Search results for ""james currey""

Re-examines this unresolved murder in Kenya and the underlying role of rumour, the media and inter-state relations on how the death has been reported and investigated. Julie Ann Ward was a British tourist and wildlife photographer who went missing in Kenya's Maasai Mara Game Reserve in 1988 and was eventually found to have been murdered. Her death and the protracted search for her killers, stillat large, were hotly contested in the media. Many theories emerged as to how and why she died, generating three trials, several "true crime" books, and much speculation and rumour. At the core of Musila's study are thefollowing questions: why would this young woman's death be the subject of such strong contestations of ideas and multiple truths? And what does this reveal about cultural productions of truth and knowledge in Kenya and Britain, particularly in the light of the responses to her disappearance of the Kenyan police, the British Foreign Office, and the British High Commission in Nairobi. Building on existing scholarship on African history, narrative, gender and postcolonial studies, the author reveals how the Julie Ward murder and its attendant discourses offer insights into the journeys of ideas, and how these traverse the porous boundaries of the relationship between Kenya and Britain, and, by extension, Africa and the Global North. Grace A. Musila is a lecturer in the English Department of Stellenbosch University, South Africa

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The re-issue of archival volumes ALT 1 to ALT 14 makes the complete series available and provides the historical perspective of these early contributions to the literature and its criticism. First published in 1973, this volume of the series includes a tribute from the Editor to the poet Christopher Okigbo who died fighting in the Biafran War in 1967, and two articles on his poetry. Also discussed are Leopold Senghor,Dennis Brutus, Wole Soyinka, Lenrie Peters and Ferdinand Oyono. The contributions analyse East African poetry, French Algerian poetry, Zulu poetry, and "Rara" chants in Yoruba oral poetry. Donatus I. Nwoga writes a general article on modern African poetry. The new books reviewed include Mazisi Kunene's Zulu Poems and Okot p'Bitek's Two Songs: "Song of Prisoner" and "Song of Malaya" and Taban lo Liyong's Another Nigger Dead.

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A timely, ethnographically informed account of the "development state" of Tanzania, showing how development practice and culture have become integrated into everyday life, politically, socially and economically. How has development affected the practices of the state in Africa? How has the development state become the basis of social organisation? How do Tanzanians position themselves to obtain aid money to effect change in their personallives? Financial aid flows have entrenched an economy of intervention in which the main beneficiaries are those who can claim to undertake development activities. Even for those not formally engaged in the development sector, its discourses influence everyday discussion about class and inequality, poverty and wealth, modernity and tradition. With Tanzania as the country focus, the author shows how the practices of development have infiltrated not only the state at large but many aspects of people's everyday lives. Maia Green is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.

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Proposes a dynamic new approach to the production of knowledge on Africa, one that is global, multiple and heterogeneous, elucidating this through both discursive theoretical chapters and case histories. Knowledge production is a highly political and politicized practice. This book questions the way in which knowledge of and about Africa is produced and how this influences development policy and practice. Rebutting both Euro-and Afrocentric production of knowledge, this collection proposes a multiple, global and dynamic Africa-centredness in which scholars use whatever concepts and research tools are most appropriate to the different African contextsin which they work. In the first part of the book key conceptual themes are raised and the epistemological foundations are laid through questions of gender, literature and popular music. Contributors in the second part apply andtest these tools and concepts, examining the pressures on doctoral students in a South African university, the crisis in knowledge about declining marine fish populations, perplexities around why certain ICT provisions fail, or how some Zimbabwean students, despite being beset by poverty, succeed. The light thrown on the mechanics of how knowledge comes into being, and in whose interests, illuminates one of the key issues in African Studies. Brenda Cooper is an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Manchester. She was for many years the Director of the Centre for African Studies and a Professor in the English department at the University of Cape Town, where she is now Emeritus Professor. Robert Morrell is Coordinator of the Programme for the Enhancement of Research Capacity at the University of Cape Town.

