Jessica M. Marglin
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780300218466
- eISBN:
- 9780300225082
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300218466.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African History
This book presents a previously untold story of Jewish-Muslim relations in modern Morocco, showing how law facilitated Jews' integration into the broader Moroccan society in which they lived. Morocco ...
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This book presents a previously untold story of Jewish-Muslim relations in modern Morocco, showing how law facilitated Jews' integration into the broader Moroccan society in which they lived. Morocco went through immense upheaval in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the experiences of a single Jewish family, the book charts how the law helped Jews to integrate into Muslim society—until colonial reforms abruptly curtailed their legal mobility. Drawing on a broad range of archival documents, the book expands our understanding of contemporary relations between Jews and Muslims and changes the way we think about Jewish history, the Middle East, and the nature of legal pluralism.Less
This book presents a previously untold story of Jewish-Muslim relations in modern Morocco, showing how law facilitated Jews' integration into the broader Moroccan society in which they lived. Morocco went through immense upheaval in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the experiences of a single Jewish family, the book charts how the law helped Jews to integrate into Muslim society—until colonial reforms abruptly curtailed their legal mobility. Drawing on a broad range of archival documents, the book expands our understanding of contemporary relations between Jews and Muslims and changes the way we think about Jewish history, the Middle East, and the nature of legal pluralism.
Ruma Chopra
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780300220469
- eISBN:
- 9780300235227
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300220469.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African History
In spring 1796, after eight months of war in the mountainous terrain of Jamaica, most of the village of Trelawney Town—a community of about 550 runaway slaves and their descendants—surrendered. They ...
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In spring 1796, after eight months of war in the mountainous terrain of Jamaica, most of the village of Trelawney Town—a community of about 550 runaway slaves and their descendants—surrendered. They had resisted black militia and British regulars but they were frightened by the savagery of the bloodhounds imported from Cuba to defeat them. They could not have imagined the outcome that followed. The Jamaican government, fearing that the Maroon War would trigger a second Haitian Revolution, deported the Maroon families to a remote location from whence they could never return home – Nova Scotia. After four years of enduring Halifax, the Maroons were sent to the West African colony in Sierra Leone. Remarkably, some returned home in the 1840s after the British Empire abolished slavery. The insurrection in Jamaica, the deportation it triggered, and the far-reaching impact of a small group of refugees together comprise one of the earliest instances of community displacement. Yet, remarkably, although the Maroons did not choose their initial place of exile, they actively determined the next one. The Maroon rebels of Jamaica transformed into protected refugees in Nova Scotia and empire builders in Africa. During an era of British abolitionism and global expansion, a small group of black insurrectionists maneuvered on a world stage. In each British zone, the Maroons brought to bear the full range of their cultural and military experience. Their remarkable adaptations form the crux of this book.Less
In spring 1796, after eight months of war in the mountainous terrain of Jamaica, most of the village of Trelawney Town—a community of about 550 runaway slaves and their descendants—surrendered. They had resisted black militia and British regulars but they were frightened by the savagery of the bloodhounds imported from Cuba to defeat them. They could not have imagined the outcome that followed. The Jamaican government, fearing that the Maroon War would trigger a second Haitian Revolution, deported the Maroon families to a remote location from whence they could never return home – Nova Scotia. After four years of enduring Halifax, the Maroons were sent to the West African colony in Sierra Leone. Remarkably, some returned home in the 1840s after the British Empire abolished slavery. The insurrection in Jamaica, the deportation it triggered, and the far-reaching impact of a small group of refugees together comprise one of the earliest instances of community displacement. Yet, remarkably, although the Maroons did not choose their initial place of exile, they actively determined the next one. The Maroon rebels of Jamaica transformed into protected refugees in Nova Scotia and empire builders in Africa. During an era of British abolitionism and global expansion, a small group of black insurrectionists maneuvered on a world stage. In each British zone, the Maroons brought to bear the full range of their cultural and military experience. Their remarkable adaptations form the crux of this book.
Reginald K. Ellis
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780813056609
- eISBN:
- 9780813053516
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813056609.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African History
The purpose of this manuscript is threefold. First, it will serve as a cultural biography of Dr. James Edward Shepard and the National Religious Training Institute and Chautauqua for the Negro Race ...
