Search results for ""James Currey""

In 2012 the African Writers Series celebrated its 50th anniversary. Africa Writes Back tells the publishing story behind some of the books and authors in the series. Africa Writes Back was published in 2008 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart - the novel which provided the impetus for the foundation of the Heinemann African Writers Series in 1962 with Chinua Achebe as the Editorial Adviser. With the 60th anniversary of the AWS being celebrated in 2022, James Currey's book has a new resonance. '... not only the story of a publishing enterprise of great significance; it is also a large part of the story of African literature and its dissemination in the latter half of the twentieth century. The manuscript is full of the drama of that enterprise, the drama of dealing with the mother house, William Heinemann, of dealing with the often intractable political constraints dominating the intellectual space across Africa, and not least of all dealing with the writers themselves - with their ambitions,their temperaments, their financial needs and, at time, their perception of a colonial relationship between themselves and a European publishing house.' - Clive Wake, Emeritus Professor of Modern Languages, University of Kent at Canterbury. North America: Ohio U Press; Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers; South Africa: Wits U Press; Nigeria: HEBN; Kenya: EAEP; Zimbabwe: Weaver Press

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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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This is the first ethnography of the Uganda Martyrs Guild [UMG], a lay movement of the Catholic Church, and its organized witch-hunts in the kingdom of Tooro, Western Uganda. This book explores cannibalism, food, eating and being eaten in its many variations. It deals with people who feel threatened by cannibals, churches who combat cannibals and anthropologists who find themselves suspected of being cannibals. It describes how different African and European images of the cannibal intersected and influenced each other in Tooro, Western Uganda, where the figure of the resurrecting cannibal draws on both pre-Christian ideas andchurch dogma of the bodily resurrection and the ritual of Holy Communion. In Tooro cannibals are witches: they bewitch people so that they die only to be resurrected and eaten. This is how they were perceived in the 1990s when a lay movement of the Catholic Church, the Uganda Martyrs Guild [UMG] organized witch-hunts to cleanse the country. The UMG was responding to an extended crisis: growing poverty, the retreat and corruption of the local government, a guerrilla war, a high death rate through AIDS, accompanied by an upsurge of occult forces in the form of cannibal witches. By trying to deal, explain and "heal" the situation of "internal terror", the UMG reinforced the perception of the reality of witches and cannibals while at the same time containing violence and regaining power for the Catholic Church in competition for "lost souls" with other Pentecostal churches and movements. This volumeincludes the DVD of a video film by Armin Linke and Heike Behrend showing a "crusade" to identify and cleanse witches and cannibals organized by the UMG in the rural area of Kyamiaga in 2002. With a heightened awareness and reflective use of the medium, UMG members created a domesticated version of their crusade for Western (and local) consumption as part of a "shared ethnography". Heike Behrend is Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany, the author of Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits [James Currey, 1999], and co-editor of Spirit Possession, Modernity and Power in Africa[James Currey, 1999]

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The author argues for the continued importance of NGOs, social movements and other 'civil society' actors in creating new forms of citizenship and democracy in South Africa. Critics of liberalism in Europe and North America argue that a stress on 'rights talk' and identity politics has led to fragmentation, individualisation and depoliticisation. But are these developments really signs of 'the end ofpolitics'? In the post-colonial, post-apartheid, neo-liberal new South Africa poor and marginalised citizens continue to struggle for land, housing and health care. They must respond to uncertainty and radical contingencies on a daily basis. This requires multiple strategies, an engaged, practised citizenship, one that links the daily struggle to well organised mobilisation around claiming rights. Robins argues for the continued importance of NGOs, socialmovements and other 'civil society' actors in creating new forms of citizenship and democracy. He goes beyond the sanitised prescriptions of 'good governance' so often touted by development agencies. Instead he argues for a complex, hybrid and ambiguous relationship between civil society and the state, where new negotiations around citizenship emerge. Steven L. Robins is Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Stellenbosch and editorof Limits to Liberation after Apartheid (James Currey).

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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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Analyses Muslim-Muslim divisions within northern Nigeria, which are as important for understanding the violence in the region as those between Muslim and Christian (for which, see the companion volume, Creed and Grievance),with consequences for long-term peacemaking. Nigerian society has long been perceived as divided along religious lines, between Muslims and Christians, but alongside this there is an equally important polarization within the Muslim population in beliefs, rituals and sectarian allegiance. This book highlights the crucial issue of intra-Muslim pluralism and conflict in Nigeria. Conflicting interpretations of texts and contexts have led to fragmentation within northern Nigerian Islam, and differentIslamic sects have often resorted to violence against each other in pursuit of 'the right path'. The doctrinal justification of violence was first perfected against other Muslim groups, before being extended to non-Muslims: conflict between Muslim groups therefore preceded the violence between Muslims and Christians. It will be impossible to manage the relationship between the latter, without addressing the schisms within the Muslim community itself. Nigeria: Premium Times Books Abdul Raufu Mustapha is Associate Professor in African Politics, University of Oxford. His publications include (co-edited with Lindsey Whitfield) Turning Points in African Democracy (James Currey, 2009). Forthcoming: Creed & Grievance: Muslims, Christians & Society in Northern Nigeria edited by Abdul Raufu Mustapha and David Ehrhardt.

