Bøger i African Studies serien

Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara describes life on and around the contemporary border between Algeria and Mali, exploring current developments in a broad historical and socioeconomic context. Basing her findings on long-term fieldwork with trading families, truckers, smugglers and scholars, Judith Scheele investigates the history of contemporary patterns of mobility from the late nineteenth century to the present. Through a careful analysis of family ties and local economic records, this book shows how long-standing mobility and interdependence have shaped not only local economies, but also notions of social hierarchy, morality and political legitimacy, creating patterns that endure today and that need to be taken into account in any empirically-grounded study of the region.

Rwanda has become a touchstone case in genocide studies. This study evaluates the myriad theories behind the genocide. Combining original field data with some of the best existing evidence, it offers a rigorous and comprehensive explanation of how and why the genocide occurred, and how and why so many Rwandans participated in it.

"Original and innovative, this book tells the story of Senegalese children freed from slavery in 1848 only to be relegated to tutelle or guardianship. Bernard Moitt demonstrates that tutelle allowed slavery to persist under another name, with children continuing to be subject to the same widespread labor exploitation and abuse"--

African forest landscapes are often considered as degraded. However, this fascinating 1996 study reveals how inhabitants have enriched their land when scientists believe they have damaged it. It provides a framework for ecological anthropology, and a challenge to old assumptions about the African landscape.

"Using oral and archival sources, Toivo Asheeke excavates the neglected history of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), a militant revolutionary nationalist wing of the anti-colonial struggle in South Africa. Asheeke highlights the BCM's engagement with guerrilla warfare, community feminism and Black Internationalism"--

"Highlights the agency of local people in enabling transitional justice in post-conflict Sierra Leone. Moving past questions of institutional effectiveness, Laura S. Martin explores the diversity of post-conflict experiences and shows how individuals and communities enact justice on their own terms"--

Exploring over a century of Zimbabwe's colonial and post-colonial history, Elijah Doro investigates the murky and noxious history of that powerful crop: tobacco. In a compelling narrative that debunks previous histories glorifying tobacco farming, Doro reveals the indelible marks that tobacco left on landscapes, communities, and people. Demonstrating that the history of tobacco farming is inseparable from that of colonial encounter, Doro outlines how tobacco became an institutionalised culture of production, which was linked to state power and natural ecosystems, and driven by a pernicious heritage of unbridled plunder. With the destruction of landscapes, the negative impacts of the export trade and the growing tobacco epidemic in Zimbabwe, tobacco farming has a long and varied legacy in southern African and across the world. Connecting the local to the global, and the environmental to the social, this book illuminates our understandings of environmental history, colonialism and sustainability.

"Exploring the multifaceted history of dispossession, consumption, and inequality in West Central Africa, Mariana P. Candido presents a bold revisionist history of Angola from the sixteenth century until the Berlin Conference of 1884-5. Synthesising disparate strands of scholarship, including the histories of slavery, land tenure, and gender in West Central Africa, Candido makes a significant contribution to ongoing historical debates. She demonstrates how ideas about dominion and land rights eventually came to inform the appropriation and enslavement of free people and their labour. By centring the experiences of West Central Africans, and especially African women, this book challenges dominant historical narratives, and shows that securing property was a gendered process. Drawing attention to how archives obscure African forms of knowledge and normalize conquest, Candido interrogates simplistic interpretations of ownership and pushes for the decolonization of African history"--

"In this innovative new history, Erin Pettigrew utilizes invisible forces and entities - esoteric knowledge and spirits - to show how these forms of knowledge and unseen forces have shaped social structures, religious norms, and political power in the Saharan West. Situating this ethnographic history in what became la Mauritanie under French colonial rule and, later the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, Pettigrew traces the changing roles of Muslim spiritual mediators and their Islamic esoteric sciences - known locally as l'òhjåab - over the long-term history of the region. By exploring the impact of the immaterial in the material world and demonstrating the importance of Islamic esoteric sciences in Saharan societies, she illuminates peoples' enduring reliance upon these sciences in their daily lives and argues for a new approach to historical research that takes the immaterial seriously"--

"Challenging assumptions regarding the strength and control of authoritarian governments in Rwanda in the decades before the 1994 genocide, Marie-Eve Desrosiers uses original archival data and interviews to highlight the complex relations between authorities, opponents, and society. Through careful, detailed analysis Desrosiers offers a nuanced assessment of the functions and evolution of authoritarianism over time, demonstrating how the governments of Rwanda's first two post-independence Republics (1962- 1990) sought and often struggled to cement their rule. Whilst the deeper, lived realities of authoritarianism are generally neglected by multicases comparisons at the heart of comparative authoritarian studies, this illuminating survey highlights the essential, yet subtle authoritarian strategies, patterns, and forms of decay that are too often overlooked when addressing authoritarian contexts"--

Political life among the Wolof (the largest and most powerful of Senegal's 'tribal' groups) is the principal theme of this collection of essays. The focus of study is on African political leadership, in towns and villages. Within the constraints of alien control or influence, it is argued, cultural and organisational barriers have consistently allowed a wide range of initiative to African leaders and communities in a creative and flexible adjustment to new and unfamiliar demands. Exploration of this African initiative in various contexts suggests a complex, fascinating pattern of cultural and structural interaction. The multidisciplinary approach to politics in these essays will interest historians and social anthropologists as well as political scientists. These studies are indeed relevant to any student of the problems of 'underdeveloped' societies involved in the modern state. Parts of the essays have been published elsewhere, but all have been extensively revised, updated and integrated to a coherent pattern of analysis.

The small but important region of Dahomey (now the People's Republic of Benin) has played an active role in the world economy throughout the era of mercantile and industrial capitalism, beginning as an exporter of slaves and becoming an exporter of plain oil and palm kernels. This book covers a span of three centuries, integrating into a single framework the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial economic history of Dahomey. Mr Manning has pieced together an extensive body of new evidence and new interpretations: he has combined descriptive evidence with quantitative data on foreign trade, slave demography and colonial government finance, and has used both Marxian and Neoclassical techniques of economic analysis. He argues that, despite the severe strain on population and economic growth caused by the slave trade, the economy continued to expand from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and the colonial state acted as an economic depressant rather than a stimulant.

This book examines the gradual decline of slavery in Northern Nigeria during the first forty years of colonial rule. At the time of the British conquest, the Sokoto Caliphate was one of the largest slave societies in modern history. The authors have written a thoughtful and provocative book which raises doubts over the moral legitimacy of both the Sokoto Caliphate and the colonial state. They chart the development of British colonial policy towards resolving the dilemma of slavery and how to end it.

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.

Based on rich archival and oral histories, this book uses the life of an African clerk who became a king under French indirect rule policies to examine the contested meanings of colonialism and the rule of law during the first three decades of colonialism in the French Soudan.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The first comprehensive narrative of French involvement in Chad's civil wars in the first two decades of its independence between 1960 and 1982, this study explores France's counterinsurgency efforts to protect the regime of Francois Tombalbaye and its contribution to the rise to power of Hissene Habre, one of Africa's most notorious dictators.

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.

Whereas border regions are often treated as marginal, Paul Nugent demonstrates through a comparison of two African sub-regions that they are in fact vital in the process of shaping state forms and forging social contracts. Border regions are fundamental to the making of regional and national economies and to patterns of contemporary urbanism.

Based on long-term research in an area long closed to researchers, this book provides an internal account of trans-border connectivity, armed conflict, labour and gender relations, and aspirations to political autonomy in northern Chad. It sheds light on current Saharan political developments, and adds a new perspective to Saharan studies.