Constructions of Belonging provides a history of local communities living in Southeastern Nigeria since the late nineteenth century, examining the processes that have defined, changed, and re-produced these communities. Harneit-Sievers explores both the meanings and the uses that the community members have given to their particular areas, while also looking at the processes that have shaped local communities, and have made them work and continue to be relevant, in a world dominated by the modern territorial state and by worldwide flows of people, goods, and ideas. Axel Harneit-Sievers is a...

Elizabeth Isichei explores the Atlantic slave trade, as reflected in the poetics of rumour and the poetics of memory -- an approach different from the quantitative and demographic studies which have transformed the subject over the past twenty years. To this and to her study of popular consciousness in the colony and postcolony, she brings together a wide range of disciplines -- ethnography, art and art history, and contemporary literary theory among them -- to look at the intellectual history of Africa, from African rather than European premises. The result is a history of popular...

Sufi City: Urban Design and Archetypes in Touba is a geographical study of the modern Muslim holy city of Touba in Senegal, capital of the Mouride Sufi order. Touba was founded in 1887 by a Sufi shaykh in a moment of mystic illumination. Since the death of the founder in 1927, the Mouride order has designed and built the entire city. Touba is named for Tuba, the "Tree of Paradise" of Islamic tradition. This archetypal tree articulates Islamic conceptions of righteous life on earth, divine judgment, and access to the Hereafter; the city of Touba actualizes this spiritual construct. Important...

Yoruba Identity and Power Politics covers the major issues on Yoruba history and politics, thus offering a solid understanding of one of the most popular ethnic groups in Africa. With a careful blend of sources and methods, narratives on the past and present, the book manages to present a long history as the backdrop to complicated contemporary politics. Contributors: Tunde M. Akinwumi, Olufunke A. Adeboye, R. T. Akinyele, Aribidesi Usman, Tunde Oduwobi, Olufemi Vaughan, Abolade Adeniji, Jean-Luc Martineau, Ann O'Hear, Rasheed Olaniyi, Charles Temitope Adeyanju, Julius O. Adekunle, Funso...

Many societies worldwide possess oral histories and long memories, reaching back many centuries, particularly of wars and events of great trauma. Labeling them -blood memories- in this book, Stephanie Beswick presents a pre-colonial history of Southern Sudan, a region that, according to some, -has no history.- Beginning in the fourteenth century, the book follows the region's largest ethnic group today, the Dinka, from their original homelands in the central Sudanese Gezira between the Blue and White Niles, into their more recently adopted homelands in Southern Sudan. Beswick demonstrates how...

The history of world art has long neglected the work of modern African artists and their search for forms of modernist expression as either irrelevant to the discourse of modern art or as fundamentally subservient to the established narrative of Western European modernist practice. With this engaging new volume, Sylvester Ogbechie refutes this approach by examining the life and work of Ben Enwonwu (1917-94), a premier African modernist and pioneer whose career opened the way for the postcolonial proliferation and increased visibility of African art. In the decades between Enwonwu's birth and...

The Abolition of the Slave Trade in Southeastern Nigeria, 1885-1950, is a history of the campaign waged by Great Britain in colonial Nigeria from approximately 1885 on, to abolish the internal slave trade in the Bight of Biafra and its hinterland, a region also known as Eastern Nigeria, Southeastern Nigeria, the Eastern Provinces, or the trans-Niger Provinces. It treats the internal slave trade and the war against it in this region and period as themes separate from the institution of slavery in the same area and the campaign to root it out generally known as emancipation. For this reason,...

This book analyzes how indigenous political power structures in Nigeria survived both the constricting forces of colonialism and the modernization programs of postcolonial regimes. With twenty detailed case studies on colonial and postcolonial Nigerian history, the complex interactions between chieftaincy structures and the rapidly shifting sociopolitical and economic conditions of the twentieth century become evident. Drawing on the interactions between the state and chieftaincy, this study goes beyond earlier Africanist scholarship that attributes the resilience of these indigenous...

Writing African History is an essential work for anyone who wants to write, or even seriously read, African history. It will replace Daniel McCall's classic Africa in Time Perspective as the introduction to African history for the next generation and as a reference for professional historians, interested readers, and anyone who wants to understand how African history is written. Africa in Time Perspective was written in the 1960s, when African history was a new field of research. This new book reflects the development of African history since then. It opens with a comprehensive introduction...

In this original interdisciplinary study of Togo and African colonial history, Benjamin Lawrance synthesizes political, gender, and social history by documenting the contributions of rural-dwelling populations in anti-colonial struggles. Anchoring his arguments on the premise that nationalist historiographies have overstated the role of urban and elite power while undervaluing the strategic place of rural constituencies, Lawrance uses the Ewe nationalist movement of southern Togo as a case study in what he terms -periurban colonialism- -- a historical paradigm that reunites the urban and...