Bücher der Reihe African Studies

First published in 1973, this is a study of the historical relationship between the system of colonial control and local social and political structures in the Ahafo region of Ghana since the arrival of the British. The authors have conveyed enough context for someone who knows nothing about Africa to begin to understand what politics there means.

This book examines the effects of migrant labour in a southern African labour reserve. Politically independent, Lesotho is acutely dependent on the export of labour to South Africa. This system of oscillating migration is analysed in its historical context - the development of industrial capitalism in South Africa - and with particular emphasis on its contemporary implications.

Economic transformations in Africa have been dramatic. This 2002 study of Mozambique's shift to a market economy reveals that it is more political and protracted than critics contend. The state remains a central actor, but social forces have also shaped the outcome of the restructuring.

Scholarship on the West African kingdom of Asante is at the leading edge of Africanist research. In this book, T. C. McCaskie gives a detailed and richly nuanced historical portrait of pre-colonial Asante.

This authoritative study of 400 years of West African history is unrivalled in its grasp of a huge range of sources. Boubacar Barry explores the changing dynamics of regional authority, the colonial system and the slave trade, providing a vital tool for understanding the region's history.

In this first major historical study of Islam among the Swahili, Randall Pouwels shows how Islam and other aspects of coastal civilization have evolved since about AD 1000 as an organic whole.

This book chronicles the rise to power of the student-controlled Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in the northern Ethiopian province of Tigray, who liberated the province from military control in 1989, and in an alliance with local peasants formed an ethnically based coalition, assumed state power in 1991.

The first comprehensive economic history of pre-colonial Madagascar, this study examines the island's role from 1750 to 1895 in the context of a burgeoning international economy and the rise of modern European imperialism.

This 1984 study of South African trade unionism traces the history of the TLC from its origins in the 1920s to its demise in the early 1950s. It shows how divisions within the labour movement were bound up with the development of production processes, rather than being the inevitable outcome of racial antagonisms.

Eritrea, the newest nation state in Africa, gained independence from the Ethiopian state after a prolonged and bitter conflict. This is a comprehensive analysis of the country's political history over the past three decades. It charts the development of the various nationalist movements involved in the struggle for independence.

Once the major success story of a troubled continuent, Kenya came in the early 1990s to be ragarded as its fallen star. This book challenges such images of reversal and the analytical polarities which sustain them, in a multi-scale and multi-disciplinary exploration of the culture of modern Kenyan politics.

In The Politics of Evil, Clifton Crais provides a unique interpretation of South African history and a fresh approach to the study of power, culture and resistance in the modern world. Encompassing all of South Africa's history in his analysis, Crais examines the formation of an authoritarian political order and the complex ways people understood and resisted the colonial state.

This social and economic history of Mauritius, from French colonization in 1721 to the mid-1930s, describes changing relationships between different elements in the society, slave, free and maroon, and East Indian indentured populations. First published in 1999, it brings the Mauritian case to the attention of scholars of slavery and plantation systems.

This book explores the making of an agricultural revolution by tens of thousands of small-scale peasant farmers engaged in the cultivation of cotton. Thomas Bassett combines colonial era archives, oral histories, and field research in the northern Cote d'Ivoire to explain the social and agricultural history of this agrarian transformation.

This book is about the conquest and reduction to servitude of the Khoisan in the eastern Cape in the period up to 1799. It sheds light on the history of the South African interior during the late eighteenth century, when South Africa's specific variant of social discrimination first evolved.

In Senegal, Sufi Muslim orders have contributed significantly to democracy and stability, Leo Villalon's superb study of these orders combines a detailed account of local politics with an analysis of national and international political forces. It should be read by every student of Islam and African politics.

Nineteenth-century Cape Town, the capital of the British Cape Colony, was conventionally regarded as a liberal oasis in an otherwise racist South Africa. Vivian Bickford-Smith skilfully interweaves political, economic and social analysis to show that the English merchant class, far from being liberal, were generally as racist as Afrikaner farmers.

This is a major contribution to the social, political and intellectual history of the French West African Federation. Focusing on French policy towards Islam, it sheds light on a wide range of issues, from the grand strategy of French imperialism to the psychology of individual administrators in isolated outposts of the empire.

This study examines the role of cowrie-shell money in West African trade, particularly the slave trade. Over a large part of West Africa they became the regular market currency, but then disappeared almost totally, except during the depression of the 1930s, and occasionally in the markets of remote frontier districts.

The Politics of Harmony analyses how traditional ruling elites in Swaziland, as in other parts of Africa, use harmony ideologies to downplay and resolve land disputes. This book is unusual in its focus on political rather than economic dimensions of land tenure disputes.

This academic history of diamond mining in Kimberley is a major study of the beginning of South Africa's mineral revolution. It includes an analysis of the formation of De Beers Consolidated Mines, one of the most successful companies ever to have been established in Africa.

During the first colonial period (the Turkiyya, 1821-85), the Shendi region of the Northern Sudan was inhabited by peasants, traders and nomads. This book analyses socio-economic change among the peasants and traders during this formative period of Sudanese history. Administration, agriculture and trade in transition from a pre-colonial to a colonial economy are also discussed.

Argues that growth of the Atlantic trade stimulated the development of slavery within West Africa. Dr Searing's concern is with the effects of the Atlantic slave trade on the societies of the Senegal River Valley in the 18th century.

This substantial and thoroughly documented book is a political biography of an important figure in Sierra Leone. It is also a comment on two of the major themes of the country's history - the relations between the Colony (Krio society) and the Protectorate (the earlier inhabitants of the territory) and, more importantly, the position of the imperial regime vis-a-vis its colonial subjects.

This book studies the role of Christian churches in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Timothy Longman's research shows that Rwandan churches have consistently allied themselves with the state and engaged in ethnic politics, making them a center of struggle over power and resources.

Pottier shows how the post-genocide regime in Rwanda imposed their account of Central Africa's crises upon international commentators, and explains the ideological underpinnings of this official narrative. He examines how persuasive, but fatally misleading analysis of the situation on the ground led to policy errors that exacerbated the original crisis.

Founded during the jihads which swept the savannah in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Bundu, under the rule of Malik Sy, developed a more pragmatic policy then its neighbours. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, both oral and documentary, Arabic, English and French, this book provides the first full acount of Bundu's history.

Examining the process of abolition on the island of Pemba off the East African coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book demonstrates the links between emancipation and the redefinition of honour among all classes of people on the island.

The precolonial kingdom of Buganda has long attracted scholarly interest, though historians have had to rely on oral traditions. These sources provide rich materials on Buganda in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in this 1996 book Christopher Wrigley endeavours to show that the stories which appear to relate to earlier periods are largely mythology.

Wa and the Wala is the first full study of Wala history and society. The author pays particular attention to relations between the Muslim and non-Muslim elements in its population, and examines the impact of Zabarima, Samorian, British and French intrusions into Wala affairs.