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Analyses the lives and livelihoods of the female cashew shellers in Mozambique's capital in the colonial era, during which the industry grew to be a major export, and relates how the women played a fundamental, but previously underappreciated, role in the colony's economy. JOINT RUNNER-UP FOR THE 2017 AIDOO-SNYDER BOOK PRIZE Between the late 1940s and independence in 1975, rural Mozambican women migrated to the capital, Lourenço Marques, to find employment in the cashew shelling industry.This book tells the labour and social history of what became Mozambique's most important late colonial era industry through the oral history and songs of three generations of the workforce. In the 1950s Jiva Jamal Tharani recruited a largely female labour force and inaugurated industrial cashew shelling in the Chamanculo neighbourhood. Seasonal cashew brews had long been an essential component of the region's household, gift and informal economies, but bythe 1970s cashew exports comprised the largest share of the colony's foreign exchange earnings. This book demonstrates that Mozambique's cashew economy depended fundamentally on women's work and should be understood as "whole cloth". Drawing on over 100 interviews, the rich narratives convey layered histories: the rural crises that triggered the flight of women, their lives as factory workers, widespread payment and wage fraud, the formation of innovative urban families, and the health costs that all African families paid for municipal neglect of their neighbourhoods. Jeanne Marie Penvenne is Professor of History, and core faculty in International Relations, Africana and Women, and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Tufts University.. She is the author of the Herskovits shortlisted African Workers and Colonial Racism (James Currey/Heinemann, 1995)

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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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Analyses the complexities of Christian-Muslim conflict that threatens the fragile democracy of Nigeria, and the implications for global peace and security. In northern Nigeria, high levels of ethnic diversity have coincided with 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 part of 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 Christian groups contending for influence and relevance, and the doctrinal, political and historical drivers of conflict and violence between and within them. They analyse three of the most contentious issues: the conflicts in Jos; the Boko Haram insurgency; 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 policy responses 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 is Associate Professor in African Politics, University of Oxford. David Ehrhardt is Assistant Professor of International Development at Leiden University College. 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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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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This new research in English on the work of the Mozambican writer Mia Couto provides a comprehensive introduction to the critical terrain of Couto's literary thought. Already well-established in the Lusophone world, Mia Couto is increasingly acknowledged as a major voice in World literature. Winner of the Camões Prize for Literature in 2013, the most prestigious literary prize honouring Lusophone writers, he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2014, and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Yet, despite this high profile there are very few full-length critical studiesin English about his writing. Mia Couto is known for his imaginative re-working of Portuguese, making it distinctively Mozambican in character. This book brings together some of the key scholars of his work such as Phillip Rothwell, Luís Madureira, and his long-time English translator David Brookshaw. Contributors examine not only his early works, which were written in the context of the 16-year post-independence civil war in Mozambique, but alsothe wide span of Couto's contemporary writing as a novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. There are contributions on his work in ecology, theatre and journalism, as well as on translation and Mozambican nationalist politics. Most importantly the contributors engage with the significance of Couto's writing to contemporary discussions of African literature, Lusophone studies and World literature. Grant Hamilton is Associate Professor of English literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the editor of Reading Marechera (James Currey, 2013). David Huddart is Associate Professor of English literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kongand is author of Involuntary Associations: World Englishes and Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool University Press, 2014]

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A counterbalance to the predominant study of Islam's role in social and political struggles, this book examines life in Ede, south-west Nigeria, offering important analyses of religious co-existence. Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since 9/11, religion has become an increasingly important factor of personal and group identification. Based on an African case study, this book calls for new ways of thinking about diversity that go "beyond religious tolerance". Focusing on the predominantly Muslim Yoruba town of Ede, the authors challenge the assumption that religious difference automatically leads to conflict: in south-west Nigeria, Muslims,Christians and traditionalists have co-existed largely peacefully since the early twentieth century. In some contexts, Ede's citizens emphasise the importance and significance of religious difference, and the need for tolerance.But elsewhere they refer to religious boundaries in passing, or even celebrate and transcend religious divisions. Drawing on detailed ethnographic and historical research, survey work, oral histories and poetry by UK- and Nigeria- based researchers, the book examines how Ede's citizens experience religious difference in their everyday lives. It examines the town's royal history and relationship with the deity Sàngó, its old Islamic compounds and itsChristian institutions, as well as marriage and family life across religious boundaries, to illustrate the multiplicity of religious practices in the life of the town and its citizens and to suggest an alternative approach to religious difference. Insa Nolte is Reader in African Studies at the University of Birmingham, and Visiting Research Professor at Osun State University, Osogbo. She is President of the African Studies Association of the UK(2016-18) and Principal Investigator of the ERC project "Knowing Each Other: Everyday Religious Encounters, Social Identities and Tolerance in Southwest Nigeria". Olukoya Ogen is Provost of Adeyemi College of Education, Ondo; Professor of History at Osun State University, Osogbo; and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. He is the Nigerian coordinator of the "Knowing Each Other" project. Rebecca Jones is Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the "Knowing Each Other" project. Her book, A Cultural History of Nigerian Travel Writing, will be published by James Currey in 2017. Nigeria: Adeyemi College Academic Press (paperback)

