Bücher der Reihe African Studies

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Over twenty years this book has become the standard single-volume history of Africa for both students and general readers. Following the overarching theme of population changes, causes and consequences, it has been fully updated to incorporate developments and research findings for all periods to 2016.

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 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.

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 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.

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 traces the history and development of the port of Benguela, on the coast of Africa, from the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. In discussing the impact of the transatlantic slave trade on African societies, Mariana P. Candido explores the formation of new elites, the collapse of old states and the emergence of new states.

Examining the slave trade between Angola and Brazil, Roquinaldo Ferreira focuses on the cultural ties between the two countries.

Pitcher offers an engaging theory to explain different patterns of private sector development across Africa. She argues that the interaction of formal institutions, party system competition and the quality of democracy explain patterns of private sector development across Africa.

The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland examines the history and politics behind the failed project of Togoland unification, in which the United Nations trust territory of British Togoland was to be separated from the Gold Coast to join with French Togoland in a new independent African state.