Books in the New African Histories series

Thomas F. McDow synthesizes Indian Ocean, Middle Eastern, and East African studies to explain how in the nineteenth century, credit, mobility, and kinship knit together a vast interconnected Indian Ocean region. McDow's new historical analysis of the Indian Ocean reveals roles of previously invisible people.

Spanning the years just before (and just after) Nelson Mandela's 1962 arrest, this entirely fresh history of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), or Spear of the Nation, and its revolutionary milieu brings to life the period in which Mandela and his comrades fought South Africa's apartheid regime not only with words and protests, but also with bombs and fire.

Schler's study of Nigerian seamen during Nigeria's transition to independence provides a fresh perspective on the meaning of decolonization for ordinary Africans.

Why did some central African peoples embrace gun technology in the nineteenth century, and others turn their backs on it? In answering this question, The Gun in Central Africa offers a thorough reassessment of the history of firearms in central Africa. Marrying the insights of Africanist historiography with those of consumption and science and technology studies, Giacomo Macola approaches the subject from a culturally sensitive perspective that encompasses both the practical and the symbolic attributes of firearms.Informed by the view that the power of objects extends beyond their immediate service functions, The Gun in Central Africa presents Africans as agents of technological re-innovation who understood guns in terms of their changing social structures and political interests. By placing firearms at the heart of the analysis, this volume casts new light on processes of state formation and military revolution in the era of the long-distance trade, the workings of central African gender identities and honor cultures, and the politics of the colonial encounter.

Together, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, and the Institut des Musees Nationaux du Zaire (IMNZ) in the Congo have defined and marketed Congolese art and culture. In Authentically African, Sarah Van Beurden traces the relationship between the possession, definition, and display of art and the construction of cultural authenticity and political legitimacy from the late colonial until the postcolonial era. Her study of the interconnected histories of these two institutions is the first history of an art museum in Africa, and the only work of its kind in English.Drawing on Flemish-language sources other scholars have been unable to access, Van Beurden illuminates the politics of museum collections, showing how the IMNZ became a showpiece in Mobutu's effort to revive "e;authentic"e; African culture. She reconstructs debates between Belgian and Congolese museum professionals, revealing how the dynamics of decolonization played out in the fields of the museum and international heritage conservation. Finally, she casts light on the art market, showing how the traveling displays put on by the IMNZ helped intensify collectors' interest and generate an international market for Congolese art.The book contributes to the fields of history, art history, museum studies, and anthropology and challenges existing narratives of Congo's decolonization. It tells a new history of decolonization as a struggle over cultural categories, the possession of cultural heritage, and the right to define and represent cultural identities.

In articles for the newspaper O Brado Africano in the mid-1950s, poet and journalist Jose Craveirinha described the ways in which the Mozambican football players in the suburbs of Lourenco Marques (now Maputo) adapted the European sport to their own expressive ends.

Though often associated with foreigners and refugees, many Somalis have lived in Kenya for generations, in many cases since long before the founding of the country.

The helmet-shaped mapiko masks of Mozam-bique have garnered admiration from African art scholars and collectors alike, due to their striking aesthetics and their grotesque allure. This book restores to mapiko its historic and artistic context, charting in detail the transformations of this masquerading tradition throughout the twentieth century. Based on field research spanning seven years, this study shows how mapiko has undergone continuous reinvention by visionary individuals, has diversified into genres with broad generational appeal, and has enacted historical events and political engagements. This dense history of creativity and change has been sustained by a culture of competition deeply ingrained within the logic of ritual itself. The desire to outshine rivals on the dance ground drives performers to search for the new, the astonishing, and the topical. It is this spirit of rivalry and one-upmanship that keeps mapiko attuned to the times that it traverses. In Step with the Times is illustrated with vibrant photographs of mapiko masks and performances. It marks the most radical attempt to date to historicize an African performative tradition.

Between the 1880s and the 1940s, the region known as British West Africa became a dynamic zone of literary creativity and textual experimentation.

For more than half a century before World War II, black South Africans and "American Negroes" - a group that included African Americans and black West Indians - established close institutional and personal relationships that laid the necessary groundwork for the successful South African and American antiapartheid movements.

In this groundbreaking study, Jacob A. Tropp explores the interconnections between negotiations over the environment and an emerging colonial relationship in a particular South African context-the Transkei-subsequently the largest of the notorious "homelands" under apartheid.

Since the late 1940s, a violent African criminal society known as the Marashea has operated in and around South Africa's gold mining areas.

Who Shall Enter Paradise? recounts in detail the history of Christian-Muslim engagement in a core area of sub-Saharan Africa's most populous nation, home to roughly equal numbers of Christians and Muslims.

In locating her arguments at the intersection of visual culture and literary and performance studies, Giorgis details how innovations in visual art intersected with shifts in narratives of modernity. The result is a bold intellectual, cultural, and political history of Ethiopia, with art as its centerpiece.

Reel Pleasures brings the world of African moviehouses and the publics they engendered to life, revealing how local fans creatively reworked global media-from Indian melodrama to Italian westerns, kung fu, and blaxploitation films-to speak to local dreams and desires.