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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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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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A key book on Zimbabwe's industrial policy and the relationship between manufacturing, the state, and economic interest groups. Under pressure from local manufacturers, and recognising that industrial policy was a legitimate instrument for development, on 1 July 2016, to boost domestic production, the Government of Zimbabwe passed Statutory Instrument 64 which limited imports and foreign manufactures, allowing local producers satisfy demand. Zimbabwe's neighbours immediately protested that this flouted the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC)'s Protocol on Trade, which aimed to increase trade across borders at regional and national levels. This matter revived the conversation about protectionism as an instrument of industrial policy. Protectionism in Africa is neither limited to Zimbabwe, nor is it a new phenomenon. This book brings a historical perspective to the conversation by exploring the policy proposals and political pressure exerted by manufacturing businesses on the trajectory of industrialisation in colonial Zimbabwe, and reveals that the major point of contention between the state, industry, and other economic interest groups in this period was protection. Tracing changing attitudes to the country's political economy, the author examines the way in which industrialists advanced their interests through the Association of Rhodesian Industries (ARnI) and other trade bodies, and shows how this pitted them not only against the state but other blocs of capital - farmers, miners and commerce. He examines the impact of the post-war Customs Union Agreement with South Africa, manufacturing strategy under UDI, and examines the impact of Southern Rhodesia's development on its trading partners in South Africa, Zambia and Malawi. Casting new light on the continuing debate on regional trade, this important book adds to our understanding of the settler colony's economic, business, and political history.

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Gives voice to the conscripts who are forced to serve indefinitely without remuneration under the ENS in a powerful critical survey of its effect from the Liberation Struggle to today. The Eritrean National Service (ENS) lies at the core of the post-independence state, not only supplying its military, but affecting every aspect of the country's economy, its social services, its public sector and its politics. Over half the workforce are forcibly enrolled into it by the government, driving the country's youth to escape national service by seeking employment and asylum elsewhere. Yet how did the ENS, which began during the 1961-91 liberation struggle as part of the idea of the "common good" - in which individual interests were sacrificed in pursuit of the grand scheme of independence and the country's development - degenerate into forced labour and a modern form ofslavery? And why, when Eritrea no longer faces existential threat, does the government continue to demand such service from its citizens? This book provides for the first time an in-depth and critical scrutiny of the ENS'sachievements and failures and its overarching impact on the social fabric of Eritrea. The author discusses the historical backdrop to the ENS and the rationales underlying it; its goals and objectives; its transformative effects,as well as its impact on the country's defence capability, national unity, national identity construction and nation-building. He also analyses the extent to which the national service functions as an effective mechanism of transmitting the core values of the liberation struggle to the conscripts and through them to the rest of country's population. Finally, the book assesses whether the core aims and objectives of the ENS proclaimed by various governmentshave been or are in the process of being accomplished and, drawing on the testimony of the hitherto voiceless conscripts themselves, its impact on their lives and livelihoods.

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Winner of the 2021 ALA Book of the Year Award - Scholarship The author uses the image of blood under the skin as a way of understanding cultural and literary forms in contemporary South Africa. Chapters deal with the bloodied histories of apartheid and blood as trope for talking about change. In this book the author argues that a younger generation of South Africans is developing important and innovative ways of understanding South African pasts, and that challenge the narratives that have over the last decades been informed by notions of forgiveness and reconciliation. The author uses the image of history-rich blood to explore these approaches to intergenerational memory. Blood under the skin is a carrier of embodied and gendered histories andusing this image, the chapters revisit older archives, as well as analyse contemporary South African cultural and literary forms. The emphasis on blood challenges the privileged status skin has had as explanatory category inthinking about identity, and instead emphasises intergenerational transfer and continuity. The argument is that a younger generation is disputing and debating the terms through which to understand contemporary South Africa, as well as for interpreting the legacies of the past that remain under the visible layer of skin. The chapters each concern blood: Mandela's prison cell as laboratory for producing bloodless freedom; the kinship relations created and resisted in accounts of Eugene de Kock in prison; Ruth First's concern with information leaks in her accounts of her time in prison; the first human-to-human heart transplant and its relation to racialised attempts to salvage whiteidentity; the #Fallist moment; Abantu book festival; and activist scholarship and creative art works that use blood as trope for thinking about change and continuity. Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland): Wits University Press

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Explores the complex and intersecting dimensions of gender, ethnicity, and culture on women in the Global South, as well as the central roles of women in resisting colonial rule, and their foundational contributions to post-independence constitutional reform and nation building. For all the effort and attention women across the Global South receive from the international human rights community and from their own governments, human rights frameworks frequently fail to significantly improve the lives of these women or their communities. Taking Kenya as a case study, this book explores the reasons for this, emphasising the need to understand the effects of the legacy of local colonial and postcolonial histories on the production of gendered identities and power in modern Kenyan cultural and political life. Drawing on interviews with women in Nairobi and rural areas around Lake Victoria in Kenya, the author examinestheir access to, and experiences of, civil and political rights and citizenship, beginning with the colonial encounter, following these legacies into modern times, and the promulgation of the 2010 Constitution. In four thematic chapters, Kenny discusses women as victims and objects of cultural violence, the myths of the sorority of African women, women as victims of political and state violence, and women as actors in national political processes. In revealing that international human rights interventions have in fact reproduced the very patterns, structures, and hierarchies which are at the core of women's disenfranchisement and marginalization, the book provides new insights into the difficulties women face in accessing their rights and will be invaluable for scholars and NGOs working in developing states. Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa.

