Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora – serie

An analysis of the historical and scientific effects of technology transfer from an imperial to colonial setting.Science and Power in Colonial Mauritius examines, within the context of the history of sugarcane production in Mauritius, the cross-cultural debates about the production and dissemination of science and technology from "developed" to "less-developed" countries and from elites to peasants within these countries. The book also shows in great detail that the history of science, technology, and colonialism can shed light on contemporary problems in natural resource management and global policy making.

A history of the West Indians who migrated to Sierra Leone from the Caribbean after the abolition of slavery in 1807.An examination of the trans-oceanic migration of West Indians from the Caribbean to Sierra Leone in the decades following the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in 1807. The West Indians who immigrated to Sierra Leone during this period came to occupy many positions in the colonial government of the colony, and, in time, they were an important [although not always liked] minority. Nemata Blyden is a Professor in the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Texas at Dallas.

A look at the encounter between the French and the peoples of Southern Gabon in terms of their differing conceptions of boundaries.In the second half of the nineteenth century, two very different practices of territoriality confronted each other in Southern Gabon. Clan and lineage relationships were most important in the local practice, while the French practice was informed by a territorial definition of society that had emerged with the rise of the modern nation-state and industrial capitalism. This modern territoriality used an array of bureaucratic instruments -- such as maps andcensuses -- previously unknown in equatorial Africa. Such instruments denied the existence of locally created territories and were fundamental to the exercise of colonial power. Thus modern territoriality imposed categories and institutions foreign to the peoples to whom they were applied. As colonial power became more effective from the 1920s on, those institutions started to be appropriated by Gabonese cultural elites who negotiated their meanings in reference to their own traditions. The result was a strongly ambiguous condition that left its imprint on the new colonial territories and subsequently the postcolonial Gabonese state.Christopher Gray was Assistant Professor of History, Florida International University.

A detailed historiographical examination of the role the Ovimbundu people have played in Angolan politics from Portuguese colonization to the present.Contested Power in Angola, 1840s to the Present argues that the Ovimbundu of central Angola have been key players in the history of modern Angola. The work focuses on the tensions between the centralising forces of the state and the pull of local, regional and ethnic tendencies which have characterised the modern history of Angola. The study begins with a chapter which highlights the relationship between relatively weak pre-colonial Ovimbundu state systems and the autonomous local economic, political and social institutions that functioned in the villages. The chapter also looks at how both state and local systems adapted to the commercial, political and cultural imperatives of industrializing Europe and America. The subsequent chapters explore the emergence and transformation of the Portuguese colonial state in central Angola, including issues of pacification and colonialization, the Estado Novo and the politics of subjugation. They illustrate the contradictions between the rhetoric of racial democracy of the apologists of the colonial state and the reality of rising ethnic and regional tension.The study concludes with the evolution of Ovimbundu nationalism during the colonial and post-colonial periods. It argues that the divisions of the Cold War and continuing ethnic and regional divisions frustrated the Ovimbundu leadership in its efforts to make the state more inclusive. This quest to reshape the state remains a salient feature in the relationship between the Ovimbundu and the state.Linda Heywood is Associate Professor of History, Howard University.

A history of America's tangled involvement in the transition of British and French West African territories to statehood.As an investigation of America's response to the decolonization process in West Africa, The United States and Decolonization in West Africa, 1950-60 fills several important gaps. The history of America's involvement in Africa remains understudied. This book focuses on a neglected decade when the "wind of change" swept across Africa. Critical of the traditional "nationalist" interpretation of the decolonization process in Africa, the author begins his book by placing the transition of British and French West African territories to statehood with a neocolonialist framework. In doing so, he abandons the conventional definitions and usages of "independence" and "decolonization", and makes a compelling case that these are two related but different phenomena. Nwaubani argues that the United States was not a catalyst in the transition process in West Africa, but rather acted in a neocolonialist fashion itself. He also gives a nuanced appraisal of the Cold War, demonstrating that it was not as important as popularly believed in determining US behavior in Africa.The primary focus of the book is on West Africa, with case studiesfocusing on the Ewe, Ghana [including the Volta dam project], and Guinea. But the broad issues discussed are framed in the larger context of sub-Saharan Africa, and against the backdrop of the larger debates about the nature of post-1945 United States diplomacy.Ebere Nwaubani is a member of the History Department, University of Colorado at Boulder.

