Laurel Rose analyzes how traditional ruling elites in Swaziland, as in other parts of Africa, use harmony ideologies to downplay and resolve land disputes. Such disputes could be used by foreign development agents or indigenous new elites as justification for implementing land tenure changes, including a reduction of traditional elites' power based upon land control. Swazi commoners accept the cultural value and legitimacy of most harmony ideologies, but they adopt various strategies when disputing about particular land rights in order to produce more favorable outcomes. This book is unusual...

This study examines the interaction between growing palm oil export production and changes in Ngwa patterns of food production and family relations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It challenges the arguments of both dependency and vent-for-surplus theorists on the dominance of export-sector developments and the importance of changes initiated by Europeans. Local patterns of export growth and capital investment are shown to have been heavily influenced by independent changes in food production methods, gender and inter-generational relationships. Ngwa producers were affected by...

This book chronicles the rise to power of the student controlled Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in the northern Ethiopian province of Tigray.

This social and economic history of the island of Mauritius, from French colonization in 1721 to the beginnings of modern political life in the mid-1930s, emphasizes the importance of domestic capital formation, particularly in the sugar industry. Describing changing relationships among different elements in the society, slave, free and maroon, and East Indian indentured populations, it shows how these were conditioned by demographic changes, world markets, and local institutions. It brings the Mauritian case to the attention of scholars engaged in the comparative study of slavery and...

The South African War was a costly and bitterly contested struggle. It was fought in a region populated by five million people, four million of whom were black. This is the first history of the war to focus upon the wartime experiences of black people, and to examine the war in the context of a complex and rapidly changing colonial society increasingly shaped, but not yet transformed, by mining capital. The ways in which the war influenced the lives and livelihoods of different sections of the black population are studied - from chiefs and newspaper editors to peasant farmers and artisans, to...

This interpretation of the impact of slavery on African life emphasizes the importance of external demand for slaves by Occidental and Oriental purchasers in developing an active trade in slaves within Africa. The book summarizes a wide range of recent literature on slavery for all of tropical Africa. It analyzes the demography, economics, social structure and ideology of slavery in Africa from the beginning of large-scale slave exports in the seventeenth century to the gradual elimination of slavery in the twentieth century. While primarily a general survey, Dr. Manning presents original...

This is a book for all readers concerned with the future of Africa. The first history of the poor of Sub-Saharan Africa, it begins in the monasteries of thirteenth-century Ethiopia and ends in the South African resettlement sites of the 1980s. It provides a historical context for poverty in Africa--both the permanent poverty of the dispossessed and the temporary poverty of famine victims. Its thesis, modelled on the histories of poverty in Europe, is that most very poor Africans have been incapacitated for labor, bereft of support, and unable to fend for themselves in a land-rich economy. Dr....

The author shows how the societies of West Africa were transformed by the slave trade. The growth of the Atlantic trade stimulated the development of slavery within the region, with slaves working in the river and coasting trades or producing surplus grain to feed slaves in transit. A few held pivotal positions in the political structure of the coastal kingdoms of Senegambia. This local slave system had far-reaching consequences, leading to religious protest and slave rebellions. The changes in agricultural production fostered an ecological crisis.

In a study of Africa's political and religious past, Christopher Wrigley uses local traditions and comparative mythology to explore an ancient system of myth and ritual in the precolonial kingdom of Buganda, the nucleus of modern Uganda. The study includes critical assessment of oral traditions and places Buganda in a wider regional context. The book is an elegant, wide-ranging and original study of one of Africa's most famous kingdoms.

This is the first full-length study of the political economy of one of the African states which were formed in the course of the nineteenth-century Zulu revolution. The early chapters examine the evolution of the Swazi state and the dynamics of its stratified systems, paying particular attention to the 'layering' of inequality through marriage and inheritance patterns, and the simultaneous integration of age regiments and the elaboration of a national ideology based on the Swazi royalty. Dr Bonner then sets the Swazi state in the wider context of south-eastern Africa and discusses its...