New Books in African Studies

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world’s most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World (Princeton University Press, 2024) by Dr....

Commercial Banking in Kenya: A History from Colonisation to Digital Age (Routledge, 2024) investigates the impact of commercial banks in Kenya right through from their origins, to their role during the colonial period, the process of adaptation following independence, and up to their responses to new challenges and economic policies in the twenty-first century. The British colonisation of East Afr...

Over the course of the 20th century, the South African state attempted to construct a “White Man’s Country” on the African continent using the biopolitical tools and spatial and economic planning strategies that characterized modern statecraft. My guest today, the geographer Sharad Chari, examines how racialized subaltern populations of Blacks, Indians, and coloureds resisted and circumvented thes...

A key part of the experience of migration is not being in full control of one’s circumstances and doing. In this episode, Ingrid Piller speaks with Marco Santello about his research with Gambian migrants in Italy. The focus is on Marco’s recent article in Language in Society about migrant experiences of constraints and suffering. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Refe...

A compelling work that explores the lives and aspirations of young footballers with deep nuance and insight, The Precarity of Masculinity: Football, Pentecostalism, and Transnational Aspirations in Cameroon (Berghahn Books, 2022) shows how precarious masculinity, Pentecostal spirituality, and aspirations of prosperous futures are intertwining and interrelated in the everyday lives in Southwest reg...

Caree A. Banton's book More Auspicious Shores: Barbadian Migration to Liberia, Blackness, and the Making of an African Republic (Cambridge UP, 2019) chronicles the migration of Afro-Barbadians to Liberia. In 1865, 346 Afro-Barbadians fled a failed post-emancipation Caribbean for the independent black republic of Liberia. They saw Liberia as a means of achieving their post-emancipation goals and pr...

Spain's former African colonies-Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara-share similar histories. Both are under the thumbs of heavy-handed, postcolonial regimes, and are known by human rights organizations as being among the worst places in the world with regard to oppression and lack of civil liberties. Yet the resistance movement in one is dominated by women, the other by men.  In Silenced Resistan...

For decades, media and academic analysis of African politics has emphasised instability, political violence, and male dominance. Yet a brilliant new article by Zoe Marks for the Journal of Democracy entitled “African Popular Protest and Political Change” reveals that in fact Africa stands out as the region globally with the largest number of nonviolent campaigns both in the 1990s and since. What i...

Professor David Zeitlyn’s book offers a major contribution to the study and analysis of divination, based on continuing fieldwork with the Mambila in Cameroon. It seeks to return attention to the details of divinatory practice, using the questions asked and life histories to help understand the perspective of the clients rather than that of the diviners. Drawing on a corpus of more than 600 cases,...

Drawing on a rare cross-regional comparison, Playing with Fire: Parties and Political Violence in Kenya and India (Cambridge UP, 2024) develops a novel explanation about ethnic party violence. Combining rich historical, qualitative, and quantitative data, the book demonstrates how levels of party instability can crucially inform the decisions of political elites to organize or support violence. Ce...

Marie-Eve Desrosiers (Univ. of Ottawa) has written a wonderful book. Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Rwanda: Elusive Control Before the Genocide (Cambridge University Press, 20203) challenges scholarly and policy assumptions about the strength and control of authoritarian governments in Rwanda in the decades before the 1994 genocide. Desrosiers employs original archival data and interviews to...

South Africa remains the only state that developed a nuclear weapons capability, but ultimately decided to dismantle existing weapons and abandon the programme. Disarming Apartheid: The End of South Africa's Nuclear Weapons Programme and Accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, 1968–1991 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Robin E. Möser reconstructs the South Afr...

Well into the early nineteenth century, Luanda, the administrative capital of Portuguese Angola, was one of the most influential ports for the transatlantic slave trade. Between 1801 and 1850, it served as the point of embarkation for more than 535,000 enslaved Africans. In the history of this diverse, wealthy city, the gendered dynamics of the merchant community have frequently been overlooked. V...

Women, Agency, and the State in Guinea: Silent Politics (Routledge, 2020) examines how women in Guinea articulate themselves politically within and outside institutional politics. It documents the everyday practices that local female actors adopt to deal with the continuous economic, political, and social insecurities that emerge in times of political transformations. Carole Ammann argues that wom...

Over the course of the Almoravid (1040–1147) and Almohad (1121–1269) dynasties, mediaeval Marrakesh evolved from an informal military encampment into a thriving metropolis that attempted to translate a local and distinctly rural past into a broad, imperial architectural vernacular. In Marrakesh and the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghrib (Penn State Universit...

Perpetrators of mass atrocities have used displacement to transport victims to killing sites or extermination camps to transfer victims to sites of forced labor and attrition, to ethnically homogenize regions by moving victims out of their homes and lands, and to destroy populations by depriving them of vital daily needs.  Displacement has been treated as a corollary practice to crimes committed,...

Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa: Regionalism by Design (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Catherine Boone integrates African countries into broader comparative theories of how spatial inequality shapes political competition over the construction of markets, states, and nations. Existing literature on African countries has found economic cleavages, institutions, and policy choice...

In Automotive Empire: How Cars and Roads Fueled European Colonialism in Africa (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Andrew Denning uncovers how roads and vehicles began to transform colonial societies across Africa but rarely in the manner Europeans expected. Like seafaring ships and railroads, automobiles and roads were more than a mode of transport—they organised colonial spaces and structured...

Jane-Marie Collins's book Emancipatory Narratives & Enslaved Motherhood: Bahia, Brazil, 1830-1888 (Liverpool UP, 2023) examines three major currents in the historiography of Brazilian slavery: manumission, miscegenation, and creolisation. It revisits themes central to the history of slavery and race relations in Brazil, updates the research about them, and revises interpretations of the role of ge...

Will Africa’s increasingly youthful population lead to new democratic and development breakthroughs? Or will it generate fresh instability as frustrated young people demand economic opportunities their governments cannot provide? In this episode, Nic Cheeseman talks to Professors Amy Patterson and Megan Hershey about their recent book Africa’s Urban Youth. They explain how young people across Afri...

Roots of Power: The Political Ecology of Boundary Plants (Routledge, 2023) tells five stories of plants, people, property, politics, peace, and protection in tropical societies. In Cameroon, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, St. Vincent, and Tanzania, dracaena and cordyline plants are simultaneously property rights institutions, markers of social organization, and expressions of life-force and v...

Distributed to millions of people annually across Africa and the global south, insecticide-treated bed nets have become a cornerstone of malaria control and twenty-first-century global health initiatives. Despite their seemingly obvious public health utility, however, these chemically infused nets and their rise to prominence were anything but inevitable. In Nothing But Nets: A Biography of Global...

All too often, the history of early modern Africa is told from the perspective of outsiders. In his book A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Toby Green draws upon a range of underutilized sources to describe the evolution of West Africa over a period of four transformative centuries. With these sources Gree...

Explaining how and why there are such diverging outcomes of UN peace negotiations and treaties, this book offers a detailed examination of peace processes in order to demonstrate that how treaties are negotiated and written significantly impacts their implementation.  Drawing on case studies from the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars, Miranda Melcher demonstrates the critical importance of specifi...

Between the 1920s and 1980s, the choices that Ghanaian women made regarding their reproductive health were defined by development policy and practice. Spanning the colonial and immediate postcolonial periods, Holly Ashford's book Development and Women's Reproductive Health in Ghana, 1920-1982 (Routledge, 2022) demonstrates that whilst the substance of development discourse shifted over time, princ...