An examination of French citizenship and cultural identity in Algeria during the last quarter-century of colonial rule.In recent years, a multicultural society and changing conceptions of French identity have been the source of considerable debate in scholarship, literature and the media in France. This book examines equally contested definitionsof French identity from the past, but not those forged within the borders of the French 'Hexagon,' as French geographic space is sometimes called. It is the study of French sentiment in colonial Algeria of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, during the last quarter century of colonial rule in North Africa. It seeks to uncover elements of French identity that were generated past the Pyrenees and the Alps, beyond the bordering Atlantic Ocean, English Channel and Mediterranean Sea, outside the physical space so central to "Frenchness." It asks whether far-reaching state institutions could transform indigenous and settler populations in colonial Algeria -- Europeans, Jews and Muslims -- intoFrench men and women. It examines what these individuals wrote of French sentiment in colonial Algeria. Did they articulate alternative definitions of French identity? The colonial "periphery" is clearly quite central to France'sevolving postcolonial sense of self.Colonial Algerian heterogeneity and the country's unique relationship to France make it an especially rich site in which to study French national and cultural identities. French military conquest and the occupation of the North African coast established one of the oldest and largest settler colonies within the French Empire. Unlike other colonies, Algeria lay relatively close to metropolitan France, a daylong journey by ship from Marseilles. No colony other than Algeria was granted French departmental status. No other land administered under the auspices of the French Empire had as numerous a European settler population, many of whom becamenaturalized French citizens. This study suggests that although Algeria had become officially French, "Algerie française", even at the pinnacle of its acceptance, was more diverse and more contested than its title suggests.

The only complete study of modern Gambian politics from the establishment of British rule to the overthrow of the Jawara government.A Political History of the Gambia: 1816-1994 is the first complete account of the political history of the former British West African dependency to be written. It makes use of much hitherto unconsulted or unavailable British and Gambian official and private documentary sources, as well as interviews with many Gambian politicians and former British colonial officials. The first part of the book charts the origins and characteristics of modern politics in colonial Bathurst (Banjul) and its expansion into the Gambian interior (Protectorate) in the two decades after World War II. By independence in 1965, older urban-based parties in the capital had been defeated bya new, rural-based political organisation, the People's Progressive Party (PPP).The second part of the book analyzes the means by which the PPP, under President Sir Dawda Jawara, succeeded in defeating both existing and new rival political parties and an attempted coup in 1981. The book closes with an explanation of the demise of the PPP at the hands of an army coup in 1994.The book not only establishes those distinctive aspects ofGambian political history, but also relates these to the wider regional and African context, during the colonial and independence periods.

An overview of the ongoing methods used to understand African history.Spurred in part by the ongoing re-evaluation of sources and methods in research, African historiography in the past two decades has been characterized by the continued branching and increasing sophistication of methodologies and areas of specialization. The rate of incorporation of new sources and methods into African historical research shows no signs of slowing.This book is both a snapshot of current academic practice and an attempt to sort throughsome of the problems scholars face within this unfolding web of sources and methods. The book is divided into five sections, each of which begins with a short introduction by a distinguished Africanist scholar. The first sectiondeals with archaeological contributions to historical research. The second section examines the methodologies involved in deciphering historically accurate African ethnic identities from the records of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The third section mines old documentary sources for new historical perspectives. The fourth section deals with the method most often associated with African historians, that of drawing historical data from oral tradition. Thefifth section is devoted to essays that present innovative sources and methods for African historical research.Together, the essays in this cutting-edge volume represent the current state of the art in African historical research.Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.Christian Jennings is a Doctoral Candidatein History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Applies new approaches to the study of a small, densely populated region of West Africa, integrating them into a regional history that analyzes interactions between localities and the modern state.Constructions of Belonging provides a history of local communities living in Southeastern Nigeria since the late nineteenth century, examining the processes that have defined, changed, and re-produced these communities. Harneit-Sievers explores both the meanings and the uses that the community members have given to their particular areas, while also looking at the processes that have shaped local communities, and have made them work and continue tobe relevant, in a world dominated by the modern territorial state and by worldwide flows of people, goods, and ideas.Axel Harneit-Sievers is a Research Fellow at the Center for Modern Oriental Studies, and Director ofthe Nigeria Office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Lagos.

