African Studies
About African Studies
Ohio University Press’s African Studies publishing program includes regional surveys, works of distinguished scholarship that contribute to academic debates, and multiauthor collections on key topics. Groundbreaking series such as Eastern African Studies, Western African Studies, Research in International Studies (RIS) Africa, RIS Global and Comparative Studies, and the Ohio University Press Series in Ecology and History have redefined the study of Africa. The New African Histories series promotes continued research on the lived experience of Africans while pushing the boundaries of social history in exciting new directions. A forthcoming series, Africa in World History, will produce accessibly written books by African specialists who speak to current images of Africa in the popular culture, drawing attention to the parallels in human experience in Africa and other parts of the world.
Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, our list promotes the work of both first-time authors and established scholars. Topics include the nature of the colonial state, social history and social life, religion and politics, conflict and reconstruction, environmental history, poverty, public health, and development.
Many books on our African Studies list are available in paperback editions.
Featured Title(s)
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.…
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.…
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.…
Ethnic Federalism
The Ethiopian Experience in Comparative Perspective
Edited by David Turton
Since 1991, Ethiopia has gone further than any other country in using ethnicity as the fundamental organizing principle of a federal system of government. And yet this pioneering experiment in “ethnic federalism” has been largely ignored in the growing literature on democratization and ethnicity in Africa and on the accommodation of ethnic diversity in democratic states.…
Ethnicity & Conflict In The Horn of Africa
Composed of eleven studies on the Horn of Africa, the book is based on primary research by David Turton, Hiroshi Matsuda, John Lamphear, Eisei Kurimoro, Wendy James, P.T.W. Baxter, Tim Allen and others.…
Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa
Edited by Bruce Berman, Will Kymlicka and Dickson Eyoh
The politics of identity and ethnicity will remain a fundamental characteristic of African modernity. For this reason, historians and anthropologists have joined political scientists in a discussion about the ways in which democracy can develop in multicultural societies.…
Eurafricans in Western Africa – On Sale
Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century
Eurafricans in Western Africa traces the rich social and commercial history of western Africa. The most comprehensive study to date, it begins prior to the sixteenth century when huge profits made by middlemen on trade in North African slaves, salt, gold, pepper, and numerous other commodities prompted Portuguese reconnaissance voyages along the coast of western Africa.…
Faces in the Revolution – On Sale
The Psychological Effects of Violence on Township Youth in South Africa
By Gill Straker
One of South Africa’s most serious problems is the large number of youths in the black townships who have been exposed to an incredible depth and complexity of trauma. Not only have they lived through severe poverty, the deterioration of family and social structures, and an inferior education system, but they have also been involved in catastrophic levels of violence, both as victims and as perpetrators.…
Facing the Truth
South African Faith Communities and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Edited by James Cochrane, John de Gruchy and Stephen Martin
The unique desire of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to turn its back on revenge and to create a space where deeper processes of "forgiveness, confession, repentance, reparation, and reconciliation can take place" reflects the spirit of some churches and faith communities in South Africa.…
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.…
Fighting the Slave Trade
West African Strategies
Edited by Sylviane A. Diouf
While most studies of the slave trade focus on the volume of captives and on their ethnic origins, the question of how the Africans organized their familial and communal lives to resist and assail it has not received adequate attention.…
Flickering Shadows
Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe
By J. M. Burns
Every European power in Africa made motion pictures for its subjects, but no state invested as heavily in these films, and expected as much from them, as the British colony of Southern Rhodesia.…
Forests of Gold
Essays on the Akan & the Kingdom of Asante
By Ivor Wilks
The Asante had unique conceptions of time and motion, and the relationships between the unborn, the living and the dead. This study suggests that awareness of their past has much to do with the survival of their culture in this century.…
Freedom In Our Lifetime – On Sale
Collected Writings of Anton Muziwakhe Lembede
By Anton Muziwakhe Lembede
Edited by Robert R. Edgar and Luyanda ka Msumza
When a group of young political activists met in 1944 to launch the African National Congress Youth League, it included the nucleus of a remarkable generation of leaders who forged the struggle for freedom and equality in South Africa for the next half century: Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Jordan Ngubane, Ellen Kuzwayo, Albertina Smith, A.…
From Civilization to Segregation – On Sale
Social Ideals and Social Control in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1934
This study examines the social changes that took place in Southern Rhodesia after the arrival of the British South Africa Company in the 1890s. Summer’s work focuses on interactions among settlers, the officials of the British South America Company and the administration, missionaries, humanitarian groups in Britain, and the most vocal or noticeable groups of Africans.…
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.…
Gender Violence and the Press
The St. Kizito Story
On the night of Saturday, July 13, 1991, a mob of male students at the St. Kizito Mixed Secondary School in Meru, Kenya, attacked their female classmates in a dormitory. Nineteen schoolgirls were killed in the melee and more than 70 were raped or gang raped.…
Ghanaian Popular Fiction – On Sale
Thrilling Discoveries in Conjugal Life and Other Tales
This is a study of the 'unofficial' side of African fiction—the largely undocumented writing, publishing, and reading of pamphlets and paperbacks—which exists outside the grid of mass production.…
Hanging by a Thread
Cotton, Globalization, and Poverty in Africa
Edited by William G. Moseley and Leslie C. Gray
The textile industry was one of the first manufacturing activities to become organized globally, as mechanized production in Europe used cotton from the various colonies. Africa, the least developed of the world’s major regions, is now increasingly engaged in the production of this crop for the global market, and debates about the pros and cons of this trend have intensified.…
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.…
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.…
The History of Islam in Africa
Edited by Nehemia Levtzion and Randall Pouwels
The history of the Islamic faith on the continent of Africa spans fourteen centuries. For the first time in a single volume, The History of Islam in Africa presents a detailed historic mapping of the cultural, political, geographic, and religious past of this significant presence on a continent-wide scale.…
