African History
Featured Title(s)
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.…
From Guerrillas to Government
The Eritrean People's Liberation Front
By David Pool
In 1991 the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) took over Asmara and completed the liberation of Eritrea; formal independence came two years later after a referendum in May 1993. It was the climax of a thirty-year struggle, though the EPLF itself was formed only in the early 1970s.…
Herero Heroes
A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923
The Herero-German war led to the destruction of Herero society. Yet Herero society reemerged, reorganizing itself around the structures and beliefs of the German colonial army and Rhenish missionary activity.…
Available July 2008 (est.)
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.…
The History and Conservation of Zanzibar Stone Town
Edited by Abdul Sheriff
Zanzibar Stone Town presents the problems of conservation in its most acute forms. Should it be fossilized for the tourists? Or should it grow for the benefit of the inhabitants? Can ways be found to accommodate conflicting social and economic pressures? For its size, Zanzibar, like Venice, occupies a remarkably large romantic space in world imagination.…
A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1991
Second Edition
By Bahru Zewde
Bounded by Sudan to the west and north, Kenya to the south, Somalia to the southeast, and Eritrea and Djibouti to the northeast, Ethiopia is a pivotal country in the geopolitics of the region. Yet it is important to understand this ancient and often splintered country in its own right.…
A History of the Excluded
Making Family a Refuge from State in Twentieth-Century Tanzania
The twentieth-century history of Njombe, the Southern Highlands district of Tanzania, can aptly be summed up as exclusion within incorporation. Njombe was marginalized even as it was incorporated into the colonial economy.…
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.…
In the Heart of the Hausa States – On Sale
By Paul Staudinger
Edited by Johanna E. Moody
Consequent upon the Berlin West Africa Conference (1884-1885), the Africanische Gesellschaft in Deutschland launched the Niger-Benue expedition to investigate possible riverine communications throughout the Niger-Benue river system.…
Individual Freedoms and State Security – On Sale
In The African Context
In 1980 the ZANU/PF government of Robert Mugabe came to power after an extended war of liberation. They inherited a cluster of emergency laws similar to those available to the authorities in South Africa.…
Kakungulu & the Creation of Uganda: 1868–1928
This is a history of the early days of Uganda. The account has an African focus because it shows the British takeover through the experiences of an extraordinary leader.“At this spot in the year 1901 the British flag was first hoisted by Semei Kakanguru, emissary and loyal servant of His Majesty the King.…
Katutura: A Place Where We Stay – On Sale
Life in a Post-Apartheid Township in Namibia
Katutura, located in Namibia’s major urban center and capital, Windhoek, was a township created by apartheid, and administered in the past by the most rigid machinery of the apartheid era. Namibia became a sovereign state in 1990, and Katutura reflects many of the changes that have taken place.…
The Krobo People of Ghana to 1892 – On Sale
A Political and Social History
This book presents a broad analytical framework for the history of southeastern Ghana within the context of a representative study of one of the country’s most important political and economic forces.…
Leaf of Allah
Khat & Agricultural Transformation in Harerge, Ethiopia, 1875–1991
Khat is a quasi-legal psychoactive shrub, produced and marketed in the province of Harerge, Ethiopia, and widely consumed throughout Northeast Africa. In the late nineteenth century the main cash crop of Harerge was coffee.…
Lineages of State Fragility – On Sale
Rural Civil Society in Guinea-Bissau
In Guinea-Bissau, as elsewhere in Africa, there is a disjuncture between the central state and rural civil society. It is this significant and overlooked aspect of Guinea-Bissau's political evolution—the continuing ability of civil society to evade and thwart state power—that is at the heart of Joshua B.…
Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa – On Sale
Edited by Jonathan Crush and Charles Ambler
In June 1976 political demonstrations in the black township of Soweto exploded into an insurrection that would continue sporadically and spread to urban areas across South Africa. In their assault on apartheid the youths who spearheaded the rebellion attacked and often destroyed the state institutions that they linked to their oppression: police stations, government offices, schools, and state-owned liquor outlets.…
The Long Journey
South Africa’s Quest for a Negotiated Settlement
Edited by Steven Friedman
Most South Africans don’t have the faintest idea what happened at Codesa, or is happening at subsequent multiparty negotiations. Plenaries, working groups, subgroups, independent election commissions, transitional executive councils, government of national unity… it’s incomprehensible to almost everyone who hasn’t been involved, and probably quite a few who have.…
Mafeking Diary
A Black Man's View of a White Man's War
By Sol T. Plaatje
Edited by John Comaroff
“Sol Plaatje's Mafeking Diary is a document of enduring importance and fascination. The product of a young black South African court interpreter, just turned 23 years old when he started writing, it opens an entirely new vista on the famous Siege of Mafeking.…
Mau Mau and Nationhood – On Sale
Arms, Authority, and Narration
Edited by E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale
Fifty years after the declaration of the state of emergency, Mau Mau still excites argument and controversy, not least in Kenya itself. Mau Mau and Nationhood is a collection of essays providing the most recent thinking on the uprising and its aftermath.…
Mau Mau from Below – On Sale
John Lonsdale says in his introduction: “This is the oral evidence of the Kikuyu villagers with whom Greet Kershaw lived as an aid worker during the Mau Mau ‘Emergency’ in the 1950s, and which is now totally irrecoverable in any form save in her own field notes.…
