Visar resultat för..."James Currey"

A collection of essays about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity, that advocates for linguistic decolonization.'The language of literature', Ngũgĩ writes, 'cannot be discussed meaningfully outside the context of those social forces which have made it both an issue demanding our attention, and a problem calling for a resolution.' First published in 1986, Decolonising the Mind is one of Ngũgĩ's best-known and most-cited non-fiction publications, helping to cement him as a pre-eminent voice theorizing the 'language debate' in postcolonial studies. Ngũgĩ wrote his first novels and plays in English but was determined, even before his detention without trial in 1978, to move to writing in Gikuyu. He describes the book as 'a summary of some of the issues in which I have been passionately involved for the last twenty years of my practice in fiction, theatre, criticism, and in teaching of literature...'. Split into four essays - 'The Language of African Literature', 'The Language of African Theatre', 'The Language of African Fiction', and 'The Quest for Relevance' - the book offers an anti-imperialist perspective on the destiny of Africa and the role of languages in combatting and perpetrating imperialism and neo-colonialism in African nations. East Africa [Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda]: EAEP

Professor Vansina is the foremost authority on the history of Rwanda.The author of the classic Oral Tradition as History bases his account on hundreds of grass-roots narratives. It shows the historical roots of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 through an investigation of Rwanda's Nyiginya Dynasty of the 18th and 19th centuries. It demystifies Rwanda's precolonial past and colonial historiography. It describes the genesis of the Hutu and Tutsi identities, their growing social and political differences, their bitter feuds,revolts and massacres.North America: University of Wisconsin Press

Analyses how combined South African and US strategic interests combined to defer an independence settlement for Namibia.Documents resistance to the German conquest by the Herero and Nama peoples; the South African take-over under the League of Nations mandate; land, labour and community resistance from 1920-1960; the emergence of Nationalist organisations; appeals to the UN and the ICJ; the launching of SWAPO's armed struggle, and nationalist responses to South Africa's Bantustan policy.Published in association with the OAU and UNESCO.North America: Africa World Press

Examines how regional integration can resolve the crises of the Greater Horn of Africa, exploring how it can be used as a mechanism for conflict resolution, promoting the economy and tackling issues of identity and citizenship.The Greater Horn of Africa (GHA) is engulfed by three interrelated crises: various inter-state wars, civil wars, and inter-communal conflicts; an economic crisis manifested in widespread debilitating poverty, chronic food insecurity and famines; and environmental degradation that is ravaging the region. While it is apparent that the countries of the region are unlikely to be able to deal with the crises individually, there is consensus that their chances of doing so improve markedly with collective regional action.The contributors to this volume address the need for regional integration in the GHA. They identify those factors that can foster integration, such as the proper management of equitable citizenship rights, as well as examining those that impede it, including the region's largely ineffective integration scheme, IGAD, and explore how the former can be strengthened and the latter transformed; explain how regional integration can mitigate the conflicts; and examine how integration can help to energise the region's economy.Kidane Mengisteab is Professor of African Studies and Political Science at Penn State University; Redie Bereketeab is a researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute, Sweden.

A critical examination of the engaging voice and multiple stories of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on war, feminism, art, ideology, hair, complex human identities and the challenges of multicultural existence.Easily the leading and most engaging voice of her era and generation, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has bridged gaps and introduced new motifs and narrative styles which have energized contemporary African fiction since her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003). With Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) and The Thing Around Your Neck - Short Stories (2009), she established herself as a preeminent story-teller. Americanah (2013), with ingeniouscraftsmanship addresses the sensitive themes of passionate love, independence, freedom and moral responsibility with extravagant and versatile narrative innovations.Through her writings, she has made herself relevant topeople of all ages - across racial and linguistic boundaries. Her talks, blogs, musings on social media, essays and commentaries, workshop-mentoring for budding young writers, lecture circuit discourses, all enrich her imaginativecreativity as they expand and define her mission as a writer. "We Should All be Feminists" she proclaimed in an essay, giving feminism a "tweak and twist" and suggesting new outlooks in literary theory.Her contributionsto African, Diasporic and World literatures deserve serious analyses, commentaries and interpretations, and this Companion to her work critically examines her creative outputs from her art and ideology, from feminism to war, to matters of myth and perception, and the challenges of multicultural existence and complex human identities.Ernest N. Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA.

