African History Commons^™

Book Reviews, Duncan Money

Zambia Social Science Journal

Review of:

The long shadow of the British Empire: The on going legacies of race and class in Zambia. By Juliette Bridgette Milner-Thornton

On Counting, Consumption, And Labour: Writing Histories Of Central Africa, Robert Ross, Iva Peša

Zambia Social Science Journal

This special issue of the Zambia Social Science Journal is the product of the fifth CART conference, held in Oegstgeest, the Netherlands, from 28-29 November 2013. Beginning in 2005, the research programme From Muskets to Nokias: Technology, Consumption and Social Change in Central Africa from Pre-Colonial Times to the Present (Leiden University and partners) has facilitated five Central African Research Themes (CART) conferences in the Netherlands and in Zambia. These conferences highlighted research being carried out by researchers associated with the programme, and provided a forum within which researchers could debate and discuss their findings and on-going research intentions. During …

The Politics Of Household Budget Research In Colonial Central Africa, Robert Ross

Zambia Social Science Journal

This paper investigates the various academic studies of the household budgets of Africans living in what became the countries of Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi, and the Congolese province of Katanga. These studies were made during the colonial period, by members of the Rhodes- Livingstone Institute, the Central Statistical Office of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, in what was then Salisbury, and by Belgian researchers in the Congo. It demonstrates how what at first sight appears to be a neutral form of investigation was in fact highly politicised. On the one hand, there were many who showed how African incomes …

Air Too Pure For Slavery And The Rights Of British Liberty: The Black Experience In London, 1772-1883, Tony A. Frazier

Dissertations

This dissertation presents abundant evidence that people of African descent were very present and visible in eighteenth-century London society. In the eighteenth century, London was one of the largest cities in the world with a population that reached almost 700,000 in 1750 and over a million in 1800. In addition, Great Britain was the leading slave trafficking nation in the world. Therefore, it was no surprise that the debate concerning black freedom and liberty was center stage in one of the most important regions in Europe and the Atlantic world. This question, much like the development of slavery in eighteenth-century …

Global Futures And Government Towns: Phosphates And The Production Of Western Sahara As A Space Of Contention, Mark Drury

Publications and Research

The study of natural resources lends itself to theorizing the politics of nature and the politics of time. The space of Western Sahara, where both remain highly contested, provides an opportunity to consider the ramifications of resources in political conflict at different historical moments. Drawing from environmental histories of North Africa and the Sahara, as well as the anthropology of time, the author focuses on two historical moments. The first, from 1945 to 1972, concerns the discovery of phosphate deposits during the Spanish colonial period and the implications of this discovery for political authority in the Sahara more broadly. The …

Session D-1: African Muslims And The Transatlantic Slave Trade, Steven Buenning

Professional Learning Day

African Muslims played central roles in the largest forced migration in human history; the transatlantic slave trade. This presentation employs primary sources from the online collection of the National Humanities Center and from the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (Emory University). Participants will engage in close reading of two memoirs of Muslim slaves, as well as three newspaper articles written in 1828. In addition, participants will receive geography exercises. A Powerpoint and a full list of helpful resources are included.

Matriarchy, The Colonial Situation, And The Women's War Of 1929 In Southeastern Nigeria, Samantha Mallory Kies

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the Igbo women of Southeastern Nigeria from the eve of colonial intrusion to the imposition of colonialism, the Women’s War of 1929, and its aftermath. By placing the Women’s War into the context of the stripping away of inherent rights guaranteed them by matriarchy following the imposition of patriarchy upon the society, this study provides a new explanation of the women’s involvement and lack of male participation in the war. Under traditional matriarchal umbrellas, through their networks and social groups and by the banding together of all women, the Igbo Women’s War of 1929 was the beginning …

Women Leaders In The Rwandan Genocide: When Women Choose To Kill, Donna J. Maier

UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

The role of women as perpetrators in the Rwanda Genocide has been documented much more so than that of women in other genocides and crimes against humanity: more than in the holocaust of World War II, than in the massacres of Mayan Guatemala's Indians in 1982, and more even than in the widespread atrocities that accompanied the break-up of the former Yugoslavia which were virtually concurrent with the Rwanda Genocide. It is not entirely clear why this is the case. Testimonies of women perpetrators and victims were collected in the immediate aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide by various human rights …

Education And Literacy, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

Loram's definition of education as planned by the powerful for the social construction of useful and 'good' Africans, along with his implicit concerns about bad or disruptive literate individuals, represented the views of many educationists during the colonial era. Such views, moreover, survived the end of colonial rule, re-emerging at the centre of shifting debates over how educational institutions and pedagogies should either persist or be challenged. Social utility defined education, not its specific content in reading, arithmetic, religious faith, business, or gardening. Struggles over educational planning were less over whether it was a form of social control than over …

Particularizing Universal Education In Postcolonial Sierra Leone, Grace Pai

Publications and Research

This paper presents a vertical case study of the history of universalizing education in postcolonial Sierra Leone from the early 1950s to 1990 to highlight how there has never been a universal conception of universal education. In order to unite a nation behind a universal ideal of schooling, education needed to be adapted to different subpopulations, as the Bunumbu Project did for rural Sierra Leoneans in the 1970s to 1980s. While the idea of “localizing” education was sound, early program success was undermined by a lack of clarity behind terms like “rural” or “community.” This was exacerbated by a change …

A Nation In Name, A 'State' In Exile : The Frelimo Proto-State, Youth, Gender, And The Liberation Of Mozambique 1962-1975, Michael Gerald Panzer

