New Books In African Studies

Today I talked to Dr. Mohamed Adhikari about his book Destroying to Replace: Settler Genocides of Indigenous Peoples (Hackett, 2022). "This book explores settler colonial genocides in a global perspective and over the long durée. It does so systematically and compellingly, as it investigates how settler colonial expansion at times created conditions for genocidal violence, and the ways in which genocide was at times perpetrated on settler colonial frontiers. This volume will prove invaluable to teachers and students of imperialism, colonialism, and human rights." — Lorenzo Veracini, Swinburne University of Technology, and author of The World Turned Inside Out: Settler Colonialism as a Political Idea "A succinct, insightful, and highly readable text discussing an issue that deserves to be integral to any world history course. Using four finely crafted, yet widely dispersed, case studies Adhikari strikingly shows how vulnerability and resistance occur as the waves of global capitalism hit indigenous societies."

L. L. Wynn and Angel M. Foster,'s edited volume Sex in the Middle East and North Africa (Vanderbilt UP, 2022) examines the sexual practices, politics, and complexities of the modern Arab world. Short chapters feature a variety of experts in anthropology, sociology, health science, and cultural studies. Many of the chapters are based on original ethnographic and interview work with subjects involved in these practices and include their voices. The book is organized into three sections: Single and Dating, Engaged and Married, and It's Complicated. The allusion to categories of relationship status on social media is at once a nod to the compulsion to categorize, recognition of the many ways that categorization is rarely straightforward, and acknowledgment that much of the intimate lives described by the contributors is mediated by online technologies. Mathew Gagné is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit mega

In February 1937, following an abortive attack by a handful of insurgents on Mussolini's High Command in Italian-occupied Ethiopia, 'repression squads' of armed Blackshirts and Fascist civilians were unleashed on the defenseless residents of Addis Ababa. In three terror-filled days and nights of arson, murder and looting, thousands of innocent and unsuspecting men, women and children were roasted alive, shot, bludgeoned, stabbed to death, or blown to pieces with hand-grenades. Meanwhile the notorious Viceroy Rodolfo Graziani, infamous for his atrocities in Libya, took the opportunity to add to the carnage by eliminating the intelligentsia and nobility of the ancient Ethiopian empire in a pogrom that swept across the land. In The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy's National Shame (Hurst, 2017), Ian Campbell reconstructs and analyses one of Fascist Italy's least known atrocities, which he estimates eliminated 19-20 per cent of the capital's population. He exposes the hitherto little known cover-up conducted at the hi

In 2008, the artist Renzo Martens released his controversial film Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty filmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The film portrayed the artist as a colonial explorer travelling around the Congo’s plantations with the naiveté of the cartoon character Tintin. Martens encounters poverty, hunger, and abuse, all the while narrating the way in which these experiences enrich him as a western observer. In a manner now familiar in mainstream critical culture, the film was labelled as 'problematic'. Martens’ work and method were critiqued widely by an array of commentators. Some have changed their mind in light of Martens’ further work. Others - and I know this from speaking with an editor of a prominent art magazine - won’t come anywhere near it even twelve years on "for fear of inadvertently promoting the Martens' practice". Critique in Practice: Renzo Martens' Episode III (Enjoy Poverty) (Sternberg Press, 2020), a volume edited by Anthony Downey brings together a range of responses to Enjoy Pov

Worrier State: Risk, Anxiety and Moral Panic in South Africa (Manchester University Press, 2022) looks at the pervasive culture of fear in South Africa. It reveals how narratives of fear manifest in contemporary media forms and the people they serve, and how these are impacted by race, class, gender, space and identity. Through an interdisciplinary body of work, and using a case-based study approach, media analyst Nicky Falkof investigates how risk, anxiety and moral panic show up in media portrayals in modern South Africa. Her main intervention in this approach is through ‘affect’: how do South Africans feel about living under conditions of extreme fear, which is related to gross inequality, and how does the media make us feel? Together, these essays about ‘white genocide’, ‘Satanist’ murders, township urban legends and suburban community groups present an always-partial and necessarily contingent picture of some of the ways in which cultures of fear structure life and meaning for various people in various c