An ambitious new approach to African studies, utilizing indigenous sources to bring back the voices of the native Africans in their own words rather than that of colonizers and foreigners.Elizabeth Isichei explores the Atlantic slave trade, as reflected in the poetics of rumour and the poetics of memory -- an approach different from the quantitative and demographic studies which have transformed the subject over the past twenty years. To this and to her study of popular consciousness in the colony and postcolony, she brings together a wide range of disciplines -- ethnography, art and art history, and contemporary literary theory among them -- to look at the intellectual history of Africa, from African rather than European premises. The result is a history of popular consciousness which shows the experiences of ordinary people, often in protest to an ongoing experience of exploitation.Elizabeth Isichei is Professor of Religious Studies, Otago University, Dunedin, New Zealand and author of over a dozen books on African history and religion. She holds an Oxford doctorate, and aD.Litt from the University of Canterbury, and is a fellow of the Royal Society [N.Z.]

An exploration of the subject of Afro-Germans, which, in recent years has captured the interest of scholars across the humanities for providing insight into contemporary Germany's transformation into a multicultural society.Since the Middle Ages, Africans have lived in Germany as slaves and scholars, guest workers and refugees. After Germany became a unified nation in 1871, it acquired several African colonies but lost them after World War I. Children born of German mothers and African fathers during the French occupation of Germany were persecuted by the Nazis. After World War II, many children were born to African American GIs stationed in Germany and German mothers. Today there are 500,000 Afro-Germans in Germany out of a population of 80 million. Nevertheless, German society still sees them as "foreigners," assuming they are either African or African American but never German.In recent years, the subject of Afro-Germans has captured the interest of scholars across the humanities for several reasons. Looking at Afro-Germans allows us to see another dimension of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas of race that led to the Holocaust. Furthermore, the experience of Afro-Germans provides insight into contemporary Germany's transformation, willing or not, into a multicultural society. The volume breaks new ground not onlyby addressing the topic of Afro-Germans but also by combining scholars from many disciplines.Patricia Mazon is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the State University of New York at Buffalo.Reinhild Steingrover is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.

A book about contemporary urban design, a metaphysical worldview and a cultural process that transcends the pre-colonial/colonial/post-colonial divides.Sufi City: Urban Design and Archetypes in Touba is a geographical study of the modern Muslim holy city of Touba in Senegal, capital of the Mouride Sufi order. Touba was founded in 1887 by a Sufi shaykh in a moment of mysticillumination. Since the death of the founder in 1927, the Mouride order has designed and built the entire city. Touba is named for Tûbâ, the "Tree of Paradise" of Islamic tradition. This archetypal tree articulates Islamic conceptions of righteous life on earth, divine judgment, and access to the Hereafter; the city of Touba actualizes this spiritual construct. Important aspects of its configuration, such as the vertical and horizontal alignment of its monumental central shrine complex, its radiating avenues and encircling ring roads, and the actual trees that mark its landscape relate directly to the archetypal tree of Sufi theosophy. The relationship between the spiritualarchetype and its earthly actualization as a city is explained by recourse to Sufi methodology. The book employs a semiotic analysis of urban form, cartography, hermeneutics, field investigation and analysis of satellite imagery in order to relate contemporary urban design issues to overarching metaphysical concepts. Sufi City also explores the history of urban networks in Senegal since the emergence of autonomous Muslim towns in the seventeenth century. Finally, the layout of Senegal's modern Sufi cities is related to the monumental palaver trees that marked that country's historic settlements.Eric S. Ross is a cultural and urban geographer who holds a degree inIslamic Studies. Since 1998 he has been Assistant Professor of Geography at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. Apart from research on Sufi orders and Muslim towns in Senegal, he has studied cultural tourism and urban planning in Morocco.

