Books in the African Studies series

This is the detailed narrative of the Kat River Settlement, located on the border between the Cape Colony and the amaXhosa in the Eastern Cape of South Africa during the nineteenth century. The settlement created a fertile landscape and developed a political theology of great political and racial importance to the evolution of the Cape and South Africa as a whole.

This book chronicles the experiences, identity and achievements of enslaved black people in Morocco from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, arguing that we cannot rely solely on Islamic ideology as the key to explaining social relations and particularly the history of black slavery in the Muslim world.

Originally published in 1985, this book examines the rising of the menalamba, the Red Shawls, against French colonial rule in Madagascar in the 1890s. Using the words of the Malagasy themselves and the archives of the Malagasy kings and queens, as well as European records, it tells from the inside the story of an Afro-Asian society at a moment of crisis.

Originally published in 1987, this book used data from Kisangani, Upper Zaire and North Kivu to demonstrate the emergence of an indigenous bourgeoisie of local capitalists without political position. The text discusses how the spiralling economic crisis in Zaire resulted in a severe decline in the administrative capacity of the state, but also opened up opportunities for social mobility.

This book explains the shift from the government of empires to that of NGOs in the region just south of the Sahara. It describes the ambitions of newly independent African states, their political experiments, and the challenges they faced. No other book places black American activism, Amnesty International, and CARE together in the history of African politics.

Drawing on a historical study of Nigeria since independence, this book argues that the structure of the policy-making process - by which different policy demands are included or excluded - explains variations in government performance better than other commonly cited factors, such as oil, colonialism, ethnic diversity, foreign debt, and dictatorships.

Based on years of unique access to Islamists, generals, and business elites, Harry Verhoeven tells the story of Africa's most ambitious state-building project in the modern era and how Sudan's gamble to instrumentalise water to consolidate power is linked to globalisation, Islamist ideology, and the intensifying geopolitics of the Nile.

This book examines the internal politics of the war that divided Angola for over a quarter-century after its independence. Drawing upon interviews with farmers, town dwellers, soldiers and politicians in Central Angola, Justin Pearce examines the ideologies about nation and state that elites deployed in pursuit of hegemony.

This book traces the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) across its three decades in exile through rich, local histories of the camps where Namibian exiles lived in Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola and highlights how different Namibians experienced these sites, as well as the tensions that developed within.

From Slavery to Aid takes two major themes of African historiography - the death of slavery and the birth of aid - and constructs a social history of the Ader region, an understudied region of the West African Sahel in today's Republic of Niger.

This book examines the role of the law in the constitution and contestation of state power in Zimbabwean history. It is for researchers interested in the history of the state in Southern Africa, as well as those interested in African legal history.

This book traces the development of a new Sudanese state during the postcolonial era, following how economic development fostered state formation and civil war. It is for historians of colonial and postcolonial Africa. It offers important archival research for those examining the economic history of Sudan and the wider region.

This book offers an intellectual history of colonial Buganda, using previously unseen archival material to recast the end of empire in East Africa. It will be ideal for researchers, upper-level undergraduate and graduate students interested in the cultural, intellectual, religious and political history of modern East Africa.

Telling a neglected history of decolonisation and violence in Burundi, Aidan Russell examines the political language of truth that drove extraordinary change, from democracy to genocide. His study is the only English account of the first postcolonial genocide on the African continent.

Reconstructing Jomo Kenyatta's political biography and presidency in order to explore the links between his emergence as an uncontested leader and the deeper colonial and postcolonial history of Kenya, this is the first study to use Kenyatta as a basis for examining the origins of presidentialism in Africa.

A history of 150 years of social-ecological transformations in one of southern Africa's most sought after exotic tourism destinations, often dubbed as 'Arid Eden'. It demonstrates the impacts of colonialism, capitalism and creative local adaptations of environmental infrastructures in the region.

Drawing on more than a thousand cases from a diverse set of courts, Thornberry provides a ground breaking social and political history of rape in colonial South Africa, as well as an important case study for comparative legal history, histories of sexuality, and public policy on sexual violence.

A comparative analysis of how African states have engaged with fundamentalist Muslim groups between the 1950s and today. Elischer outlines how African states can become radicalizers or demobilizers of homegrown violent extremism, providing a nuanced and systematic review of state-Islamic relations.

Focusing on the role of religion and ethnicity in times of conflict, Terje ostebo investigates the Muslim-dominated insurgency against the Ethiopian state in the 1960s, shedding new light on this understudied case in order to contribute to a deeper understanding of religion, inter-religious relations, ethnicity, and ethno-nationalism in the Horn of Africa. Islam, Ethnicity and Conflict in Ethiopia develops new theoretical perspectives on the interrelations between ethnic and religious identities, considering ethnic and religious groups as mutually exclusive categories by applying the term peoplehood as an analytical tool, one that allows for more flexible perspectives. Exploring the interplay of imagination and lived, affective reality, and inspired by the 'materiality turn' in cultural- and religious studies, ostebo argues for an integrated approach which recognizes and explores embodiment and emplacement as intrinsic to formations of ethnic and religious identities.

A long-term analysis of development projects in rural Tanzania, tracing the improvised, reactive nature of small-scale interventions, aimed at staving off the threat posed by acute poverty to local governments' legitimacy and effectiveness.