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Key book on the debates surrounding the knowledge economy and decolonialization of African Studies, that brings the subject up to date for the 21st century. Decolonization of knowledge has become a major issue in African Studies in recent years, brought to the fore by social movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter. This timely book explores the politics and disputed character of knowledge production in colonial and postcolonial Uganda, where efforts to generate forms of knowledge and solidarity that transcend colonial epistemologies draw on long histories of resistance and refusal. Bringing together scholars from Africa, Europe and North America, the contributors in this volume analyse how knowledge has been created, mobilized, and contested across a wide range of Ugandan contexts. In so doing, they reveal how Ugandans have built, disputed, and reimagined institutions of authority and knowledge production in ways that disrupt the colonial frames that continue to shape scholarly analyses and state structures. From the politics of language and gender in Bakiga naming practices to ways of knowing among the Acholi, the hampering of critical scholarship by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.

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A groundbreaking analysis of 21st century labour practices in the mining industry and the new scramble for industrial power on the African continent. Since the beginning of the 21st century, African countries with mineral resources have witnessed an unprecedented rise in foreign direct investments and the development of new flexible workforce management practices in the mining industry. But what does this mean for those who actually work in this industry? Based on research in the Congo and Zambia, where a mining boom has led to more than thirty new mining projects in recent years, this book explores the processes of improvisation and adaptation behind the emergence of this neoliberal labour regime. The contributors show how mining projects' labour practices have been mediated, negotiated, or resisted by mine workers, unionists, and human resource managers. They discuss variations in labour practices put in place by new mining projects depending on the type of capital involved, the type of mine being developed, and their location. Finally, the book examines the implications of power dynamics surrounding companies' labour strategies from the broader perspective of the responsibility of trade unions, gender equality, and identity politics.

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International scholars explore one of the most important postcolonial novels of African literature. Joint winner of Best Non-Fiction Biography, Humanities and Social Sciences Awards 2020 Sol Plaatje's Mhudi is the first full-length novel in English to have been written by a black South African and is widely regarded as one of Africa's most important literary works. Drawing upon both oral and literary traditions, Plaatje uses the form of the historical novel, and romance genre, to explore the 19th-century dispossession of his people, to provide a novel black perspective on their history. It is a book that speaks to present-day concerns, to do with land, language, history and decolonisation. Today the novel has iconic status, not only in South Africa, but worldwide - it has been translated into a number of languages - and its impact on other writers has been profound. The novelist Bessie Head described it as "more than a classic; there is just no other book on earth like it. All the stature and grandeur of the author are in it." A century after its writing in London in 1920 [it was published in South Africa in 1930, for reasons explained in the book], and at a time of intellectual ferment, with debates on decolonisation to the fore, in popular culture as much as in the academy, this book celebrates Mhudi's place in African literature, reviews its critical reception, and offers fresh perspectives. The contributors discuss Mhudis genesis, writing and publication; its reception by literary critics from the 1930s to thepresent; Mhudi as a feminist novel; Mhudis use of oral tradition; issues of translation; Mhudi in the context of African literature and history, and the decolonisation of the curriculum. An authoritative listing of all editions of Mhudi, translations as well as in English completes the book. SABATA MOKAE is a novelist and lecturer in creative writing at Sol Plaatje University, Kimberley, and the author of The Story of Sol T. Plaatje (2010). BRIAN WILLAN is Senior Research Fellow at Rhodes University, Extraordinary Professor at Sol Plaatje and North West Universities. He is the author of Sol Plaatje: a life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje,1876-1932 (2018), and co-editor (with Janet Remmington and Bheki Peterson) of Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa: Past and Present (2016). Africa: Jacana

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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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Explores the impact of Jesuit missions on the development of Christianity in postcolonial French Africa, which found itself at the centre of major shifts and struggles within global Christianity and world politics. At a time when most African countries were moving towards independence, the Vatican was speeding up the Church's indigenization agenda in an effort to secure its survival in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, at the same time, African nationalism was on the rise and, following the collapse of its colonial empire, France was attempting to reassert its influence in Africa. This book shows how the Vatican, French Jesuits, the rising Cameroonian indigenous clergy and leadership, and the first Cameroonian Jesuits competed for the Catholic evangelization of French Africa during the mid-20th century. In the mission field, they also competed with different Protestant groups, with whom they shared acommon aim: to convert African traditional religionists and different groups of African Muslims to Christ, while containing the spread of anti-religious ideologies such as Communism. Tracing the rapid expansion of Christianity in Central and Western French Africa during the second half of the twentieth century, the author shows in this book how this competition for faith helped both build the church in French West Africa and Africanize the church alongside missionary Christianity in postcolonial Africa. He also explores the African reaction to this diverse and competing global agenda of Christianization, especially after Chad and Cameroon came together as part of a single Jesuit jurisdiction in 1973, and the way in which, despite differing interpretations of Catholicity which generated internal conflicts, Western Jesuits focus on popular masses and the poor, was able to contain the spread of Islam, counter the Chad's persecution of Christians during the Cultural Revolution (1973-1975) and secure the survival of Christianity as a missionary movement in which Western missionaries worked alongside a rising African clergy and leadership. JEAN LUC ENYEGUE, SJ is the Director of the Jesuit Historical Institute in Africa, Nairobi. He also lectures on church history at Hekima University College, Catholic University of Eastern Africa.

