New Books In African Studies

Professor Sean D. Murphy is the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor of Law at George Washington University and co-author of the book Litigating War: Mass Civil Injury and the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission (Oxford University Press, 2013) with Won Kidane, Associate Professor of Law at the Seattle University Law School, and Thomas R. Snider, an international arbitrator at Greenberg Taurig. Their book goes to the heart and intricacies of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission. Its analysis and comprehensiveness is certainly insightful and is a must-read for anyone wanting to learn about the commission and its context.  Professor Murphy discusses with us some of the contents of the book, providing details on the war that occasioned the commission, the commission’s establishment, its jurisdiction and other very pertinent issues relating to the commission’s work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the interplay between the physical human body and the body politic? This question is at the heart of Ellen J. Amster‘s Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956 (University of Texas Press, 2013). In this pioneering, interdisciplinary study, Professor Amster explores the French campaign to colonize Morocco through medicine. It is through medicine and medical encounters that Amster reveals competing ideas of “scientific paradigm (cosmologies), knowledge systems (hygiene and medical theory), and the technologies of physical intervention (therapeutics)” (p. 2) between the colonizing French positivists and the Moroccan populace. Amster’s breadth of expertise in the fields of medical history, Moroccan/North African history, the history of French colonization, the study of Islam and Sufism, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy is equally matched to the depth in which she explores these topics throughout the six chapters of her work. Each chapter explores a

Host Jonathan Judaken speaks with Xolela Mangcu, biographer of Anti-Apartheid leader Steve Biko, about the life and murder of Steve Biko, as well as the struggle for equality in South Africa under Apartheid rule, and how it relates to the Civil Rights Movement in America.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In our fast-paced world, it is easy to move from one crisis to another. Conflicts loom in rapid succession, problems demand solutions (or at least analysis) and impending disasters require a response. It is all we can do to pay attention to the present moment. Lingering on the consequences of the past seems to take too much of our finite attention. Jennie Burnet‘s fantastic new book Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory and Silence in Rwanda (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), offers a useful corrective to this fascination with the immediate. Jennie is interested primarily in what it means to live in a society ruptured by violence. She writes about how people try to speak, or not speak, about the killing that destroyed their families or those of their neighbors. She reflects on how the government’s decision to try to forestall future violence by eliminating ethnic categories affects individuals’ efforts to shape their own identity and self-understanding. She analyzes the way practices of memorialization re

Early modern European imperialism is really pretty easy to understand. Spain, Portugal, England, France, Russia and the rest were ruled by people whose business was war. They were conquerors, and conquering was what they did. So, when they attacked and subdued vast stretches of the world, they did so without regret or second-thought. All that changed after French Revolution. France was not, ostensibly at least, ruled by people whose business was war. Yet, even for the French republicans, imperialism remained attractive. And so the question was put: how does a republican state “do” imperialism? In her excellent book By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2011), Jennifer Sessions tells us how with reference to the French conquest and colonization of Algeria. The answer the French gave was strikingly simple: you make you imperial subjects into citizens and your imperial territories part of the mother country. That was the theory, at least. Sessions shows us how it work

We tend to understand the nuclear age as a historical break, a geopolitical and technological rupture. In Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press, 2012), Gabrielle Hecht transforms this understanding by arguing instead that nuclearity is a process, a phenomenon, a property distributed among and across objects. In this multi-sited study of several localities in Africa, Hecht weaves together narratives of atomic history, African history, and the histories of mining, economies, and health. Part I of the book looks carefully at the invention of a global market in uranium, exploring the place of African ores in a worldwide uranium trade in a series of accounts of the market and technopolitics in areas that include Niger, Gabon, Namibia, Europe, and the US. Part II focuses on the bodies and work of African mine workers and the production of nuclearity in the context of occupational health in locations that include Madagascar, Gabon, South Africa, and Namibia. Being Nuclear is grounded on sev

Lidwien Kapteijns is author of Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). She is the Kendall/Hodder Professor of History at Wellesley College. When the Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre (1969-1991) was expelled from Mogadishu in January 1991, the violence unleashed by competing political... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ask most educated people about the development of American slavery, and you’re likely to hear something about Virginia or, just maybe, South Carolina. In his far-reaching but concise and elegantly written new book A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Simon Newman takes us to the tiny Caribbean island of Barbados to trace the beginnings of African slavery in British America. The cotton slavery we know from the killing fields of Mississippi and Louisiana can be traced back to the sugar regimen that developed in Barbados. And that slavery, Newman shows, must be understood amidst the larger trajectory of bound labor in England and Scotland, and even in the British forts on Africa’s Gold Coast. A New World of Labor shows how the regime of bound servant labor — not the institution of West African slavery — provided the foundation for slavery as it developed in Britain’s New World plantation colonies. Learn more about your ad ch

