Gender is one of the most productive, dynamic, and vibrant areas of Africanist research today. But what is the meaning of gender in an African context?... Why does gender usually connote women? Why has gender taken hold in Africa when feminism hasn't? Is gender yet another Western construct that has been applied to Africa however ill-suited and riddled with assumptions? Africa After Gender? looks at Africa now that gender has come into play to consider how the continent, its people, and the term itself have changed. Leading Africanist historians, anthropologists, literary critics, and political scientists move past simple dichotomies, entrenched debates, and polarizing identity politics to present an evolving discourse of gender. They show gender as an applied rather than theoretical tool and discuss themes such as the performance of sexuality, lesbianism, women's political mobilization, the work of gendered NGOs, and the role of masculinity in a gendered world. For activists, students, and scholars, this book reveals a rich and cross-disciplinary view of the status of gender in Africa today.Contributors are Hussaina J. Abdullah, Nwando Achebe, Susan Andrade, Eileen Boris, Catherine M. Cole, Paulla A. Ebron, Eileen Julien, Lisa A. Lindsay, Adrienne MacIain, Takyiwaa Manuh, Stephan F. Miescher, Helen Mugambi, Gay Seidman, Sylvia Tamale, Bridget Teboh, Lynn M. Thomas, and Nana Wilson-Tagoe.

After a lifetime’s close observation of the continent, one of the world’s finest Africa correspondents has penned a landmark book on life and death... in modern Africa. It takes a guide as observant, experienced, and patient as Richard Dowden to reveal its truths. Dowden combines a novelist’s gift for atmosphere with the scholar’s grasp of historical change as he spins tales of cults and commerce in Senegal and traditional spirituality in Sierra Leone; analyzes the impact of oil and the internet on Nigeria and aid on Sudan; and examines what has gone so badly wrong in Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo. Dowden’s master work is an attempt to explain why Africa is the way it is, and enables its readers to see and understand this miraculous continent as a place of inspiration and tremendous humanity.

Africa and Africans keeps a watchful eye on what has happened in Africa and on what has happened in the rest of the world that shapes how people look at... Africa. The world's perception of Africa is an entanglement of myth and reality--both reflecting and changing with the times. This highly informative yet concise volume, written by two authors intimately familiar with Africa, presents the facts about African society--past and present. Readers wishing to explore Africa's historical events and rich traditions will discover that Africans want to keep what they value in their old way of life as they find themselves in an emerging global culture. Titles of related interest from Waveland Press: Curtin, Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade (ISBN 9780881339482); Holloway, Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali (ISBN 9781577664352); July, A History of the African People, Fifth Edition (ISBN 9780881339802); and Middleton, African Merchants of the Indian Ocean: Swahili of the East African Coast (ISBN 9781577663140).

The year is 1797, and the kingdom of Segu is flourishing, fed by the wealth of its noblemen and the power of its warriors. The people of Segu, the... Bambara, are guided by their griots and priests; their lives are ruled by the elements. But even their soothsayers can only hint at the changes to come, for the battle of the soul of Africa has begun. From the east comes a new religion, Islam, and from the West, the slave trade. Segu follows the life of Dousika Traore, the king’s most trusted advisor, and his four sons, whose fates embody the forces tearing at the fabric of the nation. There is Tiekoro, who renounces his people’s religion and embraces Islam; Siga, who defends tradition, but becomes a merchant; Naba, who is kidnapped by slave traders; and Malobali, who becomes a mercenary and halfhearted Christian. Based on actual events, Segu transports the reader to a fascinating time in history, capturing the earthy spirituality, religious fervor, and violent nature of a people and a growing nation trying to cope with jihads, national rivalries, racism, amid the vagaries of commerce.

Africa and Africans in Antiquity assesses recent historical research and archaeology under way in Egypt, North Africa, the Sudan, and the Horn of... Africa. Whereas many European and American scholars of earlier generations believed that Egyptian contacts with Africa to the south were not culturally significant, research contained in this important collection rejects such notions. At the same time, the volume takes issue with Afrocentric scholars who argue that most Egyptians were 'black' and that blacks are the rightful heirs to Egypt's past grandeur. These ten thought-provoking essays demonstrate that this large region was an ethnic and cultural mosaic in antiquity, a place where Phoenicians, Berbers, Greeks, as well as Egyptians and Nubians interacted.