A history of Southern Sudan, from pre-colonial times to the present.Many societies worldwide possess oral histories and long memories, reaching back many centuries, particularly of wars and events of great trauma. Labeling them "blood memories" in this book, Stephanie Beswick presents a pre-colonial history of Southern Sudan, a region that, according to some, "has no history." Beginning in the fourteenth century, the book follows the region's largest ethnic group today, the Dinka, from their original homelands in the central Sudanese Gezira between the Blue and White Niles, into their more recently adopted homelands in Southern Sudan. Beswick demonstrates how early pre-colonial stresses play a critical role in modern-day South Sudan, in what has since become the world's longest civil war, fought externally against the fundamentalist Islamic Northern Sudanese government as well as internally within the South itself. Stephanie Beswick is professor of history at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She was born in Khartoum, Sudan.

An analysis of how traditional power structures in Nigeria have survived the forces of colonialism and the modernization processes of postcolonial regimes.This book analyzes how indigenous political power structures in Nigeria survived both the constricting forces of colonialism and the modernization programs of postcolonial regimes. With twenty detailed case studies on colonial andpostcolonial Nigerian history, the complex interactions between chieftaincy structures and the rapidly shifting sociopolitical and economic conditions of the twentieth century become evident. Drawing on the interactions between the state and chieftaincy, this study goes beyond earlier Africanist scholarship that attributes the resilience of these indigenous structures to their enduring normative and utilitarian qualities. Linked to externally-derived forces, and legitimated by neotraditional themes, chieftaincy structures were distorted by the indirect rule system, transformed by competing communal claims, and legitimated a dominant ethno-regional power configuration.Olufemi Vaughan is Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and the Department of History, State University of New York at Stony Brook.Winner of the 2001 Cecil B. Currey Book-length Award from the Association ofThird World Studies.

A comprehensive evaluation of how to read African history.Writing African History is an essential work for anyone who wants to write, or even seriously read, African history. It will replace Daniel McCall's classic Africa in Time Perspective as the introduction to African history for the next generation and as a reference for professional historians, interested readers, and anyone who wants to understand how African history is written. Africa in Time Perspective was written in the 1960s, when African history was a new field of research. This new book reflects the development of African history since then. It opens with a comprehensive introduction by Daniel McCall, followed by a chapter by the editor explainingwhat African history is [and is not] in the context of historical theory and the development of historical narrative, the humanities, and social sciences. The first half of the book focuses on sources of historical data while thesecond half examines different perspectives on history. The editor's final chapter explains how to combine various sorts of evidence into a coherent account of African history. Writing African History will become the most important guide to African history for the 21st century.Contributors: Bala Achi, Isaac Olawale Albert, Diedre L. Badéjo, Dorothea Bedigian, Barbara M. Cooper, Henry John Drewal, Christopher Ehret, Toyin Falola, David Henige, Joseph E. Holloway, John Hunwick, S. O. Y. Keita, William G. Martin, Daniel McCall, Susan Keech McIntosh, Donatien Dibwe Dia Mwembu, Kathleen Sheldon, John Thornton, and Masao Yoshida.John Edwards Philips is professor of international society, Hirosaki University, and author of Spurious Arabic: Hausa and Colonial Nigeria [Madison, University of Wisconsin African Studies Center, 2000].

