African History Book List · 
Featured Title
Women and Slavery, Volume One
Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic
Edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph C. Miller
The literature on women enslaved around the world has grown rapidly in the last ten years, evidencing strong interest in the subject across a range of academic disciplines. Until Women and Slavery, no single collection has focused on female slaves who—as these two volumes reveal—probably constituted the considerable majority of those enslaved in Africa, Asia, and Europe over several millennia and who accounted for a greater proportion of the enslaved in the Americas than is customarily acknowledged.…
Healing Traditions
African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948
In August 2004, South Africa officially sought to legally recognize the practice of traditional healers. Largely in response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and limited both by the number of practitioners and by patients’ access to treatment, biomedical practitioners looked toward the country’s traditional healers as important agents in the development of medical education and treatment.…
Intonations
A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times
Intonations tells the story of how Angola’s urban residents in the late colonial period (roughly 1945–74) used music to talk back to their colonial oppressors and, more importantly, to define what it meant to be Angolan and what they hoped to gain from independence.…
Slavery, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa
Slavery, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa examines the rural Cape Colony from the earliest days of Dutch colonial rule in the mid-seventeenth century to the outbreak of the South African War in 1899.…
Heterosexual Africa?
The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS
Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS builds from Marc Epprecht’s previous book, Hungochani (which focuses explicitly on same-sex desire in southern Africa), to explore the historical processes by which a singular, heterosexual identity for Africa was constructed—by anthropologists, ethnopsychologists, colonial officials, African elites, and most recently, health care workers seeking to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic.…
Myth of Iron
Shaka in History
By Dan Wylie
Over the decades we have heard a great deal about Shaka, the most famous—or infamous—of Zulu leaders. It may come as a surprise, therefore, that we do not know when he was born, nor what he looked like, nor precisely when or why he was assassinated.…
Women, Work & Domestic Virtue in Uganda, 1900–2003
By Grace Bantebya Kyomuhendo and Marjorie Keniston McIntosh
This groundbreaking book by two leading scholars offers a complete historical picture of women and their work in Uganda, tracing developments from precolonial times to the present and into the future. Setting women’s economic activities into a broader political, social, and cultural context, it provides the first general account of their experiences amid the changes that shaped the country.…
The Unsettled Land
State-making & the Politics of Land in Zimbabwe, 1893–2003
The Unsettled Land engages with the current debates on land and politics in Africa and provides a much-needed historical narrative of the Zimbabwean case. In early 2000, a process of land occupation began in Zimbabwe.…
Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa
Edited by Henri Médard and Shane Doyle
Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa is a collection of ten studies by the most prominent historians of the region. Slavery was more important in the Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa than often has been assumed, and Africans from the interior played a more complex role than was previously recognized.…
Constructive Engagement?
Chester Crocker & American Policy in South Africa, Namibia & Angola, 1981–1988
By J. E. Davies
The notion of engagement represents an indispensable tool in a foreign policy practitioner’s armory. The idea of constructive engagement is forwarded by governments as a method whereby pressure can be brought to bear on countries to improve their record on human rights, while diplomatic and economic contracts can be maintained.…
War in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa
The Patterns and Meanings of State-Level Conflict in the 19th Century
By Richard Reid
War in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa examines the nature and objectives of violence in the region in the nineteenth century. It is particularly concerned with highland Ethiopia and the Great Lakes.…
Women and Slavery, Volume One
Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic
Edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph C. Miller
The literature on women enslaved around the world has grown rapidly in the last ten years, evidencing strong interest in the subject across a range of academic disciplines. Until Women and Slavery, no single collection has focused on female slaves who—as these two volumes reveal—probably constituted the considerable majority of those enslaved in Africa, Asia, and Europe over several millennia and who accounted for a greater proportion of the enslaved in the Americas than is customarily acknowledged.…
Women and Slavery, Volume Two
The Modern Atlantic
Edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph C. Miller
The literature on women enslaved around the world has grown rapidly in the last ten years, evidencing strong interest in the subject across a range of academic disciplines. Until Women and Slavery, no single collection has focused on female slaves who—as these two volumes reveal—probably constituted the considerable majority of those enslaved in Africa, Asia, and Europe over several millennia and who accounted for a greater proportion of the enslaved in the Americas than is customarily acknowledged.…
Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946–1958
In September 1958, Guinea claimed its independence, rejecting a constitution that would have relegated it to junior partnership in the French Community. In all the French empire, Guinea was the only territory to vote “No.…
Fighting the Greater Jihad
Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya of Senegal, 1853–1913
In Senegal, the Muridiyya, a large Islamic Sufi order, is the single most influential religious organization, including among its numbers the nation’s president. Yet little is known of this sect in the West.…
Cultivating Success in Uganda
Kigezi Farmers and Colonial Policies
Kigezi, a district in southwestern Uganda, is exceptional in many ways. In contrast to many other parts of the colonial world, this district did not adopt cash crops. Soil conservation practices were successfully adopted, and the region maintained a remarkably developed and individualized land market from the early colonial period.…
Butterflies & Barbarians
Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa
Swiss missionaries played a primary and little-known role in explaining Africa to the literate world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book emphasizes how these European intellectuals, brought to the deep rural areas of southern Africa by their vocation, formulated and ordered knowledge about the continent.…
Claim to the Country
The Archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd
In the 1870s, facing cultural extinction and the death of their language, several San men and women told their stories to two pioneering colonial scholars in Cape Town, Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. The narratives of these San—or Bushmen—were of the land, the rain, the history of the first people, and the origin of the moon and stars.…
Resurrecting the Granary of Rome
Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa
Tales of deforestation and desertification in North Africa have been told from the Roman period to the present. Such stories of environmental decline in the Maghreb are still recounted by experts and are widely accepted without question today.…
Imagining Serengeti
A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present
Many students come to African history with a host of stereotypes that are not always easy to dislodge. One of the most common is that of Africa as safari grounds—as the land of expansive, unpopulated game reserves untouched by civilization and preserved in their original pristine state by the tireless efforts of contemporary conservationists.…
Black and White in Colour
African History on Screen
Edited by Vivian Bickford-Smith
Black and White in Colour: African History on Screen considers how the African past has been represented in a wide range of historical films. Written by a team of eminent international scholars, the volume provides extensive coverage of both place and time and deals with major issues in the written history of Africa.…
