African History

In March 1896, a well-disciplined and massive Ethiopian army did the unthinkable—it routed an invading Italian force and brought Italy's war of conquest in Africa to an end. In an age of relentless European expansion, Ethiopia successfully defended its independence and cast doubt upon an unshakable certainty of the age—that sooner or later all Africans would fall under the rule...

What happens when we consider Africa through a feminist lens and feminism through an African one? And what does it mean to centre selfhood in this journey? In this shining, wide-ranging inquiry, Minna Salami explores these questions through an unhesitating and incisive vision of African feminist political philosophy. Drawing from feminist thought, postcolonial theory, historical insights, and African knowledge systems,...

After the Cold War, Africa earned the dubious distinction of being the world's most bloody continent. But how can we explain this proliferation of armed conflicts? What caused them and what were their main characteristics? And what did the world's governments do to stop them? In this fully revised and updated second edition of his popular text, Paul Williams offers...

NAACP Image Award Finalist for Outstanding Debut Author Featuring 117 full-colour photos and eight breathtaking essays on a force that fuels Black life all around the globe, this is Humans of New York meets The Black Book. "A patchwork quilt of visually stunning images, captured moments of triumph, antidotes to trauma narratives and rich, ebullient emotional and verbal spice for...

The first publication on the Yorùbá master sculptor Moshood Olúṣọmọ Bámigbóyè Bámigbóyè: A Master Sculptor of the Yorùbá Tradition is the first monograph dedicated to the 50-year career of the Nigerian artist Moshood Olúṣọmọ Bámigbóyè (ca. 1885–1975). One of the most important Yorùbá sculptors of the twentieth century, Bámigbóyè is best known for the spectacular masks that he carved for...

For decades, African nations have fought for the return of countless works of art stolen during the colonial era and placed in Western museums. In Africa's Struggle for Its Art, Bénédicte Savoy brings to light this largely unknown but deeply important history. One of the world's foremost experts on restitution and cultural heritage, Savoy investigates extensive, previously unpublished sources to...

A monumental cartographic history of the African slave trade, updated and expanded in a new edition In the first edition of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, two leading historians explored the details of the 350-year history of African slave traffic to the New World. They showed, with nearly 200 original maps, where the captives came from, how long the...

WINNER OF THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 2025 SHORTLISTED FOR THE NONFICTION CROWN AWARD 'Gripping … remarkably wide-ranging' THE TIMES This is an immersive and revelatory history of the survivors of the Clotilda, the last ship of the Atlantic slave trade, whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways. The Clotilda docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in July 1860 – more...

"After existing orally for hundreds of years, Sunjata was written down in the 20th century. David Conrad, who recorded a new version of the epic, has now crafted a prose translation that preserves the oral flavour of live performance. The result is a captivating work of literature that will finally give the story of Sunjata its well-deserved place among the...

"Featuring a clever introduction and judicious collection of documents, Michael Rutz's book neatly captures the drama of one king's quest to build an empire in Central Africa—a quest that began in the name of anti-slavery and free trade and ended in the brutal exploitation of human lives. This volume is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in the history...

Power. Empire. Plunder. The forgotten history of Britain and the Asante gold. Kumasi is burning. British soldiers prowl the streets, stoking the fires. The royal palace is filled with explosives and razed, but not before its most precious occupants are rescued – gold, lots of it. There is an abua or peace pipe, almost a metre long. Countless rings and...

Africa is a convenient abbreviation for 54 countries in which more than a thousand languages are spoken. This book offers a side-long glance, one that complicates the idea of a single continent by picking out specific episodes, specific practices – cinema, art, ethnography and journalism – that rescue us from generalisations. So much of what we understand about these places...

A riveting study of Africa's demographics – its youth and growth – and what they mean for the continent, today and into the future. Essential reading Guardian Intensely researched – and very important! The Week The research in Youthquake is meticulous Tim Marshall, Reaction Attempts to end the hysteria and ignorance surrounding demographic trends New Statesman Meticulously researched, nuanced and...

