This series, produced by publishers on three continents, brings together significant international scholarly work on Western Africa. Building on the successful model of the James Currey/Ohio University Press Eastern African Studies series, this series covers the western half of the continent from the Maghreb to the Congo. Multidisciplinary in character, the series is intended to circulate new work on the region throughout the world. In collaboration with a growing network of West African publishers and book distributors, the series includes work in anthropology, oral literature, politics, development, and in social and political history.
West African Challenge to Empire
Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War
By Mahir Şaul and Patrick Royer
West African Challenge to Empire examines the anticolonial war in the Volta and Bani region in 1915–16. It was the largest challenge that the French ever faced in their West African colonial empire, and one of the largest armed oppositions to colonialism anywhere in Africa. How such a movement could be organized in the face of European technological superiority despite the fact that this region is generally described as having consisted of rival villages and descent groups is a puzzle.
African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · Military History · African Studies · Burkina Faso · Mali
Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature
By Laura T. Murphy
Through an examination of metaphors that describe the trauma, loss, and suffering associated with the the transatlantic slave trade, Metaphor and the Slave Trade shows how the horrors of slavery are communicated from generation to generation and persist in West African discourse.
Literary Criticism, Africa · Slavery and Slave Trade · African Studies · Literature · Western Africa · African Literature
Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946–1958
By Elizabeth Schmidt
In September 1958, Guinea claimed its independence, rejecting a constitution that would have relegated it to junior partnership in the French Community. In all the French empire, Guinea was the only territory to vote “No.” Orchestrating the “No” vote was the Guinean branch of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), an alliance of political parties with affiliates in French West and Equatorial Africa and the United Nations trusts of Togo and Cameroon.
African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · Nationalism · History | Modern | 20th Century · Cold War · African Studies · Guinea
Themes in West Africa’s History
Edited by Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong
Themes in West Africa’s History draws on different disciplines and expertise to bring together key themes in West Africa’s history, from prehistory to the present.
Ouidah
The Social History of a West African Slaving Port, 1727–1892
By Robin Law
Ouidah, an African town in the Republic of Benin, was the principal precolonial commercial center of its region and the second-most-important town of the Dahomey kingdom. It served as a major outlet for the transatlantic slave trade. Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, Ouidah was the most important embarkation point for slaves in the region of West Africa known to outsiders as the Slave Coast.
African History · Slavery and Slave Trade · 18th century · 19th century · Benin · African Studies · Atlantic Studies
Kola is God’s Gift
Agricultural Production, Export Initiatives, and the Kola Industry in Asante and the Gold Coast, c. 1920–1950
By Edmund Abaka
Kola is a “food-drug”—like coffee, tea, coca, and tobacco—a substance considered neither food nor medicine, but used to induce “flights of fancy.” It is incorporated into rites of passage and ceremonies to cement treaties and contracts; its medicinal properties were first recognized outside Africa in the twelfth century; and it is a legal and popular stimulant among West African Muslims.Kola
Slavery and Reform in West Africa
Toward Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Senegal and the Gold Coast
By Trevor R. Getz
A series of transformations, reforms, and attempted abolitions of slavery form a core narrative of nineteenth-century coastal West Africa. As the region’s role in Atlantic commercial networks underwent a gradual transition from principally that of slave exporter to producer of “legitimate goods” and dependent markets, institutions of slavery became battlegrounds in which European abolitionism, pragmatic colonialism, and indigenous agency clashed.In
African History · History · 19th century · Slavery and Slave Trade · Senegal · Western Africa · Africa · Ghana · African Studies
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. But our picture of the slave trade is incomplete without an examination of the ways in which men and women responded to the threat and reality of enslavement and deportation.Fighting
African History · Slavery and Slave Trade · African Studies · Western Africa
Civil Disorder is the Disease of Ibadan
Chieftaincy and Civic Culture in a Yoruba City
By Ruth Watson
Civil Disorder Is the Disease of the Ibadan is a study of chieftaincy and political culture in Ibadan, the most populous city in Britain’s largest West African colony, Nigeria. Examining the period between 1829 and 1939, it shows how and why the processes through which Ibadan was made into a civic community shifted from the battlefield to a discursive field.
Lineages of State Fragility
Rural Civil Society in Guinea-Bissau
By Joshua B. Forrest
Lineages of State Fragility argues that despite European influences, the contemporary fragility of African states can be fully appreciated only by examining the indigenous social context in which these states evolved. Focusing on Guinea-Bissau, Forrest exposes the emergence of a strong “rural civil society” originating in precolonial times.
Political Science · African History · Guinea-Bissau · African Studies
Eurafricans in Western Africa
Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century
By George E. Brooks
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.
African History · Social History · Women’s History · African Studies · Childhood
Smugglers, Secessionists, and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier
The Life of the Borderlands since 1914
By Paul Nugent
The first integrated history of the Ghana-Togo borderlands, Smugglers, Secessionists, and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier challenges the conventional wisdom that the current border is an arbitrary European construct, resisted by Ewe irredentism.Paul Nugent contends that whatever the origins of partition, border peoples quickly became knowing and active participants in the shaping of this international boundary.
Between the Sea and the Lagoon
An Eco-social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana c. 1850 to Recent Times
By Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong
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. As a fishing community the Anlo have a strong attachment to their land. In the twentieth century coastal erosion has brought about a collapse of the balance between nature and culture.
African History · History | Historical Geography · Ghana · African Studies
West African Challenge to Empire
Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War
By Mahir Şaul and Patrick Royer
West African Challenge to Empire examines the anticolonial war in the Volta and Bani region in 1915–16. It was the largest challenge that the French ever faced in their West African colonial empire, and one of the largest armed oppositions to colonialism anywhere in Africa. How such a movement could be organized in the face of European technological superiority despite the fact that this region is generally described as having consisted of rival villages and descent groups is a puzzle.
African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · Military History · African Studies · Burkina Faso · Mali
Ghanaian Popular Fiction
‘Thrilling Discoveries in Conjugal Life’ and Other Tales
By Stephanie Newell
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.Stephanie Newell examines the popular fiction of Ghana produced since the 1930s, analyzing the distinctive ways in which narrative forms are borrowed and regenerated by authors and readers.Familiar
Literary Criticism, Africa · African History · Ghana · African Studies · Literature