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The purpose of this manuscript is threefold. First, it will serve as a cultural biography of Dr. James Edward Shepard and the National Religious Training Institute and Chautauqua for the Negro Race and later the North Carolina College for Negroes (which became North Carolina Central University). Second, it will argue that black college presidents of the early twentieth century such as Shepard were more than academic leaders; they were race leaders. Shepard’s role at the NRTIC/NCC was to develop a race through this institution. Lastly, this study argues that Shepard, like most black college presidents, did not focus primarily on the difference between liberal arts and vocational education. Rather, he considered the most practical ways to uplift his race. Therefore, this study will be more than a biography of an influential African American, but an analytical study of a black leader during the age of Jim Crow in the South.Less
The purpose of this manuscript is threefold. First, it will serve as a cultural biography of Dr. James Edward Shepard and the National Religious Training Institute and Chautauqua for the Negro Race and later the North Carolina College for Negroes (which became North Carolina Central University). Second, it will argue that black college presidents of the early twentieth century such as Shepard were more than academic leaders; they were race leaders. Shepard’s role at the NRTIC/NCC was to develop a race through this institution. Lastly, this study argues that Shepard, like most black college presidents, did not focus primarily on the difference between liberal arts and vocational education. Rather, he considered the most practical ways to uplift his race. Therefore, this study will be more than a biography of an influential African American, but an analytical study of a black leader during the age of Jim Crow in the South.
Frederick Cooper
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691161310
- eISBN:
- 9781400850280
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691161310.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African History
As the French public debates its present diversity and its colonial past, few remember that between 1946 and 1960 the inhabitants of French colonies possessed the rights of French citizens. Moreover, ...
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As the French public debates its present diversity and its colonial past, few remember that between 1946 and 1960 the inhabitants of French colonies possessed the rights of French citizens. Moreover, they did not have to conform to the French civil code that regulated marriage and inheritance. One could, in principle, be a citizen and different too. This book examines momentous changes in notions of citizenship, sovereignty, nation, state, and empire in a time of acute uncertainty about the future of a world that had earlier been divided into colonial empires. This book explains how African political leaders at the end of World War II strove to abolish the entrenched distinction between colonial “subject” and “citizen.” They then used their new status to claim social, economic, and political equality with other French citizens, in the face of resistance from defenders of a colonial order. Africans balanced their quest for equality with a desire to express an African political personality. They hoped to combine a degree of autonomy with participation in a larger, Franco-African ensemble. French leaders, trying to hold on to a large French polity, debated how much autonomy and how much equality they could concede. Both sides looked to versions of federalism as alternatives to empire and the nation-state. The French government had to confront the high costs of an empire of citizens, while Africans could not agree with French leaders or among themselves on how to balance their contradictory imperatives. The book shows how both France and its former colonies backed into more “national” conceptions of the state than either had sought.Less
As the French public debates its present diversity and its colonial past, few remember that between 1946 and 1960 the inhabitants of French colonies possessed the rights of French citizens. Moreover, they did not have to conform to the French civil code that regulated marriage and inheritance. One could, in principle, be a citizen and different too. This book examines momentous changes in notions of citizenship, sovereignty, nation, state, and empire in a time of acute uncertainty about the future of a world that had earlier been divided into colonial empires. This book explains how African political leaders at the end of World War II strove to abolish the entrenched distinction between colonial “subject” and “citizen.” They then used their new status to claim social, economic, and political equality with other French citizens, in the face of resistance from defenders of a colonial order. Africans balanced their quest for equality with a desire to express an African political personality. They hoped to combine a degree of autonomy with participation in a larger, Franco-African ensemble. French leaders, trying to hold on to a large French polity, debated how much autonomy and how much equality they could concede. Both sides looked to versions of federalism as alternatives to empire and the nation-state. The French government had to confront the high costs of an empire of citizens, while Africans could not agree with French leaders or among themselves on how to balance their contradictory imperatives. The book shows how both France and its former colonies backed into more “national” conceptions of the state than either had sought.
Kathryn M. de Luna
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780300218534
- eISBN:
- 9780300225167
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300218534.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African History
Collecting Food, Cultivating People is a three thousand year history both of agricultural societies from the perspective of those farmers who also hunted, fished, and gathered and of the central and ...
