This collection brings together scholars of history, archaeology, cultural studies, and others to present a nuanced image of fortifications, showing that over time the functions and impacts of the buildings changed as the motives, missions, allegiances, and power dynamics in the region also changed.

African cultures and politics remain significantly affected by precolonial and postcolonial configurations of modernity, as well as hegemonic global systems. This project explores Africa's conversation with itself and the rest of the world, critiquing universalist notions of democratization.

Ghana has always held a position of primacy in the African political and historical imagination, due in no small part to the indelible impression left president Kwame Nkrumah. This study examines the symbolic strategies he used to construct the Ghanaian state through currency, stamps, museums, flags, and other public icons.

During the Zimbabwean struggle for independence, the settler regime imprisoned numerous activists and others it suspected of being aligned with the guerrillas. This book is the first to look closely at the histories and lived experiences of these political detainees and prisoners, showing how they challenged and negotiated their incarceration.

President Robert Gabriel Mugabe of Zimbabwe is an enigmatic figure who has been in power for over three decades. He is a difficult subject to understand because his political life has attracted both admirers and critics. This book is the first of its kind

Literature remains one of the few disciplines that reflect the experiences, sensibility, worldview, and living realities of its people. Contemporary African literature captures the African experience in history and politics in a multiplicity of ways. Politics itself has come to intersect and impact on most, if not all, aspects of the African reality. This relationship of literature with African people's lives and condition forms the setting of this study. Tanure Ojaide's Indigeneity, Globalization, and African Literature: Personally Speaking belongs with a well-established tradition of...

This volume advances a slowly coalescing consensus around the imperative to ground discussions of leadership in Africa in the longue duree of the continent's specific history, culture, economy, and politics. It illuminates the conditions under which political leadership in postcolonial Africa has been produced, and the extent to which those conditions have shaped the kind of leaders and leadership paths which have consistently emerged across the continent. More often than not, popular rhetoric on leadership in African politics has tended to swing between the extremes of absolute condemnation...

The resurgence of regionalism is borne out of the current political logjams that have characterized the governance and operations of multilateral trading system over the past one decade and a half. Oloruntoba critically examines Euro-Nigeria relations within the context of the Economic Partnership Agreements in terms of the political and economic implications of the agreements on Nigeria's non-oil exports sub-sectors. Set within one of the main objectives of the Economic Partnership Agreements, he also interrogates the prospects and challenges of regional integration in Africa under the...

This book applies an interdisciplinary approach to evaluate the journey that Kenya has traveled as a nation since the end of colonialism on December 12, 1963. The book demonstrates that Kenya's postcolonial experience is marked with moments of tremendous feats amidst economic and political challenges that have on occasion strained the national fabric. While Kenya has distinguished itself as a commerce and industry hub in East Africa, the country is confronted with many challenges including job scarcity, ethnic differences nurtured by the political class, and widespread corruption.

This book explores the key milestones in education, gender, and policy that Kenya has achieved since independence, the challenges of this experience, and the future prospects. This edited collection of chapters also aims to illuminate the lessons learned from the experiences of the postcolonial period as well as postulate on the way forward. Through this exploration of the Kenyan experience since independence, the authors present an optimistic view that despite the many obstacles and challenges, the country still has promising prospects as a nation.