Why is the Horn such a distinctive part of Africa? This book, by one of the foremost scholars of the region, traces this question through its exceptional history and also probes the wildly divergent fates of the Horn's contemporary nation-states, despite the striking regional particularity inherited from the colonial past. Christopher Clapham explores how the Horn's peculiar topography gave rise...

In Imhotep the African, Egyptologist Robert Bauval and astrophysicist Thomas Brophy uncover the mystery of Imhotep, the ancient Egyptian superstar, a pharaonic Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo, and Newton all rolled into one. Based on their research at the Step Pyramid Complex at Saqqara, Bauval and Brophy delve into observational astronomy to 'decode' the alignments and other design features of the...

A "meticulously researched and comprehensive" (Financial Times) history of the devastating war in the heart of Africa's Congo. At the heart of Africa is the Congo, a country the size of western Europe. It borders nine other nations, and since 1996 it has been racked by a brutal war in which millions have died. In Dancing in the Glory of...

Zanzibari Muslim Moderns is a historical study of Zanzibar during the interwar years. This was a period marked by rapid intellectual and social change in the Muslim world, when ideas of Islamic progress and development were hotly debated. How did this process play out in Zanzibar? Based on a wide range of sources—Islamic and colonial, private and public—Anne K. Bang...

Most accounts of Nigeria's colonisation were written by British officials, presenting it as a noble civilising mission to rid Africans of barbaric superstition and corrupt tribal leadership. Thanks to this skewed writing of history, many Nigerians today still have Empire nostalgia and view the colonial period through rose-tinted glasses. Max Siollun offers a bold rethink: an unromanticised history, arguing compellingly...

The war in Ethiopia's northern region of Tigray began in November 2020. It inflicted more casualties than any other contemporary conflict in the world. It has also been among the least understood. The fighting and accompanying blockade led to an estimated 600,000 deaths—more than the number who died in the 1984-5 famine. International journalists were banned as the region was...

A new, full history of slavery in Africa, from the Pharaohs to the present. Slavery has ravaged African societies since at least 2,500 BCE, from Egypt to the Cape; from Mauritania to Somalia. Most writing covers just one fraction of this history: the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Yet Indian Ocean slavery was equally sizeable, and far longer-lived. Historians...

Since 2017, Mozambique has been confronted with a jihadi insurgency. This book looks at the origins of that insurgency, and the broader and longer history of the relationship between Islam and politics in the country. Did Mozambique's Muslim politics always point towards jihad? Eric Morier-Genoud examines the period immediately after independence, when the state engaged in anticlericalism; he then moves...

A lively history of an extraordinary island and the people who call it home. Many countries have an interesting tale to tell about their origins and evolution. But few are as exciting and adventurous as that of Mauritius, the Star and Key of the Indian Ocean. A tiny island of volcanoes, dodos, and lagoons, Mauritius remained untouched by humans until...

A Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2022 In 1935, Fascist Italy invaded the sovereign state of Ethiopia—a war of conquest that triggered a chain of events culminating in the Second World War. In this stunning and highly original tale of two Churches, historian Ian Campbell brings a whole new perspective to the story, revealing that bishops of the Italian Catholic...

This is an analytical history of the role Tigrinya-speakers have played and are still playing in the history of Ethiopia and Eritrea, from Tigray's very ancient incipience to the origins of today's tragically fratricidal war. Drawing from his huge corpus of publications on the Horn of Africa, Haggai Erlich sheds new light on major turning-points, as well as patterns of...

North Korea was an important player in the decolonisation of Africa. Freedom fighters across the continent received vital assistance from Pyongyang, and almost all southern African independence leaders travelled to the North Korean capital at some point, in search of support. This alliance has continued into the twenty-first century, with African postcolonial governments throwing a lifeline to Pyongyang's increasingly isolated...

In the late eleventh century, Ethiopian masons hewed great cruciform churches out of mountains in the eastern highlands of Tigray, Ethiopia's northernmost province. Hitherto unparalleled in scale, these monuments were royal foundations, instruments of political centralization and re-Christianization that anticipated the great thirteenth-century churches at Lalibela. Bastions of the Cross, the first study devoted to the subject, examines the cruciform...

