Kategoria BISAC: History >> Africa - Central

Like stars, societies are born, and this story deals with such a birth. It asks a fundamental and compelling question: How did societies first coalesce from the small foraging communities that had roamed in West Central Africa for many thousands of years?

Jan Vansina continues a career-long effort to reconstruct the history of African societies before European contact in How Societies Are Born. In this complement to his previous study Paths in the Rainforests, Vansina employs a provocative combination of archaeology and historical linguistics to turn his scholarly...

The first decades of the twentieth century were years of dramatic change in Zanzibar, a time when the social, economic, and political lives of island residents were in incredible flux, framed by the abolition of slavery, the introduction of colonialism, and a tide of urban migration. Pastimes and Politics explores the era from the perspective of the urban poor, highlighting the numerous and varied ways that recently freed slaves and other immigrants to town struggled to improve their individual and collective lives and to create a sense of community within this new environment. In...

This volume deals with aspects of genocide in Rwandaand Cambodia that have been largely unexplored to date, including the impact of regional politics and the role played by social institutions in perpetrating genocide. Although the -story- of the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979 and that of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 have been written about in detail, most have focused on how the genocides took place, what the ideas and motives were that led extremist factions to attempt to kill whole sections of their country's population, and who their victims were. This volume builds on our...

After the Holocaust, the victorious Allies pledged "never again" and enshrined their promise in the UN Convention on Genocide. Daniela Kroslak explores what the responsibility to prevent genocide entails by asking the following questions about what happened in Rwanda in 1994: To what extent can external actors, such as the French government, be held responsible for not preventing or suppressing genocide? Why did outsiders remain passive while Hutu extremists perpetrated genocide against their compatriots? How can the French government's responsibility be evaluated? What was France's role...