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An innovative examination of our understanding of political legitimacy in Mali, and its wider implications for democratization and political modernity in the Global South. The 2012 coup d'état in Mali, and the political destabilization that followed, brought an abrupt end to the country's success story as a "donor darling" and as a model of successful democratization. In spite of signing a peace treaty, Muslim militants continue to launch attacks in the country's northern and central territories and to challenge Mali's government and state institutions. The challenge is compounded by the massive opposition mobilized by protagonists of Salafi- inspired readings of Islam in the capital Bamako. Why should this be, and how can it be that these actors, particularly those employing the language of Islam, have emerged as a serious challenge to the political order and government in Mali, and garner support among the country's urban and rural populations? Against the background dynamics of the political turmoil that has shaken Mali in recent years and the uncertainties surrounding the present government, this book looks to the nature and extent of legitimacy of Mali's postcolonial state and also explores more general questions regarding the nature of political legitimacy. Schulz examines the attitudes, judgments and practices by which inhabitants of a rural area in south-western Mali attribute or disclaim the legitimacy of the state political order and of individual representatives. Countering the tendency of some scholars to adopt a belief-centered approach or to use a broad approach to legitimacy, she suggests a more comprehensive and systematic approach to legitimation that takes into account the subjective attitudes of actors as well as their material circumstances and the state of institutional governance.

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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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A significant contribution to the history of humanitarianism, Christianity and the politics of aid in Africa. In the wake of the civil wars in Congo from 1960 to 1973, international and internal struggles for power led to famines, the collapse of public health and a huge population of refugees. This book explores the role played by missionaries from the US, Canada and the UK who organized aid, and shows how they had to redefine their roles in independent Africa after the end of colonialism. Partnering US government officials to overcome the humanitarian crisis as the politics of aid threatened to sink their efforts, Protestant aid programs also worked with US-backed Congolese military efforts to crush leftist rebels and joined with Angolan rebels to help hundreds of thousands of Angolan refugees fleeing Portuguese colonialism. After Mobutu Sese Seko seized power in 1965, they found themselves adjusting with difficulty to the rise of Congolese religious leaders who demanded aid workers and donor agencies accept African control over development projects. In this examination of the changing history of humanitarianism in Central Africa, the author shows how aid workers, who believed themselves to be politically neutral humanitarians, had to question their privileged role, and negotiate new ways of collaboration. Offering material aid and support, they hoped to heal the wounds of colonial repression and the violence of independence - abandoned hospitals, starving refugees, economic recession - yet also sought to ensure a Christian Congo would emerge allied to Western countries. The author explores the role of Protestant aid workers in the ethnic violence of South Kasai province; shows how Protestant aid became a tool in US-back counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist rebels; examines the interplay of Congolese and Western medicine in the work of Protestant medical volunteers; and discusses conflict in the aims of the missionaries and Africans over the control of aid funds and aid initiatives.

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First comprehensive account of the origins and early history of the Chewa as revealed by oral tradition and archaeology that allows a more accurate picture of a pre-literate society. The Chewa are the largest ethnic group in Malawi, representing a third of the population of approximately 19 million, and their language - Chichewa - is Malawi's national language. Yet the last book on the history of this group was published in 1944, and was based on oral history, or tradition. As with much African history, oral history started to be recorded only in the late 19th century. This is the first book to use not only oral history, but also documents written by early Portuguese explorers, traders and government officials, as well as archaeology, to piece together the early history of the Chewa. The author is an archaeologist, who discovered the first major Chewa settlement, Mankhamba, near the southern part of Lake Malawi. His excavations have enabled a more scientific chronology of the migrations of the Chewa into what is today Malawi and have provided physical proof of their early history as well as their material and spiritual culture and way of life. Professor Yusuf Juwayeyi has written and documented a very readable history and description of archaeology, which reveals the value of combining oral tradition together with archaeology to arrive at a more accurate picture of the history of a pre-literate society. This book will be of value not only to historians, archaeologists and anthropologists, but also the general reader interested in Africanhistory. YUSUF M. JUWAYEYI is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York. South Africa: UCT Press

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A vivid portrayal of Kivebulaya's life that interrogates the role of indigenous agents as harbingers of change under colonization, and the influence of emerging polities in the practice of Christian faiths. Apolo Kivebulaya was a practitioner of indigenous religion and a Muslim before he became in 1895 a Christian missionary from Buganda to Toro and Ituri. He is still admired as a churchman and missionary in the Anglican churches ofUganda, Congo, Tanzania and Kenya, and is a significant civic figure in school curricula in Uganda. This book provides insight into religious encounter in the Great Lakes region of Africa, in which individuals like Kivebulaya remade themselves through conversion to Christianity and re-ordered social relations through preaching a transnational religion which brought technological advantage. In re-examining Apolo's life the author reveals the historic social processes and the cultural motivations which provoked religious and socio-political change in colonial east Africa. She explores the processes of his religious adherence, his travels and church planting, his commitment to Bible translation and its role in developing national sensibilities, and his engagement with missionaries, the Ganda political elite, and the peoples of the Ituri forest, as well as British and Belgian colonial polities. Kivebulayautilized Christian repertoires of memory-making - the Bible, hymns, prayers and fellowship - in creating communities of disciples, and was instrumental in creating new forms of Christian identity in the region, fashioned by levelsof acceptance and resistance. By focusing on the role of indigenous agents as harbingers of change, the author offers a new perspective on the history of the northern Great Lakes region of Africa. Emma Wild-Wood is Senior Lecturer of African Christianity and African Indigenous Religions and Co-director of the Centre for the Study of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh. Her books include Migration and Christian Identity in Congo (Brill, 2008) and editing, with Joel Cabrita and David Maxwell, Relocating World Christianity: Interdisciplinary Studies in Universal and Local Expressions of the Christian Faith (Brill, 2017). Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan: Twaweza Communications