Like its African neighbours, Eritrea attained colonial statehood under a European power, in this case Italy. Yet, during decolonisation, its people were singularly excluded from the right to self-determination, for external reasons: superpower rivalry over the country's strategic position on the Red Sea; a mistaken notion of irreconcilable sectarian differences within Eritrea's population, invoked in order to brand it a...

Like its African neighbours, Eritrea attained colonial statehood under a European power, in this case Italy. Yet, during decolonisation, its people were singularly excluded from the right to self-determination, for external reasons: superpower rivalry over the country's strategic position on the Red Sea; a mistaken notion of irreconcilable sectarian differences within Eritrea's population, invoked in order to brand it a...

All Rise: Resistance and Rebellion in South Africa was selected as a Kirkus Reviews Best YA Book of 2022 and recognised as a USBBY 2023 Outstanding International Book. It was a 2022 Foreword INDIES Bronze Winner in the Graphic Novels & Comics Category and received an honourable mention in the 2023 Children's Africana Book Awards. The book was also an...

'A searing, nourishing journey through a history the world needs' - Bettany Hughes, bestselling author of The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World 'Please read it!' - Philippa Gregory, bestselling author of Normal Women 'Poetic and fierce' - Olivette Otele, author of African Europeans 'An exciting and rich work for anyone who is curious about African history' - Paterson Joseph,...

A beautifully illustrated catalogue to a major exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, exploring enslavement, rebellion, revolution and Abolitionism through art, 1750–1850. Drawing on new research, Rise Up and the accompanying exhibition look at the period from 1750 to 1850 when Britain became the world’s first industrialised nation and one of history’s largest empires. At the same time, it played...

How the suppression of the slave trade and the “disposal” of liberated Africans shaped the emergence of modern humanitarianism Between 1808 and 1867, the British navy’s Atlantic squadrons seized nearly two thousand slave ships, "re‑capturing" almost two hundred thousand enslaved people and resettling them as liberated Africans across sites from Sierra Leone and Cape Colony to the West Indies, Brazil,...

Biotraffic explores the complex world of biological resource trade. It takes readers inside the contemporary Ciskei region of South Africa, a once-notorious apartheid "homeland" turned extractive hub for wild medicinal plants. Drawing from in-depth ethnographic and archival research, Christopher Morris examines the region's trade in Pelargonium sidoides, a plant once contested as a tuberculosis treatment in early twentieth-century Europe and...

An intimate reflection on culture and tradition, creativity and power, that draws on a lifetime’s commitment to aesthetic encounter. The playwright, poet, essayist, novelist, and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka is also a longtime art collector. This book of essays offers a glimpse into the motivations of the collector, as well as a highly personal look at the politics of aesthetics...

In the late 1950s, like tens of thousands of young men of his generation, Pierre Bourdieu, having recently passed the agrégation in philosophy, found himself immersed in the Algerian war. Motivated by an impulse that, as he himself says, ‘was civic rather than political’, nothing seemed more important to him than to understand the Algerian situation and provide the elements...

The ultimate and authoritative introduction to Songye culture, sculpture, masks, and iron forging This lavishly illustrated book brings a new approach to the masterpieces of Songye, a Bantu ethnic group from the central Democratic Republic of the Congo. It explores the styles of the different regions, the identification of Songye master artists, and the specificity of Kifwebe masks. The World...

Romano Guardini described Rainer Maria Rilke as the “poet who had things of such importance to say about the end of our own age [and] was also a prophet of things to come.” The complexity of Rilke is, then, “highly relevant to modern Man.” Decades after Guardini’s assessment, the reader who rediscovers Rilke will find a depth of mind and...

This innovative book reassesses the history of musicology, unearthing the field’s twentieth-century German and global roots. In the process, Anna Maria Busse Berger exposes previously unseen historical relationships such as those between the modern rediscovery of medieval music, the rise of communal singing, and the ways in which African music intersected with missionary work in the German colonial period. Ultimately,...

