Showing papers in "International Journal of African Historical Studies in 1990"
TL;DR: In this paper, Wilmsen marshals an enormous quantity of historical, archival, archeological, ethnographic, and survey data on the Kalahari Zhu to show how far from the reality these images are, how they have their own historical provenance, they have been analytically distorting, and they have proven politically pernicious for living groups like the Zhu.
Abstract: "The image of a pristine isolation has been almost as common in research on foragers as in the popular media. "Land filled with Flies" is a sustanined argument against such views. Wilmsen marshals an enormous quantity of historical, archival, archeological, ethnographic, and survey data on the Kalahari Zhu to show how far from the reality these images are, how they have their own historical provenance, how they have been analytically distorting, and how they have proven politically pernicious for living groups like the Zhu".--Pauline Peters, "Science" "[A] major work. . . . Anthropologists will, and should, use Wilmsen's meticulously detailed study to revise their early lectures in the introductory course, and no future study of African 'foragers' should ignore it".--Parker Shipton, "American Anthropologist" "An impressive book. . . . The reader need only read the first few pages to judge both the quality and ambitiousness of the work. . . . Essential reading".--David R. Penna, "Africa Today"
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TL;DR: The authors explores the historical experiences of slaves, masters, and colonials as they all confronted the end of slavery in fifteen sub-Saharan African societies, and demonstrates that it is impossible to generalize about whether the ending of slavery was a relatively mild and nondisruptive process or whether it marked a significant change in the organization of these societies.
Abstract: This landmark book, now back in print, explores the historical experiences of slaves, masters, and colonials as they all confronted the end of slavery in fifteen sub-Saharan African societies. The essays demonstrate that it is impossible to generalize about whether the end of slavery was a relatively mild and nondisruptive process or whether it marked a significant change in the organization of these societies. This wide-ranging inquiry is of lasting value to Africanists and a variety of social and economic historians.
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TL;DR: An analysis of South Africa during the first two centuries of European colonization is given in this article, with full accounts of slaves -Khoikhoi and Gruqua have been included -as well as an analysis of the administrative and economic revolution in the Cape that precipitated the Great Trek.
Abstract: An analysis of South Africa during the first two centuries of European colonization. This edition has fuller accounts of slaves - Khoikhoi and Gruqua have been included - as well as an analysis of the administrative and economic revolution in the Cape that precipitated the Great Trek.
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TL;DR: Senghor was the first black student at the seminary of the University of the Republic of Senegal and won most of the prizes and became a legend, the boy from the bush who beat the white boys in the city at scholarship.
Abstract: The wide and sweeping range of activities of President Leopold Senghor, former head of state of the Republic of Senegal, has daunted many of his biographers, who then tend to concentrate either on his poetry or on his philosophy of Negritude or on the progess of Senegal under his leadership since independence. Dr. Vaillant, an American scholar who has lived and worked in Senegal, has managed to cover most aspects of seven decades of Senghor's life. She has given vivid and invaluable information about his childhood and adolescence which makes this book of signal importance to those interested in the 20thcentury background of French education and culture in Africa. Anglophone Africans are often unaware that in West Africa there was a strong white French settler society, as was the case in Kenya and Zimbabwe, and is still the case in South Africa. When Senghor went to high school and seminary in Dakar in the 1920s, he was the only black student there. He won most of the prizes and became a legend—the boy from the bush who beat the white boys in the city at scholarship. The unique Christian Serer society in Senegal, surrounded by the majority Moslem Wolof, stamped on the young man a zeal and piety for Catholicism, frustrated when the French priest who was his teacher in Dakar, fortunately for Senegal, pronounced him temperamentally unfit to proceed with his theological studies. Dr. Vaillant's account of the heroic legends of Senghor's ancestors, gathered from older members of his family, is placed in juxtapostion with many of his earlier poems in a striking way. Indeed, the matching of his career and intellectual growth with his poetry and writing is illustrated in an illuminating way throughout. His student years in Paris, when he was a contemporary of President Pompidou of France, showed how firmly, quite early, he had become enveloped in the French Establishment—but not completely. The presence of African-Americans and French West Indians who were students, writers, and artists in Paris at the time broadened Senghor's vision into one which then encompassed Africans of the diaspora, particularly the literature of the African-Americans. He admitted them and their writing. He made lasting friends with a French-speaking AfroCaribbean, Aime Cesaire, later mayor of Martinique. It was their friendship and realization of a common bedrock of African-ness which resulted in their philosophy of Negritude, which stressed the unique contribution blacks had made, and could still make, to world civilization. Many years ago, the young Wole Soyinka had denied the necessity of this measure by his cryptic remark that a tiger did not need to stress its tigritude, thus there was no necessity for Negroes to stress
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TL;DR: A decade of research on African women has raised serious questions about the kinds of historical reconstruction we do as discussed by the authors, when we study the men and women who made events do we look at them as groups of undifferentiated migrants and militants or do we see them as men, whose behaviours were constructed and constrained by the times places and cultures in which they lived?
