. The study contends that the genocide was not the work of one rogue general or the practices of the military, but that it was inexorably propelled by Germany's national goals at the time. The book argues that the Herero genocide was linked to Germany's late entry into the colonial race, which led it frenetically and ruthlessly to acquire multiple colonies all over the world within a very short period, using any means available. Jeremy Sarkin is Chairperson-Rapporteur of the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, and is at present Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. He is also an Attorney of the High Court of South Africa and of the State of New York. A graduate of theUniversity of the Western Cape and of Harvard Law School he has been visiting professor at several US universities where he has taught Comparative Law, International Human Rights Law, International Criminal Law and Transitional Justice Southern Africa (South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia and Zimbabwe): University of Cape Town Press/Juta

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The Sudanese peace agreement reached a crisis point in its final year. This book offers an analysis of the impact of the implementation of the agreement on different Sudanese communities and neighbouring regions. After a long process of peace negotiations the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed on 9 January 2005 between the Government of Sudan (GOS) and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). The CPA raised initialhopes that it would be the foundation block for lasting peace in Sudan. This book compiles scholarly analyses of the implementation of the power sharing agreement of the CPA, of ongoing conflicts with particular respect to land issues, of the challenges of the reintegration of internally displaced people and refugees, and of the repercussions of the CPA in other regions of Sudan as well as in neighbouring countries. Elke Grawert is SeniorLecturer at the Institute for Intercultural & International Studies (InIIS), Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Bremen, Germany.

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The conflict in the Nuba Mountains in central Sudan illustrates how state policies concerning the control of land can cause local conflicts to escalate into large scale wars, which become increasingly difficult to manage or resolve. The conventional perspective on Sudan's recent civil war (1983-2005) - one of the longest and most complex conflicts in Africa - emphasises ethnicity as the main cause. This study, on the contrary, identifies the land factor as aroot cause that is central to understanding Sudan's local conflicts and large-scale wars. Land rights are about relationships between and among persons, pertaining to different economic and ritual activities. Rights toland are intimately tied to membership in specific communities, from the family to the nation-state. Control over land in Africa has been, and still is, used as a means of defining identity and belonging, an instrument to control, and a source of, political power. Membership of these communities is contested, negotiable, and changeable over time. For national governments land is a national economic resource for public and private development, but the interests and rights of rural majorities and their sedentary or nomadic subsistence forms of life are often difficult to harmonise with land policies pursued by national governments. The state's exclusionary land policies and politicsof limiting or denying communities their land rights play a crucial role in causing local conflicts that then can escalate into large-scale wars. Land issues increase the complexity of a conflict, thereby reducing the possibilityof managing, resolving, or ultimately transforming it. The conflict in the Nuba Mountains in central Sudan, the regional focus in this study, is living proof of this transformation. Guma Kunda Komey is Assistant Professor of Human Geography, Juba University, Sudan.

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Designed as a textbook for the undergraduate and graduate levels. There has long been a need for a new textbook on West Africa's history. This comprehensive collection brings together leading scholars on key themes from West Africa's prehistory to the present. It discusses various disciplinary approaches to West African history, provides overviews of the literature on major topics, and breaks new ground through the incorporation of original research. Part one provides perspectives on West Africa's history from archaeology, ecology and culture, linguistics, and oral traditions. Part two provides longue duree perspectives on environment, society, agency and historical change. Part three examines how economic and political developments haveshaped religious expression and identity in significant ways. At the end of each chapter is a short list of recommended reading. EMMANUEL KWAKU AKYEAMPONG is Professor of History at Harvard University NorthAmerica: Ohio U Press; Ghana: Woeli Publishing Services

