Who Shall Enter Paradise?
Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c. 1890–1975
By Shobana Shankar
Who Shall Enter Paradise? recounts in detail the history of Christian-Muslim engagement in a core area of sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous nation, home to roughly equal numbers of Christians and Muslims. It is a region today beset by religious violence, in the course of which history has often been told in overly simplified or highly partisan terms.
African History · Islam · Nigeria · African Studies · Religion | Christianity
Making Modern Girls
A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos
By Abosede A. George
In Making Modern Girls, Abosede A. George examines the influence of African social reformers and the developmentalist colonial state on the practice and ideology of girlhood as well as its intersection with child labor in Lagos, Nigeria. It draws from gender studies, generational studies, labor history, and urban history to shed new light on the complex workings of African cities from the turn of the twentieth century through the nationalist era of the 1950s.
African History · Labor History · Women’s History · Women’s Studies · Children's Studies · Childhood · African Studies · Nigeria
In Idi Amin’s Shadow
Women, Gender, and Militarism in Uganda
By Alicia C. Decker
In Idi Amin’s Shadow is a rich social history examining Ugandan women’s complex and sometimes paradoxical relationship to Amin’s military state. Based on more than one hundred interviews with women who survived the regime, as well as a wide range of primary sources, this book reveals how the violence of Amin’s militarism resulted in both opportunities and challenges for women.
African History · Gender Studies · Colonialism and Decolonization · Uganda · African Studies
Conjugal Rights
Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon
By Rachel Jean-Baptiste
Conjugal Rights is a history of the role of marriage and other arrangements between men and women in Libreville, Gabon, during the French colonial era, from the mid–nineteenth century through 1960. Conventional historiography has depicted women as few in number and of limited influence in African colonial towns, but this book demonstrates that a sexual economy of emotional, social, legal, and physical relationships between men and women indelibly shaped urban life.Bridewealth
Violent Intermediaries
African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa
By Michelle R. Moyd
The askari, African soldiers recruited in the 1890s to fill the ranks of the German East African colonial army, occupy a unique space at the intersection of East African history, German colonial history, and military history.Lauded by Germans for their loyalty during the East Africa campaign of World War I, but reviled by Tanzanians for the violence they committed during the making of the colonial state between 1890 and 1918, the askari have been poorly understood as historical agents.
African History · African Studies · History · Military History · Germany · Western Europe · Europe · Africa
In Step with the Times
Mapiko Masquerades of Mozambique
By Paolo Israel
The helmet-shaped mapiko masks of Mozamxadbique have garnered admiration from African art scholars and collectors alike, due to their striking aesthetics and their grotesque allure. This book restores to mapiko its historic and artistic context, charting in detail the transformations of this masquerading tradition throughout the twentieth century.Based
African History · Anthropology · African Studies · Mozambique
Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence
Nationalism, Grassfields Tradition, and State Building in Cameroon
By Meredith Terretta
Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence is the first extensive history of Cameroonian nationalism to consider the global and local influences that shaped the movement within the French and British Cameroons and beyond.
African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · Politics · Violence in Society · Cameroon · African Studies
Black Skin, White Coats
Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry
By Matthew M. Heaton
Black Skin, White Coats is a history of psychiatry in Nigeria from the 1950s to the 1980s. Working in the contexts of decolonization and anticolonial nationalism, Nigerian psychiatrists sought to replace racist colonial psychiatric theories about the psychological inferiority of Africans with a universal and egalitarian model focusing on broad psychological similarities across cultural and racial boundaries. Particular emphasis is placed on Dr.
History of Psychiatry · African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · Nigeria · Western Africa · Africa
The Krio of West Africa
Islam, Culture, Creolization, and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century
By Gibril R. Cole
Sierra Leone’s unique history, especially in the development and consolidation of British colonialism in West Africa, has made it an important site of historical investigation since the 1950s. Much of the scholarship produced in subsequent decades has focused on the “Krio,” descendants of freed slaves from the West Indies, North America, England, and other areas of West Africa, who settled Freetown, beginning in the late eighteenth century.