Abstract: A decade of research on African women has raised serious questions about the kinds of historical reconstruction we do: when we study the men and women who made events do we look at them as groups of undifferentiated migrants and militants or do we see them as men and women whose behaviours were constructed and constrained by the times places and cultures in which they lived? Do we take gender as a given or do we ask how genders were constructed contested and maintained? Do we see the sexual division of labor as a cultural absolute or do we ask how it was arranged struggled over and rearranged? In recent years feminist historians have used the testimonies of individual women to question these categories and thus have given us a detailed picture of private life power relations and their relationship to political action. The use of mens life histories and autobiographies has not yielded the same kind of information. Mens lives are thought to take place in the public spheres of production politics and work. The conventional wisdom for twentieth-century Africa is that mens preferential access to political life wage labor and the cash economy meant that their lives were governed by class and economic interests not personal ones. Therefore most studies of African men particularly in the political arena have tended to make men seem monolithic and homogeneous either as resistors or collaborators; they have had factions but no personal reasons for joining them. Men were motivated by land shortages poverty and decreasing real wages but not by their qualms and anxieties about the changing rights and obligations of fatherhood. (excerpt)
TL;DR: Hedlund and Lundahl as discussed by the authors stress that incentives are not always of an economic kind, Stefan Hedlund and Mats Lundahl stress in this study of the role of ideology in Tanzanian development.
Abstract: Incentives are not always of an economic kind, Stefan Hedlund and Mats Lundahl stress in this study of the role of ideology in Tanzanian development.The first part of the study offers a general dis ...
TL;DR: The evolution of apartheid the South African legal structure the drive for racial labour laws market manipulation to support apartheid apartheid - rhetoric versus reality apartheid - a triumph over capitalism postcript for South Africans as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The evolution of apartheid the South African legal structure the drive for racial labour laws market manipulation to support apartheid apartheid - rhetoric versus reality apartheid - a triumph over capitalism postcript for South Africans.
TL;DR: Kaggwa as discussed by the authors described the position of women in the authoritarian, strongly hierarchical, and most definitely patriarchal Buganda kingdom and why women had such special status in an avowedly patriarchal society, what their actual role in society was and what the relationship was between their role and that of non-royal females.
Abstract: "Women were looked down upon and in many respects were completely segregated. They were not permitted to touch things that the men were doing."1 Thus Sir Apolo Kaggwa (chief minister or katikkiro of Buganda from 1890 to 1926) described the position of women in the authoritarian, strongly hierarchical, and most definitely patriarchal Buganda kingdom. Yet, of the three people who could be addressed as kabaka, or king, two were women, the queen mother and the queen sister (a half-sister of the king who acted in the role of queen at his installation).2 In addition, the senior wives of the kabaka and the princesses (those women who were descended from a king) also merited special respect and had status and privilege within Ganda society. The questions that arise here is why these women had such special status in an avowedly patriarchal society, what their actual role in society was, and what the relationship was between their role and that of non-royal females. In the past twenty years much has been written on the theory and status of women in different societies.3 Many of these studies, however, concentrate too much on trying to discover a few key factors that determine a "status" level for women in general. The result is simplistic explanations that fail to account for a variety of statuses that may exist for women within a specific society. These statuses may or may not be interdependent, and a favorable position for women in one area does not necessarily translate to high status in other areas.4 In Ganda society, for example, a woman was generally considered a minor in the sense that she did not inherit property from her husband and had to have a male guardian who had authority over her and was responsible to the legal system for her acts.5 Yet the queen mother and queen sister had their own courts and had the power to collect taxes and condemn their own people to death. It would be a mistake, however, to simply dismiss these personages as exceptions to general low female
TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyze the course of South African industrialization and find that the main reasons for the poor performance of the continent's manufacturing sector are not the economic factors that hindered the development of modern industry, but rather the forces that hindered the economic development of the country.
Abstract: The process of industrialization has long formed a central theme for historians of the modern world. The reasons are quite clear: the wealth and power of nations have long rested upon a well-established industrial sector. The historical study of industrialization in Africa, however, has generated a truncated literature, reflecting the poor performance of the continent's manufacturing sector. Far from seeking to explain the course of industrialization, most scholarly attention has revolved around discussions of the forces that have hindered the development of modern industry.3 By almost any measure South Africa stands apart from these conclusions. Over the course of this century the country has moved from being a peripheral, primary producing nation to the industrial powerhouse of the continent. Yet it is striking how few of the comparative themes that have preoccupied scholars of industrialization in Africa, Latin America, and even East Asia have been engaged by those analyzing the course of South African industrialization. In
TL;DR: The demand for revolution: the agrarian origins of Mau Mau Appendix 1A. Kinship and stratification 2. Material interest and political preference as mentioned in this paper, and the emergence of political conflict.
Abstract: 1. The demand for revolution: the agrarian origins of Mau Mau Appendix 1A. Kinship and stratification 2. Material interest and political preference: the agrarian origins of political conflict 3. Institutional structure, agricultural development, and political conflict 4. From drought to famine: the dynamics of subsistence crises Appendix 4A. The buying center program 5. The politics of food crises Appendix 5A. Famine: Meru, August 1984.