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Examines the historical, political, religious, and social dynamics of Muslim minority status in Uganda, and important themes of pre- and post-colonial political community, religion and national identity. Between 2012 and 2016 several Muslim clerics were murdered in Uganda: there is still no consensus as to who was responsible. In this book Joseph Kasule seeks to explain this by examining the colonial and postcolonial history of the Muslim minority and questions of Muslim identity within a non-Muslim state. Challenging prevalent scholarship that has homogenized Muslims' political identity, Kasule demonstrates that Muslim responses to power have been varied and multiple. Beginning with the pre-colonial political community in Buganda, and Muteesa I's attempted Islamization of the country using Islam as a centralizing ideology, the author discusses how the political status of Islam and Muslims in Uganda has been defined under successive regimes. Muteesa I's Islamization faltered when Christianity entered Buganda in the latter half of the 19th century, resulting in division between Muslim and Christian sections. The colonial period created a new type of political project that defined the Muslim question as one of representation, and Kasule discusses how this laid the foundation for a politics of Muslim containment within a predominantly Christian power. He examines contrasting urban-based Muslim organizations and rural expressions of Islam; tension between representative claims of Muslim leaderships within the demand for Muslim autonomy; and the rise of new reform groups. As these splits turned violent, 'new' Muslim 'publics' emerged around opposing centres of Muslim power which sought different resolutions to their minority situation. East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi): Makerere Institute of Social Research

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The first book-length study on the relationship between African literature and new media. The digital space provides a new avenue to move literature beyond the restrictions of book publishing on the continent. Arguing that writers are putting their work on cyberspace because communities are emerging from this space, and because increasing numbers of Africans use the internet as part of their day-to-day engagement with their societies and the world, Shola Adenekan explores this transformative development in Nigeria and Kenya, both significant countries in African literature and two of the continent's largest digital technology hubs. Queer Kenyans and Nigerians find new avenues for their work online where print publishers are refusing to publish short stories and poems on same-sex desire. Binyavanga Wainaina's rise to critical acclaim arguably started on the literary blog Generator 21. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's literary celebrity partly relies on her prolific use of social media to tell thestory of powerful Nigerian women. With further examples from the development of literature across the continent, this innovative book sheds new light on narratives about digital Africa. It will also be the first major work to provide a trajectory of class consciousness in Kenyan and Nigerian writing. Through this analysis, the book articulates the difference in attitudes towards queerness, sexuality, and hetero-normativity among successive generations of writers.

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Examines the making and remaking of Nairobi, one of Africa's most fragmented, vibrant cities, contributing to debates on urban anthropology, the politics of the past and postcolonial materialities. What does it mean to make a life in an African city today? How do ordinary Africans, surrounded by collapsing urban infrastructures and amid fantastical promises of hypermodern, globalised futures, try to ensure a place for themselves in the city's future? Exploring the relationship between the remains of empire and the global city, and themes of urban belonging and exclusion, housing and security, Constance Smith examines the making and remaking of one ofAfrica's most fragmented, vibrant cities. Nairobi is on the cusp of radical urban change. As in other capital cities across Africa, the Kenyan government has launched "Vision 2030", an urban megaproject that envisions the capital as a "world class metropolis", a spectacular new node in a network of global cities. Yet as a city born of British colonialism, Nairobians also live amongst the dilapidated vestiges of imperial urban planning; spaces designed to regulate urban subjects. Based on extensive ethnographic research in a dilapidated, colonial-era public housing project built as a model urban neighbourhood but which is now slated for demolition, Smith explores how projects of self-making and city-making are entwined. She traces how it is through residents' everyday lives - in the mundane, incremental work of home maintenance, in the accumulation of stories about the past, in ordinary people's aspirations for the future - that urban landscapes are formed, imaginatively, materially and unpredictably, across time. Nairobi emerges as a place of pathways and plans, obstructions and aspirations, residues and endurances, thatinflect the way that ordinary people produce the city, generating practices of historymaking, ideas about urban belonging and attempts to refashion "Vision 2030" into a future more meaningful and inclusive to ordinary city dwellers. Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa. Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania,Rwanda: Twaweza Communications

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Cutting-edge research in the study of Islamic scholarship and its impact on the religious, political, economic and cultural history of Africa; bridges the "europhone"/"non-europhone" knowledge divides to significantly advance decolonial thinking, and extend the frontiers of social science research in Africa. The study of Islamic erudition in Africa is growing rapidly, transforming not just Islamic studies, but also African Studies. This interdisciplinary volume from leading international scholars fills a lacuna in presenting not only the history and spread of Islamic scholarship in Africa, but its current state and future concerns. Challenging the notion that Muslim societies in black Africa were essentially oral prior to the European colonial conquest at the turn of the 20th century, and countering the largely Western division of sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa, the authors take an inclusive approach to advance our knowledge of the contribution of people of African descent to the life of Mecca. This book explores in depth the intellectual and spiritual exchanges between populations in the Maghreb, the Sahara and West Africa. A key theme is Islamic learning. The authors examine the madrasa as asite of knowledge and learning, the relationship between "diasporas" and Islamic education systems, female learning circles, and the use of ICT. Diversifying the study of Islamic erudition, the contributors look at the interactions between textuality and orality, female learning circles, the vernacular study of poetry and cosmological texts, and the role of Ajami - the use of Arabic script to transcribe 80 African languages. Africa: Cerdis

