Books in the African Studies series

This social and economic history of Mauritius, from French colonization in 1721 to the mid-1930s, describes changing relationships between different elements in the society, slave, free and maroon, and East Indian indentured populations. First published in 1999, it brings the Mauritian case to the attention of scholars of slavery and plantation systems.

This book explores the making of an agricultural revolution by tens of thousands of small-scale peasant farmers engaged in the cultivation of cotton. Thomas Bassett combines colonial era archives, oral histories, and field research in the northern Cote d'Ivoire to explain the social and agricultural history of this agrarian transformation.

This book is about the conquest and reduction to servitude of the Khoisan in the eastern Cape in the period up to 1799. It sheds light on the history of the South African interior during the late eighteenth century, when South Africa's specific variant of social discrimination first evolved.

In Senegal, Sufi Muslim orders have contributed significantly to democracy and stability, Leo Villalon's superb study of these orders combines a detailed account of local politics with an analysis of national and international political forces. It should be read by every student of Islam and African politics.

Nineteenth-century Cape Town, the capital of the British Cape Colony, was conventionally regarded as a liberal oasis in an otherwise racist South Africa. Vivian Bickford-Smith skilfully interweaves political, economic and social analysis to show that the English merchant class, far from being liberal, were generally as racist as Afrikaner farmers.

This is a major contribution to the social, political and intellectual history of the French West African Federation. Focusing on French policy towards Islam, it sheds light on a wide range of issues, from the grand strategy of French imperialism to the psychology of individual administrators in isolated outposts of the empire.

This study examines the role of cowrie-shell money in West African trade, particularly the slave trade. Over a large part of West Africa they became the regular market currency, but then disappeared almost totally, except during the depression of the 1930s, and occasionally in the markets of remote frontier districts.

The Politics of Harmony analyses how traditional ruling elites in Swaziland, as in other parts of Africa, use harmony ideologies to downplay and resolve land disputes. This book is unusual in its focus on political rather than economic dimensions of land tenure disputes.

This academic history of diamond mining in Kimberley is a major study of the beginning of South Africa's mineral revolution. It includes an analysis of the formation of De Beers Consolidated Mines, one of the most successful companies ever to have been established in Africa.

During the first colonial period (the Turkiyya, 1821-85), the Shendi region of the Northern Sudan was inhabited by peasants, traders and nomads. This book analyses socio-economic change among the peasants and traders during this formative period of Sudanese history. Administration, agriculture and trade in transition from a pre-colonial to a colonial economy are also discussed.

Argues that growth of the Atlantic trade stimulated the development of slavery within West Africa. Dr Searing's concern is with the effects of the Atlantic slave trade on the societies of the Senegal River Valley in the 18th century.

This substantial and thoroughly documented book is a political biography of an important figure in Sierra Leone. It is also a comment on two of the major themes of the country's history - the relations between the Colony (Krio society) and the Protectorate (the earlier inhabitants of the territory) and, more importantly, the position of the imperial regime vis-a-vis its colonial subjects.

This book studies the role of Christian churches in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Timothy Longman's research shows that Rwandan churches have consistently allied themselves with the state and engaged in ethnic politics, making them a center of struggle over power and resources.

Pottier shows how the post-genocide regime in Rwanda imposed their account of Central Africa's crises upon international commentators, and explains the ideological underpinnings of this official narrative. He examines how persuasive, but fatally misleading analysis of the situation on the ground led to policy errors that exacerbated the original crisis.

Founded during the jihads which swept the savannah in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Bundu, under the rule of Malik Sy, developed a more pragmatic policy then its neighbours. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, both oral and documentary, Arabic, English and French, this book provides the first full acount of Bundu's history.

Examining the process of abolition on the island of Pemba off the East African coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book demonstrates the links between emancipation and the redefinition of honour among all classes of people on the island.

The precolonial kingdom of Buganda has long attracted scholarly interest, though historians have had to rely on oral traditions. These sources provide rich materials on Buganda in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in this 1996 book Christopher Wrigley endeavours to show that the stories which appear to relate to earlier periods are largely mythology.

Wa and the Wala is the first full study of Wala history and society. The author pays particular attention to relations between the Muslim and non-Muslim elements in its population, and examines the impact of Zabarima, Samorian, British and French intrusions into Wala affairs.

