New Books in African Studies

Lucy's People: An Ethiopian Memoir (Yerada Lij,2021) is the inspiring story of a country and a life. Young engineer Mesfin grows up under Emperor Haile Selassie I in Ethiopia. She is mother to all her people. Under her sun and moon, women walk tall. Many are warriors, including his mother and grandmother. The boy comprehends the burden placed upon ethical military such as his colonel father. He de...

In the wake of unthinkable atrocities, it is reasonable to ask how any population can move on from the experience of genocide. Simply remembering the past can, in the shadow of mass death, be retraumatizing. So how can such momentous events be memorialized in a way that is productive and even healing for survivors? Genocide memorials tell a story about the past, preserve evidence of the violence t...

New oral histories from Black Namibian and Angolan troops who fought in apartheid South Africa’s security forces reveal their involvement, and its impact on their lives, to be far more complicated than most historical scholarship has acknowledged. In anticolonial struggles across the African continent, tens of thousands of African soldiers served in the militaries of colonial and settler states. I...

Gill has been s a volunteer librarian at Claremont Primary School in Cape Town South Africa since 2010. Through her initiative she has been able to give several hundred children aged 6-14 from largely disadvantaged backgrounds access to books and advice about reading. She believes that this has been life changing for a significant number of her readers – as well as giving her life profound value....

In her landmark new book Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa (Harvard UP, 2020), Jocelyn Hendrickson launches a searingly brilliant legal history centered on the question of how medieval and early modern Muslim jurists in Iberia and North Africa wrestled with various thorny questions of living under or migrating away from non-Muslim political sovereignty. This b...

In Indirect Subjects: Nollywood's Local Address (Duke UP, 2021), Matthew H. Brown analyzes the content of the prolific Nigerian film industry's mostly direct-to-video movies alongside local practices of production and circulation to show how screen media play spatial roles in global power relations. Scrutinizing the deep structural and aesthetic relationship between Nollywood, as the industry is k...

Drawing primarily on Dutch and Afrikaans archival sources including the Dutch Reformed Church Archive and private collections, Retief Muller's The Scots Afrikaners: Identity Politics and Intertwined Religious Cultures in Southern and Central Africa (Edinburgh UP, 2021) presents a trans-generational narrative of the influence and role played by diasporic Scots and their descendants in the religious...

What is “capacity”? In science research and health interventions, it typically refers to the relative availability of equipment, infrastructure, personnel, and skills needed to get a job done. Noémi Tousignant’s book, Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal (Duke UP, 2018), feels its way into the experience of capacity to observe a crucial characteristic....

Kwame Bediako was one of the great African theologians of his generation. Challenging the assumption that Christianity is a Western religion, he presented a non-Western foundation for theological reflection, expanded the Christian theological imagination, and offered a path forward for post-Christendom theologies. Kwame Bediako: African Theology for a World Christianity (Fortress Press, 2022) is t...

Photographers and their images were critical to the making of Mozambique, first as a colony of Portugal and then as independent nation at war with apartheid in South Africa. When the Mozambique Liberation Front came to power, it invested substantial human and financial resources in institutional structures involving photography, and used them to insert the nation into global debates over photograp...

For a majority of African women, the “colonial encounter” occurred at the maternity ward, the health centre, or Maternal and Infant Welfare Centres. In Être mère en situation coloniale: Gold Coast (années 1910-1950) (Editions de la Sorbonne, 2020), Anne Hugon analyzes the consequences of colonialism on colonized women, through a history of maternal and child health institutions in the Gold Coast (...

In this interview, I speak with Till F. Paasche and James D. Sidaway about their new book, Transecting Securityscapes: Dispatches from Cambodia, Iraq, and Mozambique (University of Georgia Press, 2021). In addition to the book's methodological and theoretical contributions, we also discussed the extensive field research and important personal experiences informing this project. This is an innovati...