An interdisciplinary study on the myth of racial democracy in Brazil through the prism of producers of Afro-Brazilian culture.Brazil, the most racially diverse Latin American country, is also the most contradictory: for centuries it has maintained fantasy as reality through the myth of racial democracy. Enshrined in that mythology is the masking of exclusionism that strategically displaces and marginalizes Afro-Brazilians from political power.In this absorbing new study, Niyi Afolabi exposes the tensions between the official position on racial harmony and the reality of marginalization experienced by Afro-Brazilians by exploring Afro-Brazilian cultural production as a considered response to this exclusion. The author examines major contributions in music, history, literature, film, and popular culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to reveal how each performance by an Afro-Brazilian artist addresses issues of identity and racism through a variety of veils that entertain, ridicule, invoke, provoke, protest, and demand change at the same time.Raising cogent questions such as the vital role of Afro-Brazilians in the making of Brazilian national identity; the representation of Brazilian women as hapless, exploited, and abandoned; the erosion of the influence of black movements due to fragmentation and internal disharmony; and the portrayal of Afro-Brazilians on the national screen as domestics, Afolabi provides insightful, nuanced analyses that tease out the complexities of the dilemma in their appropriate historical, political, and social contexts.Niyi Afolabi teaches Luso-Brazilian, Yoruba, and African Diaspora studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese as well as the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Examines through the use of Murid oral and written sources the creation of an "alternative modernity" as an understanding of historical change by Sufi notables and disciples.The Murid order, founded in Senegal in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, grew into a major Sufi order during the colonial period and is now among the most recognizable of the Sufi orders in Africa. Murids have spread the voice of Islam and Africa in concert halls and on the airwaves through pop singers -- especially Youssou N'Dour -- and the image of Shaykh Amadu Bamba M'Backé, the founding saint of the order, often used to grace the covers ofworks concerning Islam, African culture, abolition, and European colonization.In this insightful and revealing study, John Glover explores the manner in which a Muslim society in West Africa actively created a conception ofmodernity that reflects its own historical awareness and identity. Drawing from Murid written and oral historical sources, Glover carefully considers how the Murid order at the collective and individual levels has navigated the intersection of two major historical forces -- Islam, specifically in the contexts of reform and mysticism, and European colonization -- and achieved in the process an understanding of modernity not as an unwilling witness but as anactive participant. Ultimately, Sufism and Jihad in Modern Senegal presents the reader with a new portrait of a society that has used its notion of modernity to adapt and incorporate further historical changes into its identity as an African Sufi order.John Glover is Associate Professor of History at the University of Redlands in southern California.

A provocative investigation into the root causes of the Ethiopian political upheavals in the second half of the twentieth century.During the 1960s and early 1970s, a majority of Ethiopian students and intellectuals adopted a Marxist-Leninist ideology with fanatic fervor. The leading force in an uprising against the imperial regime of Emperor Haile Selassie,they played a decisive role in the rise of a Leninist military regime. In this original study, Messay Kebede examines the sociopolitical and cultural factors that contributed to the radicalization of the educated elite in Ethiopia, and how this phenomenon contributed to the country's uninterrupted political crises and economic setbacks since the Revolution of 1974.Offering a unique, insider's perspective garnered from his direct participation in thestudent movement, the author emphasizes the role of the Western education system in the progressive radicalization of students and assesses the impact of Western education on traditional cultures. The most comprehensive study of the role of students in modern Ethiopian political history to date, Radicalism and Cultural Dislocation in Ethiopia, 1960-1974 opens the door for discussion and debate on the issue of African modernization and the effects ofcultural colonization.Messay Kebede is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Dayton and is author of Survival and Modernization -- Ethiopia's Enigmatic Present: A Philosophical Discourse [1999].

A detailed and compelling volume that contributes significantly to current trends in post-apartheid scholarship.Representing Bushmen draws on the work of Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, and Martin Bernal to show how the study of language was integral to the formation of racial discrimination in South Africa. Author Shane Moran demonstrates the central role of literary history to the cultural racism and ideology that fed into apartheid by tracing the ethno-aesthetic figuration of the Bushmen in W. H. I. Bleek's theory of the origin of language. Moran examines the gestation of colonial ideology, and provocatively traces aspects of the post-apartheid rhetoric of commemoration and national unity to their colonialist roots.This detailed and compelling volume contributes significantly to current trends in post-apartheid scholarship. Moran emphasizes the need for a cautious interrogation of the colonial archive and scrutiny of critical discourses used by the would-be postcolonial intellectual, and poses a timelychallenge to those committed to exorcising that legacy.Shane Moran teaches at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