African History · History of Islam · Slavery and Slave Trade · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · Atlantic Studies · Krio
The Power to Name
A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa
By Stephanie Newell
Between the 1880s and the 1940s, the region known as British West Africa became a dynamic zone of literary creativity and textual experimentation. African-owned newspapers offered local writers numerous opportunities to contribute material for publication, and editors repeatedly defined the press as a vehicle to host public debates rather than simply as an organ to disseminate news or editorial ideology.
Media Studies · Literary Criticism, Africa · Book and Periodical Studies · African History · Western Africa · African Studies · African Literature
Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development
Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965–2007
By Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman
This in-depth study of the Zambezi River Valley examines the dominant developmentalist narrative that has surrounded the Cahora Bassa Dam, chronicles the continual violence that has accompanied its existence, and gives voice to previously unheard narratives of forced labor, displacement, and historical and contemporary life in the dam’s shadow.
African History · Environmental Policy · Colonialism and Decolonization · Social History · History | Historical Geography · African Studies · Mozambique
Invisible Agents
Spirits in a Central African History
By David M. Gordon
Invisible Agents shows how personal and deeply felt spiritual beliefs can inspire social movements and influence historical change. Conventional historiography concentrates on the secular, materialist, or moral sources of political agency. Instead, David M. Gordon argues, when people perceive spirits as exerting power in the visible world, these beliefs form the basis for individual and collective actions.
Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake
Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa
Edited by Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts
Women and children have been bartered, pawned, bought, and sold within and beyond Africa for longer than records have existed. This important collection examines the ways trafficking in women and children has changed from the aftermath of the “end of slavery” in Africa from the late nineteenth century to the present.The formal abolition of the slave trade and slavery did not end the demand for servile women and children.
African History · Slavery and Slave Trade · Children's Studies · Women’s Studies · Legal and Constitutional History · Anthropology · African Studies · Childhood · Africa
Taifa
Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania
By James R. Brennan
Taifa is a story of African intellectual agency, but it is also an account of how nation and race emerged out of the legal, social, and economic histories in one major city, Dar es Salaam. Nation and race—both translatable as taifa in Swahili—were not simply universal ideas brought to Africa by European colonizers, as previous studies assume.
African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · Race and Ethnicity · Eastern Africa · Tanzania
The Americans Are Coming!
Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa
By Robert Trent Vinson
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.
African History · African American Studies · Social Science | Black Studies (Global) · World and Comparative History · African Studies · Apartheid
Our New Husbands Are Here
Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule
By Emily Lynn Osborn
In Our New Husbands Are Here, Emily Lynn Osborn investigates a central puzzle of power and politics in West African history: Why do women figure frequently in the political narratives of the precolonial period, and then vanish altogether with colonization? Osborn addresses this question by exploring the relationship of the household to the state.
African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · Social History · Women’s Studies · Women’s History · Western Africa · African Studies
Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa
Edited by Emily S. Burrill, Richard L. Roberts, and Elizabeth Thornberry
Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa reveals the ways in which domestic space and domestic relationships take on different meanings in African contexts that extend the boundaries of family obligation, kinship, and dependency. The term domestic violence encompasses kin-based violence, marriage-based violence, gender-based violence, as well as violence between patrons and clients who shared the same domestic space.
African History · History · Social History · Legal and Constitutional History · Law · Violence in Society · African Studies
The Law and the Prophets
Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977
By Daniel Magaziner
“No nation can win a battle without faith,” Steve Biko wrote, and as Daniel R. Magaziner demonstrates in The Law and the Prophets, the combination of ideological and theological exploration proved a potent force.The 1970s are a decade virtually lost to South African historiography. This span of years bridged the banning and exile of the country’s best-known antiapartheid leaders in the early 1960s and the furious protests that erupted after the Soweto uprisings of June 16, 1976.
Legal and Constitutional History · Religion | Religion, Politics & State · History · African History · 21st century · Law · Africa · Southern Africa · South Africa · African Studies
Colonial Meltdown
Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression
By Moses E. Ochonu
Historians of colonial Africa have largely regarded the decade of the Great Depression as a period of intense exploitation and colonial inactivity. In Colonial Meltdown, Moses E. Ochonu challenges this conventional interpretation by mapping the responses of Northern Nigeria’s chiefs, farmers, laborers, artisans, women, traders, and embryonic elites to the British colonial mismanagement of the Great Depression.