A uniquely detailed portrayal of the formative years of Tanzania's first president and the influences that led him to enter politics.Julius Kambarage Nyerere (1922-1999), the first President of Tanzania, was a man whose political life was uniquely and inextricably bound into the history of the nation he created. This book presents the first truly rounded portrait of Nyerere's early life, from his birth in 1922 until his graduation from Edinburgh in 1952, enabling us to see his later political achievements in a new light. It was after returning to Tanganyika that "Mwalimu" (the teacher)formally entered politics, and led efforts to deliver Tanganyika to independence. Drawing on interviews with his contemporaries and archival sources including his letters as a student and colonial authorities files on him, this biography brings a new perspective on how the scholarship that Nyerere engaged with as a young man influenced his ideas of the uhuru movement against colonial rule and, later, the ujamaa policy of African socialism that so defined his leadership of an independent Tanzania.Thomas Molony is Senior Lecturer in African Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

Ngugi advocates a cultural shift to redress the last 400 years of domination by a handful of western nations.In this collection Ngugi is concerned with moving the centre in two senses - between nations and within nations - in order to contribute to the freeing of world cultures from the restrictive walls of nationalism, class, race and genderBetween nations the need is to move the centre from its assumed location in the West to a multiplicity of spheres in all the cultures of the world. Within nations the move should be away from all minority class establishments to the real creative centre among working people in conditions of racial, religious and gender equality.Kenya: EAEP

Compelling memoir of Flora Veit-Wild and her relationship with the Zimbabwean novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist Dambudzo Marechera, one of Africa's most innovative and subversive writers and a significant voice in contemporary world literature.How shall I tell our story? I hear your voice ringing in mine. I struggle to disentangle a dense tapestry of memories. One thread will be caught up in another. Early images will embrace later ones. My gaze will often be filtered through your eyes, your poems. In the end I will not always be able to tell the original from the reflection. Just as you wrote, Time's fingers on the piano / play emotion into motion / the dancers in the looking glass never recognise us as their originals.This book is a memoir with a 'double heartbeat'. At its centre is the author's relationship with the late Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera, whose award-winning book The House of Hunger marked him as a powerful, disruptive, perhaps prophetic voice in African literature. Flora Veit-Wild is internationally recognised for her significant contribution to preserving Marechera's legacy. What is less known about Marechera and Veit-Wild is that they had an intense, personal and sexual relationship. This memoir explores this: the couple's first encounter in 1983, amidst the euphoria of the newly independent Zimbabwe; the tumultuous months when the homeless writer moved in with his lover and her family; the bouts of creativity once he had his own flat followed by feelings of abandonment; the increasing despair about a love affair that could not stand up against reality; and the illness of the writer and his death of HIV related pneumonia in August 1987. What follows are the struggles Flora went through once Dambudzo had died. On the one hand she became the custodian of his life and work, on the other she had to live with her own HIV infection and the ensuing threats to her health.Jacana: Southern Africa

Examines how the lives of pastoralists in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia are deeply affected by the creation of mutually exclusive ethnic territories and proposes ways to reverse this trend.This study, based on anthropological field research over a period of thirty-four years, focuses on pastoralism, politics, policies and development in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia. The authors present a detailed ethnographic view of recent events of ethnic violence in Kenya and analyse how local patterns of conflict among pastoralists were influenced by both national and regional politics, which have encouraged an increased tendency of territorialized ethnicity. They propose ways of getting out of the ethnic trap and revitalizing a mobile livestock economy in a region where other forms of land use are impossible or much less effective.A companion volume to Islam andEthnicity in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia, it will be of particular interest to political anthropologists, students of nomadism, pastoral economy ecology, and globalization.Günther Schlee is director of the Department of 'Integration and Conflict', Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany; Abdullahi Shongolo is an independent scholar based in Kenya.