This book explores Africa's involvement in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It focuses especially on the causes... and consequences of the slave trade, in Africa, in Europe, and in the New World. Prior to 1680, Africa's economic and military strength enabled African elites to determine how trade with Europe developed. Thornton examines the dynamics that made slaves so necessary to European colonizers. He explains why African slaves were placed in significant roles. Estate structure and demography affected the capacity of slaves to form a self-sustaining society and behave as cultural actors. This second edition contains a new chapter on eighteenth century developments.

In 1969 Gerhard Kubik chanced to encounter a Mozambican labor migrant, a miner in Transvaal, South Africa, tapping a cipendani, a mouth-resonated... musical bow. A comparable instrument was seen in the hands of a white Appalachian musician who claimed it as part of his own cultural heritage. Through connections like these Kubik realized that the link between these two far-flung musicians is African-American music, the sound that became the blues. Such discoveries reveal a narrative of music evolution for Kubik, a cultural anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. Traveling in Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, and the United States, he spent forty years in the field gathering the material for Africa and the Blues. In this book, Kubik relentlessly traces the remote genealogies of African cultural music through eighteen African nations, especially in the Western and Central Sudanic Belt. Included is a comprehensive map of this cradle of the blues, along with 31 photographs gathered in his fieldwork. The author also adds clear musical notations and descriptions of both African and African American traditions and practices and calls into question the many assumptions about which elements of the blues were "European" in origin and about which came from Africa. Unique to this book is Kubik's insight into the ways present-day African musicians have adopted and enlivened the blues with their own traditions. With scholarly care but with an ease for the general reader, Kubik proposes an entirely new theory on blue notes and their origins. Tracing what musical traits came from Africa and what mutations and mergers occurred in the Americas, he shows that the African American tradition we call the blues is truly a musical phenomenon belonging to the African cultural world. Gerhard Kubik is a professor in the department of ethnology and African studies at the University of Mainz, Germany. Since 1983 he has been affiliated with the Center for Social Research of Malawi, Zomba. He is a permanent member of the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, London.

African Studies, contrary to some accounts, is not a separatecontinent in the world of American higher education. Itsintellectual borders touch those of... economics, literature,history, philosophy, and art; its history is the story of theworld, both ancient and modern. This is the clear conclusionof Africa and the Disciplines, a book that addressesthe question: Why should Africa be studied in the Americanuniversity?This question was put to distinguished scholars in the socialsciences and humanities, prominent Africanists who are alsoleaders in their various disciplines. Their responses make astrong and enlightening case for the importance of researchon Africa to the academy.Paul Collier's essay, for example, shows how studies of African economies have clarified our understanding of the small open economies, and contributed to the theory of repressed inflation and to a number of areas inmicroeconomics as well. Art historian Suzanne Blier uses the terms and concepts that her discipline has applied to Africato analyze the habits of mind and social practice of her ownfield. Christopher L. Miller describes the confounding andenriching impact of Africa on European and American literarytheory. Political scientist Richard Sklar outlines Africa'scontributions to the study of political modernization,pluralism, and rational choice. These essays, together withothers from scholars in history, anthropology, philosophy,and comparative literature, attest to the influence ofAfrican research throughout the curriculum.For many, knowledge from Africa seems distant and exotic.These powerful essays suggest the contrary: that suchknowledge has shaped the way in which scholars in variousdisciplines understand their worlds. Eloquent testimony toAfrica's necessary place in the mainstream of Americaneducation, this book should alter the academy's understandingof the significance of African research, its definition of core and periphery in human knowledge."These essays are at once exceptionally thoughtful and remarkably comprehensive. Not only do they offer an unusually interesting overview of African studies; they are also striking for the depth and freshness of their insights. This is the sort of volume from which both seasoned regional experts and students stand to learn an enormous amount."—John Comaroff, University of Chicago"These essays provide an important perspective on the evolution of African studies and offer insights into what Africa can mean for the different humanistic and social science disciplines. Many show in ingenious and subtle ways the enormous potential that the study of Africa has for confounding the main tenets of established fields. One could only hope that the strictures expressed here would be taken to heart in the scholarly world."—Robert L. Tignor, Princeton University

African independence launched into international politics a group of the world's poorest, weakest and most artificial states. How have such states... managed to survive? To what extent is their survival now threatened? Christopher Clapham shows how an initially supportive international environment has become increasingly threatening to African rulers and the states over which they preside. The author reveals how international conventions designed to uphold state sovereignty have often been appropriated and subverted by rulers to enhance their domestic control, and how African states have been undermined by guerrilla insurgencies and the use of international relations to serve essentially private ends.