Provides a balanced historical narrative of the contemporary causes of conflict in the Middle East, ideal for students and scholars. The recent history of the Middle East has involved unprecedented violence and war. The Contemporary Middle East: Foreign Intervention and Authoritarian Governance Since 1979 explores the causes of the sustained turbulence in the region by focusing on three separate yet...

A comprehensive exploration, spanning 1,300 years, of the art and culture of the Sahel region of Africa This groundbreaking volume examines the extraordinary artistic and cultural traditions of the African region known as the Sahel (“shore” in Arabic), a vast area on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert that includes present-day Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Chad. This...

From the author of Sisters in Arms comes the incredible, untold story of Effa Manley, a black businesswoman in the male-dominated baseball industry, and, currently, the only woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. 1930s, New York City An ambitious Harlem woman’s husband upends her social climbing when he buys a Negro Leagues baseball team and appoints her as...

Decolonisation revolutionised the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B....

The new edition of The Making of Modern South Africa provides a comprehensive, current introduction to the key themes and debates concerning the history of this controversial country. Engagingly written, the author provides a sharp, analytical overview of the new South Africa. Examines the major issues in South Africa's history, from pre-colonial to present, including colonial conquest; the establishment of...

RESIST! illuminates 500 years of anti-colonial resistance in the Global South and tells about colonial violence and oppression and its continuities. The exhibition and the book about it pay homage to the people who resisted in the most diverse ways and whose stories have hardly ever been told or heard to this day. The works of over 40 contemporary artists...

Partisans of the Nude is a survey of genre art of the nude made by artists in areas that were formerly Ottoman but not yet Arab. Though spoken of as taboo and practically absent from Arab art production, the nude genre was important for early twentieth-century artists who sought to define their societies as post-Ottoman and cosmopolitan. Although recognized as...

New research explores Muslim arts and identities in postcolonial Africa. This collection explores the dynamic place of Islamic art, architecture, and creative expression in processes of decolonisation across the African continent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Presenting new methodologies for accentuating African agency and expression in stories about Islamic art, it is a vital new contribution to recent widespread...

From the runway in Lagos and the Afropunk festival in Johannesburg, to the "image makers" of Marrakech and the influencers of Dakar or Accra, a new generation of African fashion designers, photographers, bloggers, and artists are redefining the aesthetic contours of the continent. Audacious, humorous, disruptive, and innovative are the bywords of these young creatives who, while drawing upon and...

Two acclaimed South African artists offer a cross-generational dialogue on history, memory, and the power of self-narration. Three decades after the dismantling of apartheid began, South Africa’s so-called “born free” generation has reached adulthood, and its artists have used their work to navigate their difficult inheritance. At the same time, the historical distance between their experience and that of an...

An exploration of phrases and excerpts that inspire a major contemporary artist. Over the past several years, renowned South African artist William Kentridge has made a collection of particular phrases and sentences that have called out to him from the pages of whatever he has been reading. These phrases, which he has written into a studio notebook titled Words, have...

New York Times: 'Best Art Books' 2020 'Essential' - Sunday Times 'Brilliantly enraged' - New York Review of Books 'A real game-changer' - Economist Walk into any Western museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date, and place of origin. They...

Highlighting the strong bond between a collector and an art dealer, Shared Passion explores a remarkable collection of African art assembled in the twenty-first century. This book documents and celebrates the patience and perseverance of, and the friendship between, the Belgian collector Michel Vandenkerckhove and the Belgian art dealer and gallerist Didier Claes, and the exceptional African art collection that...

Once lauded as the wave of the African future, Zambia's economic boom in the 1960s and early 1970s was fuelled by the export of copper and other primary materials. Since the mid-1970s, however, the urban economy has rapidly deteriorated, leaving workers scrambling to get by. Expectations of Modernity explores the social and cultural responses to this prolonged period of sharp...

A panorama of the career of South African photographer David Goldblatt, elucidating his artistic commitments, networks, and influence. David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive coincides with a major traveling retrospective of the renowned South African photographer’s work. From vintage handprints of the artist’s black-and-white photography, taken between the 1950s and the 1990s, to his post-apartheid, large-format, colour work, photographs in the...

