Books in the The International African Library series

Alexander Thurston examines how Salafism, a globally influential Muslim movement, is reshaping religious authority in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country. Appealing to scholars of religion and politics, it provides a model for understanding how many new religious movements, including Salafism, place texts at the centre of their preaching and activism.

The growth of a middle class has been a feature of the 'Africa Rising' narrative in recent years. Sumich sheds new light on this important topic by exploring the political, economic, and social origins of a middle class in Mozambique and the contradictions it faces.

Johnson here calls for a shift in focus from human rights to justice in the study of gender relations as she examines the stories of ordinary Malawians striving to resolve disputes and achieve successful gender and marital relations.

Focusing on four distinct sectors (cattle trade, transport, public contracts and NGO work), Munoz combines an ethnographic study of business practices with a lucid analysis of policies and legal rules to provide an in-depth look at how businesses and state bureaucracies cope with unpredictability in times of crisis and reform.

By focusing on families and schools in Durban, Hunter provides an original lens into South Africa's political transition from apartheid to democracy. In this vivid account of the marketisation of schooling, he reveals how whiteness retains value in schools.

How did Zulu Radio in apartheid South Africa, intended to stifle debate, become one of the largest stations in Africa? Gunner maps the fashioning of a modernising Black culture through radio and highlights links between these media figures with writers and political leaders from Harlem to the American South.

This vivid ethnography, describing the precarious lives of fisher folk in post-war Sierra Leone, offers fresh perspectives on themes of gender, youth, gift exchange, and secrecy. Everyday life in this fragile frontier economy is shaped both by a global ecological crisis and a local history of war, slavery, and esoteric practice.

This study offers an incisive biography of the life and work of South Africa's foremost social anthropologist, Monica Hunter Wilson. By exploring her main fieldwork and intellectual projects in southern Africa between the 1920s and 1960s, the book offers insights into the personal and intellectual life of a leading African anthropologist.

Alexander Thurston examines how Salafism, a globally influential Muslim movement, is reshaping religious authority in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country. Appealing to scholars of religion and politics, it provides a model for understanding how many new religious movements, including Salafism, place texts at the centre of their preaching and activism.

This book draws together studies from history, archaeology, linguistics, the performing arts and cinema to show how the lifeways of the past were made into a store of authentic knowledge that political and cultural entrepreneurs could draw from - showing African heritage to be a mode of political organisation.

Unique in literature on gender-based violence in Africa, this ethnography of rape and its aftermath locates the staggering level of sexual violence women experience within broader northern Ugandan realities in a post-war context. A provocative study for scholars of gender studies, post-conflict recovery and transitional justice, and anthropologists.

An ethnographic study of Qur'anic schools in northern Nigeria that debunks stereotypes about such schools being recruitment grounds for Boko Haram and other violent groups. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Hannah Hoechner explores through the eyes of students the true nature of being young, poor, and Muslim in a context of pervasive inequality.

Tracing the personal and intellectual histories of six women anthropologists, this book will be welcomed by anthropologists, historians and students in African studies interested in the development of social anthropology in twentieth-century Africa, as well as by students and researchers in the field of gender studies.

Maxim Bolt explores the lives of Zimbabwean migrant labourers, of settled black farm workers and their dependants, and of white farmers and managers, as they intersect on the Zimbabwean-South African border. Focusing on one farm, the book investigates the role of a hub of wage labour in a place of crisis.

Based on a decade of fieldwork in southeastern Ghana and analysis of secondary sources, this book aims to reconstruct the religious history of the Anlo-Ewe peoples from the 1850s. In particular, it focuses on a corpus of rituals collectively known as 'Fofie', which derived their legitimacy from engaging with the memory of the slave-holding past. The Anlo developed a sense of discomfort about their agency in slavery in the early twentieth century which they articulated through practices such as ancestor veneration, spirit possession, and by forging links with descendants of peoples they formerly enslaved. Conversion to Christianity, engagement with 'modernity', trans-Atlantic conversations with diasporan Africans, and citizenship of the postcolonial state coupled with structural changes within the religious system - which resulted in the decline in Fofie's popularity - gradually altered the moral emphases of legacies of slavery in the Anlo historical imagination as the twentieth century progressed.

The Nazaretha church, with over four million members, is one of the largest and most influential African churches in South Africa. Unique among other churches, its members have written a new 'Bible' that tells the story of their community. This is the first study to focus upon how these believers used their new Bible to redefine Christianity in a Southern African context.

This study offers an incisive biography of the life and work of South Africa's foremost social anthropologist, Monica Hunter Wilson. By exploring her main fieldwork and intellectual projects in southern Africa between the 1920s and 1960s, the book offers insights into the personal and intellectual life of a leading African anthropologist.

This book offers an original anthropological approach to the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, demonstrating why AIDS interventions in the former homeland of Venda have failed. Through the songs of female initiation, AIDS education and wandering minstrels, the book argues that music is central to understanding how AIDS interventions operate.

This monograph explores the expansion of the Tablighi Jama'at, a transnational Islamic missionary movement that originated in India in the mid-nineteenth century, and its impact in the Gambia (West Africa) in the past decade. The book investigates how Gambian youth have incorporated the South Asian Tablighi ideology into their daily lives and adapted it to their local context.

Casting new light on scholarly understandings of the connections between politics, witchcraft and AIDS in South Africa, this biography reconstructs the life of Jimmy Mohale, who studied and worked as a teacher during the anti-apartheid struggle and died from an undiagnosed sickness, attributing his misfortunes to witchcraft.

The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), a church of Brazilian origin, has been enormously successful in establishing branches and attracting followers in post-apartheid South Africa. Unlike other Pentecostal Charismatic Churches (PCC), the UCKG insists that relationships with God be devoid of 'emotions', that socialisation between members be kept to a minimum and that charity and fellowship are 'useless' in materialising God's blessings. Instead, the UCKG urges members to sacrifice large sums of money to God for delivering wealth, health, social harmony and happiness. While outsiders condemn these rituals as empty or manipulative, this book shows that they are locally meaningful, demand sincerity to work, have limits and are informed by local ideas about human bodies, agency and ontological balance. As an ethnography of people rather than of institutions, this book offers fresh insights into the mass PCC movement that has swept across Africa since the early 1990s.

This book draws together studies from history, archaeology, linguistics, the performing arts and cinema to show how the lifeways of the past were made into a store of authentic knowledge that political and cultural entrepreneurs could draw from - showing African heritage to be a mode of political organisation.