In African Philosophy: Emancipation and Practice (Bloomsbury, 2022), Pascah Mungwini considers the history of African philosophy in relationship to world philosophies. Arguing for the importance of African philosophy to know itself through its past and its present, Mungwini takes up topics such as the characterization of ethnophilosophy as a way to reflect on the emancipatory potential in philosophical dialogue. In his view, intra-continental dialogue, as well as world philosophical dialogues, challenge impoverished conceptions of philosophy, whether postcolonial indebtedness to oppressive paradigms or dominant paradigms which exclude voices. The book weaves together reflection on seminal thinkers in the history of African philosophy, such as Paulin Hountondji, Odera Oruka, Kwasi Wiredu, and many more, as well as investigation into the relationship of concepts like Ubuntu for doing African philosophy. Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit wo

Assassinated by Idi Amin and a democratic ally of J.F. Kennedy during the Cold War, Benedicto Kiwanuka was Uganda's most controversial and disruptive politician, and his legacy is still divisive. On the eve of independence, he led the Democratic Party (DP), a national movement of predominantly Catholic activists, to end political inequalities and religious discrimination. Along the way, he became Uganda's first prime minister and first Ugandan chief justice. Earle and Carney show how Kiwanuka and Catholic activists struggled to create an inclusive vision of the state, a vision that resulted in relentless intimidation and extra-judicial killings. Focusing closely on the competing Catholic projects that circulated throughout Uganda, Contesting Catholics: Benedicto Kiwanuka and the Birth of Postcolonial Uganda (Boydell & Brewer, 2021) offers new ways of thinking about the history of democratic thought, while pushing the study of Catholicism in Africa outside of the church and beyond the gaze of missionaries. Dra

Foreign military intervention has had a profound impact on post-colonial African history and politics. Interventions have destabilized borderlands, overthrown governments, and taken a devastating toll on populations. In African Interventions: State Militaries, Foreign Powers, and Rebel Forces (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Dr. Emizet F. Kisangani and Dr. Jeffrey Pickering advance a new theoretical framework and combine quantitative, qualitative, and historical methods to shed fresh light on these important but understudied events. Their detailed analysis brings understanding to supportive and hostile interventions and to interventions by former colonial states, non-colonial foreign actors, and African countries. Dr. Kisangani and Dr. Pickering also analyse military incursions into ungoverned territories and lands engulfed in civil war. Showcasing a variety of examples from the Second Congo War to the Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict, the book offers a rich and accessible examination of military intervention o

Money does strange things to people, as Annah Lake Zhu notes in her latest book Rosewood: Endangered Species Conservation and the Rise of Global China (Harvard University Press: 2022) In Madagascar, loggers, flush with cash from the rosewood trade, don’t quite know how to react to their newfound largesse, sometimes demanding less money for their wares out of confusion. Rumors abound of how loggers make their money. There’s no way that simple wood could garner so much profit, people say, so observers think they must be trading something else–like human bones. Annah’s book studies globalization, the rise of China, and global environmental politics through trade in one commodity: Madagascar rosewood, used in furniture. In this interview, Annah and I talk about this important material–the commodity, the cultural product, and the conservation target–in China and Madagascar. Annah Lake Zhu is Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, a veteran of the United Nations Env

