For postcolonial Africa, modernization was seen as a necessary outcome of the struggle for independence and as crucial to the success of its newly established states. Since then, the rhetoric of modernization has pervaded policy, culture, and development, lending a kind of political theatricality to nationalist framings of modernization and Africans' perceptions of their place in the global economy. These 15 essays address governance, production, and social life; the role of media; and the...

While many have interpreted the cooperative movement as propagating a radical alternative to capitalism, Cooperative Rule shows that in the late British Empire, cooperation became an important part of the armory of colonialism. The system was rooted in British rule in India at the end of the nineteenth century. Officials and experts saw cooperation as a unique solution to the problems of late colonialism, one able to both improve economic conditions and defuse anticolonial politic...

A collection of early personal and political essays from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple.Includes a new letter written by the authorWhat is a womanist? Alice Walker sets out to define the concept in this anthology of early essays and other nonfiction pieces. As she outlines it, a womanist is a person who prefers to side with the oppressed: with women, with people of color, with the poor. As a writer, Walker has...

The Tragedy of Victory: On-the-Spot Account of the Nigeria-Biafra War in the Atlantic Theatre is a chronological narrative of the war that lasted from July 6, 1967 to January 15, 1970. With about 500 photographs and maps and facts, told with accuracy, the well-organised and efficient Third Marine Commandos, earlier commanded by Col. Benjamin Adekunle (with Lt. Col. G. Alabi-Isama, as the Chief of Staff) had already controlled the Atlantic coast from Bonny to Calabar before Col. Olusegun Obas...

'Poetry, always foremost of the arts in traditional Africa, has continued to compete for primacy against the newer forms of prose fiction and theatre drama.' This wonderfully comprehensive anthology of African poetry has been expanded to include ninety-nine poets from twenty-seven countries, thirty-one of whom appear for the first time. Equally wide-ranging is the content of the poetry itself: war songs and political protests jostle with poems about human love, African nature and the surpr...

In December 1941 the Japanese invaded Burma. For the British, the longest land campaign of the Second World War had begun. 100,000 African soldiers were taken from Britain’s colonies to fight the Japanese in the Burmese jungles. They performed heroically in one of the most brutal theatres of war, yet their contribution has been largely ignored.Isaac Fadoyebo was one of those ‘Burma Boys’. At the age of sixteen he ran away from his Nigerian village to join the British Army. Sent to ...

In Oxford Street, Accra, Ato Quayson analyzes the dynamics of Ghana's capital city through a focus on Oxford Street, part of Accra's most vibrant and globalized commercial district. He traces the city's evolution from its settlement in the mid-seventeenth century to the present day. He combines his impressions of the sights, sounds, interactions, and distribution of space with broader dynamics, including the histories of colonial and postcolonial town planning and the marks of tra...

A comprehensive history of one of the world's deadliest jihadist groupsBoko Haram is one of the world's deadliest jihadist groups. It has killed more than twenty thousand people and displaced more than two million in a campaign of terror that began in Nigeria but has since spread to Chad, Niger, and Cameroon as well. This is the first book to tell the full story of this West African affiliate of the Islamic State, from its beginnings in the early 2000s to its most i...

A groundbreaking exploration of Garveyism's global influence during the interwar years and beyondJamaican activist Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem in 1917. By the early 1920s, his program of African liberation and racial uplift had attracted millions of supporters, both in the United States and abroad. The Age of Garvey presents an expansive global history of the movement that came to be known as Ga...

This study of charity in Uganda "challenges current international development norms and standards . . . as . . . refusals to redistribute wealth" ( Washington Post).Believing that charity inadvertently legitimates social inequality and fosters dependence, many international development organizations have increasingly sought to replace material aid with efforts to build self-reliance and local institutions. But in some cultures—like those in rural Uganda, wh...

"Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental accomplishment: a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis."—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary ImaginationIn Black and Blur—the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy consent not to be a single being—Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of th...

Yaya’s Story is a book about Yaya Harouna*,* a Songhay trader originally from Niger who found a path to America. It is also a book about Paul Stoller—its author—an American anthropologist who found his own path to Africa. Separated by ethnicity, language, profession, and culture, these two men’s lives couldn’t be more different. But when they were both threatened by a grave illness—cancer—those differences evaporated, and the two were brought to profound existential convergence, a...