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Collecting Food, Cultivating People is a three thousand year history both of agricultural societies from the perspective of those farmers who also hunted, fished, and gathered and of the central and southern African savannas from the perspective of those who lived not within the orbits of its famous precolonial kingdoms, but within a central frontier encircled by those polities. Cereal agriculture and trade are often considered axiomatic to political change in the premodern world. Instead, political innovation in farming societies in precolonial central Africa was actually contingent on developments in hunting and fishing. The difference between food collection and cultivation was not a foregone conclusion to the practitioners who worked hard to distinguish their activities from agriculture by inventing a novel path to celebrity, friendship, and ancestorhood based on their knowledge of the bush. This book reveals the interrelated, contingent histories of subsistence, fame, talent, political authority, landscape, and personhood (both in life and in death) across the watershed events of central African history, from the transition to a Neolithic, cereal-based economy to the invention of matrilineality, the centralization of political authority in neighboring kingdoms, and the intensification of long distance trade. This story changes what we know about the development and character of political complexity in Neolithic societies by foregrounding the affective dimensions of technology and political power and the importance of personal networks and conceptions of individuality in early African history, a period dominated by histories about the development of institutions like clans, healing cults, chieftaincy, and royalty.Less
Collecting Food, Cultivating People is a three thousand year history both of agricultural societies from the perspective of those farmers who also hunted, fished, and gathered and of the central and southern African savannas from the perspective of those who lived not within the orbits of its famous precolonial kingdoms, but within a central frontier encircled by those polities. Cereal agriculture and trade are often considered axiomatic to political change in the premodern world. Instead, political innovation in farming societies in precolonial central Africa was actually contingent on developments in hunting and fishing. The difference between food collection and cultivation was not a foregone conclusion to the practitioners who worked hard to distinguish their activities from agriculture by inventing a novel path to celebrity, friendship, and ancestorhood based on their knowledge of the bush. This book reveals the interrelated, contingent histories of subsistence, fame, talent, political authority, landscape, and personhood (both in life and in death) across the watershed events of central African history, from the transition to a Neolithic, cereal-based economy to the invention of matrilineality, the centralization of political authority in neighboring kingdoms, and the intensification of long distance trade. This story changes what we know about the development and character of political complexity in Neolithic societies by foregrounding the affective dimensions of technology and political power and the importance of personal networks and conceptions of individuality in early African history, a period dominated by histories about the development of institutions like clans, healing cults, chieftaincy, and royalty.
Catherine A. Corson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780300212273
- eISBN:
- 9780300225068
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300212273.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African History
Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars to preserve Madagascar's rich biological diversity. Yet its habitats are still in decline. Studying forty ...
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Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars to preserve Madagascar's rich biological diversity. Yet its habitats are still in decline. Studying forty years of policy making in multiple sites, this book reveals how blaming impoverished Malagasy farmers for Madagascar's environmental decline has avoided challenging other drivers of deforestation, such as the logging and mining industries. This ethnographic study reveals how Madagascar's environmental program reflects the transformation of global environmental governance under neoliberalism.Less
Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars to preserve Madagascar's rich biological diversity. Yet its habitats are still in decline. Studying forty years of policy making in multiple sites, this book reveals how blaming impoverished Malagasy farmers for Madagascar's environmental decline has avoided challenging other drivers of deforestation, such as the logging and mining industries. This ethnographic study reveals how Madagascar's environmental program reflects the transformation of global environmental governance under neoliberalism.
Padraic X. Scanlan
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780300217445
- eISBN:
- 9780300231526
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300217445.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African History
Freedom’s Debtors is a history of the British movement to abolish the slave trade, told through the lens of the history of early colonial Sierra Leone. After the abolition of the British slave trade ...
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Freedom’s Debtors is a history of the British movement to abolish the slave trade, told through the lens of the history of early colonial Sierra Leone. After the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, Sierra Leone became the judicial, military, and economic capital of British efforts to interdict slave ships. British antislavery, widely seen as a great sacrifice of economic and political capital on the altar of humanitarianism, was in fact profitable, militarily useful, and crucial to the expansion of British power in West Africa. The colony was closely connected to the elite leaders of the abolitionist movement in Britain, and became closely identified with their business interests. This history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone offers insight into how antislavery policies were used to justify colonialism and reframes a moment considered a watershed in British public morality as the beginning of morally ambiguous and exploitative colonial history. From Sierra Leone, it is easier to see British antislavery as it really was: acquisitive, devoted to coercive and gradual schemes for emancipation, militarised, and shot through with imperial ambitions.Less
Freedom’s Debtors is a history of the British movement to abolish the slave trade, told through the lens of the history of early colonial Sierra Leone. After the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, Sierra Leone became the judicial, military, and economic capital of British efforts to interdict slave ships. British antislavery, widely seen as a great sacrifice of economic and political capital on the altar of humanitarianism, was in fact profitable, militarily useful, and crucial to the expansion of British power in West Africa. The colony was closely connected to the elite leaders of the abolitionist movement in Britain, and became closely identified with their business interests. This history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone offers insight into how antislavery policies were used to justify colonialism and reframes a moment considered a watershed in British public morality as the beginning of morally ambiguous and exploitative colonial history. From Sierra Leone, it is easier to see British antislavery as it really was: acquisitive, devoted to coercive and gradual schemes for emancipation, militarised, and shot through with imperial ambitions.
