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.…
The African AIDS Epidemic
A History
By John Iliffe
This history of the African AIDS epidemic is a much-needed, accessibly written historical account of the most serious epidemiological catastrophe of modern times. The African AIDS Epidemic: A History answers President Thabo Mbeki’s provocative question as to why Africa has suffered this terrible epidemic.…
An African American in South Africa
The Travel Notes of Ralph J. Bunche 28 September 1937–1 January 1938
Edited by Ralph Bunche and Robert R. Edgar
Ralph Bunche, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, traveled to South Africa for three months in 1937. His notes, which have been skillfully compiled and annotated by historian Robert R. Edgar, provide unique insights on a segregated society.…
African Apocalypse
The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a Twentieth-Century South African Prophet
By Robert R. Edgar and Hilary Sapire
The devastating influenza epidemic of 1918 ripped through southern Africa. In its aftermath, revivalist and millenarian movements sprouted. Prophets appeared bearing messages of resistance, redemption, and renewal.…
The African Experience with Higher Education
By J. F. Ade Ajayi, Lameck K. H. Goma and G. Ampah Johnson
There have been institutions of higher learning for centuries in Africa, but the phenomenal growth has taken place in the last fifty years, first in the later days of colonialism and then in the heady days of independence and commodity boom.…
African Gifts of the Spirit
Pentecostalism & the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement
This book considers the rise of born-again Christianity in Africa through a study of one of the most dynamic Pentecostal movements. David Maxwell traces the transformation of the prophet Ezekiel Guti and his prayer band from small beginnings in the townships of the 1950s into the present-day transnational business enterprise, which is now the Zimbabwe Assemblies of God.…
African Intellectuals and Decolonization
Edited by Nicholas M. Creary
Decades after independence for most African states, the struggle for decolonization is still incomplete, as demonstrated by the fact that Africa remains associated in many Western minds with chaos, illness, and disorder.…
Available April 2012 (est.)
African Soccerscapes
How a Continent Changed the World’s Game
By Peter Alegi
From Accra and Algiers to Zanzibar and Zululand, Africans have wrested control of soccer from the hands of Europeans, and through the rise of different playing styles, the rituals of spectatorship, and the presence of magicians and healers, have turned soccer into a distinctively African activity.…
African Underclass
Urbanisation, Crime, & Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam
African Underclass examines the social, political, and administrative repercussions of rapid urban growth in Dar es Salaam. The origins of an often coercive response to urbanization in postcolonial Tanzania are traced back to the colonial period.…
African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900–1950
This book explores the history of African womanhood in colonial Kenya. By focussing on key sociocultural institutions and practices around which the lives of women were organized, and on the protracted debates that surrounded these institutions and practices during the colonial period, it investigates the nature of indigenous, mission, and colonial control of African women.…
After the TRC
Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation
Edited by Wilmot James and Linda van de Vijver
Has South Africa dealt effectively with the past, and is the country ready to face the future? What are the challenges facing both government and civil society in the years ahead? These and other questions are explored in this collection of essays by international and local commentators on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.…
The Americans Are Coming!
Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa
For more than half a century before World War II, black South Africans and “American Negroes”—a group that included African Americans and black West Indians—established close institutional and personal relationships that laid the necessary groundwork for the successful South African and American antiapartheid movements.…
The Anatomy of a South African Genocide
The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples
In 1998 David Kruiper, the leader of the ‡Khomani San who today live in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa, lamented, “We have been made into nothing.” His comment applies equally to the fate of all the hunter-gatherer societies of the Cape Colony who were destroyed by the impact of European colonialism.…
Apartheid’s Genesis
Edited by Philip Bonner, Peter Delius and Deborah Posel
Apartheid is synonymous in most people's minds with a virulent form of racial ideology and social engineering. Yet ideologies of racial domination and segregation long preceded apartheid, and cannot by themselves explain the shift in racial domination that apartheid involved.…
Being Maasai
Ethnicity and Identity In East Africa
Edited by Thomas Spear and Richard Waller
Everyone “knows” the Maasai as proud pastoralists who once dominated the Rift Valley from northern Kenya to central Tanzania. But many people who identity themselves as Maasai, or who speak Maa, are not pastoralist at all, but farmers and hunters.…
Between the Sea and the Lagoon
An Eco-social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana c. 1850 to Recent Times
This study offers a “social interpretation of environmental process” for the coastal lowlands of southeastern Ghana. The Anlo-Ewe, sometimes hailed as the quintessential sea fishermen of the West African coast, are a previously non-maritime people who developed a maritime tradition.…
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.…
Black Lawyers, White Courts
The Soul of South African Law
In the struggle against apartheid, one often overlooked group of crusaders was the coterie of black lawyers who overcame the Byzantine system that the government established oftentimes explicitly to block the paths of its black citizens from achieving justice.…
Black Poachers, White Hunters
A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya
For centuries, Kenya’s game-laden plains and forests were the rewarding hunting grounds of her native African population. Black Poachers, White Hunters traces the history of hunting there in the colonial era, describing the British attempt to impose the practices and values of nineteenth-century European aristocratic hunts.…
Brothers at War
Making Sense of the Eritrean-Ethiopian War
By Tekaste Negash and Kjetil Tronvoll
The war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, which began in May 1998, took the world by surprise. During the war, both sides mobilized huge forces along their common borders and spent several hundred million dollars on military equipment.…
A Burning Hunger
One Family’s Struggle Against Apartheid
If the Mandelas were the generals in the fight for black liberation, the Mashininis were the foot soldiers. Theirs is a story of exile, imprisonment, torture, and loss, but also of dignity, courage, and strength in the face of appalling adversity.…