A groundbreaking interrogation of the myriad causes and effects of African migration, from the pre-colonial to the modern era.Migration, whether forced or voluntary, continues to be an issue vital to Africa, arguably the continent most affected by internal displacement. Over centuries -- in groups or as individuals -- Africans have been forced to leave their homes to escape unfavorable natural, social, or political circumstances, or simply to seek better lives elsewhere. This essential volume establishes the centrality of human migration and movement to the evolution of African societies.Using oral, archaeological, and written sources, and focusing on various geographical areas, the contributors show that migration is a multifaceted phenomenon, historically varied in nature and character. Movements, Borders, and Identities in Africa incorporates carefully selected case studies drawn from across the continent, and provides a broad but insightful overview of migration and its complex relationships to slavery, commerce,religion, architecture, material culture, poverty, diaspora life and identity formation, and the development of states and societies on the continent. Taken as a whole, this collection offers a groundbreaking interrogation of themyriad causes and effects of African migration, from the precolonial to the modern era.Contributors: Edmund Abaka, Maurice Amutabi, Toyin Falola, Ghislaine Geloin, Issiaka Mande, Jean-Luc Martineau, Pius S. Nyambara, Akinwumi Ogundiran, Adisa Ogunfolakan, Olatunji Ojo, Brigitte Kowalski Oshineye, Meshack Owino, Gerald Steyn, and Aribidesi Usman.Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.Aribidesi Usman is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and Anthropology at Arizona State University.

The first volume devoted to interrogating the complex relationship -- both historic and contemporary -- between the United States and West Africa.Over the last several decades, historians have conducted extensive research into contact between the United States and West Africa during the era of the transatlantic trade. Yet we still understand relatively little about more recent relations between the two areas. This multidisciplinary volume presents the most comprehensive analysis of the U.S.-West African relationship to date, filling a significant gap in the literature by examining the social, cultural, political, and economic bonds that have, in recent years, drawn these two world regions into increasingly closer contact.Beginning with examinations of factors that linked the nations during European colonial ruleof Africa, and spanning to discussions of U.S. foreign policy with regard to West Africa from the Cold War through the end of the twentieth century and beyond, these essays constitute the first volume devoted to interrogating thecomplex relationship -- both historic and contemporary -- between the United States and West Africa.Contributors: Abdul Karim Bangura, Karen B. Bell, Peter A. Dumbuya, Kwame Essien, Andrew I. E. Ewoh, Toyin Falola, Osman Gbla, John Wess Grant, Stephen A. Harmon, Harold R. Harris, Olawale Ismail, Alusine Jalloh, Fred L. Johnson III, Stephen Kandeh, Ibrahim Kargbo, Bayo Lawal, Ayodeji Olukoju, Adebayo Oyebade, Christopher Ruane, Anita Spring, Ibrahim Sundiata, Hakeem Ibikunle Tijani, Ken Vincent, and Amanda Warnock.Alusine Jalloh is associate professor of history and founding director of The Africa Program at the University of Texas at Arlington.Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Malawi's political culture is examined as it emerged in the colonial and early post-colonial periods, particularly in light of anti-colonial protest.Inspired by the events leading up to the overthrow of Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda's Life Presidency, this book explores the deep logic of Malawi's political culture as it emerged in the colonial and early post-colonial periods. It draws on archival sources from three continents and oral testimonies gathered over a ten-year period provided by those who lived these events. Power narrates how anti-colonial protest was made relevant to the African majority through the painstaking engagement of politicians in local grievances and struggles, which they then linked to the fight against white settler domination in the guise of the Central African Federation. She also explores how Dr. Banda (leader of independent Malawi for thirty years), the Nyasaland African Congress, and its successor, the Malawi Congress Party, functioned within this political culture, and how the MCP became a formidable political machine. Centralto this process was the deployment of women and youth to cut across parochial politics and consolidate a broad base of support. No less important was the deliberate manipulation of history and the use of rumor and innuendo, symbol and pageantry, persecution and reward. It was this mix that made people both accept and reject the MCP regime, sometimes simultaneously.Joey Power is Professor of History at Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario.

