African History

Reflecting on South Africa's achievement of majority rule, this book takes a critical and searching look at the country's past. It presents South Africa's past in an objective, clear, and refreshing manner.

This extensive history of South Africa was written by some of the country's most prominent historians. Its broad scope includes South Africa's pre-colonial history, slavery, Afrikaner nationalism, an environmental history and an analysis of a post-apartheid South Africa.

The new edition of The Making of Modern South Africa provides a comprehensive, current introduction to the key themes and debates concerning the history of this controversial country.

Kenya's Independence Constitution: Constitution-Making and End of Empire is a narrative of the evolution of the constitution that was put into effect as Kenya's history as a colonial possession came to an end. It details the attempts of the colony's political elite and the British Colonial Office to find a constitutional means to move Kenya to the status of independent state. As this process moved forward, political ethnicity assumed central significance. This produced an environment in which demands for a federal constitution, popularly termed majimbo, came to dominate constitutional discourse.

Nigeria is Africa's most populous country and the world's eighth largest oil producer, but its success has been undermined in recent decades by ethnic and religious conflict, political instability, rampant official corruption and an ailing economy.

The nineteenth-century American Colonization Society (ACS) project of persuading all American free blacks to emigrate to the ACS colony of Liberia could never be accomplished. Few free blacks volunteered, and greater numbers would have overwhelmed the meager resources of the ACS. No state was more involved with the project than Virginia, where white Virginians provided much of the political and organizational leadership and black Virginians provided a majority of the emigrants. In An African Republic, Marie Tyler-McGraw traces the parallel but seldom intersecting tracks of black and white Virginians' interests in African colonization, from revolutionary-era efforts at emancipation legislation to African American churches' concern for African missions. In Virginia, African colonization attracted aging revolutionaries, republican mothers and their daughters, bondpersons schooled and emancipated for Liberia, evangelical planters and merchants, urban free blacks, opportunistic politicians, Quakers, and gentlemen novelists.

In the mid-1990s, civil war and genocide ravaged Rwanda. Since then, the country's new leadership has undertaken a highly ambitious effort to refashion Rwanda's politics, economy, and society, and the country's accomplishments have garnered widespread praise. Remaking Rwanda is the first book to examine Rwanda's remarkable post-genocide recovery in a comprehensive and critical fashion. By paying close attention to memory politics, human rights, justice, foreign relations, land use, education, and other key social institutions and practices, this volume raises serious concerns about the depth and durability of the country's reconstruction.

This is a sweeping, colorful, and concise narrative history of Egypt from the beginning of human settlement in the Nile River valley 5000 years ago to the present day.

Updated and revised to emphasise long-term perspectives on current issues facing the continent, the new 2nd Edition of A History of Modern Africa recounts the full breadth of Africa's political, economic, and social history over the past two centuries. Adopts a long-term approach to current issues, stressing the importance of nineteenth-century and deeper indigenous dynamics in explaining Africa's later twentieth-century challenges Places a greater focus on African agency, especially during the colonial encounter Includes more in-depth coverage of non-Anglophone Africa Offers expanded coverage of the post-colonial era to take account of recent developments, including the conflict in Darfur and the political unrest of 2011 in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya

Inventing Africa is a critical account of narratives which have selectively interpreted and misinterpreted the continent's deep past.

Global historical events are too often recounted exclusively through European and American voices. African Voices of the Global Past explores six major historical developments of global significance - the Atlantic slave trade, industrialization, colonialism, the World Wars, decolonization, and the development of modern feminism - from an African perspective. Voices emerge throughout the text in the form of primary sources that explore the personal accounts of individuals.

The Killer Trail tells the tale of one of the most notorious atrocities to take place during the European 'scramble for Africa', a real life story of insane violence in the heart of an exotic continent that eerily prefigures fictional accounts such as The Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. The Voulet-Chanoine mission left Dakar in 1898 for the center of Africa and the region of Lake Chad with the aim of establishing effective borders between the French and British empires while 'pacifying' a notoriously belligerent region. Wreaking havoc as it went along, the mission degenerated into an extraordinary display of colonial violence and cruelty, leaving a trail of pillage, murder, and enslavement of the local inhabitants in its wake.