1959 was the year James Currey arrived in South Africa and found a nation in crisis. Hopes of change rose and foundered over the next five years. Letters and vivid conversations capture the excitement of daily life and political drama. The extra-parliamentary opposition had used non-violent means of protest since 1952, but on 21 March 1960 the police shot and killed 69 peaceful protesters in Sharpeville. It was a turning point. In March 1960 some 35,000 Africans protested on Cape Town and the police responded with further savagery. Shortly after Randolph Vigne, Neville Rubin, Tim Holmes and James Currey founded The New African a radical review of politics and the arts. The intense comings and goings of a small magazine served as effective cover for acts of sabotage. In July 1964 Randolph Vigne appealed to Clare and James to enable him escape. Clare had no hesitation; ‘Randolph and Gillian are our friends’, she said. James used his British passport, to buy a ticket on a Norwegian freighter so that Vigne could travel to Montreal. Two days later Clare and James flew out of Johannesburg.

A classic work from Terence Ranger now back in print.Draws on a wide range of archival and oral sources to argue that the history of African peasants in Zimbabwe produced a specific consciousness which meant that peasant participation in the guerrilla war was different from the peasant role in Mau Mau or in the war in Mozambique. It also examines the changing relations between the peasantry and the Zimbabwean state after the 1980 elections.North America: U of California Press

Marks a new stage in African resistance studies.Previous work has tended to place the subject of resistance studies exclusively within an anticolonial context. This collection broadens the concept to include crime and violence.

Since the publication of Vansina's earlier book, oral traditions have now become widely accepted as a legitimate source of history.Although written by a leading historian of Africa, Vansina's work on oral traditions ranges far beyond Africa, so has a wider relevance. Vansina explains not only how oral traditions have been used in the past but also how they should be used by historians in their research.North America: University of Wisconsin Press; Kenya: EAEP

First comprehensive account of Africa's economic history.This book spans two thousand years from the origins of domesticated food production to the third decade of the independence era. The author applies various theoretical perspectives to the two main themes of internal development and external dependency, with an emphasis on the continuous growth of domestic African economic capacities accompanied by an ever-increasing engagement with the international economy.North & South America: Available from Heinemann

The authors argue that a larger role should be accorded to the lives and struggles of rural South Africans in the shaping of the country's past.Terence Ranger described ths book as a '...landmark in the historiography of southern Africa.'The book is an exercise in historical retrieval, focussed on a series of forgotten episodes in South Africa's history that were neglected in subsequent historical writing.North America: University of California Press

Abdul Sheriff analyses the early stages of the underdevelopment of East Africa.The rise of Zanzibar was based on two major economic transformations: firstly, slaves became used for the production of cloves and grain for export, instead of the slaves themselves being exported; secondly there was an increaseddemand for luxuries such as ivory and Zanzibar took advantage of its strategic position to trade as far as the Great Lakes. Yet this economic success increasingly subordinated Zanzibar to Britain, with its anti-slavery crusade andits control over the Indian merchant class.North America: Ohio U Press; Kenya: EAEP

A considerable revision in the understanding of the history of colonial Kenya and, more widely, colonialism in Africa.In the sister two volumes entitled Unhappy Valley 1 and Unhappy Valley 2, the authors investigate major themes including the conquest origins and subsequent development of the colonial state, the contradictory socialforces that articulated African societies to European capitalism, and the creation of new political communities and changing meanings of ethnicity in Africa, in the context of social differentiation and class formation. There issubstantial new work on the problems of Mau Mau and of wealth, poverty and civic virtue in Kikuyu political thought.The authors make a fresh contribution to a deeper historical understanding of contemporary Kenyan society and, in particular, of the British and Kikuyu origins of Mau Mau and the emergency of the 1950s.They also highlight some of the shortcomings of ideas about development, explore the limitations of narrowly structuralist Marxisttheory of the state, and reflect on the role of history in the future of Africa.North America: Ohio U Press; Kenya: EAEPWINNER OF THE TREVOR REESE MEMORIAL PRIZE 1994

The discussion of pre-colonial slavery shows how slavery became integrated into the new colonial economy.If colonialism was the product of capitalism, as conventional wisdom would have it, why were the intersts of capitalism so ill-served? This is the central enigma which Anne Phillips confronts in this study of British colonial policy formulation in West Africa.North America: Indiana U Press

Innovative study of the relations of the peoples of West Africa in the precolonial period.Covering a period of some 400 to 500 years up to the last decades of the nineteenth century, the author takes a wide range of examples from those societies whose levels of political organisation warrant the term 'states'. The arrangements for the exercise of power within these varied from states where one man or an oligarchy made decisions about war and peace to states where power was diffused between members of the community.North America: University of Wisconsin Press

