Peoples of Africa – Serie

The Peoples of the Middle Niger This book provides the first comprehensive history of the peoples of the Middle Niger written by an English-speaking scholar. ‘The Island of Gold’ was the medieval Muslim and later European name for a fabled source of gold and other tropical riches. Although the floodplain of the Niger river lies far from the goldfields, the mosaic of peoples along the Middle Niger created a wealth of grain, fish, and livestock that supported some of Africa’s oldest cities, including Timbuktu. These ancient cities of the region that came to be known as Western Sudan were founded without outside stimulation and their inhabitants long resisted the coercive, centralized state that characterized the origins of earliest towns elsewhere. In this book, Roderick James McIntosh uses the latest archaeological and anthropological research to provide a bold overview of the distant origins of life for the inhabitants of the Middle Niger, and an explanation for their social evolution. He shows, for instance, the difficulties the peoples faced in adapting to an unpredictable climate, and how their particular social organization determined the unusual nature of their responses to that change. Throughout the book oral traditions are integrated into the story, providing vivid insights into the inhabitants' complex culture and belief systems.

This is a history of the Afrikaner peoples from their arrival in southern Africa in 1652, up to the present day. The account covers the establishment of the Dutch East India trading post in the Cape, the Greak Trek of the 1830s, the discovery of gold and diamonds in the Transvaal in the late nineteenth century, the Anglo-Boer War, the effects of the two World Wars, and the democratic elections of 1994. At all these stages, G H L Le May assesses not only the development of the state institutions of Afrikaner society, but the evolution of the people's distinct mentality.

The Berbers provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the Berber-speaking peoples.

This is an account of the Egyptians from the first settlers in the Nile Valley through to the present day. Egypt has the longest, continuous, known history of any country in the world.