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Winner of the Aidoo-Snyder Prize. This groundbreaking book by two leading scholars offers a complete historical picture of women and their work in Uganda, tracing developments from pre-colonial times to the present and into the future. Setting women's economic activities into a broader political, social, and cultural context, it provides the first general account of women's experiences amidst the changes that shaped the country. Prior to the 1970s, relatively few Ugandan women broughtin their own income, despite producing most of the food and craftwork that was taken to local markets. Educational expansion in the 1950s and 1960s were years of gradual evolution for women and their work, with many employed as lower level teachers or nurses. Since the 1970s, there have been a number of dramatic changes which have led to many more women earning their own income: high mortality of men from conflict and HIV/AIDS, increased migration of women into urban areas, the collapse of the state-controlled economy and the emergence of a magendo economy, the development of a free market economy within a system of global capitalism, deepening poverty through Structural Adjustment Programmes, and the expansion of women's roles in many areas. This book traces the origins of the current situation, highlighting the challenges working women now face, and recommending strategies that will improve their circumstances in the future. North America: Ohio U Press; Uganda: Fountain Publishers

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This work examines the relationship between violence, narrative and memory in the former West Nile district of Uganda. West Nile is best known as the home of Uganda's notoriously violent dictator, Idi Amin. But the area's association with violence goes back much further, through the colonial era, when the district was significantly under-developedin comparison with mostof Uganda, and to a pre-colonial past characterised by slave-raiding and ivory poaching. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in the district capital, Arua town, during the late 1990s, when a low intensity conflict between the government and local rebels became embroiled in wars spilling over from nearby borders with Sudan and Zaire. The author adopts the unconventional approach of moving backwards from the present through successive layers of the past, developing an anthropological critique of the forms of historical representation and their relationship with the human realities of war and violence, in a border area which has long suffered the consequences of being portrayed as a 'heart of darkness'. The book contributes to current debates in political anthropology on issues such as border areas, the local state, and the nature of the 'post-colonial'. Itwill also be of interest to historians, political scientists, literary and cultural critics, and others working on questions of violence, narrative and memory. Uganda: Fountain Publishers Series editors: Wendy James& N.J. Allen

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A volume of electoral studies of multiparty politics in 14 African countries during the 1990s. Most of the studies in this book are about national elections in Anglophone Africa. There are also less well-known examples from Sudan, Ethiopia and Guinea Bissau. The collection also features studies of the local elections in Namibia and of a significant by-election in Malawi. The multiparty period has been put, wherever possible, within the historical context of earlier elections in Africa. Questions addressed include: how did incumbent governing regimes learn to live with multiparty politics? Why have some elections been so closely fought and others have suffered from apathy? Why has there been relatively open political expression and activity when the elections have increased the political and economic manipulation by incumbent governments? Why have the elections of the 1990s been so marked by local and ethnic variations? To what extent did this wave of democracy result from pressure from donor countries? North America: Palgrave

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A detailed study of the impact of gender on the politics of Uganda. This study analyses the interrelationship between national and local politics and the women's movement in Africa. It covers: women's mobilization and social autonomy; the background to the National Resistance Movement; and decentralization and women's participation in Uganda. North America: University of Wisconsin Press; Uganda: Fountain Publishers

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Published in association with ROAPE Part of a series of studies that examine political issues confronting African peoples, societies and states, this text explores: theories of the state, the transition to democracy and economic development. Published inassociation with ROAPE North America: Africa World Press

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A political history of the Sudan since the second civil war began in 1983. This text provides a comprehensive analysis of Sudan's unresolved struggle between supporters of the majoritarian vision who seek to create a cohesive Arab-Islamic state and the pluralists who strive for equality before the law. North America: Indiana U Press

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Challenges many of the dominant beliefs in the discourse on development and aid. Is the world witnessing a global associational revolution spearheaded by development non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? Is the relationship between states and societies being more fundamentally redefined, even in remote, ruralcorners of the world? What role does the mushrooming of development NGOs play in this political-ideological process? What about NGO staff? Are they angels of mercy, government-paid development diplomats, propagandists for a triumphant West, or instruments in a coming clash between civilizations? Presented here are cases from Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Bangladesh and Nicaragua that shed light on these complex questions. The text puts forward a critique of central theories and concepts which have dominated research and discourse on development NGOs. It also proposes and demonstrates some different analytical approaches. North America: Africa World Press

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A comprehensive assessment of universities and higher education in Africa south of the Sahara. The authors draw on their experience from both Francophile and Anglophile Africa, and from teaching both in the sciences and the arts. North America: Ohio U Press; Ghana: Association of African Universities

