Books in the African Studies series

This was the first anthropological monograph to have dealt at length with the labour force of a major East African industry. It is a study of the African employees of the East African Railways and Harbours stationed at Kampala, Uganda, and living on the Railway-owned Nsambya housing estate.

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 political conflict that has taken the most violent form and proved costliest in human lives in Ghana in the last half century has been a chieftaincy dispute in the northern kingdom of Dagomba, known as the Yendi skin dispute. The major loss of life took place in 1969 but the dispute continued to trouble Ghanaian politics.

In 1956 the West African coast between southern Mauretania and western Cameroun was lined with no less than ten European colonial territories, along with a single independent African state.

First published in 1992, this book examines the social and political dimensions of Africa's food and environmental crises. Written by an anthropologist, it focuses on the changes and the problems faced during the last century by one particular ethnic group, the Il Chamus of Kenya and traces the area's transformation from a food-surplus 'granary' to one that is dependent on food imports and aid.

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.

In this study of political mobilization and organization in Zimbabwe's rural-based war of independence, Norma Kriger is interested in the extent to which ZANU guerrillas were able to mobilize peasant support, the reasons why peasants participated, and in the links between the post-war outcomes for peasants and the mobilization process.

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 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.

Argues that a cadre of African immigrants are finding themselves in the New World - mostly well educated, high-income earning professionals, and belonging to the category termed "African brain drain," they constitute the antinomy of those Africans who were forcibly removed from Africa during slavery.

City Politics is a detailed study of the city of Kinshasa (formerly Leopoldville), capital of the Congo, in the years immediately following independence. The book is a study of political leadership in an urban African movement undergoing extremely rapid change.

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.

In this case study of contemporary Sierra Leone, William Reno argues that the global reach of some foreign firms offer supposedly 'weak' African rulers political resources to reshape regimes in ways that do not include building the 'strong stakes' that reformers expect.

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.

Very similar in some ways, but strikingly different in others, Sierra Leone and Liberia have an obvious appeal for comparative analysis. They share the legacy of foundation by immigrants of African descent and the juxtaposition of these with indigenous peoples, but within the contrasting institutional frameworks of settler independence and British colonialism.

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 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.

This book summarizes a wide range of recent literature on slavery for all of tropical Africa. It analyzes the demography, economics, social structure, and ideology of slavery in Africa from the beginning of large-scale exports in the seventeenth century to the gradual elimination of slavery in the twentieth century.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book contrasts voluntary labor and political migration with the involuntary diaspora by focusing on the paradoxes of migration, exile, and survival of African immigrants in the New World.

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.

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.

The Duala people entered the international scene as merchant-brokers for precolonial trade in ivory, slaves and palm products. Under colonial rule they used the advantages gained from earlier riverain trade to develop cocoa plantations and provide their children with exceptional levels of European education. At the same time they came into early conflict with both German and French regimes and played a leading - if ultimately unsuccessful - role in anti-colonial politics. In tracing these changing economic and political roles, this book also examines the growing consciousness of the Duala as an ethnic group and uses their history to shed light on the history of 'middleman' communities in surrounding regions of West and Central Africa. The authors draw upon a wide range of written and oral sources, including indigenous accounts of the past conflicting with their own findings but illuminate local conceptions of social hierarchy and their relationship to spiritual beliefs.

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.

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.