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Examines some of the varied African literary responses to politics and social justice and injustice under colonialism/neocolonialism. In 1965, Chinua Achebe, in his classic essay "The Novelist as Teacher", declared that the "African past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the early Europeans acting on God's behalf, delivered them." That assertion included a still reverberating sentiment shared by many of the first generation of African writers that it is possible to reclaim that distorted past creatively in order to show and understand "where andwhen the rain started beating Africa". Many genres and forms of literary and cultural production have recalled and recorded and reconfigured that past - many projecting a new confident African future defined by self-determination. The spectrum of that complex engagement, which encompasses critical issues in politics and social justice, provides the basis of this volume, which concludes with tributes to the life and works of Kofi Awoonor. Articles on: Binyavanga Wainaina + Ben Okri & Nationhood + J.M. Coetzee & the Philosophy of Justice + Isidore Okpewho & "Manhood" + Ngugi's Matigari & the Postcolonial Nation + Politics & Women in Irene Salami's MoreThan Dancing + Ayi Kwei Armah's The Resolutionaries Ernest Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA; the editorial board is composed of scholars from US, UK and African universities Nigeria: HEBN

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A close analysis of Farah's novels is used to track the contradictions implicit in the notion of the modern, disengaged self and how transformations of the novel in literary history attempt to negotiate this founding contradiction. The Somali novelist, Nuruddin Farah, is one of the most important African writers today. The central question that this book investigates is the relationship between modern identity and the novel as a genre. Nuruddin Farah's novels are shown by Moolla to encompass the history of the novel: from the 'proto-realism' of the acclaimed From a Crooked Rib to the modernism of A Naked Needle and the postmodernism of, most notably, Maps, returning almost full circle with his most recent novel Crossbones. Moolla examines his writing within the framework of Somali society and culture, Islamic traditions and political contexts, all of which are central themesin his work. She also addresses Farah's engagement with women's lives - his female characters and identities being at the heart of, rather than peripheral, to his stories - something that has distinguished him from many other male African writers. The book finally suggests that through his literary negotiation of the central contradiction of modern identity, Farah comes close to constituting a subject who no longer is transcendentally 'homeless', butfinds a home 'everywhere' - a fitting project for a writer who has been in exile for the greater part of his life. F. Fiona Moolla is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa as well as a freelance writer and published author of short stories. South Africa and Zimbabwe (pb only): Blue Weaver

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Re-envisages what we know about African political economies through its examination of one of the key questions in colonial and African history, that of commercial agriculture and its relationship to slavery. This book considers commercial agriculture in Africa in relation to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery within Africa itself, from the beginnings of European maritime trade in the fifteenth century to theearly stages of colonial rule in the twentieth century. From the outset, the export of agricultural produce from Africa represented a potential alternative to the slave trade: although the predominant trend was to transport enslaved Africans to the Americas to cultivate crops, there was recurrent interest in the possibility of establishing plantations in Africa to produce such crops, or to purchase them from independent African producers. Thisidea gained greater currency in the context of the movement for the abolition of the slave trade from the late eighteenth century onwards, when the promotion of commercial agriculture in Africa was seen as a means of suppressing the slave trade. At the same time, the slave trade itself stimulated commercial agriculture in Africa, to supply provisions for slave-ships in the Middle Passage. Commercial agriculture was also linked to slavery within Africa, since slaves were widely employed there in agricultural production. Although Abolitionists hoped that production of export crops in Africa would be based on free labour, in practice it often employed enslaved labour, so that slaveryin Africa persisted into the colonial period. Robin Law is Emeritus Professor of African History, University of Stirling; Suzanne Schwarz is Professor of History, University of Worcester; Silke Strickrodt is Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham.

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A key volume for Shakespeare, African theatre and postcolonial cultural scholars, promoting debate on the role of Western cultural icons in contemporary postcolonial cultures. This volume takes as its starting point an interrogation of the African contributions to the Globe to Globe festival staged in London in 2012, where 37 Shakespeare productions were offered, each from a different nation. Five African companies were invited to perform and there are articles on four of these productions, examining issues of interculturalism, postcolonialism, language, interpretation and reception. The contributors are both Shakespeare and African theatre scholars, promoting discourse from a range of geographical and cultural perspectives. A critical debate about the process of the Globe to Globe festival is initiated in the form of a discussion article featuringsome of its directors and actors. Two further articles look at Shakespeare productions made purely for Africa, from Mauritius and Cape Verde, and leading Nigerian playwright and cultural commentator Femi Osofisan provides an overview article examining Shakespeare in Africa in the 21st century. The playscript in this volume of African Theatre is Femi Osofisan's Wesoo, Hamlet! or the Resurrection of Hamlet. Volume Editor: JANE PLASTOW Series Editors: Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies, University of Leeds; James Gibbs, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West of England; Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama at the University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds; Yvette Hutchison, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick

