The Infidels is a book about the: roles of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in today's world religious conflict. outside forces rapidly bearing down on each of them that will inevitably force each to make drastic changes in their beliefs. It exposes the origins of the underlying violent images that are built into these three belief systems and, although it leaves it to the reader to decide, argues that culpability for world religious conflict lies not only with the failures of Islam, but also with the failures of Judaism and Christianity. It calls on these ancient religions to face new world...

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 conflict in Rwanda and the Great Lakes in 1994-1996 attracted the horrified attention of the world's media, diplomats and aid workers struggling to make sense of the bloodshed. This study shows how the post-genocide regime in Rwanda managed to impose a simple, persuasive account of Central Africa's crises upon international commentators, and explains the ideological underpinnings of this official narrative. It is a sobering analysis of how simple, persuasive, but fatally misleading analysis of the situation led to policy errors that exacerbated the original crisis.

In Africa today, inherited conceptions of "honor" can obstruct democracy, inspire resistance to tyranny, and motivate the defense of dignity in the face of AIDS. This account of the role of "honor" in African history from the fourteenth century to the present argues that it is essential to understanding past and present African behavior.

Once the major success story of a troubled continent, by the early 1990s Kenya came to be regarded as its fallen star. This book challenges such images of reversal and the analytical polarities that sustain them. The analysis ranges from telescopic to microscopic fields, combining many disciplines and perspectives to give a rich and varied picture of the culture of politics in twentieth-century Kenya.

Using oral sources, as well as official and missionary archives, Martin Klein describes the history of slavery during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in three former French colonies. He considers the impact of the Atlantic slave trade and the evolution of slavery both before the French and under their rule. While he discusses French policy, the main focus of the book is the constantly changing relationships between slave and master, and the attempts on the part of slaves to seek freedom, or autonomy where they remained in servitude.

In this book, Phyllis Martin, a well-known Africanist scholar, opens up a whole new field of African research: the leisure activities of urban Africans. Her comprehensive study, set in colonial Brazzaville and based on a wide variety of written sources and interviews, investigates recreational activities from football and fashion to music, dance and night life. In it, she brings out the ways in which these activities built social networks, humanised daily life and forged new identities, and explains how they ultimately helped to remake older traditions and values with new cultural forms.

John Yoder chronicles the history of the Kanyok, a people from the southern savanna of Zaire, from before 1500 until their incorporation into the Congo Free State in the 1890s. By analyzing their oral traditions, myths, and legends, the author describes the political and cultural development of a people who, before 1891, had no written records, and whose history has previously been confined to the stale recitation of wars and succession struggles that characterize many existing books on pre-colonial Africa. Yoder sets his work firmly within the larger context of the southern savanna by...

Nineteenth-century Cape Town, the capital of the British Cape Colony, was conventionally regarded as a liberal oasis in an otherwise racist South Africa. Longstanding British influence was thought to mitigate the racism of the Dutch settlers and foster the development of a sophisticated and colour-blind English merchant class. Vivian Bickford-Smith skilfully interweaves political, economic and social analysis to show that the English merchant class, far from being liberal, were generally as racist as Afrikaner farmers. Theirs was, however, a peculiarly English discourse of race, mobilised...