History | Africa | West · History | Modern | General · Colonialism and Decolonization · Nigeria · Western Africa · Africa · African Studies · Great Depression
Recasting the Past
History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa
Edited by Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola
The study of intellectual history in Africa is in its infancy. We know very little about what Africa’s thinkers made of their times. Recasting the Past brings one field of intellectual endeavor into view. The book takes its place alongside a small but growing literature that highlights how, in autobiographies, historical writing, fiction, and other literary genres, African writers intervened creatively in their political world.The
Healing Traditions
African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948
By Karen E. Flint
Healing Traditions offers a historical perspective to the interactions between South Africa’s traditional healers and biomedical practitioners. It provides an understanding that is vital for the development of medical strategies to effectively deal with South Africa’s healthcare challenges.
African History · History of Science · Medical | Health Policy · South Africa · African Studies
Intonations
A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times
By Marissa J. Moorman
Intonations tells the story of how Angola’s urban residents in the late colonial period (roughly 1945–74) used music to talk back to their colonial oppressors and, more importantly, to define what it meant to be Angolan and what they hoped to gain from independence. A compilation of Angolan music is included in CD format.Marissa J. Moorman presents a social and cultural history of the relationship between Angolan culture and politics.
African History · Music, History and Criticism · Nationalism · History | Modern | 20th Century · African Studies · Angola
Heterosexual Africa?
The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS
By Marc Epprecht
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.
History · African Studies · African History · HIV-AIDS · Africa · Medical | Health Policy · Gender Studies
Fighting the Greater Jihad
Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya of Senegal, 1853–1913
By Cheikh Anta Babou
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. Drawn from a wide variety of archival, oral, and iconographic sources in Arabic, French, and Wolof, Fighting the Greater Jihad offers an astute analysis of the founding and development of the order and a biographical study of its founder, Cheikh Ahmadu Bamba Mbakke.Cheikh
African History · Sufism · 19th century · Senegal · African Studies
Imagining Serengeti
A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present
By Jan Bender Shetler
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.
African History · African Studies · History | Historical Geography · Eastern Africa · Tanzania
The Forger’s Tale
The Search for Odeziaku
By Stephanie Newell
In The Forger’s Tale Stephanie Newell draws on queer theory, African gender debates, and “new imperial history” to chart the story of the English novelist and poet John Moray Stuart-Young (1881–1939) as he traveled from the slums of Manchester to West Africa in order to escape the homophobic prejudices of late-Victorian society.
Biography, Literary Figures · African History · LGBT Studies · Nigeria · African Studies · African Literature
Natures of Colonial Change
Environmental Relations in the Making of the Transkei
By Jacob A. Tropp
In this groundbreaking study, Jacob A. Tropp explores the interconnections between negotiations over the environment and an emerging colonial relationship in a particular South African context—the Transkei—subsequently the largest of the notorious “homelands” under apartheid.In the late nineteenth century, South Africa’s Cape Colony completed its incorporation of the area beyond the Kei River, known as the Transkei, and began transforming the region into a labor reserve.
African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · History | Historical Geography · South Africa
We Are Fighting the World
A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947–1999
By Gary Kynoch
Since the late 1940s, a violent African criminal society known as the Marashea has operated in and around South Africa’s gold mining areas. With thousands of members involved in drug smuggling, extortion, and kidnapping, the Marashea was more influential in the day-to-day lives of many black South Africans under apartheid than were agents of the state. These gangs remain active in South Africa.In
African History · Social History · History | Modern | 20th Century · Violence in Society · South Africa · African Studies · Criminology · Global Issues
The Risks of Knowledge
Investigations into the Death of the Hon. Minister John Robert Ouko in Kenya, 1990
By David William Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo
The Risks of Knowledge minutely examines the multiple and unfinished investigations into the murder of Kenya’s distinguished Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Robert Ouko, and raises important issues about the production of knowledge and the politics of memory.
African History · History · Kenya · Eastern Africa · Africa · African Studies
Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid
By Belinda Bozzoli
A compelling study of the origins and trajectory of one of the legendary black uprisings against apartheid, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid draws on insights gained from the literature on collective action and social movements. It delves into the Alexandra Rebellion of 1986 to reveal its inner workings.Belinda
African History · History · Violence in Society · South Africa · Southern Africa · Africa · African Studies · Apartheid