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Examines the commodification of land rights and the effect of international licences for resource extraction on the pastoral communities of Sudan. Nowhere has a range of case studies of Sudan been brought together in a single volume. Given the concern with the growing number and complexity of conflicts in Sudan and South Sudan there is a significant readership in academic circles and from those involved in humanitarian organisations of all kinds. Professor Peter Woodward, University of Reading "A timely contribution to an important set of debates ... tackles questions emerging from discussions about modernisation, urbanisation and globalisation from an explicitly local angle with regards to Sudan." Dr Harry Verhoeven, University of Oxford Sudan experiences one of the most severe fissures between society and territory in Africa. Not only were its international borders redrawn when South Sudan separated in 2011, but conflicts continue to erupt over access to land: territorial claims are challenged by local and international actors; borders are contested; contracts governing the privatization of resources are contentious; and the legal entitlements to agricultural land are disputed. Under these new dynamics of land grabbing and resource extraction, fundamental relationships between people and land are being disrupted: while land has become a global commodity, for millions it still serves as a crucial reference for identity-formation and constitutes their most important source of livelihood. This book seeks to disentangle the emerging relationships between people and land in Sudan. The first part focuses on the spatial impact of resource-extracting economies: foreign agricultural land acquisitions; Chinese investments in oil production; and competition between artisanal and industrial gold mining. Detailed ethnographic case studies in the second part, from Darfur, South Kordofan, Red Sea State, Kassala, Blue Nile, and Khartoum State, show how rural people experience "their" land vis-à-vis the latest wave of privatization and commercialization of land rights. Jörg Gertel is Professor of Economic Geography at Leipzig University; Richard Rottenburg is Chair of Anthropology at the University of Halle; Sandra Calkins is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle

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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 at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and author of Ghosts of Kanungu

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Examines the impact of new media (such as video and YouTube) and the use of multi-media on live and recorded performance in Africa. Focuses on the ways African theatre and performance relate to various kinds of media. Includes contributions on dance; popular video, with an emphasis on video drama and soaps from Eastern and Southern Africa, and the Nigerian 'Nollywood' phenomenon; the interface between live performance and video (or still photography), and links between on-line social networks and new performance identities. As a group the articles raise, from original angles, the issues of racism, gender, identity, advocacy and sponsorship. Volume Editor: DAVID KERR is Professor of English in the University of Botswana, and is the author of African Popular Theatre Series Editors: Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies, University of Leeds; James Gibbs, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West of England; Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama at the University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds; Yvette Hutchison, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick

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Examines how the lives of pastoralists in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia are deeply affected by the creation of mutually exclusive ethnic territories and proposes ways to reverse this trend. Focuses on pastoralism, politics, policies and development in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia. It is based on anthropological field research over a period of thirty-four years and attempts a synthesis of historical findingsand political anthropology, including studies carried out from a perspective of development intervention. Presenting a detailed ethnographic view of recent events of ethnic violence in Kenya, the authors analyse how local patterns of conflict among pastoralists were influenced by both national and regional politics, which have encouraged an increased tendency of territorialized ethnicity. The authors then discuss ways of getting out of the ethnic trap and revitalizing a mobile livestock economy in a region where other forms of land use are impossible or much less effective. A companion volume to Islam and Ethnicity in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia, it will be of particular interest to political anthropologists, students of nomadism, pastoral economy ecology, and globalization. Günther Schlee is director of the Department of 'Integration and Conflict', Max Planck Institute forSocial Anthropology, Halle, Germany; Abdullahi Shongolo is an independent scholar based in Kenya.