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Cutting-edge research in the study of Islamic scholarship and its impact on the religious, political, economic and cultural history of Africa; bridges the "europhone"/"non-europhone" knowledge divides to significantly advance decolonial thinking, and extend the frontiers of social science research in Africa. The study of Islamic erudition in Africa is growing rapidly, transforming not just Islamic studies, but also African Studies. This interdisciplinary volume from leading international scholars fills a lacuna in presenting not only the history and spread of Islamic scholarship in Africa, but its current state and future concerns. Challenging the notion that Muslim societies in black Africa were essentially oral prior to the European colonial conquest at the turn of the 20th century, and countering the largely Western division of sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa, the authors take an inclusive approach to advance our knowledge of the contribution of people of African descent to the life of Mecca. This book explores in depth the intellectual and spiritual exchanges between populations in the Maghreb, the Sahara and West Africa. A key theme is Islamic learning. The authors examine the madrasa as asite of knowledge and learning, the relationship between "diasporas" and Islamic education systems, female learning circles, and the use of ICT. Diversifying the study of Islamic erudition, the contributors look at the interactions between textuality and orality, female learning circles, the vernacular study of poetry and cosmological texts, and the role of Ajami - the use of Arabic script to transcribe 80 African languages. Africa: Cerdis

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An alternative analysis of the impact of the 1975 land reforms on peasant land rights, rural inequality and development in Ethiopia's Amhara highlands; essential reading for those engaged in research and policymaking in peasant studies, land and agriculture. The land issue, as in other parts of Africa, dominates life in Ethiopia, where agriculture accounts for 80 per cent of employment, but despite land reform, progress seems out of reach for many. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in northern Ethiopia from the 1990s onwards, this is a welcome and overdue local analysis of the impact of the land tenure system in the Amhara highlands. Complementing the macro research of international economists, the authors take a detailed look at the impact of the 1975 land reforms for those in North Shäwa, Wälo and Gojam regions, where the peasantry depend upon the land not only for their homes, but their livelihoods. The land tenure systemis commonly thought to have been settled by land certification following the reforms, but the contributors reveal that rather than this leading to periodic redistribution and tenure insecurity, farmers here had 'conditional' private ownership within the framework of ultimate state control. The book also reveals the importance of social differentiation, with the peasant farm closely linked to household processes. In rural economies such as Ethiopia, the land question remains critical for future development, and the book ends by drawing out the implications of the authors' research for policymakers, governments and societies in the Global South. SVEIN EGE is Associate Professor in African Studies at the Department of Social Anthropology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. His published works include The Promised Land: The Amhara land redistribution of 1997 (1997).

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Winner of the 2021 ALA Book of the Year Award - Scholarship The author uses the image of blood under the skin as a way of understanding cultural and literary forms in contemporary South Africa. Chapters deal with the bloodied histories of apartheid and blood as trope for talking about change. In this book the author argues that a younger generation of South Africans is developing important and innovative ways of understanding South African pasts, and that challenge the narratives that have over the last decades been informed by notions of forgiveness and reconciliation. The author uses the image of history-rich blood to explore these approaches to intergenerational memory. Blood under the skin is a carrier of embodied and gendered histories andusing this image, the chapters revisit older archives, as well as analyse contemporary South African cultural and literary forms. The emphasis on blood challenges the privileged status skin has had as explanatory category inthinking about identity, and instead emphasises intergenerational transfer and continuity. The argument is that a younger generation is disputing and debating the terms through which to understand contemporary South Africa, as well as for interpreting the legacies of the past that remain under the visible layer of skin. The chapters each concern blood: Mandela's prison cell as laboratory for producing bloodless freedom; the kinship relations created and resisted in accounts of Eugene de Kock in prison; Ruth First's concern with information leaks in her accounts of her time in prison; the first human-to-human heart transplant and its relation to racialised attempts to salvage whiteidentity; the #Fallist moment; Abantu book festival; and activist scholarship and creative art works that use blood as trope for thinking about change and continuity. Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland): Wits University Press

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The first comprehensive and authoritative history of work and labour in Africa; a key text for all working on African Studies and Labour History worldwide. Co-published with the International Labour Organization on the centenary of its founding in 1919, the General Labour History of Africa is a landmark in the study of labour history. It brings, for the first time, an African perspective within a global context to the study of labour and labour relations. The volume analyses key developments in the 20th century, such as the emergence of free wage labour; the transformation in labour relations; the role of capital and employers; labour agency and movements; the growing diversity of formal and informal or precarious labour; the meaning of work; and the impact of gender and age on the workplace. The contributors - eminent historians, anthropologists and social scientists from Africa, Europe and the United States - examine African labour in the context of labour and social issues worldwide: mobility and colonial and postcolonial migration, forced labour, security, the growth of entrepreneurial labour, the informal sector and self-employment, and the impact of trade unionism, welfare and state relations. The book discusses key sectors such as mining, agriculture, industry, transport, domestic work, and sport, tourism and entertainment, as well as the international dimension and the history and impact of the International Labour Organization itself. This authoritative and comprehensive work will be an invaluableresource for historians of labour, social relations and African history. In association with the ILO Regional Office for Africa Stefano Bellucci is senior researcher at the International Institute of SocialHistory, Amsterdam, and lecturer in African History and Economy at Leiden University, the Netherlands; Andreas Eckert is Director of the International Research Centre for Work and the Human Life Cycle in Global History and professor of African history at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.