Trade in palm oil was at the core of relations between Britain and West Africa, and of immense importance to the economies of large parts of West Africa. Martin Lynn's authoritative and comprehensive study of the palm oil trade covers the whole of this critical period for all of West Africa.

By analysing the oral histories, myths and legends of the Kanyok, John Yoder describes the political and cultural development of a people who, before 1891, had no written records. His history forms the nucleus for a broader and more composite understanding of the entire southern savanna region of Zaire.

The Basotho kingdom emerged in the dramatic environment of nineteenth-century South Africa. This 2003 book explores its transition from chiefdom to kingdom to the British colony of Basutoland.

This is the first full-length study of the political economy of one of the African states formed during the nineteenth-century Zulu revolution. It covers the evolution of the Swazi state and the dynamics of its stratified systems; its relations with the surrounding Boer societies; and its eventual dissolution.

This is the first published account of the role played by ideas of honour in African history from the fourteenth century to the present day. It argues that appreciation of these ideas is essential to an understanding of past and present African behaviour.

In this study of salt production and trade, Professor Lovejoy examines the interaction between ecology, technology and social structure as a means of analysing the organisation of the salt industry of the Sokoto Caliphate and Borno in central Sudan.

The Ngwa region lies in the heart of the Nigerian palm belt. Palm oil is one of the oldest foodstuffs of the region and has also been an export crop, produced mainly by women, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. This 1988 book describes the rise and fall of the oil palm export industry.

This book focuses upon the wartime experiences of black people, and to examine the war in the context of a complex and rapidly changing colonial society increasingly shaped, but not yet transformed, by mining capital.

Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival shows how, in the era of African political independence, cosmopolitan Christian converts struggled with East Africa's patriots over the definition of culture and community. The book traces the history of the East African Revival, an evangelical movement that spread through much of eastern and central Africa. Its converts offered a subversive reading of culture, disavowing their compatriots and disregarding their obligations to kin. They earned the ire of East Africa's patriots, who worked to root people in place as inheritors of ancestral wisdom. This book casts religious conversion in a new light: not as an inward reorientation of belief, but as a political action that opened up novel paths of self-narration and unsettled the inventions of tradition.

Smith argues that citizenship creation and expansion is a pivotal part of political contestation in Africa today. Citizenship is a powerful analytical tool to approach political life in contemporary Africa because the institutional and structural reforms of the past two decades have been inextricably linked with the battle over the 'right to have rights'. Professor Lahra Smith's work advances the notion of meaningful citizenship, referring to the ways in which rights are exercised, or the effective practice of citizenship. Using data from Ethiopia and developing a historically informed study of language policy, ethnicity and gender identities, Smith analyzes the contestation over citizenship that engages the state, social movements and individuals in substantive ways. By combining original data on language policy in contemporary Ethiopia with detailed historical study and a focus on ethnicity, citizenship and gender, this work brings a fresh approach to Ethiopian political development and contemporary citizenship concerns across Africa.

This history of African motherhood over the longue duree demonstrates that it was, ideologically and practically, central to social, economic, cultural and political life. The book explores how people in the North Nyanzan societies of Uganda used an ideology of motherhood to shape their communities. More than biology, motherhood created essential social and political connections that cut across patrilineal and cultural-linguistic divides. The importance of motherhood as an ideology and a social institution meant that in chiefdoms and kingdoms queen mothers were powerful officials who legitimated the power of kings. This was the case in Buganda, the many kingdoms of Busoga, and the polities of Bugwere. By taking a long-term perspective from c.700 to 1900 CE and using an interdisciplinary approach - drawing on historical linguistics, comparative ethnography, and oral traditions and literature, as well as archival sources - this book shows the durability, mutability and complexity of ideologies of motherhood in this region.

Zimbabwe's guerrilla veterans have burst into the international media as the storm troopers in Mugabe's new war of economic liberation. In this book, Norma Kriger gives the unfolding contemporary drama a historical background, and shows continuities between the present and past. Between 1980 and 1987, guerrilla veterans and the ruling party colluded with and manipulated each other to build power and privilege in the army, police, bureaucracy and among workers. Both relied chiefly on violence and appeals to their participation in the anti-colonial liberation war as they sought to vanquish their then political opponents. Today, violence and a liberation war discourse continue to be salient as Mugabe's party and its guerrilla veterans struggle to maintain power through land invasions and purges of a new political opposition. This study gives a critical review of guerrilla programs and the war-to-peace transitions literatures, thus changing the way we view post-conflict societies.