Thanks in no small part to John K. Thornton, professor of history at Boston University, the field of Atlantic history has emerged as one of the most exciting fields of historical research over the past quarter century. Thornton has long insisted that the the age of discovery fostered linkages between the Americas, Europe, and Africa that transformed the diverse peoples of all three regions. Europeans did not simply impose their will upon Africans and Native Americans. A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2012) showcases Thornton’s deep research in the primary source material of multiple nationalities — and languages — to provide the most comprehensive interpretation we have of how the first era of globalization transformed the cultures of all the peoples of the Atlantic basin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2010, for the first time, an African nation hosted the FIFA World Cup. The advertisements surrounding the tournament used graphics and sounds intended to conjure the image of a vibrant, exotic land. In fact, though, the African-ness of the South African World Cup was pretty thin, when not wholly fabricated. For example, the music that introduced ESPN’s World Cup coverage sounded very African, as it opened with the sounding of an ox horn (the promo showed a bare-chested tribesman blowing the horn atop a mountain, silhouetted against the setting sun) and then built with pulsing drums and a choir singing layered refrains. But the piece had been written by a composer from Utah, the musicians had recorded it in Utah, and the choir consisted of members of the Broadway cast of The Lion King. At least Shakira’s ubiquitous song “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” had a more substantial African connection. It had been lifted, initially without credit, from a Cameroonian military song made popular in the 1980s by the

How did French colonial administrators, missionaries, and different groups of Africans interact with one another in colonial Senegal? In her new book, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940 (Stanford University Press, 2013), historian Elizabeth Foster draws on a wealth of archival material to reveal the interests and negotiations of key powerbrokers in the colony from the end of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. Emphasizing the heterogeneity of French rule and the significance of local agency in its various forms, Foster interrogates the relationship between metropole and colony while exploring a religious landscape in Senegal that included French, African, and metis Catholics; Muslims; and animists. The book’s chapters explore a variety of fascinating themes and events, from a scandal involving a nun accused of becoming pregnant in 1886, to the trial of an African accused of murdering a Wolof agent of the French empire, to the impact

The question Lee Ann Fujii asks in her new book Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Cornell University Press, 2009) is a traditional one in genocide studies. Her research builds on earlier scholars such as Christopher Browning, James Waller and Scott Strauss. Her eye for nuances and for the complexities of local relationships allows her to extend this earlier research in helping us to understand why neighbors killed neighbors in Rwanda. However. The metaphor she uses to help illuminate her explanations is both new and remarkably insightful. She argues that genocide must be viewed as a script. This script has directors and producers. but it also has actors. And the actors, far away from the directors, are able to interpret the script in ways that makes genocide make sense to their own lives and circumstances. sometimes this leads them to kill more people than they had been ordered to kill. But sometimes it leads individuals to ignore or save people who logically should have been targeted, sometimes

With elegant and accessible prose, Catherine Higgs takes us on a journey in Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa (Ohio University Press, 2012). It is a fascinating voyage fueled by the correspondence of Joseph Burtt, a man who had helped found a utopian commune before being sent by the chocolate magnate William Cadbury in the early 1900s to investigate labor conditions on cocoa plantations in Africa. For almost two years, Burtt observed and wrote and fevered his way to the large Portuguese colony of Angola, to Mozambique in Portuguese East Africa, and finally to Transvaal in British southern Africa. Higgs’s wonderfully evocative account uses Burtt’s journey to tell a much larger story about competing British and Portuguese colonial interests in Africa that was fueled, in part, by tensions over very different notions of “labor” and “slavery.” It is a story of the co-creation of two vital commodities of the twentieth century – chocolate and human beings – that invites readers into the hospital

Anybody who has been following the news in recent months knows that bloodshed has returned to South Africa. The recent violence and deaths among strikers in the country’s platinum mining industry resonate strongly in a country with such memories of the last years of apartheid. But they also point to a different reality – that South Africa is now undergoing a crisis of leadership, despite the continued electoral success of the ANC, and a crunch point in its history. Martin Plaut, the co-author of Who Rules South Africa? (Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2012), is himself a South African who wound up here in London many years ago and then ended up working as Africa Editor in the newsroom of the BBC World Service. He knows the country inside out but is also able to bring a deep level of understanding that comes from his own personal history and experience. In the book Martin and his co-author examine the roots of the ANC and move on to ask what kind of force it is now, in a South Africa that is itself changing rapidl

In Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the U.S.-Egyptian Alliance (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Jason Brownlee explains the two countries relationship over the past several decades.  From the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty up to the present, Brownlee describes four areas in which the U.S. strengthened Egyptian leaders: national defense, coup proofing, macroeconomic stability, and domestic repression. The book outlines the evolving relationship between Washington and Cairo, from Cold War efforts against the Soviet Union, to working with Egypt in the fight against Islamic terrorism.  Brownlee explains how repeated U.S. rhetoric of spreading democracy and human rights did not always match its actions, and how strategic interests almost always trumped idealistic goals, both in the past, and potentially in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The liberal media in the Western World takes a firm line on how two of the big issues facing Africa intersect – bluntly speaking Africa’s high levels of religiosity have contributed substantially to its high levels of HIV infection. Religion and AIDS in Africa (Oxford UP, 2012), however, tells a different story, and one based upon an impressive amount of data. For a start, the story that the authors tell is far more nuanced than this broad-brush representation of how religion has impacted HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. In places it has aggravated infection rates and in others it has led to lower levels, for instance through emphasising sex within marriage and through education. Often the picture depends far more upon the message being put out by particular religious leaders in particular villages than the niceties of any Islamic or Christian doctrine. Jenny Trinitapoli and Alex Weinreb also treat AIDS and HIV in a far more holistic way than simply talking about infection rates. They look at the impact

In the Pacific Northwest, immigrants from Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia coexist, making a life for themselves and their family in a new country. In the book Seeking Salaam : Ethiopians, Eritreans and Somalis in the Pacific Northwest (University of Washington Press, 2011), Sandra Chait goes into these communities to understand the particular issues and conflicts that they face, particularly with each other. Though these immigrants often work together and have children in the same school, tensions among them are high, due to historical as well as current events in the Horn of Africa. Violence and poverty continue to plague these three countries, and news from back home increases the resentment that creates a heavy burden for these immigrants to carry. Chait, herself having grown up in apartheid South Africa, felt a need to bear witness to their stories, and records their narratives with grace and sensitivity. Though Salaam (peace in Arabic) may be difficult to find, these survivors continue to search for it, as

Every so often a book lands on my desk about something so obviously interesting that I have never really considered it before. Bruce Whitehouse‘s Migrants and Strangers in an African City: Exile, Dignity, Belonging (Indiana University Press, 2012) is exactly like that, tackling something that is an integral part of the lives of millions across the continent of Africa, and so familiar as to almost be ignored: migration between African countries. The book is the result of extensive fieldwork by Bruce in Congo Brazzaville, examining the lives of West African immigrants (initially from Mali, but from other neighboring countries as well) who had moved there for work, and the challenges they face. Why were they there? What were they doing? How long did they want to stay? What were they there for? The result is an in-depth study that provokes more questions about other migrants in other settings across the continent. It opens a window on the motivations, lives, achievements and frustrations that affect so many Af

Three years ago I travelled overland with my wife from Victoria Falls through Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania. It felt like we were on a real adventure. Having just read Steve Kemper‘s excellent book Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 miles through Islamic Africa (Norton, 2012) about the real explorer, Heinrich Barth, I now feel like our trip was little more adventurous than a trip to the shops to buy some milk. Steve’s book brings home what an extraordinary feat a 19th-century expedition really was. The 10,000 miles that Barth covered took him over five years, from Tripoli down across the Sahara to Lake Chad, and then through the Sahel to Timbuktu. His passage took him through kingdoms, entrepot states and vast areas patrolled by ruthless bandits. The story is an insight into what really lay in those blank bits on European maps of the time – often everything in Africa other than the coast and a couple of rivers. These areas, far from being blank, teemed with life. Steve does a terrific job in documentin

When I saw Nwando Achebe‘s book The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe (Indiana University Press, 2011), I thought: “Really? A female king? Cool!” It turns out Ahebi Ugbabe was not only a female king, but also a female husband and father. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Ahebi Ugbaba was born late in the nineteenth century in Igboland, in present-day Nigeria. She fled home to escape her community’s dedication of her in marriage to a deity to compensate for a crime her father had committed. The marriage would have reduced her to the status of a slave. After twenty years as a prostitute and trader in exile, she returned and established herself: first as headman, then as warrant chief, and finally as king. For a biological woman to transform herself into a social man was a familiar practice in Igboland. But for anyone to be chief or king was not. The Igbo had practiced communitarian rule by groups of elders; it was the British who imposed rule by a single person. It was perhaps inevitable that Ahebi’