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This volume explores the relationship between environment and rural culture, politics and economy in Tanzania. In his conclusion, Isaria Kimambo reflects on the efforts of successive historians to strike a balance between external causes of change and local initiative in their interpretations of Tanzanian history. He argues that nationalist and Marxist historians of Tanzanian history, understandably preoccupied through the first quarter-century of the country's post-colonial history with the impact of imperialism and capitalism on East Africa, tended to overlook the initiatives taken by rural societies to transform themselves. Yet, he suggests, there is good reason for historians to think about the causes of change and innovation in the rural communities of Tanzania, because farming and pastoral people have constantly changed as they adjusted to shifting environmental conditions. North America: Ohio U Press; Tanzania: Mkuki na Nyota

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How have African writers addressed the issue of war and its impact across the continent? Since the second half of the twentieth century, no single phenomenon has marred the image and development of Africa more than senseless fratricidal wars which rapidly followed the political independence of nations. This issue ofAfrican Literature Today is devoted to studies of how African writers, as historical witnesses, have handled the recreation of war as a cataclysmic phenomenon in various locations on the continent. The contributors explore the subject from a variety of perspectives: panoramic, regional, national and through comparative studies. War has enriched contemporary African literature, but at what price to human lives, peace and the environment? ERNESTEMENYONU is Professor of the Department of Africana Studies University of Michigan-Flint. The contributors include: CHIMALUM NWANKWO, CHRISTINE MATZKE, CLEMENT A. OKAFOR, INIBONG I. UKO, OIKE MACHIKO, SOPHIE OGWUDE, MAURICE TAONEZVI VAMBE, ZOE NORRIDGE and ISIDORE DIALA. Nigeria: HEBN

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This issue of African Literature Today focuses on new novels by emerging as well as established African novelists. This is a seminal work that discusses the validity of the perception that the new generation of African novelists is remarkably different in vision, style, and worldview from the older generation. The contention is that the oldergeneration novelists who were too close to the colonial period in Africa had invariably made culture-conflict and little else their dominant thematic concern while the younger generation novelists are more versatile in their thematic preoccupations, and are more global in their vision and style. Do the facts in the novels justify and validate these claims? The 13 papers in this volume have been carefully selected to consider these issues. Brenda Cooper a renowned literary scholar from Cape Town writes on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, while Charles Nnolim writes about Adichie's more recent novel Half of a Yellow Sun; Omar Sougou of Universite GastonBerger, Senegal discusses 'ambivalent inscriptions' in Buchi Emecheta's later novels; Clement Okafor of the University of Maryland, addresses the theme of 'racial memory' in Isidore Okpewho's Call Me By My Rightful Name, juxtaposed between the world of the old and the realities of the present. Joseph McLaren, Hofstra University, New York, discusses Ngugi's latest novel, Wizard of the Crow, while Machiko Oike, Hiroshima University, Japan looksat a new theme in African adolescent literature, 'youth in an era of HIV/AIDS'. There is abundant evidence of the contrasts and diversities which characterize the African novel not only geographically, but also ideologically andgenerationally. ERNEST EMENYONU is Professor of the Department of Africana Studies University of Michigan-Flint. Nigeria: HEBN

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This is an annotated bibliography of the literature on mass communication and the press in Africa.

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With a focus on the urban setting of key Kenyan novels. A study of the key Kenyan novels since Ngugi published Weep Not, Child in 1962. North America: Africa World Press; Kenya: EAEP

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Is the woman writer free to follow her own creative impulse and write about what she pleases? Reflects the emergence of accomplished works by African women writers. North America: Africa World Press

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Challenges the myth of an African wilderness, and the conflict between conservation policies and the livelihoods of rural people. Many conservationists insist that conservation that ignores local costs cannot be sustained. For if conservation is greeted with hostility locally then guards and patrols will simply not prevail against determined, and more numerous, rural opponents. This is welcome thinking. It is vital to recognise the problems that conservation policies can pose, and it makes sense strategically to build local alliances. But this thinking also risks overstating thepower of rural groups, and under-estimating the power of the state. It also fails to realise how some conservation visions can become powerful, and the role of international finance and sponsorship in imposing injustice. FortressConservation is a detailed look at a dark underbelly of international wildlife conservation. By exploring one, now famous case of 'successful' conservation, the Mkomazi Game Reserve in Tanzania, it shows how complex and messy thehistory of conservation initiatives can be, how uncertain the ecological theories underpinning particular policies, and how problematic the social consequences. But it also shows how little all of this matters when the fund-raising machines that sustain these fortresses kick in. Published in association with the International African Institute North America: Indiana U Press