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation analyzes the early political development of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) during the 1960s. The thesis offers several new theoretical perspectives on the evolution of FRELIMO as a liberation front. While operating from military bases, settlement camps, and urban settings in Tanzania, FRELIMO functioned as a proto-state with authority derived from a contingent sovereignty. At the beginning of the anti-colonial war against Portugal in September 1964, FRELIMO was able to help organize and oversee the lives of thousands of Mozambican refugees who fled into Tanzania to escape the escalating violence. Many of these refugees became FRELIMO's revolutionary constituents …

The United States And The Congo, 1960-1965: Containment, Minerals And Strategic Location, Erik M. Davis

Theses and Dissertations--History

The Congo Crisis of the early 1960s served as a satellite conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Scholars have argued about U.S. motivations and interests involved in the Congo Crisis. The major division between scholars is between those who contend the United States acted for national security reasons and those scholars who argue the United States desired to establish a neocolonial regime to protect economic interests pertaining to vast Congolese mineral wealth. The argument of this thesis is that the United States policy in the Congo between 1960 and 1965 focused on installing …

Whiteness In Africa: Americo-Liberians And The Transformative Geographies Of Race, Robert P. Murray

Theses and Dissertations--History

This dissertation examines the constructed racial identities of African American settlers in colonial Liberia as they traversed the Atlantic between the United States and West Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century. In one of the great testaments that race is a social construction, the West African neighbors and inhabitants of Liberia, who conceived of themselves as “black,” recognized the significant cultural differences between themselves and these newly-arrived Americans and racially categorized the newcomers as “white.” This project examines the ramifications for these African American settlers of becoming simultaneously white and black through their Atlantic mobility. This is …

Between Two Jailers: Women's Experience During Colonialism, War, And Independence In Algeria, Adrienne Leonhardt

Anthós

After a nearly 130-year regime of violence and oppression under French colonialism, Algerians began their struggle for independence in 1954. Nearly one million people were killed, centuries-old traditions were broken, and the country was torn apart. The Algerian war has also been described as a “moment in which gendered, religious, and ethnic identities were challenged.” Within Algerian society and the French colonial regime at the time, expectations were deeply ingrained regarding the status and rights of women. Particularly significant is the impact that the war had on shaping Algerian women’s role in society. Both sides used women during the conflict …

"The Most Deadly Spot On The Face Of The Earth": The United States And Antimodern Images Of "Darkest Africa" 1880-1910, Melinda Stump

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries in the United States, images of Africa and Africans were prevalent throughout society. Africans were described as primitive or child-like and were contrasted with the so-called high civilization of middle-class Anglo-Saxons. This thesis will look at these images and attempt to complicate the current historiography on United States images of Africa. Furthering Jackson Lears’s theories of antimodernism in Progressive Era United States, I argue that the images produced of Africa and Africans were attempts at regeneration and intense experiences. Due to the huge progress made due to the Industrial Revolution and the urbanization …

Re-Framing The Slaughter: Remembering The Rwandan Genocide, Jordan C. Broutman

Senior Independent Study Theses

This project looks at both official and silenced discourse pertaining to Rwandan genocide remembrance. I look specifically at discourse at museums, memorials, memoir, and film. I argue that the Rwandan state exists in the midst of a political conflict that has produced dual memories of victimization. While the genocidal violence inflicted on Tutsi should be commemorated as uniquely cruel and inhumane, many Hutu experienced similar acts of genocide in the 1972 Burundian genocide and in eastern Congo at the hands of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. The Rwandan state faces the challenge of rebuilding in a context in which both sides …

Soldiers And Savants: An Enlightened Despot Discovers Egypt, Dana Kappel

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Entanglement: Health, Healing And Society In Africa, Haley Noel

Anthós

As a continent, Africa has been explored, exploited, and largely abandoned by the West. During the colonial era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, foreign powers encountered diverse cultures, superstitions and disease before promptly labeling the entire continent a dangerous and primitive place. For early explorers and colonialists, disease and the threat of ill health is what defined Africa. They overlooked the pre-existing strategies and practices that Africans had adapted to guard against certain diseases, either ignoring them or labeling the misunderstood safety nets as primitive. Also overlooked was the importance of societal organization and communal cooperation among …

Parliamentary Supremacy In Tanzania: Rhetoric And Reality, Frank J. Mateng’E

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

This paper interrogates the theory and practice of parliamentary supremacy in Tanzania. We examine the assertion that, on becoming independent, Tanzania inherited the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy enshrined in the Westminster model. Using a historical approach, the paper analyzes the relationship between the legislature and the executive branch of government from 1926 to 2010, and concludes that the notion of parliamentary supremacy in Tanzania has remained more rhetorical. In theory the parliament is supreme, but at the level of practice its role has mainly been confined to the law-making and advisory functions with limited scope for the exercise of the …

Defining “Third Force” Activity: The South African Truth And Reconciliation Commission And Eugene De Kock, John Grimes

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines claims about a purported “third force,” individuals and organizations that operated in South Africa during the “transitional period,” from 1990 to1994, who aimed to destabilize the country and prevent a democratic election. This paper focuses on the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and testimony contained in the official Amnesty Committee’s transcripts of former Colonel Eugene de Kock. This paper argues that the “third force” was not a designated government agency and former President F.W. de Klerk did not order “third force” violence. This paper further argues that numerous governmental and non-governmental organizations worked collectively to …