Southern Africa surveys the contemporary history of the whole region encompassing economic, social, political, security, foreign policy, health, environmental and gender issues in one short succinct volume.Positioning the collapse of Portugal’s African Empire in the context of the region’s history since 1945, Farley asserts that this collapse set in motion a train of events that eventually led to the transition of power from minority to majority rule in Angola, Mozambique,...

Africa is playing a more important role in world affairs than ever before. Yet the most common images of Africa in the American mind are ones of poverty, starvation, and violent conflict. But while these problems are real, that does not mean that Africa is a lost cause. Instead, as Stephen Ellis explains in Season of Rains, we need to rethink Africa’s place in time if we are to understand it in all its complexity—it is a region where growth and prosperity coexist with failed state...

The Berber identity movement in North Africa was pioneered by the Kabyles of Algeria. But a preoccupation with identity and language has obscured the fact that Kabyle dissidence has been rooted in democratic aspirations inspired by the political traditions of Kabylia itself, a Berber-speaking region in the north of Algeria. The political organisation of pre-colonial Kabylia, from which these traditions originate, was well described by nineteenth-century French authors. But their inability ...

This book chronicles the life of Nelson Mandela from his early childhood, his lifetime struggle, his twenty-seven years in prison on Robbens Island, including his being elected as the first black president of South Africa to his death in December 2013. The book also provides a brief history of the development of South Africa from its early days that laid the foundation for the oppressive Apartheid System. The apartheid era stripped blacks of most of their rights, their dignity, and individ...

Now we will think about the other two tribes who live in this country, but who are of quite a different race from the others. These little red and black Pigmy peoples do not have villages at all. They are all hunters, and each man wanders with his wife and children wherever he chooses. Then, near the village of some chief of another tribe, he collects grass and sticks, and builds a little house which is too small for an ordinary man to stand upright inside. The Pigmy people are not so dark...

Africa’s newest nation has a long history. Often considered remote and isolated from the rest of Africa, and usually associated with the violence of slavery and civil war, South Sudan has been an arena for a complex mixing of peoples, languages, and beliefs. The nation’s diversity is both its strength and a challenge as its people attempt to overcome the legacy of decades of war to build a new economic, political, and national future.Most recent studies of South Sudan’s history hav...

Is the West to blame for the agony of Uganda and its neighbors?In this powerful account of Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni’s 30 year reign, Helen Epstein chronicles how Western leaders’ single-minded focus on the War on Terror and their naïve dealings with strongmen are at the root of much of the turmoil in eastern and central Africa.Museveni’s involvement in the conflicts in Sudan, South Sudan, Rwanda, Congo, and Somalia has earned him substantial amounts...

First Published in 1979. This is a collection of twelve lectures, essays and articles with the aim of revealing some of the too many aspects of the African past yet to be explored or sufficiently developed. Another aim was to attempt new perspectives and interpretations of the more familiar aspects. The themes—exploration, Western-style education, the reaction of Africans to the activities of Christian missions, and the thought-pattern and modernity aspirations of the educated elite—have t...

This book combines evidence from natural and social sciences to examine the impact on Africa of seven cholera pandemics since 1817, particularly the current impact of cholera on such major countries as Senegal, Angola, Mozambique, Congo, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Myron Echenberg highlights the irony that this once-terrible scourge, having receded from most of the globe, now kills thousands of Africans annually - Africa now accounts for more than 90 percent of the world's cases and deaths ...

Based on the multiple lives and tumultuous times of Vance Moran, Ghosts of Time takes the reader on an extraordinary, often unbelievable real-life adventure. An abusive childhood in the swamps of Louisiana, a family breadwinner at age six, alone by the age of twelve and being a professional boxer does not prepare Vance for what he faces as a US Military pilot at eighteen on a secret mission behind enemy lines in the scorching, barren wastelands of Northern Africa during World War II. Few h...

No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky stands as a key text in the history of the eleven-year struggle against Portuguese rule in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. Though perhaps less well known than the struggles in Angola and Mozambique, the liberation war waged by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) easily ranks alongside those conflicts as an example of an African independence movement triumphing against overwhelming odds.Basil Davidson, ...

This book argues that the Dutch East India Company empire manifested itself through multiple networks that amalgamated spatially and over time into an imperial web whose sovereignty was effectively created and maintained but always partial and contingent. Networks of Empire proposes that early modern empires were comprised of durable networks of trade, administration, settlement, legality, and migration whose regional circuits and territorially and institutionally based nodes of regulatory...