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The first full-length biography of Christopher Okigbo, the most anthologized modern African poet, giving an extended narrative and rounded account of his life and times. Christopher Okigbo, once described as 'Africa's most lyrical poet of the twentieth century' was killed in September 1967, fighting for the independence of Biafra. The Sunday Times described his death as 'the single most important tragedy of the Nigerian civil war'. The manner in which Okigbo died typified the passionate, tortured and dramatic quality of his life. Widely considered along with Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe as part of modern Nigeria'sgreatest literary triumvirate, Okigbo's death promoted him to cult status among subsequent generations of African writers. This is the first full biography of the Nigerian poet. It places Okigbo within the turmoil of his generation and illustrates the aspects of his life that gave rise to such an intense poetry. How did his experience in the prestigious, English-type boarding school, Umuahia, where he was known more as a sportsman than a scholar, influence his life and later choices? Why was he sacked from the colonial service, and how did that lead him towards a search for private recovery, and ultimately towards poetry? What led him to take up arms? In other words, how didhis eclectic pursuits as high school teacher, university librarian, publisher, gun-runner and guerrilla fuel his poetic drive? OBI NWAKANMA, journalist and poet, is Associate Professor of English, University of CentralFlorida Nigeria: HEBN (PB)

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The proliferation of 'new wars' since the end of the Cold War has forced scholars to re-open the debate about 'what is war?' For most commentators, 'new war' is 'mindless' mass action. It has become a behavioural problem. Like a disease, the risk of infection must be contained. This book takes a different approach. Anthropologists who have lived with and through the wars they describe here reflect a paradoxical assumption that to understand war we must deny it a special status. Rather than quarantine war and leave it to security specialists they attempt to grasp its character asbut one among many phases or aspects of social reality, organised by social agents, made through social action. All war is long-term struggle organised for political ends, and neither the means nor the ends can be understood without reference to a specific social context. North America: Ohio U Press

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An examination of the political instrumentalization of disorder. Are there social, political and cultural factors in Africa which aspire to the continuation of patrimony and conspire against economic development? In association with the International African Institute North America: Indiana U Press

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Detailed study of Kenya's 1992 election. The two authors of this work analyse the case of post-colonial Kenya under Kenyatta and Moi and show how, in spite of a multi-party system, the ruling elite has kept power and wealth to itself. North America: Ohio U Press; Kenya: EAEP

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This volume lists the work produced on anglophone black African literature between 1997 and 1999. This bibliographic work is a continuation of the highly acclaimed earlier volumes compiled by Bernth Lindfors. Containing about 10,000 entries, some of which are annotated to identify the authors discussed, it covers books, periodical articles, papers in edited collections and selective coverage of other relevant sources.

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This work features articles which examine the works of new African writers who have appeared (or who have developed significantly) in the last two decades in all of the genres.< This work features articles which examine the works of new African writers who have appeared (or who have developed significantly) in the last two decades in all of the genres. North America: Africa World Press

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North America: Africa World Press

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Interviews with a selection of African women writers. This book makes a strong and compelling statement about the position of women writers and women in contemporary Africa using the words of the writers themselves', says Dennis Duerden, the author of the earlier African WritersTalking.

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Ouidah, an African town in Dahomey, now Benin, was the principal pre-colonial commercial centre of its region and this is the first detailed study of the town's history and its role in the Atlantic slave trade. Ouidah, an indigenous African town in the modern Republic of Benin, was the principal pre-colonial commercial centre of its region, and the second most important town of the Dahomey kingdom. It served as a major outlet for the export of slaves for the trans- Atlantic trade. Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries Ouidah was the most important embarkation point for slaves in the region of West Africa known to outsiders as the 'Slave Coast'. Exporting over a million slaves, it was second only to Luanda in Angola for the embarkation of slaves in the whole of Africa. The author's central concerns are the organization of the African end of the slave trade, and the impact participation in the trade had on the historical development of the African societies involved. It shifts the focus from the viewpoint of the Dahomian monarchy, represented in previous studies, to the coast. Here is a well documented case study of pre-colonial urbanism, of the evolution of a merchant community, and in particular the growth of a group of private traders whose relations with the Dahomian monarchy grew increasingly problematic over time. North America: Ohio U Press

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In highlighting the role of East Africa's commercial connections to the Middle East and India during the colonial period, this book makes a major contribution to African history as part of world history. Conventional history assumes that the rise of the steamship trade killed off the Indian ocean dhow trade in the twentieth century. This study argues that the dhow economy played a major role in shaping the economic and social lifeof colonial Zanzibar. Dhows and the regional trade they fostered allowed a class of indigenous entrepreneurs to thrive in Zanzibar. These entrepreneurs, whose economic interests stretched across continents and colonial boundaries, were able to thwart or shape many of the colonial state's pet projects. Not only did steamships fail to drive out indigenous sailing craft, but in some cases dhows were able to drive the steamer out of specific market niches. North America: Ohio U Press; Tanzania: Zanzibar Gallery