This abundantly illustrated book examines the figure of Balthazar, one of the biblical magi, and explains how and why he came to be depicted as a Black African king. According to the Gospel of Matthew, magi from the East, following a star, travelled to Jerusalem bearing precious gifts for the infant Jesus. The magi were revered as wise men and...

From Cape Town to Bristol and Richmond, statues have become sites of resistance and contestation of our imperial past and postcolonial present. The Psychic Lives of Statues by Rahul Rao offers an insightful exploration of these global controversies, demonstrating that beneath their surface lie deeper struggles over race, caste, and the politics of decolonisation. Rao takes readers on a journey...

“A stunning atlas of the present and future.” — Rebecca Solnit, author of several books including Infinite Cities: A Trilogy of Atlases—San Francisco, New Orleans, New York This immersive portal to islands around the world highlights the impacts of sea level rise and shimmers with hopeful solutions to combat it. Atlases are being redrawn as islands are disappearing. What does...

After Barbary explores the connection between the United States and North Africa between the Barbary Wars of the early nineteenth century and the era of European decolonization after World War II. Timothy Mason Roberts offers a new approach to the study of empires, highlighting the significance of Algeria in French-American relations from France's first occupation of the country through the...

Ethiopia has captured the imagination of observers since ancient times. The Ethiopians provides a fresh perspective on Ethiopian history up to 1500, beginning with the Aksumite civilisation at the start of the Common Era. It revisits famous stories like the legend of the Queen of Sheba, examines the rise and fall of Aksum, explores the role of Muslims and Islam...

A beautifully illustrated look at how the acclaimed ceramicist draws on the postcolonial experience in her work. Magdalene Odundo (b. 1950) is a Kenyan-born British ceramicist whose extraordinary works have been widely celebrated for their beauty and universality. Her studies of classical forms across many global traditions—from Greek and Chinese to Aztec and African—are evident in her intimate, evocative shapes....

A groundbreaking history of Africa's looted architectural heritage and a bold proposal for the repatriation of the continent's stolen cultural artefacts. Between the nineteenth century and today, colonial officials, collectors, and anthropologists dismembered African buildings and dispersed their parts to museums in Europe and the United States. Most of these artefacts were catalogued as ornamental art objects, which erased their...

One of the world's greatest revolutionary leaders, Amílcar Cabral's long and arduous campaign for the liberation of Portuguese-dominated Africa is explored in this vivid compilation of his most influential speeches and writings. Unity and Struggle is the compelling account of Amílcar Cabral’s fight against imperialism, discrimination and injustice, as well as his progressive advocacy for religious toleration and gender equality—all...

Which gods created the world according to the ancient Egyptians? How did they explain the sun's movements and its disappearance at night? In what ways did mythology permeate their lives? And what did they believe happened in the afterlife? This handy guide to Egyptian mythology explores how the ancient Nile-dwellers explained the world around them. The text delves into the...

Born in French Equatorial Africa, Andrée Blouin played a leading role in the struggles for decolonisation that shook the continent in the 1950s and 1960s. From the colonial orphanage of her childhood, she escaped an arranged marriage to become an avatar of pan-Africanism, advising heads of state from Algiers to Abidjan. Her autobiography retraces this journey. In Guinea, where Blouin...

Charting the photographic history of South Africa from colonialism to democracy, from early European photographers to work today by young South Africans, Life Itself explores how people, events and places have been depicted in photographic images over the decades. Featuring images from the heyday of Drum magazine and Black emergence to Peter Magubane's Soweto uprising pictures, David Goldblatt's In Boksburg...

For decades, African nations have fought for the return of countless works of art stolen during the colonial era and placed in Western museums. In Africa’s Struggle for Its Art, Bénédicte Savoy brings to light this largely unknown but deeply important history. One of the world's foremost experts on restitution and cultural heritage, Savoy investigates extensive, previously unpublished sources to...

A stunning memoir that transforms our understanding of a generation. In my home country, they call me a 'bornfree'. Simukai Chigudu was one of the first generation to be born after the end of colonial rule in Zimbabwe. Growing up, he heard stories about his grandfather's murder by the Rhodesian regime, how his father had been imprisoned and tortured as...