Encompassing history, geography, and political science, MacArthur's study evaluates the role of geographic imagination and the impact of cartography not only as means of expressing imperial power and constraining colonized populations, but as tools for the articulation of new political communities and resistance.

Black Skin, White Coats is a history of psychiatry in Nigeria from the 1950s to the 1980s.

In the 1950s, Ghana, under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People's Party, drew the world's attention as anticolonial activists, intellectuals, and politicians looked to it as a model for Africa's postcolonial future. Nkrumah was a visionary, a statesman, and one of the key makers of contemporary Africa.

This in-depth study of the Zambezi River Valley examines the dominant developmentalist narrative that has surrounded the Cahora Bassa Dam, chronicles the continual violence that has accompanied its existence, and gives voice to previously unheard narratives of forced labor, displacement, and historical and contemporary life in the dam's shadow.

Diamonds in the Rough explores the lives of African laborers on Angola's diamond mines from the commencement of operations in 1917 to the colony's independence from Portugal in 1975. The mines were owned and operated by the Diamond Company of Angola, or Diamang, which enjoyed exclusive mining and labor concessions granted by the colonial government. Through these monopolies, the company became the most profitable enterprise in Portugal's African empire. After a tumultuous initial period, the company's mines and mining encampments experienced a remarkable degree of stability, in striking contrast to the labor unrest and ethnic conflicts that flared in other regions. Even during the Angolan war for independence (1961-75), Diamang's zone of influence remained comparatively untroubled.Todd Cleveland explains that this unparalleled level of quietude was a product of three factors: African workers' high levels of social and occupational commitment, or "e;professionalism"e;; the extreme isolation of the mining installations; and efforts by Diamang to attract and retain scarce laborers through a calculated paternalism. The company's offer of decent accommodations and recreational activities, as well as the presence of women and children, induced reciprocal behavior on the part of the miners, a professionalism that pervaded both the social and the workplace environments. This disparity between the harshness of the colonial labor regime elsewhere and the relatively agreeable conditions and attendant professionalism of employees at Diamang opens up new ways of thinking about how Africans in colonial contexts engaged with forced labor, mining capital, and ultimately, each other.

Many students come to African history with a host of stereotypes that are not always easy to dislodge. One of the most common is that of Africa as safari grounds-as the land of expansive, unpopulated game reserves untouched by civilization and preserved in their original pristine state by the tireless efforts of contemporary conservationists.

In Senegal, the Muridiyya, a large Islamic Sufi order, is the single most influential religious organization, including among its numbers the nation's president. Yet little is known of this sect in the West.

In Water Brings No Harm, Matthew V. Bender explores the history of community water management on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Kilimanjaro's Chagga-speaking peoples have long managed water by employing diverse knowledge: hydrological, technological, social, cultural, and political. Since the 1850s, they have encountered groups from beyond the mountain-colonial officials, missionaries, settlers, the independent Tanzanian state, development agencies, and climate scientists-who have understood water differently. Drawing on the concept of waterscapes-a term that describes how people "e;see"e; water, and how physical water resources intersect with their own beliefs, needs, and expectations-Bender argues that water conflicts should be understood as struggles between competing forms of knowledge.Water Brings No Harm encourages readers to think about the origins and interpretation of knowledge and development in Africa and the global south. It also speaks to the current global water crisis, proposing a new model for approaching sustainable water development worldwide.

Conjugal Rights is a history of the role of marriage and other arrangements between men and women in Libreville, Gabon, during the French colonial era, from the mid-nineteenth century through 1960.

Safari Nation tells the history of the Kruger National Park through a black perspective, helping explain why Africa's national parks-often derided by scholars as colonial impositions-survived the end of white rule on the continent.

Age of Concrete is about people building homes on tenuous ground in the outer neighborhoods of Maputo, Mozambique, places thought of simply as slums. But up close, they are an archive: houses of reeds, wood, zinc, and concrete embodying the ambitions of people who built their own largest investment and greatest bequest to the future.

Healing Traditions offers a historical perspective to the interactions between South Africa's traditional healers and biomedical practitioners. It provides an understanding that is vital for the development of medical strategies to effectively deal with South Africa's healthcare challenges.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Ivory Coast was touted as an African miracle, a poster child for modernization and the ways that Western aid and multinational corporations would develop the continent. At the same time, Marxist scholars-most notably Samir Amin-described the capitalist activity in Ivory Coast as empty, unsustainable, and incapable of bringing real change to the lives of ordinary people. To some extent, Amin's criticisms were validated when, in the 1980s, the Ivorian economy collapsed.In African Miracle, African Mirage, Abou B. Bamba incorporates economics, political science, and history to craft a bold, transnational study of the development practices and intersecting colonial cultures that continue to shape Ivory Coast today. He considers French, American, and Ivorian development discourses in examining the roles of hydroelectric projects and the sugar, coffee, and cocoa industries in the country's boom and bust. In so doing, he brings the agency of Ivorians themselves to the fore in a way not often seen in histories of development. Ultimately, he concludes that the "e;maldevelopment"e; evident by the mid-1970s had less to do with the Ivory Coast's "e;insufficiently modern"e; citizens than with the conflicting missions of French and American interests within the context of an ever-globalizing world.