Bücher der Reihe The International African Library

Religious pluralism, as encountered in multi-faith settings such as Nigeria's biggest city Lagos, challenges much of what we have long taken for granted about religion, including the ready-made binaries of Christianity versus Islam, religion versus secularism, religious monism versus polytheism, and tradition versus modernity. In this book, Marloes Janson offers a rich ethnography of religions, religious pluralism and practice in Lagos, analysing how so-called 'religious shoppers' cross religious boundaries, and the coexistence of different religious traditions where practitioners engage with these simultaneously. Prompted to develop a broader conception of religion that shifts from a narrow analysis of religious traditions as mutually exclusive, Janson instead offers a perspective that focuses on the complex dynamics of their actual entanglements. Including real-life examples to illustrate religion in Lagos through religious practice and lived experiences, this study takes account of the ambivalence, inconsistency and unpredictability of lived religion, proposing assemblage as an analytical frame for exploring the conceptual and methodological possibilities that may open as a result.

White workers occupied a unique social position in apartheid-era South Africa. Shielded from black labour competition in exchange for support for the white minority regime, their race-based status effectively concealed their class-based vulnerability. Centred on this entanglement of race and class, Privileged Precariat examines how South Africa's white workers experienced the dismantling of the racial state and the establishment of black majority rule. Starting from the 1970s, it shows how apartheid reforms constituted the withdrawal of state support for working-class whiteness, sending workers in search of new ways to safeguard their interests in a rapidly changing world. Danelle van Zyl-Hermann tracks the shifting strategies of the blue-collar Mineworkers' Union, culminating in its reinvention, by the 2010s, as the Solidarity Movement, a social movement appealing to cultural nationalism. Integrating unique historical and ethnographic evidence with global debates, Privileged Precariat offers a chronological and interpretative rethinking of South Africa's recent past and contributes new insights from the Global South to debates on race and class in the era of neoliberalism.

Senegal features prominently on the UNESCO World Heritage List. As many of its cultural heritage sites are remnants of the French empire, how does an independent nation care for the heritage of colonialism? How does it reinterpret slave barracks, colonial museums, and monuments to empire to imagine its own national future? This book examines Senegal's decolonization of its cultural heritage. Revealing how Leopold Sedar Senghor's philosophy of Negritude inflects the interpretation of its colonial heritage, Ferdinand de Jong demonstrates how Senegal's reinterpretation of heritage sites enables it to overcome the legacies of the slave trade, colonialism, and empire. Remembering and reclaiming a Pan-African future, De Jong shows how World Heritage sites are conceived as the archive of an Afrotopia to come, and, in a move towards decolonization, how they repair colonial time.

Looking at Christian and Muslim schools in urban Tanzania, this book explores how transformations in the country's educational sector, and students', parents' and teachers' quests for a "good life" in the neoliberal context, have affected their school and professional trajectories.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.