Carl Death
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780300215830
- eISBN:
- 9780300224894
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300215830.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African History
Like much of the globe, the African continent is in the midst of navigating numerous, interwoven environmental challenges. From climate-related risks such as crop failure and famine to longer-term ...
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Like much of the globe, the African continent is in the midst of navigating numerous, interwoven environmental challenges. From climate-related risks such as crop failure and famine to longer-term concerns about sustainable urbanization, environmental justice, and biodiversity conservation, African states are charged with addressing a complex range of issues. As this book demonstrates, they are doing so with innovations such as community-based conservation programs and transnational parks, rural development schemes and environmental education initiatives, carbon taxes and pricing for ecosystem services, and significant investments into hydropower, solar, and wind energy. It deploys a theoretical framework for analysing green states in Africa inspired by Michel Foucault and postcolonial theory, which focuses attention on the governance and contestation of land and territory, populations and biopolitics, economies and international relations. Although much of the literature on “green states” has focused on highly developed areas in Europe and North America, this book reveals how central African environmental politics are to the transformation of African states, challenges current understandings of green politics, and explores the ramifications for the rest of the global south.Less
Like much of the globe, the African continent is in the midst of navigating numerous, interwoven environmental challenges. From climate-related risks such as crop failure and famine to longer-term concerns about sustainable urbanization, environmental justice, and biodiversity conservation, African states are charged with addressing a complex range of issues. As this book demonstrates, they are doing so with innovations such as community-based conservation programs and transnational parks, rural development schemes and environmental education initiatives, carbon taxes and pricing for ecosystem services, and significant investments into hydropower, solar, and wind energy. It deploys a theoretical framework for analysing green states in Africa inspired by Michel Foucault and postcolonial theory, which focuses attention on the governance and contestation of land and territory, populations and biopolitics, economies and international relations. Although much of the literature on “green states” has focused on highly developed areas in Europe and North America, this book reveals how central African environmental politics are to the transformation of African states, challenges current understandings of green politics, and explores the ramifications for the rest of the global south.
Monique A. Bedasse
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781469633596
- eISBN:
- 9781469633619
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469633596.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African History
From its beginnings in 1930s Jamaica, the Rastafarian movement has become a global presence. While the existing studies of Rastafari have primarily focused on its cultural expression through reggae ...
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From its beginnings in 1930s Jamaica, the Rastafarian movement has become a global presence. While the existing studies of Rastafari have primarily focused on its cultural expression through reggae music, art, and iconography, Monique A. Bedasse argues that repatriation to Africa represents the most important vehicle of its international growth. Shifting the scholarship on repatriation from Ethiopia to Tanzania, Bedasse foregrounds Rastafari’s enduring connection to black radical politics and establishes Tanzania as a critical site to explore gender, religion, race, citizenship, socialism, and nation. Beyond her engagement with how the Rastafarian idea of Africa translated into a lived reality, she demonstrates how Tanzanian state and nonstate actors not only validated the Rastafarian idea of diaspora but were also crucial to defining the parameters of Pan-Africanism. Based on previously undiscovered oral and written sources from Tanzania, Jamaica, England, the United States, and Trinidad, Bedasse uncovers a vast and varied transnational network--including Julius Nyerere, Michael Manley, and C. L. R James--revealing Rastafari’s entrenchment in the making of Pan-Africanism in the postindependence period.Less
From its beginnings in 1930s Jamaica, the Rastafarian movement has become a global presence. While the existing studies of Rastafari have primarily focused on its cultural expression through reggae music, art, and iconography, Monique A. Bedasse argues that repatriation to Africa represents the most important vehicle of its international growth. Shifting the scholarship on repatriation from Ethiopia to Tanzania, Bedasse foregrounds Rastafari’s enduring connection to black radical politics and establishes Tanzania as a critical site to explore gender, religion, race, citizenship, socialism, and nation. Beyond her engagement with how the Rastafarian idea of Africa translated into a lived reality, she demonstrates how Tanzanian state and nonstate actors not only validated the Rastafarian idea of diaspora but were also crucial to defining the parameters of Pan-Africanism. Based on previously undiscovered oral and written sources from Tanzania, Jamaica, England, the United States, and Trinidad, Bedasse uncovers a vast and varied transnational network--including Julius Nyerere, Michael Manley, and C. L. R James--revealing Rastafari’s entrenchment in the making of Pan-Africanism in the postindependence period.