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A stimulating account of a specific period in Uganda's history. This study of the recovery of Uganda asks whether its constitution-making process, which even involved a special election, will help consolidate the progress. It also considers the lessons for all the countries of Africa which areinvolved in introducing democracy. North America: Ohio U Press Uganda: Fountain Publishers

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Rich ethnographic studies expanding the understanding of ngoma in Africa. The indigenous African healing system of music, dance, possession and trance is perhaps best known through John Janzen's book Ngoma: Discourse of Healing in Central and Southern Africa. This collection engages with Janzen'sanalysis and examines ngoma in its culturally diverse manifestations. North America: Ohio U Press

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Exposes the subtle and ambiguous role ethnicity can play in social conflict. Social conflict is routinely attributed to ethnic differentiation because divinding lines between rival groups often follow ethnic contours; and cultural symbolism has often proved a potent ideological weapon. The purpose of thisbook is to examine the nature of the bond linking ethnicity to conflict in a variety of circumstances. The ten case studies from the Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya are based on primary research by anthropologists and historianswho have long experience of the region. North America: Ohio U Press; Uganda: Fountain Publishers; Kenya: EAEP

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This text offers an analysis of Africa's economic future. Has a turning point been reached in African economic recovery? Why have so few countries reached the UN growth target? Published in association with UNCTAD North America: Africa World Press

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SPECIAL COMMENDATION in Africa's 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century. The series is illustrated throughout with maps and black and white photographs. Volume 7 examines the period of partition, conquest and occupation from the beginnings of the 'European Scramble for Africa' to the Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Throughout the volume the focus is on the responsesof Africans themselves to the challenge of colonialism. A general overview is followed by more detailed regional analyses. Chapters 13 to 21 concern the impact of economic and social aspects of colonial systems in Africa from1919 to 1935; the operation of colonial economies; the emergence of new social structures and demographic patterns; and the role of religion and the arts in Africa during the colonial period. The final section traces the growth of anti-colonial movements, the strengthening of African political nationalism and the interaction between black Africa and blacks of the New World. Liberia and Ethiopia are discussed in special chapters. The seriesis co-published in Africa with seven publishers, in the United States and Canada by the University of California Press, and in association with the UNESCO Press.

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SPECIAL COMMENDATION in Africa's 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century. The series is illustrated throughout with maps and black and white photographs. Covers the major forces at work in African society at the beginning of the 19th century until the onset of the European scramble for colonial territory in the 1880s. This study also looks at Africa's changing role in the world economy, and the effects of the abolition of the slave trade. The series is co-published in Africa with seven publishers, in the United States and Canada by the University of California Press, and in association with the UNESCOPress.

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As the research to this book proceeded there were major finds of papers previously unknown even to the David Livingstone Research Project in Edinburgh. This collection of David Livingstone's personal papers, edited by Timothy Holmes, is from the Livingstone Museum in Zambia and features many previously unpublished letters. The first part deals with his period in Botswana, the second part focuses on the Zambezi expedition (1858-64), the third section covers to time of his visit to Britain in 1864-5, and the fourth part covers his last journey (1866-73). North America: Indiana U Press; Zambia: UNZA Press

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Abdul Sheriff analyses the early stages of the underdevelopment of East Africa. The rise of Zanzibar was based on two major economic transformations: firstly, slaves became used for the production of cloves and grain for export, instead of the slaves themselves being exported; secondly there was an increaseddemand for luxuries such as ivory and Zanzibar took advantage of its strategic position to trade as far as the Great Lakes. Yet this economic success increasingly subordinated Zanzibar to Britain, with its anti-slavery crusade andits control over the Indian merchant class. North America: Ohio U Press; Kenya: EAEP

