Spurred in part by the ongoing re-evaluation of sources and methods in research, African historiography in the past two decades has been characterized by the continued branching and increasing sophistication of methodologies and areas of specialization. The rate of incorporation of new sources and methods into African historical research shows no signs of slowing.This book is both a snapshot of current academic practice and an attempt to sort through some of the problems scholars f...

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 a range of fascinating historical examples, drawn from over 5 millennia across this vast continent.

There are many stories we can tell about the past, and we are not, perhaps, as free as we might imagine in our choice of which stories to tell, or where those stories end. John Arnold's Very Short Introduction is a stimulating essay about how we study and understand history. The book begins by inviting us to think about various questions provoked by our investigation of history, and explores the ways these questions have been answered in the past. Concepts such as causation, interpretation...

Africa is a huge continent, as large as the more habitable areas of Europe and Asia put together. It has a history immensely long, yet the study of that history as an academic discipline in its own right is little more than fiftyyears old. Since then the subject has grown enormously, but the question of what this history is and how it has been approached still needs to be asked, not least to answer the question of why should we study it.This book takes as its subject the last 10,00...

Poverty is South Africa's greatest challenge. But what is 'poverty'? How can it be measured? And how can it be reduced if not eliminated? In South Africa, human science knowledge about the cost of living grew out of colonialism, industrialization, apartheid and civil resistance campaigns, which makes this knowledge far from neutral or apolitical. South Africans have used the Poverty Datum Line (PDL), Gini coefficients and other poverty thresholds to petition the state, to chip away at the ...

The Horn of Africa consists of five nations with unique historical experiences from lofty and distinguishing to awful and tarnishing. North-East Africa is a region shaped by history from migrations and invasions to modern global politics and internal dynamics of historical ethnic and religious sectarian divisions. Aside Ethiopia, the other nations of Africas horn have been significantly shaped by the delineation of boundaries by Islamic and later European empires. That has defined its poli...

Presenting a set of rich case-studies which demonstrate novel and productive approaches to the study of colonial knowledge, this volume covers British, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial encounters in Africa, Asia, America and the Pacific, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

This book is an oral history-based study of the politics of history in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Using life history and thematic interviews, the author brings the narratives of officials, survivors, returnees, perpetrators, and others whose lives have been intimately affected by genocide into conversation with scholarly studies of the Rwandan genocide, and Rwandan history more generally. In doing so, she explores the following questions: How do Rwandans use history to m...

This book explores how modern Egyptians understand the Mamluks and reveals the ways in which that historical memory is utilized for political and ideological purposes. It specifically examines the representations of the Mamluks from two historical periods: the Mamluk Sultanate era (1250–1517) and the Mamluks under the Ottoman era (1517–1811) focusing mostly on the years 1760–1811. Although the Mamluks have had a great impact on the Egyptian collective memory and modern thought, the subject...

Based on archival sources and oral history, this book reconstructs a border-building process in Namibia that spanned more than sixty years. The process commenced with the establishment of a temporary veterinary defence line against rinderpest by the German colonial authorities in the late nineteenth century and ended with the construction of a continuous two-metre-high fence by the South African colonial government sixty years later. This 1250-kilometre fence divides northern from central ...

While there are five important festschriften on Toyin Falola and his work, this book fulfills the need for a single-authored volume that can be useful as a textbook. I develop clearly articulated rubrics and overarching concepts as the foundational basis for analyzing Falola's work.

Inventing Africa is a critical account of narratives which have selectively interpreted and misinterpreted the continent's deep past.Writers have created alluring images of lost cities, vast prehistoric migrations and golden ages of past civilisations. Debates continue on the African origins of humankind, the contributions of ancient Egypt to the world and Africa's importance to global history.Images of 'Africa', simplifying a complex and diverse continent, have existed fro...