This study examines the role of cowrie-shell money in West African trade, particularly the slave trade. The shells were carried from the Maldives to the Mediterranean by Arab traders for further transport across the Sahara, and to Europe by competing Portuguese, Dutch, English and French traders for onward transport to the West African coast. In Africa they served to purchase the slaves exported to the New World, as well as other less sinister exports. Over a large part of West Africa they became the regular market currency, but were severely devalued by the importation of thousands of tons...

This book is a major contribution to the social, political and intellectual history of the largest colonial state in Africa, the French West African Federation. By focusing on the specific subject of the development of French policy towards Islam, it sheds light on a wide range of issues, from the grand strategy of French imperialism to the psychology of individual administrators in isolated outposts of the empire. Christopher Harrison argues that in order to make sense of colonial rule, it is vitally important to understand the way in which the colonial power thought about the people it...

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.

This authoritative study of 400 years of Senegambian history is unrivaled in its detailed grasp of published and unpublished materials. Taking as his subject the vast area covering the Senegal and Gambia river basins, Boubacar Barry explores the changing dynamics of regional trade, clashes between African and Muslim authorities, the colonial system and the slave trade. This newly-translated book is a vital tool in our understanding of West African history.

This is a history of the training and work of East African doctors since modern medicine began in the region during the 1870s. It discusses recruitment and education of doctors, their understanding and practice of modern medicine, the struggle to secure professional status and to preserve it amid recent political and economic decline. Proposing a new understanding of professionalization in the Third World, it ends with an account of their important contribution to the study and control of AIDS.

A key theme in the West African trading system of the nineteenth century is the transition from the slave trade to "legitimate" commerce, and its significance for the African societies of the region. In this period of transition, trade in palm oil was at the core of relations between Britain and West Africa in the nineteenth century, and of immense importance to the economies of large parts of West Africa. Filling a major gap in the literature, Martin Lynn's authoritative study of the trade covers the whole of this critical period for all of West Africa.

Scholarship on the West African kingdom of Asante is at the leading edge of Africanist research. T.C. McCaskie gives a detailed and nuanced historical portrait of precolonial Asante. The book is both a profound historical reconstruction of an African polity, and a deeply informed meditation on Asante concepts and ideas. Throughout the book, the Asante experience is consistently discussed in relation to a broad range of historiography and critical theory.

In the late seventeenth century Wala emerged as a small state in what is now northwestern Ghana. Ivor Wilks traces the history of Wala from its beginnings to the present, paying particular attention to the complex relations between the Muslim and non-Muslim elements in the population. He also examines the impact of Zabrima, Samorian, British, and French intrusions into Wala affairs. By the use of orally transmitted traditions and recensions of these in both Arabic and Hausa, he is able to show how the Wala themselves view thier past. Ivor Wilks analyzes the periodic eruptions of communal...