Bengt Sundkler wrote his 1940 book Bantu Prophets in South Africa for a white, European audience. He had no idea that his ethnographic study would play a critical role in keeping African independent churches active during the repressive apartheid regime. In this episode, Stanford professor Joel Cabrita discusses the book’s path from academia to activism. Joel Cabrita is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. She is the author of The People’s Zion: Southern African, the United States and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Sokoto was the largest and longest lasting of West Africa's nineteenth-century Muslim empires. Its intellectual and political elite left behind a vast written record, including over 300 Arabic texts authored by the jihad's leaders: Usman dan Fodio, his brother Abdullahi and his son, Muhammad Bello (known collectively as the Fodiawa). Sokoto's early years are one of the most documented periods of pre-colonial African history, yet current narratives pay little attention to the formative role these texts played in the creation of Sokoto, and the complex scholarly world from which they originated.  Far from being unified around a single concept of Muslim statecraft, Paul Naylor's book From Rebels to Rulers: Writing Legitimacy in the Early Sokoto State (James Currey, 2021) demonstrates how divided the Fodiawa were about what Sokoto could and should be, and the various discursive strategies they used to enrol local societies into their vision. Based on a close analysis of the sources (some appearing in English tran

Postwar multilateral cooperation is often viewed as an attempt to overcome the limitations of the nation-state system. However, in 1945, when the United Nations was founded, large parts of the world were still under imperial control. Building States investigates how the UN tried to manage the dissolution of European empires in the 1950s and 1960s—and helped transform the practice of international development and the meaning of state sovereignty in the process. In Building States: The United Nations, Development, and Decolonization, 1945–1965 (Columbia University Press, 2022) Dr. Eva-Maria Muschik argues that the UN played a key role in the global proliferation and reinvention of the nation-state in the postwar era, as newly independent states came to rely on international assistance. Drawing on previously untapped primary sources, she traces how UN personnel—usually in close consultation with Western officials—sought to manage decolonization peacefully through international development assistance. Examining i

The Atlantic has borne witness to major historic events that have drastically shaped humanity with each crossing of its path. In A Brief History of the Atlantic (Robinson, 2022), Jeremy Black takes the reader through its evolution to becoming one of the most important oceans in the world. Black discusses the importance of the Atlantic in relation to world history as well as addressing topics such as those bravest to attempt to cross the ocean before Columbus, the beginnings of slavery from 1400-1600, the struggle for control between empires in the 1600s, the way technology adapted with steamships to telegraph cables, the battle of the Falkland, and the Cold War. Black also touches on the Atlantic we know today, and the struggles it faces due to urgent global issues including climate change, pollution, and the trials of the economic rise in the Indo-Pacific world. If you have ever yearned to know more about this famed and vital ocean, this clear and concise history will be a key read as one of the first of its

Military coups are a constant threat in Africa and many former military leaders are now in control of 'civilian states', yet the military remains understudied, especially over the last decade. Drawing on extensive archival research, cross-national data, and four in-depth comparative case studies, When Soldiers Rebel: Ethnic Armies and Political Instability in Africa (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines the causes of military coups in post-independence Africa and looks at the relationship between ethnic armies and political instability in the region. Kristen A. Harkness argues that the processes of creating and dismantling ethnically exclusionary state institutions engenders organized and violent political resistance. Focusing on rebellions to protect rather than change the status quo, Harkness sheds light on a mechanism of ethnic violence that helps us understand both the motivations and timing of rebellion, and the rarity of group rebellion in the face of persistent political and economic inequalities along ethnic

During the Cold War, the British government oversaw the transition to independence of dozens of colonies. Often the most challenging aspect of this transition was the creation of a national army from colonial forces. In Built on the Ruins of Empire: British Military Assistance and African Independence (University Press of Kansas, 2022), Dr. Blake Whitaker examines this process in Kenya and Zambia and how it set the course for the creation of the army in Zimbabwe. He also looks at three themes as they intersect in African military history: British decolonization, race relations, and the Cold War. While the transition to independence was a difficult process in places such as Ghana and Nigeria, it was compounded by the racial tensions in Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. All three were settler colonies home to a sizable community of white Europeans who controlled the levers of power and economic prosperity. Built on the Ruins of Empire focuses on the difficulties that arose in creating a cohesive and apolitical milit