Jonathan Wyrtzen
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781501700231
- eISBN:
- 9781501704253
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501700231.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African History
How did four and a half decades of European colonial intervention transform Moroccan identity? As elsewhere in North Africa and in the wider developing world, the colonial period in Morocco ...
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How did four and a half decades of European colonial intervention transform Moroccan identity? As elsewhere in North Africa and in the wider developing world, the colonial period in Morocco (1912–1956) established a new type of political field in which notions about and relationships among politics and identity formation were fundamentally transformed. Instead of privileging top-down processes of colonial state formation or bottom-up processes of local resistance, the analysis in this book focuses on interactions between state and society. The book demonstrates how, during the Protectorate period, interactions among a wide range of European and local actors indelibly politicized four key dimensions of Moroccan identity: religion, ethnicity, territory, and the role of the Alawid dynasty. This colonial inheritance is reflected today in ongoing debates over the public role of Islam, religious tolerance, and the memory of Morocco's Jews; recent reforms regarding women's legal status; the monarchy's multiculturalist recognition of Tamazight (Berber) as a national language alongside Arabic; the still-unresolved territorial dispute over the Western Sahara; and the monarchy's continued symbolic and practical dominance of the Moroccan political field.Less
How did four and a half decades of European colonial intervention transform Moroccan identity? As elsewhere in North Africa and in the wider developing world, the colonial period in Morocco (1912–1956) established a new type of political field in which notions about and relationships among politics and identity formation were fundamentally transformed. Instead of privileging top-down processes of colonial state formation or bottom-up processes of local resistance, the analysis in this book focuses on interactions between state and society. The book demonstrates how, during the Protectorate period, interactions among a wide range of European and local actors indelibly politicized four key dimensions of Moroccan identity: religion, ethnicity, territory, and the role of the Alawid dynasty. This colonial inheritance is reflected today in ongoing debates over the public role of Islam, religious tolerance, and the memory of Morocco's Jews; recent reforms regarding women's legal status; the monarchy's multiculturalist recognition of Tamazight (Berber) as a national language alongside Arabic; the still-unresolved territorial dispute over the Western Sahara; and the monarchy's continued symbolic and practical dominance of the Moroccan political field.
Thomas Bauman
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252038365
- eISBN:
- 9780252096242
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252038365.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African History
In 1904, political operator and gambling boss Robert T. Motts opened the Pekin Theater in Chicago. Dubbed the “Temple of Music,” the Pekin became one of the country's most prestigious African ...
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In 1904, political operator and gambling boss Robert T. Motts opened the Pekin Theater in Chicago. Dubbed the “Temple of Music,” the Pekin became one of the country's most prestigious African American cultural institutions, renowned for its all-black stock company and school for actors, an orchestra able to play ragtime and opera with equal brilliance, and a repertoire of original musical comedies. A missing chapter in the history of African American theater, this book presents how Motts used his entrepreneurial acumen to create a successful black-owned enterprise. Concentrating on institutional history, the book explores the Pekin's philosophy of hiring only African American staff, its embrace of multi-racial upper class audiences, and its ready assumption of roles as diverse as community center, social club, and fundraising instrument. The Pekin's prestige and profitability faltered after Motts' death in 1911 as his heirs lacked his savvy, and African American elites turned away from pure entertainment in favor of spiritual uplift. But, as the book shows, the theater had already opened the door to a new dynamic of both intra- and inter-racial theater-going and showed the ways a success, like the Pekin, had a positive economic and social impact on the surrounding community.Less
In 1904, political operator and gambling boss Robert T. Motts opened the Pekin Theater in Chicago. Dubbed the “Temple of Music,” the Pekin became one of the country's most prestigious African American cultural institutions, renowned for its all-black stock company and school for actors, an orchestra able to play ragtime and opera with equal brilliance, and a repertoire of original musical comedies. A missing chapter in the history of African American theater, this book presents how Motts used his entrepreneurial acumen to create a successful black-owned enterprise. Concentrating on institutional history, the book explores the Pekin's philosophy of hiring only African American staff, its embrace of multi-racial upper class audiences, and its ready assumption of roles as diverse as community center, social club, and fundraising instrument. The Pekin's prestige and profitability faltered after Motts' death in 1911 as his heirs lacked his savvy, and African American elites turned away from pure entertainment in favor of spiritual uplift. But, as the book shows, the theater had already opened the door to a new dynamic of both intra- and inter-racial theater-going and showed the ways a success, like the Pekin, had a positive economic and social impact on the surrounding community.
