By David Newbury
Foreword by Jan Vansina
“This collection is a fitting survey of a career dedicated to understanding the history of a place that came to dominate the world’s attention for a short period and the drifted back under the radar. The Land Beyond the Mists showcases some of the most innovative work in the field of African History in essays that explore the history of Rwanda, most importantly is western marches, and other pre-twentieth states of the Great Lakes region.”
Gregory Maddox, author of Custodians of the Land and In Search of a Nation
“The Land beyond the Mists is far more than a ‘must read’ for everyone interested in the history of Central Africa. It powerfully demonstrates the achievements of Africanist historiography over the last four decades and represents historical work at its best: empirically based, methodologically sophisticated, locally informed, broadly inclusive.”
African Studies Review
“The Land Beyond the Mists serves as a fitting testament to a distinguished career of scholarship devoted to unearthing overlooked perspectives into the deep past of an often neglected area of the continent.”
Journal of African History
“Newbury's essays … provide sophisticated approaches to understanding the recent troubled trajectory of the Kivu Rift Valley. … (A) rich collection that traces (Newbury’s) personal intellectual journey as much as it explores the tortuous history of the land beyond the mists.”
Africa: The Journal of the IAI
The horrific tragedies of Central Africa in the 1990s riveted the attention of the world. But these crises did not occur in a historical vacuum. By peering through the mists of the past, the case studies presented in The Land Beyond the Mists illustrate the significant advances to have taken place since decolonization in our understanding of the pre-colonial histories of Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Congo.
Based on both oral and written sources, these essays are important both for their methods—viewing history from the perspective of local actors—and for their conclusions, which seriously challenge colonial myths about the area.
David Newbury is the Gwendolen Carter Professor of African Studies at Smith College. His books include Kings and Clans: A Social History of the Lake Kivu Rift Valley, African Historiographies: What History for Which Africa?, and Paths to the Past: Essays in Honor of Jan Vansina. More info →
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Colonialism in the Congo Basin, 1880–1940
By Samuel H. Nelson
This exceptional study of the Mongo people of the upper Congo River basin focuses on the evolution of Mongo work patterns from the period of the late nineteenth century to 1940, the high-water mark of the colonial period. It brings new evidence from oral histories, anthropological research, and archival records to build on or to correct colonial ethnographic accounts.
African History · Sociology · Labor History · Democratic Republic of the Congo · African Studies
African Genius
By Basil Davidson
The African Genius presents the ideas, social systems, religions, moral values, arts, and metaphysics of a range of African peoples, disputing the notion that Africa gained under colonialism by entering the modern world.
African History · Historical Essays · Africa · African Studies
Forests of Gold
Essays on the Akan and the Kingdom of Asante
By Ivor Wilks
Forests of Gold is a collection of essays on the peoples of Ghana with particular reference to the most powerful of all their kingdoms: Asante. Beginning with the global and local conditions under which Akan society assumed its historic form between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, these essays go on to explore various aspects of Asante culture: conceptions of wealth, of time and motion, and the relationship between the unborn, the living, and the dead.
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. The essays in this collection reveal the connections between the peoples of the region as well as their encounters with the conquering Europeans.
African History · Slavery and Slave Trade · African Studies · Eastern Africa · Democratic Republic of the Congo