This book presents new and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of African urban history and culture. Moving between precolonial, colonial, and contemporary urban spaces, it covers the major regions, religions, and urban societies of sub-Saharan Africa.African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective presents new and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of African urban history and culture. It presents original research and integrates historical methodologies with those of anthropology, geography, literature, art, and architecture. Moving between precolonial, colonial, and contemporary urban spaces, it covers the major regions, religions, and cultural influences of sub-Saharan Africa. The themes include Islam and Christianity, architecture, migration, globalization, social and physical decay, identity, race relations, politics, and development. This book elaborates on not only what makes the study of African urban spaces unique within urban historiography, it also offers an-encompassing and up-to-date study of the subject and inserts Africa into the growing debate on urban history and culture throughout the world. The opportunities provided by the urban milieu are endless and each study opens new potential avenues of research. This book explores some of those avenues and lays the groundwork on which new studies can build. Contributors: Maurice NyamangaAmutabi, Catherine Coquery Vidrovitch, Mark Dike DeLancey, Thomas Ngomba Ekali, Omar A. Eno, Doug T. Feremenga, Laurent Fourchard, James Genova, Fatima Muller-Friedman, Godwin R. Murunga, Kefa M. Otiso, Michael Ralph, Jeremy Rich,Eric Ross, Corinne Sandwith, Wessel Visser.Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin; Steven J.Salm is Assistant Professor of History, Xavier University of Louisiana.

An examination of the varied ways, outside and inside markets, in which Asante producers obtained labor, land and capital during the transformative era.This is a study of the changing rules and relationships within which natural, human and man-made resources were mobilized for production during the development of an agricultural export economy in Asante, a major West African kingdom which became, by 1945, the biggest regional contributor to Ghana's status as the world's largest cocoa producer. The period 1807-1956 as a whole was distinguished in Asante history by relatively favorable political conditionsfor indigenous as well as [during colonial rule] for foreign private enterprise. It saw generally increasing external demands for products that could be produced on Asante land. This book, which fills a major gap in Asante economic history, transcends the traditional divide between studies of precolonial and of twentieth-century African history. It analyses the interaction of coercion and the market in the context of a rich but fragile natural environment,the central process being a transition from slavery and debt-bondage to hired labor and agricultural indebtedness. It contributes to the broad debate about Africa's historic combination of emerging "capitalist" institutions and persistent 'precapitalist' ones, and tests the major theories of the political economy of institutional change. It is written accessibly for an interdisciplinary readership.Gareth Austin is a Lecturer in Economic History, London School of Economics and Political Science, and Joint Editor of the Journal of African History.

This book makes Africa the centerpiece of an intercultural investigation of modern colonial power and its resistance, focusing on the writings of Ghanaian intellectuals.Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa changes dominant ideas about Africa's relations with modernity and the global history of nationalism by recovering, and bringing fresh interpretations to, a modern genealogy of African nationalist theory. Author Kwaku Larbi Korang examines the writing of intellectuals from preindependence Ghana from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, writers who operated self-consciously in a Pan-African ideological framework. By confronting the concept of "the African Nation" under the colonial order, Korang contends that these writer-intellectuals were also confronting modernity in ways that would be important to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.Through its affiliation with recent revisionary works that have demonstrated the conceptual and existential validity of "alternative modernities," the volume shifts our understanding of the modern from a securely and exclusively Western mode of being to the modern as relational and inclusively intercultural. It mobilizes this relational and intercultural conception to locate and outline "African modernity." Additionally,Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa demonstrates why and how projections of, and debates about, "African modernity" have been more than a continental affair. Korang comprehensively relates the thought of African Americans (Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright), and West Indians (George Padmore, C.L.R. James), to that of seminal anglophone West African thinkers like E. W. Blyden, Africanus Horton, J. E. Casely Hayford, and Kwame Nkrumah.Kwaku Larbi Korang is associate professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Ohio State University.