Finn Fuglestad
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190876104
- eISBN:
- 9780190943110
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190876104.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African History
The small Slave Coast between the river Volta and Lagos, and especially its central part around Ouidah, was the epicentre of the slave trade in West Africa. But it was also an inhospitable, ...
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The small Slave Coast between the river Volta and Lagos, and especially its central part around Ouidah, was the epicentre of the slave trade in West Africa. But it was also an inhospitable, surf-ridden coastline, subject to crashing breakers and devoid of permanent human settlement. Nor was it easily accessible from the interior due to a lagoon which ran parallel to the coast. The local inhabitants were not only sheltered against incursions from the sea, but were also locked off from it. Yet, paradoxically, this small coastline witnessed a thriving long-term commercial relationship between Europeans and Africans, based on the trans-Atlantic slave trade. How did it come about? How was it all organized? Dahomey is usually cited as the Slave Coast's archetypical slave raiding and slave trading polity. An originally inland realm, it was a latecomer to the slave trade, and simply incorporated a pre-existing system by dint of military prowess, which ultimately was to prove radically counterproductive. Dahomey, which never controlled more than half of the region we call the Slave Coast, represented an anomaly in the local setting, an anomaly the author seeks to define and to explain.Less
The small Slave Coast between the river Volta and Lagos, and especially its central part around Ouidah, was the epicentre of the slave trade in West Africa. But it was also an inhospitable, surf-ridden coastline, subject to crashing breakers and devoid of permanent human settlement. Nor was it easily accessible from the interior due to a lagoon which ran parallel to the coast. The local inhabitants were not only sheltered against incursions from the sea, but were also locked off from it. Yet, paradoxically, this small coastline witnessed a thriving long-term commercial relationship between Europeans and Africans, based on the trans-Atlantic slave trade. How did it come about? How was it all organized? Dahomey is usually cited as the Slave Coast's archetypical slave raiding and slave trading polity. An originally inland realm, it was a latecomer to the slave trade, and simply incorporated a pre-existing system by dint of military prowess, which ultimately was to prove radically counterproductive. Dahomey, which never controlled more than half of the region we call the Slave Coast, represented an anomaly in the local setting, an anomaly the author seeks to define and to explain.
Sara Rich Dorman
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190634889
- eISBN:
- 9780190848514
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190634889.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African History
This book seeks to understand the state, nation and political identities that are being forged in modern Zimbabwe, and the nature of control that Robert Mugabe’s ZANU exercises over those political ...
