Books in the African Histories and Modernities series

This book examines 21st-century South African autobiographical writing that addresses the nation's socio-political realities, both past and present.

This book examines the representation of figures, memories and images of childhood in selected contemporary diasporic African fiction by Adichie, Abani, Wainaina and Oyeyemi.

This collection of essays analyzes different iterations of African unity, exploring the political and cultural visions that informed projects aimed at African unification. It explores the cultural, economic and non-state aspects of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) as the principal institution dedicated to the cooperation of African states, from its establishment in 1963 to its transformation into the African Union (AU) in 2000, as well as how ideas of African unity shaped the Cold War and African liberation struggles. Bringing together contributors from a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds across Africa, Europe and the US, this book investigates the ideological origins and historiography of Pan-African and unification projects, and considers how African intellectuals, leaders and populations engaged with these ideas.

This book is the first major work to explore the utility of the border as a theoretical, methodological, and interpretive construct for understanding colonial public health by considering African experiences in the Zimbabwe-Mozambique borderland.

This book celebrates Chinua Achebe, one of the most profound and famous African writers of our time, and his widely read masterpiece, Things Fall Apart. The novel remains a "must read" literary text for reasons the many contributors to this book make clear in their astute readings.

The successor to Kenyatta and Britain: An Account of Political Transformation, 1929-1963, this book completes the first systematic political history of Jomo Kenyatta by examining the mechanisms of installing a neo-colonial regime in Kenya, and how such regimes were duplicated elsewhere in Africa.

The first of two parts, it explores Kenyatta's formative years in nationalist activism in Kenya and Britain, the complex links between colonial and British intelligence services and Kenyatta's career and the political compromise he forged between Kenya and Britain.

This study on Kapsiki-Higi tales compares two corpuses of stories collected over two generations. These dynamics affect some types of tales more than others, reflect social change and intergroup contact, but also depend on characteristics of the tales themselves.

This book explores the politics of artistic creativity, examining how black artists in Africa and the diaspora create art as a procedure of self-making.

This book is the first to tackle the difficult and complex politics of transition in Zimbabwe, with deep historical analysis. Its focus is on a very problematic political culture that is proving very hard to transcend. At the center of this culture is an unstable but resilient ¿nationalist-military¿ alliance crafted during the anti-colonial liberation struggle in the 1970s. Inevitably, violence, misogyny and masculinity are constitutive of the political culture. Economically speaking, the culture is that of a bureaucratic, parasitic, primitive accumulation and corruption, which include invasion and emptying of state coffers by a self-styled ¿Chimurenga aristocracy.¿ However, this Chimurenga aristocracy is not cohesive, as the politics that led to Robert Mugabe¿s ousting from power was preceded by dirty and protracted internal factionalism. At the center of the factional politics was the ¿first family¿:Robert Mugabe and his wife, Grace Mugabe. This book offers a multidisciplinary examination of the complex contemporary politics in Zimbabwe, taking seriously such issues as gender, misogyny, militarism, violence, media, identity, modes of accumulation, the ethnicization of politics, attempts to open lines of credit and FDI, national healing, and the national question as key variables not only of a complete political culture but also of difficult transitional politics.

This book investigates the links between human trafficking and national security in Southern Africa. Human trafficking violates borders, supports organised crime and corrupts border officials, and yet policymakers rarely view the persistence of human trafficking as a security issue.

Pairing sophisticated theoretical frameworks with firsthand accounts from actors in the oil industry, this book identifies the root causes of Nigeria's development struggles and offers practical policy solutions for successfully deregulating the oil sector.

This long-awaited book is a vivid history of Frelimo, the liberation movement that gained power in Mozambique following the sudden collapse of Portuguese rule in 1974.

This book is a vivid history of racism in post-apartheid South Africa, focusing on how colonialism still haunts black intraracial relationships.

This book examines vital intersections of narration, linguistic innovation, and political insight that distinguish Chinua Achebe's fiction as well as his non-fiction commentaries.

This book, the second of two parts, demonstrates that societies experiencing prolonged and severe crises of legitimacy are prone to intense and persistent political violence.

This book examines the active role played by Africans in the pre-colonial production of historical knowledge in South Africa, focusing on perspectives of the second king of amaZulu, King Dingane.

This is the first full- length historical analysis of Victoria Falls. The text offers a critical examination of Victoria Falls providing new insight into the British Southern African project and reveals how Victoria Falls became one of the first modern African tourist destinations.

The book examines popular fiction columns, a dominant feature in Kenyan newspapers, published in the twentieth century and examines their historical and cultural impact on Kenyan politics.

This book demonstrates that societies experiencing prolonged and severe crises of legitimacy are prone to intense and persistent political violence.

This book examines the historical and current state of health and the health of the African people, including the Arab North, impacted by such factors as geography and natural elements, cultural and colonial traditions, and competing biomedical and traditional systems.

This book offers an interpretation of Yoruba people's affective responses to an adult Yoruba male with a 'deviant' hairstyle.

This book is a historical narrative covering various periods in Sierra Leone's history from the fifteenth century to the end of its civil war in 2002. It entails the history of Sierra Leone from its days as a slave harbor through to its founding as a home for free slaves, and toward its political independence and civil war.

This book explores some of the major forces and changes in higher education across the world between 1945 and 2015. There were also profound shifts in the financing and economic role of higher education reflected in the processes of privatization of universities and curricula realignments to meet the shifting demands of the economy.

Set within one of the main objectives of the Economic Partnership Agreements, he also interrogates the prospects and challenges of regional integration in Africa under the regime of transnational accumulation, which the Economic Partnership Agreements represents.

Thisbook maintains that South Africa, despite the official end of apartheid in1994, remains steeped in the interstices of coloniality. Tafira explores a range of topicsincluding youth political movement, the social construction of blackness inAzania, and conceptualizations from the Black Liberation Movement.

Ghana has always held a position of primacy in the African political and historical imagination, due in no small part to the indelible impression left president Kwame Nkrumah. This study examines the symbolic strategies he used to construct the Ghanaian state through currency, stamps, museums, flags, and other public icons.

African cultures and politics remain significantly affected by precolonial and postcolonial configurations of modernity, as well as hegemonic global systems. This project explores Africa's conversation with itself and the rest of the world, critiquing universalist notions of democratization.