A radical reassessment of the importance of women in East-Central African society during the precolonial period.This study of more than two thousand years of African social history weaves together evidence from historical linguistics, archaeology, comparative ethnography, oral tradition, and art history to challenge the assumptions that allAfrican societies were patriarchal and that the status of women in precolonial Africa is beyond the scope of historical research. In East-Central Africa, women played key roles in technological and economic developments during the long precolonial period. Female political leaders were as common as male rulers, and women, especially mothers, were central to religious ceremonies and beliefs. These conclusions contribute a new and critical element to our understanding of Africa's precolonial history.Christine Saidi is Assistant Professor of History at Kutztown University.

Explores the instrumentalization of various aspects of popular culture in Africa.This anthology provides insightful data on and discussions of a wide array of popular cultural manifestations and theoretical perspectives, covering such issues as kinship, religion, conflict resolution, music, cinema, drama, andliterary texts. The issues cohere around the understanding that culture is situational and political. Going beyond merely challenging popular stereotypes and representations of Africans and African-related practices in various outlets, the book reveals how popular cultural practices are instruments that have been manipulated for personal and collective survival.The book is distinctive in its codification and explication of aspects of popular practices that are based on data from countries in Africa, Europe, and the Americas that showcase cultural negotiations either with reference to how notions, values, norms, and images of Africans have been packaged and exploited over theyears or how popular cultures are used as tools of resistance and agitation by the various focal groups that are discussed. The topics are presented and illustrated in ways easily accessible to readers of all backgrounds.Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Augustine Agwuele is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Anthropology, Texas State University, San Marcos.Contributors: Arinpe Adejumo, Augustine Agwuele, Antoinette Tidjani Alou, Maurice N. Amutabi, Tokunbo A. Ayoola, Nicholas M. Creary, Toyin Falola, Celeste A. Fisher, Denise Amy-Rose Forbes-Erickson, Hetty ter Haar, Debra L. Klein, Emmanuel M. Mbah, Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, and Asonzeh Ukah

Since the Middle Ages, Africans have lived in Germany as slaves and scholars, guest workers and refugees. After Germany became a unified nation in 1871, it acquired several African colonies but lost them after World War I. Children born of German mothers and African fathers during the French occupation of Germany were persecuted by the Nazis. After World War II, many children were born to African American GIs stationed in Germany and German mothers. Todaythere are 500,000 Afro-Germans in Germany out of a population of 80 million. Nevertheless, German society still sees them as "foreigners," assuming they are either African or African American but never German.In recent years, the subject of Afro-Germans has captured the interest of scholars across the humanities for several reasons. Looking at Afro-Germans allows us to see another dimension of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas of racethat led to the Holocaust. Furthermore, the experience of Afro-Germans provides insight into contemporary Germany's transformation, willing or not, into a multicultural society. The volume breaks new ground not only by addressing the topic of Afro-Germans but also by combining scholars from many disciplines.Patricia Mazon is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Reinhild Steingrover is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.

A groundbreaking new study of the ways in which South African leaders struggle to legitimize themselves through the costuming of political power.Indirect rule -- the British colonial policy of employing indigenous tribal chiefs as political intermediaries -- has typically been understood by scholars as little more than an expedient solution to imperial personnel shortages.A reexamination of the history of indirect rule in South Africa reveals it to have been much more: an ideological strategy designed to win legitimacy for colonial officials. Indirect rule became the basic template from which segregation and apartheid emerged during the twentieth century and set the stage for a post-apartheid debate over African political identity and "traditional authority" that continues to shape South African politics today.This new study, based on firsthand field research and archival material only recently made available to scholars, unveils the inner workings of South African segregation. Drawing influence from a range of political theorists including Machiavelli, Marx, Weber, Althusser, and Zizek, Myers develops a groundbreaking understanding of the ways in which leaders struggle to legitimize themselves through the costuming of political power.J. C. Myers is Associate Professor of Political Science at California State University, Stanislaus.