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This book seeks to understand the state, nation and political identities that are being forged in modern Zimbabwe, and the nature of control that Robert Mugabe’s ZANU exercises over those political institutions. Focusing on the perspective and experiences of societal groups including NGOs, churches, trade unions, students and academics the book explores how the construction of consent, threat of coercion and material resources are used to integrate social groups into the ruling nationalist coalition, but also how they resist and frame competing discourses and institutions. Taking seriously the discursive and institutional legacies of the nationalist struggle and the liberation war in shaping politics, it explores how independent Zimbabwe’s politics were molded by discursive claims to foster national unity that delegitimize autonomous political action outside the ruling party. Building a new societal coalition entailed the "demobilization" of ZANU(PF)’s original nationalist constituency which had backed it during the liberation war, and the "inclusion" of new groups including donors, white farmers and business interests. It also shows how legal practices and institution-building defused and constrained opportunities for contestation, even while the regime used the security forces to suppress those who challenged its political monopoly or who otherwise resisted incorporation. It thus presents a complex picture of how individuals and groups became bound up in the project of state- and nation-building, despite contesting or even rejecting aspects of it.Less
This book seeks to understand the state, nation and political identities that are being forged in modern Zimbabwe, and the nature of control that Robert Mugabe’s ZANU exercises over those political institutions. Focusing on the perspective and experiences of societal groups including NGOs, churches, trade unions, students and academics the book explores how the construction of consent, threat of coercion and material resources are used to integrate social groups into the ruling nationalist coalition, but also how they resist and frame competing discourses and institutions. Taking seriously the discursive and institutional legacies of the nationalist struggle and the liberation war in shaping politics, it explores how independent Zimbabwe’s politics were molded by discursive claims to foster national unity that delegitimize autonomous political action outside the ruling party. Building a new societal coalition entailed the "demobilization" of ZANU(PF)’s original nationalist constituency which had backed it during the liberation war, and the "inclusion" of new groups including donors, white farmers and business interests. It also shows how legal practices and institution-building defused and constrained opportunities for contestation, even while the regime used the security forces to suppress those who challenged its political monopoly or who otherwise resisted incorporation. It thus presents a complex picture of how individuals and groups became bound up in the project of state- and nation-building, despite contesting or even rejecting aspects of it.
Philip Roessler and Harry Verhoeven
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190611354
- eISBN:
- 9780190686581
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190611354.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African History
In October 1996, a motley crew of ageing Marxists and unemployed youths coalesced to revolt against Mobutu Seso Seko, president of Zaire/Congo since 1965. Backed by a Rwanda-led regional coalition ...
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In October 1996, a motley crew of ageing Marxists and unemployed youths coalesced to revolt against Mobutu Seso Seko, president of Zaire/Congo since 1965. Backed by a Rwanda-led regional coalition that drew support from Asmara to Luanda, the rebels of the AFDL marched over 1500 kilometers in seven months to crush the dictatorship. To the Congolese rebels and their Pan-Africanist allies, the vanquishing of the Mobutu regime represented nothing short of a “second independence” for Congo and Central Africa as a whole. Within 15 months, however, Central Africa’s “liberation Peace” would collapse, triggering a cataclysmic fratricide between the heroes of the war against Mobutu and igniting the deadliest conflict since World War II. Uniquely drawing on hundreds of interviews with protagonists from Congo, Rwanda, Angola, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Africa, Belgium, France, the UK and the US, Why Comrades Go to War offers a novel theoretical and empirical account of Africa’s Great War. It argues that the seeds of Africa’s Great War were sown in the revolutionary struggle against Mobutu—the way the revolution came together, the way it was organized, and, paradoxically, the very way it succeeded. In particular, the book argues that the overthrow of Mobutu proved a Pyrrhic victory because the protagonists ignored the philosophy of Julius Nyerere, the father of Africa's liberation movements: they put the gun before the unglamorous but essential task of building the domestic and regional political institutions and organizational structures necessary to consolidate peace after revolution.Less
In October 1996, a motley crew of ageing Marxists and unemployed youths coalesced to revolt against Mobutu Seso Seko, president of Zaire/Congo since 1965. Backed by a Rwanda-led regional coalition that drew support from Asmara to Luanda, the rebels of the AFDL marched over 1500 kilometers in seven months to crush the dictatorship. To the Congolese rebels and their Pan-Africanist allies, the vanquishing of the Mobutu regime represented nothing short of a “second independence” for Congo and Central Africa as a whole. Within 15 months, however, Central Africa’s “liberation Peace” would collapse, triggering a cataclysmic fratricide between the heroes of the war against Mobutu and igniting the deadliest conflict since World War II. Uniquely drawing on hundreds of interviews with protagonists from Congo, Rwanda, Angola, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Africa, Belgium, France, the UK and the US, Why Comrades Go to War offers a novel theoretical and empirical account of Africa’s Great War. It argues that the seeds of Africa’s Great War were sown in the revolutionary struggle against Mobutu—the way the revolution came together, the way it was organized, and, paradoxically, the very way it succeeded. In particular, the book argues that the overthrow of Mobutu proved a Pyrrhic victory because the protagonists ignored the philosophy of Julius Nyerere, the father of Africa's liberation movements: they put the gun before the unglamorous but essential task of building the domestic and regional political institutions and organizational structures necessary to consolidate peace after revolution.
