The World and a Very Small Place in Africa is a fascinating look at how contacts with the wider world have affected how people have lived in Niumi, a small and little-known region at the mouth of West
The World and a Very Small Place in Africa is a fascinating look at how contacts with the wider world have affected how people have lived in Niumi, a small and little-known region at the mouth of West
This groundbreaking volume explores the history of Muslim Fula business elites' participation in the post-independence politics of Sierra Leone. One of the country's main entrepreneurial groups, the F
West African history is inseparable from the history of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. According to historical archaeologist François Richard, however, the dominance of this narrativ
In this book, Oluwatoyin Oduntan offers a critical intervention in the scholarly fields of Nigerian, and West African history, as well as towards understanding the intellectual ideas by which modern A
Though Adjay recalls the glory of Elmina as the first urban center of the Gold Coast, he also echoes that nostalgic past against the present decadence and neglect, laying bare the yearning need for
“Timbuktu is a real place, and Charlie English will fuel your wanderlust with true descriptions of the fabled city’s past, present, and future.” –Fodor’s Two tales o
The Slave Coast, situated in what is now the West African state of Benin, was the epicentre of the Atlantic Slave Trade. But it was also an inhospitable, surf-ridden coastline, subject to crashing bre
A Vietnamese cook, a German journalist, and a Senegalese student—what did they have in common? They were all suspicious persons kept under surveillance by French colonial authorities in West Afr
The harrowing but triumphant story of Liberia’s greatest daughter—Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female president of an African nation and winner of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.When Ellen
Based on a previously unexamined body of qadi court records as well as two hundred oral interviews in Wolof and Mandinka, Contours of Change: Muslim Courts, Women, and Islamic Society in Colonial Bath
For the past decade, Boko Haram has relentlessly terrorized northeastern Nigeria. Few if any explanations for the rise of this violent insurgent group look beyond its roots in worldwide jihadism and r
A groundbreaking history that puts early and medieval West Africa in a global contextPick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the p
Based on a decade of fieldwork in southeastern Ghana and analysis of secondary sources, this book aims to reconstruct the religious history of the Anlo-Ewe peoples from the 1850s. In particular, it focuses on a corpus of rituals collectively known as 'Fofie', which derived their legitimacy from engaging with the memory of the slave-holding past. The Anlo developed a sense of discomfort about their agency in slavery in the early twentieth century which they articulated through practices such as ancestor veneration, spirit possession, and by forging links with descendants of peoples they formerly enslaved. Conversion to Christianity, engagement with 'modernity', trans-Atlantic conversations with diasporan Africans, and citizenship of the postcolonial state coupled with structural changes within the religious system - which resulted in the decline in Fofie's popularity - gradually altered the moral emphases of legacies of slavery in the Anlo historical imagination as the twentieth century
This book examines democracy, governance, and social justice in Côte d’Ivoire by analyzing the political effects of the 2011–2012 presidential conflict. Okosun explains driving facto
This book explores the world of Nigerian universities to offer an innovative perspective on the history of development and decolonisation from the 1930s to the 1960s. Using political, cultural and spa
A history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone and how the British used its success to justify colonialism in Africa British anti-slavery, widely seen as a great sacrifice of ec
