Africa category: 4903 books

Essential reading for anyone interested in the African continent and the diversity of human history, this Very Short Introduction looks at Africa's past and reflects on the changing ways it has been imagined and represented. Key themes in current thinking about Africa's history are illustrated with...

With forced marriage, as with so many human rights issues, the sensationalized hides the mundane, and oversimplified popular discourses miss the range of experiences. In sub-Saharan Africa, the relationship between coercion and consent in marriage is a complex one that has changed over time and place,...

African History through Sources recounts the history of colonial Africa through more than 100 primary sources produced by a variety of actors: ordinary men and women, the educated elite, and colonial officials. Including official documents, as well as interviews, memoirs, lyrics, and photographs,...

This history of African slavery from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries examines how indigenous African slavery developed within an international context. Paul E. Lovejoy discusses the medieval Islamic slave trade and the Atlantic trade as well as the enslavement process and the marketing...

Patrick Manning refuses to divide the African diaspora into the experiences of separate regions and nations. Instead, he follows the multiple routes that brought Africans and people of African descent into contact with one another and with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In weaving these stories together,...

Much has been written about the origins of the great push which led Europe to colonise sub-Saharan Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. This book provides a new perspective on this controversial subject by focussing on Europe and a range of empire-building states: Germany, France, Italy and...

Mali is currently the seventh largest country in Africa. It shares borders with Mauritania and Senegal in the west, Algeria in the north, Guinea and Ivory Coast in the south, and Burkina Faso and Niger in the east. After decades of dictatorship, in 1992, a new democratic constitution was adopted and...

A History of the Yoruba People is an audacious comprehensive exploration of the founding and growth of one of the most influential groups in Africa. In this commendable book, S. Adebanji Akintoye deploys four decades of historiography research with current interpretation and analyses to present the most...

The Republic of the Sudan was long the largest country in Africa and, according to the general consensus, also one of the least successful in many ways. This was not entirely its fault since it lay along the fault line between Muslim and Christian Africa and between the Nile Valley civilizations and...

Presenting a continent-wide comparative analysis of ethnic, political, and colonially based insurgencies, this text examines the causes, tactics, outcomes, and key individuals of African insurgent events and assesses a range of foreseeable outcomes in Africa's multiple regions of continuing political...

The Igbo are one of the most populous ethnic groups in Nigeria and are perhaps best known and celebrated in the work of Chinua Achebe. In this landmark collection on Igbo society and arts, Toyin Falola and Raphael Chijioke Njoku have compiled a detailed and innovative examination of the Igbo experience...

The mobilization of local ideas about racial difference has been important in generating, and intensifying, civil wars that have occurred since the end of colonial rule in all of the countries that straddle the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. From Sudan to Mauritania, the racial categories deployed...

In July 2011 the Republic of South Sudan achieved independence, concluding what had been Africa's longest running civil war. The process leading to independence was driven by the Sudan Peoples' Liberation Movement, a primarily Southern rebel force and political movement intent on bringing about the...

The push for independence in African nations was ultimately an incomplete process, with the people often left to wrestle with a partial, imperfect legacy. Rather than settle for liberation in name alone, the people engaged in an ongoing struggle for meaningful freedom. Phyllis Taoua shows how the...