Books in the African Studies series

Develops an African indigenous discourse paradigm for interpreting and understanding literary and cultural materials. This work is suitable for scholars and students of African culture and literature.

This collection of essays brings together historians and political scientists from Britain, France and the United States, who, from widely differing perspectives and traditions, have been involved in the process of rethinking African politics. They present here the outline of a new approach, grounded in universal political theory rather than on theories of Third World political development.

This book addresses several of the classic questions in African Studies. In answering these questions, the book explores various forms of explanation and advances a form of political economy based upon rational-choice analysis.

The successful jihad of 1804 in Hausaland - perhaps the most important Islamic revolution in West African history, with consequences still apparent in Nigeria today - resulted in the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate, the largest and most enduring West African polity in the nineteenth century.

The popular image of the Kalahari is a romantic one of desert space and untouched Bushmen.

This book surveys the field of industrialisation in Ghana and its effects through such other factors as migration. It provides a valuable comparison both with industrialisation elsewhere and with other aspects of African social life.

The study concludes that instead of being a separating step to remove colonial influence, decolonization in more important respects ensured the continuity of the colonial political economy. The book is of interest to scholars, students and others interested in decolonization, white settles, East African affairs and land reform, as well as the general reader following current events in Africa.

Presenting an analysis of ancient African texts that predate Greco-Roman treatises, this title revisits the roots of rhetorical theory and challenges what is often advanced as the 'darkness metaphor' - the rhetorical construction of Africa and Africans.

This book examines the history of the colonial conquest of a neglected region of Angola from an alternative perspective. Dr Clarence-Smith has used advances in Marxist theory to develop a model of the early colonial period which differs greatly from the established historiography of `African resistance'.

This book is about Fourah Bay College (FBC) and its role as an institution of higher learning in both its African and international context. The study traces the College's development through various periods of education from 1816 to 2001.

Offers an interpretation of Africa's legacy to the world and the worldwide African Diaspora through bringing to light the sociocultural contributions of the Songhoy people and the cosmopolitan empire they established in West Africa.

A critical examination of Maat, the moral ideal in ancient Egypt, this title seeks to present Maat in the language of modern moral discourse while at the same time preserving and building on its distinctiveness as a moral ideal capable of inspiring and maintaining ethical philosophic reflection.

Like most African societies, the Afikpo indigenous justice system employs restorative, transformative, and communitarian principles in conflict resolution. This study examines the principles and practices of the Afikpo (Eugbo) Nigeria indigenous justice system.

Nigeria's democratization in the 1990s was a civil and international movement to free Nigeria from over 20 years of authoritarian military rule. This book examines the role and agenda of the Nigerian press in the democratization process, highlighting the grave challenges the Nigerian press faced.

In this book, William Kelleher Storey shows that guns and discussions about guns during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were fundamentally important to the establishment of racial discrimination in South Africa.

First published in 1973, this is a study of the historical relationship between the system of colonial control and local social and political structures in the Ahafo region of Ghana since the arrival of the British. The authors have conveyed enough context for someone who knows nothing about Africa to begin to understand what politics there means.

This book examines the effects of migrant labour in a southern African labour reserve. Politically independent, Lesotho is acutely dependent on the export of labour to South Africa. This system of oscillating migration is analysed in its historical context - the development of industrial capitalism in South Africa - and with particular emphasis on its contemporary implications.

Examining the impact of post-colonial leadership on political integration in Nigeria, this book offers an understanding of the historical and contemporary forces that shape Nigeria's national politics as well as African politics. It discusses how those histories, along with external forces have affected emerging post-independence politics.

Economic transformations in Africa have been dramatic. This 2002 study of Mozambique's shift to a market economy reveals that it is more political and protracted than critics contend. The state remains a central actor, but social forces have also shaped the outcome of the restructuring.

Examining social movements in Africa, this book analyses how they emerge and how they may impact public policy, the legal and political situation, and society.

Scholarship on the West African kingdom of Asante is at the leading edge of Africanist research. In this book, T. C. McCaskie gives a detailed and richly nuanced historical portrait of pre-colonial Asante.

This authoritative study of 400 years of West African history is unrivalled in its grasp of a huge range of sources. Boubacar Barry explores the changing dynamics of regional authority, the colonial system and the slave trade, providing a vital tool for understanding the region's history.

In this first major historical study of Islam among the Swahili, Randall Pouwels shows how Islam and other aspects of coastal civilization have evolved since about AD 1000 as an organic whole.

This book chronicles the rise to power of the student-controlled Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in the northern Ethiopian province of Tigray, who liberated the province from military control in 1989, and in an alliance with local peasants formed an ethnically based coalition, assumed state power in 1991.

Focusing on the politics of democratization in Africa, this book details the strategic choices of the political elite, both incumbent and opposition, within the context of transition politics.

The first comprehensive economic history of pre-colonial Madagascar, this study examines the island's role from 1750 to 1895 in the context of a burgeoning international economy and the rise of modern European imperialism.

This 1984 study of South African trade unionism traces the history of the TLC from its origins in the 1920s to its demise in the early 1950s. It shows how divisions within the labour movement were bound up with the development of production processes, rather than being the inevitable outcome of racial antagonisms.

Eritrea, the newest nation state in Africa, gained independence from the Ethiopian state after a prolonged and bitter conflict. This is a comprehensive analysis of the country's political history over the past three decades. It charts the development of the various nationalist movements involved in the struggle for independence.

Once the major success story of a troubled continuent, Kenya came in the early 1990s to be ragarded as its fallen star. This book challenges such images of reversal and the analytical polarities which sustain them, in a multi-scale and multi-disciplinary exploration of the culture of modern Kenyan politics.

In The Politics of Evil, Clifton Crais provides a unique interpretation of South African history and a fresh approach to the study of power, culture and resistance in the modern world. Encompassing all of South Africa's history in his analysis, Crais examines the formation of an authoritarian political order and the complex ways people understood and resisted the colonial state.