Africa and World War II

Judith A. Byfield is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University, teaching African and Caribbean history. She is coeditor of Gendering the African Diaspora: Women, Culture and Historical Change in the Caribbean and Nigerian Hinterland (2010) and author of The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Indigo Dyers in Western Nigeria, 1890-1940 (2002). She is a former president of the African Studies Association (2011) and is on the editorial board of the Blacks in the Diaspora series. Carolyn A. Brown is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of We Are All Slaves: African Miners, Culture, and Resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery, Nigeria, 1914-1950 (2001). She is coeditor, with Paul Lovejoy, of Repercussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Interior of the Bight of Biafra and the African Diaspora (2010). She is on the editorial board of Cambridge University Press's Africa Studies series and is a senior editor of the labor journal International Labor and Working Class History. Timothy Parsons holds a joint appointment as Professor of African History in the history department and in the African and African American studies program at Washington University, St Louis, where he also directs the international and area studies program. His primary publications include The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall (2010), Race, Resistance and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa (2004), and The 1964 Army Mutinies and the Making of Modern East Africa (2003). Ahmad Alawad Sikainga is Professor of History at the Ohio State University. He is the author of City of Steel and Fire: A Social History of Atbara, Sudan's Railway Town, 1906-1984 (2002), Slaves into Workers: Emancipation and Labor in Colonial Sudan (1996), Western Bahr al-Ghazal under British Rule, 1898-1956 (1990), and Sudan Defense Force: Origin and Role, 1925-1955 (1983). He is coeditor of Post-War Reconstruction in Africa (2006) and Civil War in Sudan (1993).

'For Africans, World War II began in 1935 with Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, and it lasted well beyond 1945, as Africans demanded that their contributions and sacrifices for the Allied war effort be recognized. Africa and World War II brings together well-researched and compelling accounts by accomplished scholars, exploring not only the importance of Africans' roles as soldiers and producers, but the war's effects on class, race, and gender relations. This collection makes clear the importance of the war in provoking a crisis in colonial empires and transforming the nature of political mobilization across the African continent.' Frederick Cooper, author of Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960

• 1. The experiences of ordinary Africans in World War II T. Parsons; 2. Producing for the war J. A. Byfield; 3. African labor in the making of World War II C. Brown; 4. The military, race, and resistance: the conundrums of recruiting black South African men during the Second World War L. Grundlingh; 5. The Moroccan 'effort de guerre' in World War II D. Maghraoui; 6. Free to coerce: forced labor during and after the Vichy years in French West Africa C. B. Ash; 7. No country fit for heroes: the plight of disabled Kenyan veterans T. Parsons; 8. Women, rice, and war: political and economic crisis in war-time Abeokuta (Nigeria) J. A. Byfield; 9. Africa's 'battle for rubber' in the Second World War W. G. Clarence-Smith; 10. Freetown and World War II: strategic militarization, accommodation, and resistance A. M. Howard; 11. Free France, unfree Africa: extraction and labor in French Equatorial Africa under free French rule E. T. Jennings; 12. The Portuguese African colonies and World War II M. Newitt; 13. Pit sawyers, rubber tappers, and forest farmers: World War II and the transformation of the Tanzanian forests T. Sunseri; 14. Wrestling with race on the eve of human rights: British management of the color line in post-fascist Eritrea G. Barrera; 15. To be treated as a man: masculinity, race, and the imperial state in the Nigerian coal industry C. Brown; 16. 'A white man's war': settler masculinity in the Union Defense Force, 1939–45 S. Chetty; 17. African soldiers, French women, and colonial fears during and after World War II R. Ginio; 18. World War II and the sex trade in British West Africa C. Ray; 19. American missions in war-time French West Africa B. M. Cooper; 20. Fighting fascism: Ethiopian women patriots 1935–41 H. Habtu and J. A. Byfield; 21. Defending the land of their ancestors: African American military experience in Africa during World War II D. Hutchinson; 22. French African soldiers in German POW camps, 1940–5 R. Scheck; 23. Resistance and mobilization: Guinea and World War II E. Schmidt; 24. Sudanese response to World War II A. Sikainga; 25. Uganda after World War II C. Summers; 26. Consequences of the war A. Sikainga.