A book written both for and about the Luo.The authors use stories to reveal Siaya, the Luo-speaking area of western Kenya, bringing together ideas and debates which Luo express about their past and present with findings, arguments and questions produced by scholars. For the Luo, what constitutes culture, what is correct behaviour, what is history, are questions that are heavily fought over. This is one of those rare books that makes students and other interested readers question their own culturalpreconceptions and re-examine the concerns of academic disciplines.North America: Ohio U Press; Kenya: EAEP

As the research to this book proceeded there were major finds of papers previously unknown even to the David Livingstone Research Project in Edinburgh.This collection of David Livingstone's personal papers, edited by Timothy Holmes, is from the Livingstone Museum in Zambia and features many previously unpublished letters. The first part deals with his period in Botswana, the second part focuses on the Zambezi expedition (1858-64), the third section covers to time of his visit to Britain in 1864-5, and the fourth part covers his last journey (1866-73).North America: Indiana U Press; Zambia: UNZA Press

A collection of studies by key academics on ethnic identity in Africa.The great virtue of this book is that it is the first major study to focus exclusively on the historical evolution of ethnic identity over a broad region from Zaire ... to South Africa.' - John McCracken, University of StirlingUS & Canada & the Philippines: University of California Press

With a Preface reviewing some of the debates prompted by the earlier edition of this book.The first edition of this book was hailed as a major reinterpretation of South African history. It criticised the prevailing view that African agriculture was primitive or backward, and attacked the notion that poverty and lack ofdevelopment were a result of 'traditionalism'. Bundy's work introduced the idea that by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century capitalist development in South Africa was increasingly hostile to peasant producers and a massive onslaught was launched against them - the understanding of this was vital to an understanding of both the South African past and present.

Aimed at students of African politics and political sociologists interested in rural revolution and revolt.Although Mau Mau was militarily crushed in the mid-fifties, the struggle for land rights was only contained in Kenya's post-independence era. Kikuyu squatters on European estates who formed the backbone of this movement are the main subject of this book.Furedi breaks new ground in following the story of the participants of the rural movement during the decade after the defeat of Mau Mau. New archival sources and interviews provide exciting material on the mechanics of decolonisation and on the containment of rural radicalism in Kenya.North America: Ohio U Press; Kenya: EAEP

Counteracts the misconception of Africa having no history before colonisation.Eminent historian A. Adu Boahen gives an African perspective on colonialism.A. ADU BOAHEN was Professor Emeritus of History, University of Ghana (Legon), fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts & SciencesNorthAmerica: The Johns Hopkins University Press

The first full length study of the development of the colonial state in Africa.Professor Berman argues that the colonial state was shaped by the contradictions between maintaining effective political control with limited coercive force and ensuring the profitable articulation of metropolitan and settler capitalism with African societies.North America: Ohio U Press; Kenya: EAEP

A synthesis of more than 3000 years of equatorial African history.The rainforests of equatorial Africa cover an area almost as large as Western Europe and some 12 million people live there. So why has this area remained without a historiography? Vansina disputes the myth of an unchanging past ina hostile environment and demonstrates that there are rich and complex political, social and economic histories to be uncovered, as varied as the forest habitats themselves.North America: University of Wisconsin Press

James de Vere Allen, who was curator at Lamu Museum, set out to give modern Swahili evidence of their shared history during a period of eight centuries.Kiswahili has become the lingua franca of eastern Africa and yet the history of the Swahili peoples has remained elusive. Some have described themselves as Arabs, as Persians, or even in one place as Portuguese. This book is Jamesde Vere Allen's major study of the origin of the Swahili peoples and their cultural identity.North America: Ohio U Press; Kenya: EAEP

Follows on from the period covered in Abdul Sheriff's acclaimed Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar.Zanzibar stands at the centre of the Indian Ocean system's involvement in the history of Eastern Africa. The first part of the book shows the transition of Zanzibar from the commercial economy of the nineteenth century to the colonial economy of the twentieth century. In the second part the authors analyse social classes and their role in the period culminating in the insurrection of 1964.North America: Ohio U Press; Tanzania: Historical Association of Tanzania