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This collection of thirteen case studies by international scholars examines the strategies whole societies adopted in opposition to slavery over a period of five centuries. This is the first book to explore in a systematic manner the strategies used by Africans to protect and defend themselves and their communities from the onslaught of the Atlantic slave trade and how they assaulted it. It concludes with a reflective epilogue on the memory of slavery. North America: Ohio U Press

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This work outlines the importance of local knowledge for understanding environmental change. African farmers and herders modify landscapes in far more subtle and unexpected ways than commonly depicted in environment and development debates. This interdisciplinary collection uses collaborative research from the major savanna regions which stretch across Africa to make its case, and covers topics such as land users and landscapes, pastoral ecologies and policy, producers and resources. Environmental thinking about Africa is dominated by narratives of degradation and chaos. The contributors demonstrate that the empirical foundations of such long-held views are shaky at best.

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Students of armed liberation struggle should find much to challenge received wisdom. It took 23 years of armed struggle before Namibia could gain its independence from South Africa in March 1990. SWAPO's victory was remarkable in the face of an overwhelmingly superior enemy. How this came about, and at what cost,is the subject of this study which is based on unpublished documents and extensive interviews with a large range of the key activists in the struggle. The study should be of interest to everyone concerned with southern Africa. North America: Ohio U Press

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Religious activities have been of continuing importance in the rise of protest against post-colonial governments in Eastern Africa. This volume describes attempts by governments to manage religious affairs in both Muslim and Christian areas of East Africa. It also shows how religious denominations act in opposition to one-party state regimes; Islamic fundamentalism and its role before and after the end of the Cold War; and the part played by Christian churches operating as NGOs within the constraints of structural adjustment. North America: Ohio U Press; Uganda: Fountain Publishers; Kenya: EAEP

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Analyses how combined South African and US strategic interests combined to defer an independence settlement for Namibia. Documents resistance to the German conquest by the Herero and Nama peoples; the South African take-over under the League of Nations mandate; land, labour and community resistance from 1920-1960; the emergence of Nationalist organisations; appeals to the UN and the ICJ; the launching of SWAPO's armed struggle, and nationalist responses to South Africa's Bantustan policy. Published in association with the OAU and UNESCO. North America: Africa World Press

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First comprehensive assessment of the requirements for recovery and development in the Horn after the cessation of conflict in the region. International specialists and experts from within the Horn address the problems facing the region as various conflicts in the region come to an end and the challenges of peacetime emerge. North America: Africa World Press; Ethiopia: University Book Centre, Addis Ababa; Netherlands: ISS, The Hague

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Readers at all levels will find even-handed coverage of politics in sub-Saharan Africa's more than thirty states from the early years of independence to today. Readings in African Politics provides an overview of key topics and themes that collectively contribute to an understanding of politics in Africa. The selections included here come from a wide range of Western and non-Western sources and together represent core knowledge in the field of African politics. Topic areas covered are methods for appraising the modern African state, approaches to understanding African states and their politics, dimensionsof regional conflict, conflict between traditional and modern values, the politics of new social forces, and the meaning of contemporary trends. An introductory essay by Tom Young sketches the terrain of politics in Africa from national and international efforts toward development to local problems such as corruption and ethnic conflict. TOM YOUNG is Senior Lecturer in Politics with reference to Africa, SOAS, London Contributors include: ROBERT H. BATES, GORAN HYDEN, Jean-FRANCOIS BAYART, MAHMOOD MAMDANI, PATRICK CHABAL & JEAN-PASCAL DALOZ, ROY MAY, MARGARET HALL & TOM YOUNG, TOYIN FALOLA, RICHARD FANTHORPE, MAMADOU DIOUF, AILI MARI TRIPP, BESSIE HOUSE-MIDAMBA,JOCELYN ALEXANDER, SALLY FALK MOORE, ADAM ASHWORTH Published in association with the International African Institute North America: Indiana U Press

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The author provides evidence to question many common assumptions about land degradation. What impact do displaced people and refugees have on the place where they eke out a living from resources under pressure? Gaim Kibreab questions the degree of impact on land degradation by war-displaced Eritreans on the Gedaref region of the Sudan. Was land degradation on and around the scheme really due to humans and their livestock? North America: Africa World Press/Red Sea Press

