Books in the African Studies series

This book chronicles witchcraft practices in colonial Kenya and the attempts of British bureaucrats to control them. Colonial authorities produced an elaborate body of jurisprudence, making witchcraft a capital offense punishable by death. This book offers an analytical narrative of these efforts in the first half of the twentieth century.

Starting in 1945 and culminating with the Arusha Declaration of 1967, Emma Hunter explores political argument in mainland Tanzania's public sphere to show how political narratives succeeded when they managed to combine promises of freedom with new forms of belonging at both a local and national level.

This history of African slavery from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries examines how indigenous African slavery developed within an international context. The new edition revises statistical material and incorporates recent research.

Martin Klein's history of slavery during the 19th and 20th centuries in three former French colonies focuses on the constantly changing relationships between slave and master, and the attempts on the part of slaves to seek freedom, or autonomy where they remained in servitude.

This pioneering study was first published in 1988. It examines the effects of revolution on one of Africa's largest states. Christopher Clapham traces the continuities between revolutionary Ethiopia and the development of a centralised Ethiopian state since the nineteenth century, emphasising the institutionalisation of the revolutionary regime since 1978.

The main theme of this 1972 book is the determination of wages. Dr Wilson believes that successive South African governments used the gold mining industry when planning labour policies, so that the mines' labour strategy exerted a profound influence on the social and economic structure of South Africa.

Examines the emergence of American-educated Kenyan elites (Asomi), their role in the nationalist movement, and their 'Africanization' of the Kenyan civil and private sectors. This book provides a historical perspective on the development of western-educated Kenyans, depicting the commonalities that existed between Africans and African-Americans.

Written in a style attractive to non-specialists, this book combines evidence from natural and social sciences to examine the impact on Africa of seven cholera pandemics since 1817, particularly the current impact of cholera on such major countries as Senegal, Angola, Mozambique, Congo, Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Provides a historical analysis of the role of student voices in the development of Uganda's higher education. This book not only chronicles incidents of student protests, but also explores and analyses their trigger points as well as the strategies employed by the university, the government, and the students to manage or resolve those crises.

This study analyses the complexity and flexibility of gender relations in Igbo society with emphasis on such major cultural zones as the Anioma, the Ngwa, the Onitsha, the Nsukka and the Aro.

This 1985 comprehensive study analyses slavery in early colonial South Africa under the Dutch East India Company (1652-1795). Based on archival research in Britain, the Netherlands and South Africa, it examines the nature of Cape slavery with reference to the literature on other slave societies.

From Africa to Brazil traces the flows of enslaved Africans from identifiable points in the broad region of Africa called Upper Guinea to Amazonia, Brazil, considering why planters in Amazonia wanted African slaves, why and how those sent to Amazonia were enslaved, and what their Middle Passage experience was like.

This book traces the development of arguments about race over a period of more than 350 years in the Niger Bend in northern Mali. Bruce S. Hall reconstructs an African intellectual history of race that long predated colonial conquest, and which has continued to orient community relations ever since.

Analysing the social conflict over affirmative action in South Africa and the United States, this text presents a theoretical approach, and demonstrates that different populations interpret and view core societal principles differently. It shows that these divergences represent the core conflict over the implementation of affirmative action.

This compelling 1999 example of the cultural history of South Africa argues that cultural factors were related to high political developments in the colonial Cape. It describes changes in social identity accompanying the transition from Dutch to British overrule, and the development of white racism and of ideologies of resistance.

Showing how international law is often manipulated in the debate about humanitarian intervention, this book explains why the Liberian case provides an opportunity to challenge UN and the Economic Community of West African States' (ECOWAS') approach. It argues that ECOWAS' and the UN's justifications for moving away from these norms are flawed.

Analyses contributions made by Kwame Nkrumah to the development of pan-African groups from the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester to the military coup d'etat that deposed Nkrumah's government in 1966. The text employs an Aftrocentric approach and a synthesis of tools from a variety of disciplines used by scholars in Black and African studies.

There exists a strong tendency within Western literary criticism to either deny the existence of epics in Africa or to see African literatures as exotic copies of European originals. This book revises traditional literary canons in examining the social, cultural and emotional specificity of African epics.

This book details the devastating Mau Mau civil war fought in Kenya during the 1950s and the legacies of that conflict for the post-colonial state. Branch explores the instrumental use of violence, changes to allegiances, and the ways in which cleavages created by the war informed local politics for decades after the conflict's conclusion.

In this study, Dr Mosley considers the economies of colonial Kenya and Southern Rhodesia and argues at the level of policy, most white producers acknowledged that they could not afford to let 'white mate black in a very few moves': they needed his cheap labour, cattle and maize too much to wish to damage seriously the peasant economy that sustained them.

Exploring the history of a group of Muslim Sufi mystics and their religious community in colonial French West Africa, this study shows the relationship between religious, social and economic change in the region. It highlights the role that the people played in shaping social and cultural change.

Provides an analysis of South Africa's political economy in transition, documenting the history of the gold mining industry's involvement in shaping the political landscape of the country.

This book examines the ways in which racial and economic stratification were brought to coincide in pre-industrial South Africa by describing in detail the history of one group, the Griquas of Philippolis and Kokstad.

Volkskapitalisme analyses the development of Afrikaner nationalism from the early thirties to the election victory of the Nationalist Party in 1948. The book sets out to refute the commonly held belief that the nationalist policies of apartheid are simply the product of 'irrational' racial ideology.

This book explores the influence of oral poetry on Somali politics. Said Samater shows how an indigenous resource can be harnessed in a non-literate society, not only as a medium of mass communication but also as a tool for acquiring political power.

This comprehensive history of Niger during the colonial period is a work based on primary research which attempts an overall appraisal of the colonial past. Dr Fuglestad questions the assumption that the colonial conquest constituted a clear break in African history.

The churches in Africa probably constitute the most important growth area for Christianity in the second half of the twentieth century. From being a number of rather tightly controlled 'mission fields' zealously guarded by the great missionary societies, Catholic and Protestant, they have emerged across the last decades in bewildering variety to selfhood.

First published in 1978, this study analyses the political history and sociology of one particular group - the railway workers of Ghana's third city, Sekondi-Takoradi, who are renowned for their leading role in the Ghanaian nationalist movement and for their sustained opposition to the elitism and authoritarianism of post-Independence governments.

An account of the Nigerian military coups of 1966 in which the author discusses both the events themselves and their sociological background.