Spend 24 hours with the inhabitants of the most powerful kingdom in the ancient world. Ancient Egypt wasn’t all pyramids, sphinxes and gold sarcophagi. For your average Egyptian, life was tough, and work was hard, conducted under the burning gaze of the sun god Ra. During the course of a day in the ancient city of Thebes (modern-day Luxor), Egypt’s...

From the author of the much-celebrated Lost Pianos of Siberia, comes a new critically acclaimed and Sunday Times bestselling story of a journey, this time tracing a colonial-era African expedition. 'History and travelogue combine wonderfully in this tale of colonial plunder and hubris... Roberts is such a vivid travel writer that you forget what a brilliant historian she is. She...

Violence was a constant on all colonial frontiers, from the British expansion into the Australian and African continents, to the expansion of the United States and the Napoleonic Empire’s many incursions into Europe. Yet how did the forms of violence perpetrated in these four corners of the world compare? Did the oppression and exploitation of colonised peoples constitute a new...

'The reigning Queen of Classics' - Spectator 'Mary Beard is the best in the business' - Dan Snow 'Excellent' - Guardian 'Enthralling' - Sunday Times Britain's most famous classicist asks: what are civilisations? Central to this huge question are the ways in which we have depicted the human and the divine from prehistory to the present day. Across such iconic...

Blue-veiled nomads, camels crossing infinite dunes, oases shimmering on the horizon: ready-made images of the Sahara are easy to conjure. But they can never truly capture a region that crosses eleven countries and is home to millions. This sweeping account upends old fantasies, revealing the far more interesting reality of the Earth's largest hot desert. Drawing on decades of research,...

Introduced by Lois Pryce, author of Lois on the Loose, Red Tape & White Knuckles, and Revolutionary Ride. In 1959, Barbara Toy, famous for her solo overland travels in North Africa and Arabia, set out in her trademark Land Rover to drive from Libya to Ethiopia. Alone, she crossed the Sahara Desert and the equatorial forests of the Congo before...

A revelatory account of Black Atlantic political thought in the era of decolonisation, revealing how West African and Caribbean newspapers invigorated debates about imperialism, capitalism, and Black freedom. In the 1930s and 1940s, amid intensifying anticolonial activism across the British Empire, dozens of new West African and Caribbean newspapers printed their first issues. With small staffs and shoestring budgets, these...

In the nineteenth century, global systems of capitalism and empire knit the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds into international networks in contest over the meanings of slavery and freedom. Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves mines multinational archives to illuminate the Atlantic reverberations of US mercantile projects, "free labor" experiments, and slaveholding in western Indian Ocean societies. Gunja SenGupta and Awam...

A richly detailed transoceanic history of the early French Empire, illuminating how it became bound by a common legal culture of race—as well as how enslaved and free people critically shaped the development of the colonies. From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history...

This study explores the relations among computerization, labour, and the arts in South Africa. There are many books about the history and discourses of computerization in the United States but relatively little about these phenomena anywhere in the Global South. In A Will for the Machine, Mark Sanders outlines South Africa's entry into the computer age in the 1960s and...

Explores how psychiatry in Ghana was never just about medicine; it was about migration, exile, and the politics of who gets to stay and who must be cast out. For centuries, mental distress in West Africa has been navigated through a mix of healing, harming, ritual, and regulation. In African Pharmakon, Nana Osei Quarshie questions conventional narratives about colonial psychiatry....

This book is an introduction to the Pharaonic war machine of New Kingdom Egypt from ca. 1575 - 1100 BC. Written by a respected Egyptologist, it concentrates on Dynasty XVIII and the Ramesside period, in which the Egyptians created a professional army and gained control of Syria, creating an "Empire of Asia." The author highlights technological developments during this period,...

A revealing account of the lives and work of Ethiopian Orthodox pilgrims in sixteenth-century Rome, examining how this African diasporic community navigated the challenges of religious pluralism in the capital of Latin Christianity. Tucked behind the apse of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome is the ancient church of Santo Stefano. During the sixteenth century, Santo Stefano hosted an unusual community:...