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.…
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 London Missionary Society in Southern Africa, 1799-1999 – On Sale
Historical Essays in Celebration of the Bicentenary of the LMS in Southern Africa
Edited by John de Gruchy
Compiled to mark the bicentenary of the London Missionary Society in Southern Africa, this volume provides an assessment of the work and legacy of the Society, which played a critical role in the politics and societies of the subcontinent and whose leading figure—like David Livingstone, Robert Moffat, and John Phili—were major historical actors in their day.…
Mandela’s World
The International Dimension of South Africa's Political Revolution
By James Barber
The demise of apartheid, the release of Nelson Mandela, and a new constitution leading to a democratic government elevated South Africa's status during the 1990s. Mandela's World describes and analyzes South Africa's international development during this momentous decade in which Nelson Mandela stamped his personality on his nation and on the international stage.…
Mau Mau and Nationhood – On Sale
Arms, Authority, and Narration
Edited by John Lonsdale and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo
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.…
The Mau Mau War in Perspective
By Frank Furedi
The book breaks new ground in following the story of the participants of the rural movement during the decade after the defeat of the Mau Mau. New archival sources and interviews provide exciting material on the mechanics of the sociology of decolonization and on the containment of rural radicalism in Kenya.…
Media and Dependency in South Africa
A Case Study of the Press and the Ciskei “Homeland”
By Les Switzer
Switzer looks at how South Africa’s communications industry, the largest and most powerful on the continent, promotes dependency among the subject African populations. This study of the Ciskei “Homeland”, which has long been a fountainhead of African nationalism and a zone of conflict between blacks and whites, focuses on the privately owned, commercial press and its role in helping to frame a consensus in support of the political, economic and ideological values of the ruling alliance.…
The Migrant Farmer in the History of Cape Colony, 1657–1842 – On Sale
Petrus Johannes Van der Merwe wrote three of the most significant books on the history of South Africa before he was 35 years old. His trilogy, of which The Migrant Farmer is the first volume, has become a classic that no student of Cape colonial history of the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth century can ignore.…
A Modern History of the Somali
Nation and State in the Horn of Africa
By I. M. Lewis
This latest edition of A Modern History of the Somali brings I. M. Lewis's definitive history up to date and shows the amazing continuity of Somali forms of social organization. Lewis's history portrays the ingeniousness with which the Somali way of life has been adapted to all forms of modernity.…
The Moral Economy of the State
Conservation, Community Development, and State-Making in Zimbabwe
The Moral Economy of the State examines state formation in Zimbabwe from the colonial period through the first decade of independence. Drawing on the works of Gramsci, E. P. Thompson, and James Scott, William Munro develops a theory of "moral economy" that explores negotiations between rural citizens and state agents over legitimate state incursions in social life.…
Moral Philosophy and Development
The Human Condition in Africa
By Tedros Kiros
Although development issues generally have been considered in a framework of economic theory and politics, in this volume Tedros Kiros looks to European ideas of moral philosophy to explain the underdevelopment of Africa and the persistent African food crisis.…
A Most Promising Weed
A History of Tobacco Farming and Labor in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890-1945
A Most Promising Weed examines the work experience, living conditions, and social relations of thousands of African men, women, and children on European-owned tobacco farms in colonial Zimbabwe from 1890 to 1945.…
Multi-Party Politics in Kenya – On Sale
By David Throup and Charles Hornsby
This book uses the Kenyan political system to address issues relevant to recent political developments throughout Africa. The authors analyze the construction of the Moi state since 1978. They show the marginalization of Kikuyu interests as the political economy of Kenya has been reconstructed to benefit President Moi's Kalenjin people and their allies.…
Namibia Under South African Rule – On Sale
Mobility and Containment, 1915–46
Edited by Jeremy Silvester, Marion Wallace, Wolfram Hartmann and Patricia Hayes
The peoples of Namibia have been on the move throughout history. The South Africans in 1915 took over from the Germans in trying to fit Namibia into a colonial landscape. This book is about the clashes and stresses which resulted from the first three decades of South African colonial rule.…
Namibia’s Liberation Struggle
The Two-Edged Sword
By Colin Leys and John S. Saul
It took twenty-three years of armed struggle before Namibia could gain its independence from South Africa in March 1990. Swapo’s victory was remarkable in the face of an overwhelmingly superior enemy.…
Native Life in South Africa
Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion
First published in 1916 and one of South Africa's great political books, Native Life in South Africa was first and foremost a response to the Native's Land Act of 1913, and was written by one of the most gifted and influential writers and journalists of his generation.…
Negotiating Power and Privilege – On Sale
Career Igbo Women in Contemporary Nigeria
Even with a university education, the Igbo women of southeastern Nigeria face obstacles that prevent them from reaching their professional and personal potentials. Negotiating Power and Privilege is a study of their life choices and the embedded patriarchy and other obstacles in postcolonial Africa barring them from fulfillment.…
Nigerian Video Films
Revised and Expanded Edition
Edited by Jonathan Haynes
Nigerian video films—dramatic features shot on video and sold as cassettes—are being produced at the rate of nearly one a day, making them the major contemporary art form in Nigeria. The history of African film offers no precedent for such a huge, popularly based industry.…
Not White Enough, Not Black Enough
Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community
The concept of Colouredness—being neither white nor black—has been pivotal to the brand of racial thinking particular to South African society. The nature of Coloured identity and its heritage of oppression has always been a matter of intense political and ideological contestation.…
On the Fringes of History
A Memoir
In the 1950s, professional historians claiming to specialize in tropical Africa were no more than a handful. The teaching of world history was confined to high school courses, and even those were focused on European history, with a chapter added to account for the history of East and South Asia.…