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The first comprehensive and authoritative history of work and labour in Africa; a key text for all working on African Studies and Labour History worldwide. Co-published with the International Labour Organization on the centenary of its founding in 1919, the General Labour History of Africa is a landmark in the study of labour history. It brings, for the first time, an African perspective within a global context to the study of labour and labour relations. The volume analyses key developments in the 20th century, such as the emergence of free wage labour; the transformation in labour relations; the role of capital and employers; labour agency and movements; the growing diversity of formal and informal or precarious labour; the meaning of work; and the impact of gender and age on the workplace. The contributors - eminent historians, anthropologists and social scientists from Africa, Europe and the United States - examine African labour in the context of labour and social issues worldwide: mobility and colonial and postcolonial migration, child and forced labour, security, the growth of entrepreneurial labour, the informal sector and self-employment, and the impact of trade unionism, welfare and state relations. The book discusses key sectors such as mining, agriculture, industry, transport, domestic work, and sport, tourism and entertainment, as well as the international dimension and the history and impact of the International Labour Organization itself. This authoritative and comprehensive work will be aninvaluable resource for historians of labour, social relations and African history. In association with the ILO Regional Office for Africa Stefano Bellucci is senior researcher at the International Instituteof Social History, Amsterdam, and lecturer in African History and Economy at Leiden University, the Netherlands; Andreas Eckert is Director of the International Research Centre for Work and the Human Life Cycle in Global History and professor of African history at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.

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Of interest to linguists, artists, ma-youth, scholars of urban studies, educationalists, policy makers and language planners who are grappling with the challenges of multilingualism and language of education in Kenya. The city of Nairobi is a rich context for the study of sociolinguistic phenomena. The coexistence of speakers of many different languages, further differentiated by socio-economic status, age and ethnicity provide conditions for the development of a mixed code such as Sheng, an urban variety of Kenyan Swahili which has morphed from a "youth language" into a vernacular of wider use. Sheng is a unique phenomenon in the study of linguistic change and innovation in an African context, a reflection of the ethnolinguistic diversity of Kenya, and language asymmetry created by socio-economic disparities. It also provides a window into understanding the processes of urban multilingualism, within the specific space structuring of Nairobi city. This book is a detailed account of the rise and development of Sheng, its linguistic structure, social functions, and possible future directions. The author's analysis ofits presence in newspapers, TV, radio and online, makes it clear that Sheng functions as a particularly useful lens through which to explore contemporary Kenya.

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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. Tsehai Berhane-Selassie taught Social Anthropology, Gender and Development Studies in universities in Ethiopia, the UK, the USA and Ireland. She is a former member of The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Her publications include editing Gender Issues in Ethiopia.

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Unusable pasts; scandalous lives; political betrayal, confession and collaboration: reading narrative non-fiction across South Africa's unfinished transition. Over the last decades, South Africa has seen an outpouring of life writing and narrative non-fiction. Authors like Panashe Chigumadzi, Jacob Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Antjie Krog, Sisonke Msimang, Njabulo Ndebele, Jonny Steinberg and Ivan Vladislavic; have produced a compelling and often controversial body of work, exploring the country's ongoing political and social transition with great ambition, texture and risk. Experiments with Truth is the first book-length account of non-fiction in South African literature. It reads the country's transition as refracted through an array of documentary modes that are simultaneously refashioned and blurred into each other: long-form analytic journalism and reportage; experiments in oral history, microhistory and archival reconstruction; life-writing, memoir and the essay. It traces the strange and ethically complex process by which real people, places and events are shuffled, patterned and plotted in long-form prose narrative. While holding in mind the imperatives of testimony and witness so important to the struggle for liberation and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the case studies here are increasingly drawn to a post-TRC aesthetic: works that engage with difficult, inappropriate or unusable elements of the past, and the unfinished project of social reconstruction in SouthAfrica. The author examines non-fictions that are speculative, formally innovative and sometimes experimental, rather than informational or narrowly journalistic; that explore difficult subjects like collaboration, complicity, confession - and have embedded within them their own reflections on the problems of narrating within a scene of unresolved difference. In this way, southern African materials are placed in a global context, and in dialogue with otherimportant non-fictional traditions that have emerged at moments of social rupture and transition. Hedley Twidle is a writer, teacher and researcher based in the English Department at the University of Cape Town. He specialises in twentieth-century, southern African and world literatures, as well as creative non-fiction and the environmental humanities. His essay collection, Firepool: Experiences in an Abnormal World, was published in 2017.

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An in-depth analysis of the politics and practice of food production and supply in Ethiopia, and their impact on the largely agricultural economy and farming populations, who represent nearly 80 per cent of the country's population. Winner of the Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize to the author of the best book on East African Studies, 2018. In October 2016, the Ethiopian administration declared a State of Emergency in response to anti-Government demonstrations and mass riots. While the Government claimed the riots stemmed from subversive activities among large diasporic populations in the West, the evidence suggests that they were provoked by widespread internal dissatisfaction.Land deals by the Government with foreign investors, the building of vast hydroelectric dams, sugar estates and industry parks, and urban sprawl have put pressure on agricultural, rural areas. Today, dispossessions, drought and social unrest surround fears of the worst food shortages in decades. Examining these developments in Ethiopia's lake region, the author shows how transformations in state-society relations and the organization of production and exchange have impacted on a population of smallholder farmers for whom agriculture is not only the mainstay of the economy but a way of life. Getnet Bekele is Associate Professor of History at Oakland University, MI, wherehe teaches African History and the Environmental and Economic History of Africa and the Global South.

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