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This volume focuses on population displacement in Northeast Africa. For many people, flight across an international border occurs repeatedly and is not a uniquely traumatic event. For many more, displacement has occurred within their own countries. The contributors suggest that in situations of such long-term upheaval, notions of flight into refuge and repatriation to a homeland cease to have much meaning. These populations have received minimal assistance from international organizations and have lacked protection from oppressive governments and marauding guerillas. Their plight has largely been ignored. North America: Africa World Press

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Examines refugees' own strategies for return that do not always relate to formal repatriation schemes. It is well known that there are millions of refugees in Africa. It is less well known that there are milions of refugees who have returned home. This book puts these 'returnees' on the map, documenting some of what happens to people when they go back to their countries of origin and start to pick up the pieces of their lives. Published in association with UNRISD; North America: Africa World Press

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Theoretical perspectives on the crisis of development theories. Twenty-three contributions, from established analysts such as Samir Amin, Peter P. Ekeh, Mahmood Mamdani and Goran Hyden on: the state of development theory, the effect of population on development, rural development, industrialization and the IMF, democracy and ethnicity, women in politics and in agriculture, and Africa in search of a new mode of politics. North America: St Martin's Press

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This text focuses on whether African development has historically been weighted in favour of the urban areas. While the authors come out clearly against urban bias, one of their main worries is that the benefits, and the necessity, of urban development are being lost in adjustment approaches. What is necessary, they suggest, is to harnessthe financial and human resources of the human city as part of a strategy to ensure greater and more widespread economic development. This book provides many important - and controversial - conclusions and recommendations. North America: Heinemann

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The first full length study of the development of the colonial state in Africa. Professor Berman argues that the colonial state was shaped by the contradictions between maintaining effective political control with limited coercive force and ensuring the profitable articulation of metropolitan and settler capitalism with African societies. North America: Ohio U Press; Kenya: EAEP

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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. Assesses the importance attached by African societies to their past and the growth and development of African historiography. This is followed by accounts of the primary literary sources, the oral and living traditions and Africanarchaeology and its techniques. There are further chapters on linguistics, migrations and historical geography before the second part of the book which deals specifically with earliest man and the prehistory of Africa according to geographical area. Specific chapters are also devoted to prehistoric art, agricultural techniques and the development of metallurgy. 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 UNESCO Press.

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A considerable revision in the understanding of the history of colonial Kenya and, more widely, colonialism in Africa. In the sister two volumes entitled Unhappy Valley 1 and Unhappy Valley 2, the authors investigate major themes including the conquest origins and subsequent development of the colonial state, the contradictory socialforces that articulated African societies to European capitalism, and the creation of new political communities and changing meanings of ethnicity in Africa, in the context of social differentiation and class formation. There issubstantial new work on the problems of Mau Mau and of wealth, poverty and civic virtue in Kikuyu political thought. The authors make a fresh contribution to a deeper historical understanding of contemporary Kenyan society and, in particular, of the British and Kikuyu origins of Mau Mau and the emergency of the 1950s. They also highlight some of the shortcomings of ideas about development, explore the limitations of narrowly structuralist Marxisttheory of the state, and reflect on the role of history in the future of Africa. North America: Ohio U Press; Kenya: EAEP WINNER OF THE TREVOR REESE MEMORIAL PRIZE 1994

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Examines the variety of mostly unorganized and informal ways in which Africans exercise agency and resist state power in the 21st century, through citizen action and popular culture, and how the relationship between ruler and ruled is being reframed. The recent eruption of popular protests across North Africa and the Middle East has reopened academic debate on the meaning and strategies of resistance in the 21st century. This book argues that Western notions of state and civilsociety provide only a limited understanding of how power and resistance operate in the African context, where informality is central to the way both state officials and citizens exercise agency. With the principle of informality as a template, the chapters in this volume collectively examine the various modes - organised and unorganised, formal and informal, urban and rural, embodied and discursive, serious and ludic, online and offline, successful and failing - through which Africans contend with power. Resistance takes place against the backdrop of deep fractures in state sovereignty, the remnants of colonial rule and the constraints of a global, neoliberal economic system. Ebenezer Obadare is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Kansas; Wendy Willems is Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Media Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

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Examines 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.