How do Black women entrepreneurs in South Africa play off westerners’ fear and desire for impoverished townships through home-based tourist accommodations? This episode’s guest is Dr. Annie Hikido, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Colby College. She tells us how her racialized experiences growing up as a Japanese-American woman in California pushed her to become an ethnographer and race scholar...

During the height of the Cold War, passionate idealists across the US and Africa came together to fight for Black self-determination and the antiracist remaking of society. Beginning with the 1957 Ghanaian independence celebration, the optimism and challenges of African independence leaders were publicized to African Americans through community-based newspapers and Historically Black Colleges and...

In Emergent Masculinities: Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age (Ohio University Press, 2019), Ndubueze L. Mbah argues that the Bight of Biafra region’s Atlanticization—or the interaction between regional processes and Atlantic forces such as the slave trade, colonialism, and Christianization—between 1750 and 1920 transformed gender into the primary mode of social different...

"Algeria is different." Africa's largest country is a place that few western academics have studied or been able to travel to. The modern nation, forged in the anticolonial struggle against French colonialism between 1957 and 1963, has been bolstered by the discovery of oil shortly thereafter. Nearly two-thirds of Algeria's population is under the age of 35. Growing up during or soon after the vio...

At his 1994 inauguration, South African president Nelson Mandela announced the "Rainbow Nation, at peace with itself and the world." This national rainbow notably extended beyond the bounds of racial coexistence and reconciliation to include "sexual orientation" as a protected category in the Bill of Rights. Yet despite the promise of equality and dignity, the new government's alliance with neolib...

Why do weak autocrats create strong autocracies? Using game-theoretic logic and an analysis of the post-colonial experience of sub-Saharan Africa, Anne Meng shows that by creating institutions that incorporate other elites into the inner circles of power, dictators create regimes that can outlast their founders. By creating clear lines of succession, they avoid disruptive power struggles that coul...

Today I talked to Ben Guest about his new book Zen and the Art of Coaching Basketball: A Namibian Odyssey (2021). Pressure plays, buzzer-beaters, and mindfulness meditation: A team of teenagers goes for the championship in Namibia’s professional basketball league. Ben Guest takes a high school coaching gig on the other side of the world. On the first day of practice one of the ten players can’t co...

In 1994, almost one million ethnic Tutsis were killed in the genocide in Rwanda. In the aftermath of the genocide, some of the top-echelon Hutu officers who had organized it fled Rwanda to the eastern Congo (DRC) and set up a new base for military operation, with the goal of retaking power in Kigali, Rwanda. More than twenty years later, these rebel forces comprise a diverse group of refugees, reb...

In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation’s explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a f...

In this ambitious book, Max Siollun provides an overview of Nigerian history from 1472 to the 1950s. As such, What Britain Did to Nigeria: A Short History of Conquest and Rule (Hurst, 2021) provides an excellent primer for those interested in learning about the gradual process of colonial conquest and the attendant resistance by local populations, as well as colonialism’s long-term impact on what...

The construction of collective identity among the Muridiyya abroad is a communal but contested endeavor. Differing conceptions of what should be the mission of Muridiyya institutions in the diaspora reveal disciples’ conflicting politics and challenge the notion of the order’s homogeneity. While some insist on the universal dimension of Ahmadu Bamba Mbakke’s calling and emphasize dawa (proselytizi...

Countering the traditional narrative of "migration as crisis," Global Nomads tells the story of a group of people for whom migration is not a symptom of a disordered world, but rather an ordinary practice full of social and personal meaning. Decentering migration from North America and Europe, this ethnography explores how ethnic Fulbe people in the West African Republic of Guinea migrate abroad t...

Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations (Oxford UP, 2019) reveals the various ways in which Colonial Germans attempted to cope with the loss of the German colonies after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. These Kolonialdeutsche (Colonial Germans) had invested substantial time and money in German imperialism. German men and women from the former Afric...