African social development is often explained from outsider perspectives that are mainly European and Euro-American, leaving African indigenous discourses and ways of knowing and doing absent from dis
How is it that rural poverty in southern Tanzania appears both easy to explain and yet also mystifying? Why is it that 'development' is such a touchstone, when actual attempts at fostering development have been largely ephemeral and/or unpopular for decades? In this book, Felicitas Becker traces dynamics of rural poverty based on the exportation of foodstuffs rather than the better-known problems connected to exportation of migrant labour, and examines what has kept the development industry going despite its failure to break these dynamics. Becker argues that development planners often exaggerated their prospects to secure funding, repackaged old strategies as new to maintain their promise, and shifted blame onto rural Africans for failing to meet the expectations they had raised. But the rural poor, too, pursued conversations on the causes and morality of poverty and wealth. Despite their dependence and deprivation, officials found repeatedly that they could not take them for granted.
Africa has been and currently is the site of numerous conflicts and crises. Authors previously wrote of these as specifically African problems or the problems of Europeans in Africa, but newer scholar
In December 1963, Kenya formally declared its independence yet it would take a year of intense negotiations for it to transform into a presidential republic, with Jomo Kenyatta as its first president. Archival records of the independence negotiations, however, reveal that neither the British colonial authorities nor the Kenyan political elite foresaw the formation of a presidential regime that granted one man almost limitless executive powers. Even fewer expected Jomo Kenyatta to remain president until his death in 1978. Power and the Presidency in Kenya reconstructs Kenyatta's political biography, exploring the links between his ability to emerge as an uncontested leader and the deeper colonial and postcolonial history of the country. In describing Kenyatta's presidential style as discreet and distant, Angelo shows how the burning issues of land decolonisation, the increasing centralisation of executive powers and the repression of political oppositions shaped Kenyatta's politics. Tel
This book examines the concept of land reform as defined by selected African states during the colonial and post-colonial eras, analyzing the factors and conditions that led to reforms and the social,
The Niger Delta Region has in the past two decades experienced protracted violent conflicts. At the roots of these violent conflicts are the genuine quests of the people for sustainable development th
While Africa is too often regarded as lying on the periphery of the global political arena, this is not the case. African nations have played an important historical role in world affairs. It is with
Elizabeth Thornberry uses historical evidence to shed light on South Africa's contemporary epidemic of sexual violence. Drawing on over a thousand cases from a diverse set of courts, Thornberry reconstructs the history of rape in South Africa's Eastern Cape, from the precolonial era to the triumph of legal and sexual segregation, and digs deep into questions of conceptions of sexual consent. Through this process, Thornberry also demonstrates the political stakes of disputes over sexual consent, and the ways in which debates over the regulation of sexuality shaped both white and black politics in this period. From customary authority to missionary Christianity and humanitarian liberalism to segregationism, political claims implied theories of sexual consent, and enabled distinctive claims to control female sexuality. The political history of rape illuminates not only South Africa's contemporary crisis of sexual violence, but the entangled histories of law, sexuality, and politics across
This book examines regional development and planning in a poor administrative region of Ghana, assessing the effectiveness of the programmes and projects initiated to reduce poverty, d
Colonial Buganda was one of the most important and richly documented kingdoms in East Africa. In this book, Jonathon L. Earle offers the first global intellectual history of the Kingdom, using a series of case studies, interviews and previously inaccessible private archives to offer new insights concerning the multiple narratives used by intellectuals. Where previous studies on literacy in Africa have presupposed 'sacred' or 'secular' categories, Earle argues that activists blurred European epistemologies as they reworked colonial knowledge into vernacular debates about kingship and empire. Furthermore, by presenting Catholic, Muslim and Protestant histories and political perspectives in conversation with one another, he offers a nuanced picture of the religious and social environment. Through the lives, politics, and historical contexts of these African intellectuals, Earle presents an important argument about the end of empire, making the reader rethink the dynamics of political
This volume seeks to identify and examine two categories of colonial and postcolonial knowledge production about Africa. These two broad categories are "environment" and "landscape," and both are usef
Cutting across countries, genres, and time periods, this volume explores topics ranging from hip hop’s influence on Maasai identity in current day Tanzania to jazz in Bulawayo during the interwar year