Africa and the West presents a fascinating array of primary sources to engage readers in the history of Africa's long and troubled relationship with the... West. Many of the sources have not previously appeared in print, or in books readily available to students. Volume 1 covers two major topics: the Atlantic slave trade and the European conquest. It details the beginnings of the slave trade, slavery as a business, the experiences of slaves, and the effect of abolitionism on the trade, using such documents as a letter from a sixteenth-century African king to the king of Portugal calling for a more regulated slave trade, and the nineteenth-century testimony of a South African slave accused of treason. The volume also covers the early nineteenth-century considerations of the costs and benefits of colonization, the development of conquest as the century progressed, with special attention to technology, legislation, empire, religion, racism, and violence, through such unusual documents as Cecil Rhodes's will and a chart of the costs of African animals exported to Western zoos.

Africa and the West presents a fascinating array of primary sources to engage readers in the history of Africa's long and troubled relationship with the... West. Many of the sources have not previously appeared in print, or in books readily available to students. Volume 2 picks up on the theme of conquest and covers the implementation of colonial rule, education, labor, nationalist movements, the world wars, decolonization, and independence. These documents include a German school examination for African children, the Natives Land Act from South Africa, a report on the impact of colonialism on women from the founder of the Women's League of the African National Congress, and Nelson Mandela's presidential address "No Easy Walk to Freedom."

Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range... of new scientific specialties and research methods. Africa as a Living Laboratory is a far-reaching study of the thorny relationship between imperialism and the role of scientific expertise—environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological—in the colonization of British Africa.A key source for Helen Tilley’s analysis is the African Research Survey, a project undertaken in the 1930s to explore how modern science was being applied to African problems. This project both embraced and recommended an interdisciplinary approach to research on Africa that, Tilley argues, underscored the heterogeneity of African environments and the interrelations among the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was unquestionably to transform and modernize Africa, their efforts, Tilley contends, were often unexpectedly subverted by scientific concerns with the local and vernacular. Meticulously researched and gracefully argued, Africa as a Living Laboratory transforms our understanding of imperial history, colonial development, and the role science played in both.

This is a concise but sweeping account of the African past, its peoples, and their institutions. The book attempts to provide an overview of African... history without getting bogged down in details and data. This approach is very useful for general readers who seek to gain an understanding of the major trends and developments, and for teachers who plan to supplement this text with primary sources depending on the emphasis of the course. Beginning with the dynasties of the Nile valley, Collins explains the importance of language in identifying the enormous human diversity of the Africans, the evolution of African societies into kingdoms and empires through new social structures, the introduction of Christianity and Islam, and the migrations of various groups. The book then describes the appearance of the Europeans in the fifteenth century and the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. It continues with the brief but traumatic period of colonial rule and the nationalist movements for independence that ensued. Finally, it accounts for the struggles of Africans in recent years, including civil conflict, military dictatorships, and ethnic insurgencies, as the newly independent states of the continent mature. Robert O. Collins, University of California at Santa Barbara, is the author of eighteen books.

Vast, diverse, dynamic, and turbulent, the true nature of Africa is often obscured by its poverty-stricken image. In this controversial guide, Tom Young... cuts through the emotional hype to critically analyse the continent's political history and the factors behind its dismal economic performance. Maintaining that colonial influences are often overplayed, Young argues that much blame must lie with African governments themselves and that Western aid has often caused more harm than good.

With independence from colonial rule, Africans had hoped for liberty, prosperity and a new beginning. Instead, they have experienced have brought... nothing but economic misery, famine, senseless civil wars, wanton destruction, flagrant violations of human rights and brutal repression. Africa Betrayed is a powerful attack on the dictators who have ruined an entire continent. Dr. Ayittey writes devastatingly on the horrors of black neo-colonialism, arguing that it is naive for commentators to blame Africa's misery on external factors: African leaders have betrayed both the just aspirations of their countrymen and Africa's indigenous political systems, which in no way endorse tyranny. He argues that a second liberation struggle is beginning throughout the continent - one that will sweep away the kleptocracy and rediscover the African traditions that have endured throughout the horrors of both white colonialism and black neo-colonialism.