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Important 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.

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Brenda Cooper examines the work of the new generation of African writers who have placed migration as central to their writing. There is a new interest among publishers in New York and London in books by writers of African origin. These authors have often grown up or passed their early adult years out of Africa. The Orange Prize for Fiction was awarded inLondon 2007 to Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, and the Caine Prize for African Writing has introduced new writers such as Leila Aboulela, Biyi Bandele and Chimamanda Adichie herself to agents and publishers. This examination of the extraordinary work which has recently appeared is therefore very timely. Migration is a central theme of much African fiction written in English. Here, Brenda Cooper tracks the journeys undertakenby a new generation of African writers, their protagonists and the solid objects that populate their fiction, to depict the material realities of their multiple worlds and languages. The book explores the uses to which the Englishlanguage is put in order to understand these worlds. It demonstrates how these writers have contested the dominance of colonising metaphors. The writers' challenge is to find an English that can effectively express their many lives, languages and identities. BRENDA COOPER is Director of the Centre for African Studies and a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town. Southern Africa(South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland): University of KwaZulu-Natal Press (PB]

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A unique historical and linguistic resource for those in anthropology, art, folklore, history, linguistics, literature, psychology, religion, sociology, and environmental studies, as well as performers and poets. Not simply relics of the past, proverbs are an oral tradition containing historical and anthropological knowledge missing from conventional sources, and as micro-histories, provide a valuable source for the reconstruction of the manners, characteristics, and worldviews of societies. While only a few hundred Kamba proverbs have ever appeared in print, thousands have circulated over time, from the monsoon exchange era of the Roman Empire through the advent of Islam, European imperialism and colonialism to independence. Today, a resurgence of interest in the form has been generated via social media, songs and vernacular radio programmes. This book provides the first, comprehensive collection of Kamba proverbs from Eastern Kenya in their original Kĩkamba language and in translation. Analysing 2,000 proverbs drawn from oral interviews, archival collections, museum artefacts and published sources, the author traces the origins of each and explores their meaning, interpretation and use. Covering a diverse range of subjects that ranges from plants, animals, birds and insects, to weather, land, the roles of men and women, cosmology, ritual and belief, healing, trade, politics and peacemaking, the book offers new insights into Kenya's rural world and the expansion of Kamba society, East African history, language and culture of vital significance for the social sciences. A valuable comparative work for societal change elsewhere in Africa and beyond, the book also suggests an innovative, alternative approach to the study of the African past.

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Offers 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.

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Provides 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.

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Landmark 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.

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'Today we are taking a decisive step on the path of democracy,' the newly sworn-in President Olusegun Obasanjo told Nigerians on 27 May 1999. 'We will leave no stone unturned to ensure sustenance of democracy, because it is good for us, it is good for Africa, and it is good for the world.' Nigeria's Fourth Republic has survived longer than any of the previous three Republics, the most durable Republic in Nigeria's more than six decades of independence. At the same time, however, the country has witnessed sustained periods of violence, including violent clashes over the imposition of Sharia'h laws, insurgency in the Niger Delta, inter-ethnic clashes, and the Boko Haram insurgency. Despite these tensions of, and anxieties about, democratic viability and stability in Nigeria, has democratic rule come to stay in Africa's most populous country? Are the overall conditions of Nigerian politics, economy and socio-cultural dynamics now permanently amenable to uninterrupted democratic rule? Have all the social forces which, in the past, pressed Nigeria towards military intervention and autocratic rule resolved themselves in favour of unbroken representative government? If so, what are the factors and forces that produced this compromise and how can Nigeria's shallow democracy be sustained, deepened and strengthened? This book attempts to address these questions by exploring the various dimensions of Nigeria's Fourth Republic in a bid to understand the tensions and stresses of democratic rule in a deeply divided major African state. The contributors engage in comparative analysis of the political, economic, social challenges that Nigeria has faced in the more than two decades of the Fourth Republic and the ways in which these were resolved - or left unresolved - in a bid to ensure the survival of democratic rule. This key book that examines both the quality of Nigeria's democratic state and its international relations, and issues such as human rights and the peace infrastructure, will be invaluable in increasing our understanding of contemporary democratic experiences in the neo-liberal era in Africa.

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Finalist 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.

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The 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.

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