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Since the publication of Vansina's earlier book, oral traditions have now become widely accepted as a legitimate source of history. Although written by a leading historian of Africa, Vansina's work on oral traditions ranges far beyond Africa, so has a wider relevance. Vansina explains not only how oral traditions have been used in the past but also how they should be used by historians in their research. North America: University of Wisconsin Press; Kenya: EAEP

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Explores to what extent Africa's "rise" has impacted on development and whether the BRICS are creating a new version of dependency. Africa is said to be rising, turning a definitive page in its history, heralding new and exciting possibilities for the continent. This discourse maintains that with upsurge in economic growth comes improved governance and endogenous dynamics; that the emerging economies, and especially the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), have been instrumental in diversifying Africa's international relations, perhaps leading to a radical change in theglobal order, favourable to the developing world. But to what extent is this true, and how deep and how broad has been the impact on society at large? This book takes a critical look at the prevalent Africa Rising discourse,and explores the nature and implications of Africa's "rise" and the role that the BRICS have played in it. The author argues that Africa has still to undergo any structural transformation; that there is strong evidence that deindustrialisation and jobless growth have accompanied the upsurge of interest in the continent; and that far from making a radical turn in its developmental trajectory, Africa is being pushed into the resource corner as commodity exporters, to the North (and now, the BRICS) with little scope for industrial progress or skills advancement. Hope that the BRICS might offer an alternative to the extant neoliberal order are misplaced, for the BRICS have a stake in maintaining the current global unequality. Africa must therefore fashion its own independent path - while the emerging economies will be important, relying on external actors may simply reproduce anew the current state of underdevelopment. Ian Taylor is Professor in International Relations and African Politics, University of St Andrews; Chair Professor, Renmin, University of China; Professor Extraordinary, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa; Honorary Professor, Institute of African Studies, Zhejiang Normal University, China; and a Visiting Scholar at Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Uganda.

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A 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.

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Examines war and the impact of warfare on identity formation in Ethiopia. Images of war, narratives of suffering and notions of ethnicity are intrinsically linked to Western perceptions of Africa. Filtered through a mostly international media the information of African wars is confined to narrow categories of explanation emerging from and adapted to a Western history and political culture. This book aims at reversing this process; to look at war and suffering from the point of view of those who fight it and suffer through it. Indoing so it reveals that the simplistic models explaining contemporary wars in Africa which are reproduced in a Western discourse are basically false. This book examines the understanding of war and the impact of warfare onthe formation and conceptualisation of identities in Ethiopia. Building on historical trajectories of enemy images, the recent Eritean-Ethiopian war [1998-2000] is used as an empirical backdrop to explore war's formative impact, by analysing politics of identity and shifting perceptions of enemies and allies. KJETIL TRONVOLL is Professor in Human Rights, Peace and Conflict Studies at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo. Hisother publications include Brothers at War: Making Sense of the Eritrean-Ethiopian War (co-author; James Currey/Ohio University Press, 2000) and The Ethiopian Red Terror Trials: Transitional Justice Challenged (co-editor; James Currey 2009) .

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Innovative 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 Press

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Analyses the complexities of Christian-Muslim conflict that threaten the fragile democracy of Nigeria, and the implications for global peace and security. In northern Nigeria, high levels of ethnic diversity have resulted in acute polarization between Muslims and Christians, increasingly fuelling violent conflict. The climate of insecurity threatens northern Nigeria's development, accentuates the inequalities between it and the rest of the country, and undermines the attempt to stabilize democracy in the country. Externally, fears have also been expressed that Islamist movements in northern Nigeria form partof a wider network constituting a threat to global peace and security. Refuting a "clash of civilizations" between Muslims and Christians, the authors of this new study highlight the multiplicity of Muslim and Christiangroups contending for influence and relevance, and the doctrinal, political and historical drivers of conflict and violence between and within them. They analyse some of the region's most contentious issues: conflict and peacebuilding in Jos; the Boko Haram insurgency; the informal economy; and the challenges of legal pluralism posed by the declaration of "full" Sharia law in 12 Muslim-majority states. Finally, they suggest appropriate and effective policyresponses at local, national, and international levels, discussing the importance of informal institutions as avenues for peace-building and the complementarities between local and national dynamics in the search for peace. Abdul Raufu Mustapha (deceased 2017), was Associate Professor in African Politics, University of Oxford. David Ehrhardt is Assistant Professor of International Development at Leiden University College, The Netherlands. Companion volume: Sects & Social Disorder: Muslim Identities & Conflict in Northern Nigeria edited by Abdul Raufu Mustapha (James Currey 2014) Nigeria: Premium Times Books