The formation of post-colonial states in Africa, and the Middle East gave birth to prolonged separatist wars. Exploring the evolution of these separatist wars, In Second-Generation Liberation Wars Cambridge UP, 2022), Yaniv Voller examines the strategies that both governments and insurgents employed, how these strategies were shaped by the previous struggle against European colonialism and the practices and roles that emerged in the subsequent period, which moulded the identities, aims and strategies of post-colonial governments and separatist rebels. Based on a wealth of primary sources, Voller focuses on two post-colonial separatist wars; In Iraqi Kurdistan, between Kurdish separatists and the government in Baghdad, and Southern Sudan, between black African insurgents and the government in Khartoum. By providing an account of both conflicts, he offers a new understanding of colonialism, decolonisation and the international politics of the post-colonial world. Dilan Okcuoglu is post-doctoral fellow at Americ

The Italian Empire and the Great War (Oxford UP, 2021) by Vanda Wilcox brings an imperial and colonial perspective to the Italian experience of the First World War. Italy's decision for war in 1915 built directly on Italian imperial ambitions from the late nineteenth century onwards, and its conquest of Libya in 1911–12. The Italian empire was conceived both as a system of overseas colonies under Italian sovereignty, and as an informal global empire of emigrants; both were mobilized to support the war in 1915–18. The war was designed to bring about 'a greater Italy' both literally and metaphorically. In pursuit of global status, Italy fought a global war, sending troops to the Balkans, Russia, and the Middle East, though with limited results. Italy's newest colony, Libya, was also a theatre of the war effort, as the anti-colonial resistance there linked up with the Ottoman Empire, Germany, and Austria to undermine Italian rule. Italian race theories underpinned this expansionism: the book examines how Italian

Maeve Ryan’s new book Humanitarian Governance and the British Antislavery World System (Yale UP, 2022) highlights Britain’s early-nineteenth-century, Royal Navy seizures of slave ships and the processes involved in the “liberation” of these enslaved Africans. Nearly two hundred thousand Africans were resettled throughout the British Empire from Sierra Leone to St Helena, the British West Indies, and by treaties to Cuba and Brazil. From 1808 to the end of the Atlantic slave trade, abolitionists attempted to bring relief to these “liberated” Africans. Yet, the needs of Empire often clashed with the moral ideals of abolitionism creating then a “benevolent despotism.” Ryan’s work highlights these imperial experiments across time and the Atlantic and the manifestations of this resettlement. Ryan expertly claims that what Britain did during this period is the beginning ruminations “Humanitarian Governance”; that the evolution of what we today consider humanitarian relief has at its roots this “anti slavery mother.”

Why did some sectors of the Rwandan churches adopt an ambiguous attitude towards the genocide against the Tutsi which claimed the lives of around 800,000 people in three months between April and July 1994? What prevented the churches' acceptance that they may have had some responsibility? And how should we account for the efforts made by other sectors of the churches to remember and commemorate the genocide and rebuild pastoral programmes?  Drawing on interviews with genocide survivors, Rwandans in exile, missionaries and government officials, as well as Church archives and other sources, this book is the first academic study on Christianity and the genocide against the Tutsi to explore these contentious questions in depth, and reveals more internal diversity within the Christian churches than is often assumed. While some Christians, Protestant as well as Catholic, took risks to shelter Tutsi people, others uncritically embraced the interim government's view that the Tutsi were enemies of the people and some,

In 2005, Tony Perman attended a ceremony alongside the living and the dead. His visit to a Zimbabwe farm brought him into contact with the madhlozi, outsider spirits that Ndau people rely upon for guidance, protection, and their collective prosperity. Perman's encounters with the spirits, the mediums who bring them back, and the accompanying rituals form the heart of his ethnographic account of how the Ndau experience ceremonial musicking. As Perman witnessed other ceremonies, he discovered that music and dancing shape the emotional lives of Ndau individuals by inviting them to experience life's milestones or cope with its misfortunes as a group. Signs of the Spirit: Music and the Experience of Meaning in Ndau Ceremonial Life (U Illinois Press, 2020) explores the historical, spiritual, and social roots of ceremonial action and details how that action influences the Ndau's collective approach to their future. The result is a vivid ethnomusicological journey that delves into the immediacy of musical experience