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A uniquely detailed account of the dynamics of Afro-European trade in two states on the western Slave Coast over three centuries and the transition from slave trade to legitimate commerce. From 1550 to colonial partition in the mid-1880s, trade was key to Afro-European relations on the western Slave Coast (the coastal areas of modern Togo and parts of what are now Ghana and Benin). This book looks at the commercialrelations of two states which played a crucial role in the Atlantic slave trade as well as the trade in ivory and agricultural produce: Hula, known to European traders as Grand Popo (now in Benin) and Ge, known as Little Popo (nowin Togo). Situated between the Gold Coast to the west and the eastern Slave Coast to the east, this region was an important supplier of provisions for Europeans and the enslaved Africans they purchased. Also, due to its positionin the lagoon system, it facilitated communication along the coast between the trading companies' headquarters on the western Gold Coast and their factories on the eastern Slave Coast, particularly at Ouidah, the Slave Coast's major slave port. In the 19th century, when the trade at more established ports was disrupted by the men-of-war of the British anti-slave trade squadron, the western Slave Coast became a hot-spot of illegal slave trading. Providing a detailed reconstruction of political and commercial developments in the western Slave coast, including the transition from the slave trade to legitimate commerce, this book also reveals the region's position in the wider trans-Atlantic trade network and how cross-cultural partnerships were negotiated; the trade's impact on African coastal "middlemen" communities; and the relative importance of local and global factors for the history of a region or community. Silke Strickrodt is Research Fellow in Colonial History, German Historical Institute London. She is co-editor (with Robin Law and Suzanne Schwarz) of Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa (James Currey, 2013).

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Weaving together critical analysis and a filmic conversation, this book journeys through the multiple layers of Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno's thematically and aesthetically challenging body of work, framed here as a form of decolonial cinematic resistance. Co-winner African Literature Association Book of the Year - Scholarship Both a monograph and a critical dialogue between academic Melissa Thackway, author of Africa Shoots Back, and the Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno, this collaborative work takes the reader on a journey through Teno's multifaceted on-going filmic reflection on Cameroon and the wider African continent, its socio-political systems, history, memory and cultures. Presenting and contextualizing Teno's cinema, it addresses the notion of political commitment in art and of cinema as a form of resistance. It also considers Teno's filmmaking both in relation to the theoretical and aesthetic debates to have animated West and Central African filmmakers since the 1960s and 1970s, and n relation to documentary filmmaking practices on the continent and beyond. In so doing, the book offers an analysis of the predominant stylistic and thematic traits of Teno's work, examines the individual films and the collective oeuvre, and highlights the evolutions of his film language and concerns. It identifies and explores the committed socio-political and historical themes at play, such as violence, power, history, memory, gender, trauma and exile. It also considers Teno's unwavering focus, both thematically and in his filmmaking choices, on forms and instances of resistance, framing his cinema as a form of decolonial aesthetics.

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Interrogates and explores African literature in African languages today, and the continuing interfaces between works in indigenous languages and those written in European languages or languages of colonizers. Sixty years after the Conference of African Writers of English Expression at Makerere University, the dominance in the global canon of African literatures written in European languages over those in indigenous languages continues to be an issue. This volume of ALT re-examines this central question of African literatures to ask, 'What is the state of African literatures in African languages today?' Contributors discuss the translation of Gurnah's novel Paradise to Swahili, and Osemwegie's Ọrọ Epic to English, and Wolof wrestlers' panegyrics. They analyse Edo eco-critical poetry, and the poetics of Igbo mask poetry, and morality in early prose fiction in indigenous Nigerian languages. Other essays contribute a semiotic analysis of Duruaku's A Matter of Identity, and the decolonization of trauma in Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them. Overall, the volume paints a complex image of African cultural production in indigenous languages, especially in the ways Africa's oral performance traditions remain resilient in the face of a seemingly undiminished presence of non-African language literary traditions.

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