African History

What does it take to make a dictator answer for his crimes? Hissène Habré, the former despot of Chad, had terrorised, tortured, and killed on a horrific scale over eight bloody years in power—all while enjoying full American and Western support. After Habré's overthrow, his victims and their supporters were determined to see him held responsible for his atrocities. Their...

What does it take to make a dictator answer for his crimes? Hissène Habré, the former despot of Chad, had terrorised, tortured, and killed on a horrific scale over eight bloody years in power—all while enjoying full American and Western support. After Habré's overthrow, his victims and their supporters were determined to see him held responsible for his atrocities. Their...

The surprising story of how Algeria joined and then left the postwar European Economic Community and what its past inclusion means for extracontinental membership in today's European Union. On their face, the mid-1950s negotiations over European integration were aimed at securing unity in order to prevent violent conflict and boost economies emerging from the disaster of World War II. But...

The Prehistory of Egypt covers the history of the Nile Valley from Nubia to the Mediterranean, during the period from the earliest hominid settlement, around 700,000 BC, to the beginnings of dynastic Egypt at the end of the fourth millennium BC. The book focuses primarily on the fifteen millennia from 18,000 to 3,000 BC, when different cultures can be identified...

The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. A spellbinding work of history that reads like a Cold War spy thriller—about the U.S.-sanctioned plot to assassinate the democratically elected leader of the newly independent Congo. A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR—The New Yorker, The Economist, Financial Times "This is one of the best books I have read in years... gripping,...

Siollun's books are gripping - Financial Times Much is known about what Europeans did in Africa, yet very little is known about Africa's history before its colonisation. In this surprising exploration, Max Siollun uncovers societies that were not part of a backward 'Dark Continent', but which instead had rich lore to rival the ancient Greeks and Romans. Pre-colonial West Africa...

Legend has it that the end of France’s empire in sub-Saharan Africa was a peaceful affair. This book tells a very different story, exposing the shocking violence of a secret war. Its theatre was Cameroon in the 1950s and ’60s, where a mass movement for self-determination emerged under the leadership of a pro-independence party, the Union of the Peoples of...

The surprising story of the wine industry's role in the rise of French Algeria and the fall of empire. "We owe to wine a blessing far more precious than gold: the peopling of Algeria with Frenchmen," stated agriculturist Pierre Berthault in the early 1930s. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Europeans had displaced Algerians from the colony's best...

The Berbers provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the Berber-speaking peoples.

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...

The aftermath of Algeria’s revolutionary war for independence coincided with the sexual revolution in France, and in this book, Todd Shepard argues that these two movements are inextricably linked. Sex, France, and Arab Men is a history of how and why—from the upheavals of French Algeria in 1962 through the 1970s—highly sexualised claims about Arabs were omnipresent in important public...

Rwanda by Susan Thomson offers a sobering study of the troubled African nation, both pre- and post-genocide, and its uncertain future. The brutal civil war between Hutu and Tutsi factions in Rwanda ended in 1994 when the Rwandan Patriotic Front came to power. This marked the beginning of an ambitious social, political, and economic project to remake the devastated central-east...

Winston Churchill wrote five books before he was elected to Parliament at the age of twenty-five. The most impressive of these books, The River War tells the story of Britain’s arduous and risky campaign to reconquer the Sudan at the end of the nineteenth century. More than half a century of subjection to Egypt had ended a decade earlier when...

A useful companion to the seventh volume of K. A. Kitchen’s seminal Ramesside Inscriptions Ramesside Inscriptions: Translated and Annotated Notes and Comments, Volume VII complements the seventh volume of Kitchen's seminal hieroglyphic texts (KRI VII) and its companion volume of translations (KRITA VII) that cover the period between Ramesses I and Ramesses XI. This newly published reference work contains the...

First published to mark the centenary of Nelson Mandela’s birth, The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela sparked celebrations around the globe for one of the “greatest warriors of all time” (O, The Oprah Magazine). Featuring 94 letters selected from that landmark collection, as well as six new letters that have never been published, this historic paperback provides an essential political...

On 7 December 1941, an armada of 354 Japanese warplanes launched a surprise attack on the United States, killing 2,403 people and forcing America's entry into the Second World War. With vivid prose and astonishing detail, Craig Nelson combines thrilling historical drama with individual concerns and experiences, following an ensemble of sailors, soldiers, pilots, diplomats, admirals, generals, the emperor, and...

"Impressive [Readers] will be rewarded with greater understanding of historical developments that changed the relationship between consumers and producers in a global economy in ways that reverberate to this day." -Wall Street Journal "Everill repositions West Africa as central to the broader Atlantic story of 18th and 19th century economic morality, its relationship with commercial ethics, and the expansion of...

"The fascinating story of arguably the greatest queen in sub-Saharan African history, who surely deserves a place in the pantheon of revolutionary world leaders." - Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Though largely unknown in the West, the seventeenth-century African queen Njinga was one of the most multifaceted rulers in history, a woman who rivalled Queen Elizabeth I in political cunning and...

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived programme, which commemorates the University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. Legitimating the Illegitimate was originally published in 1987....

'We need this book' SIMON REEVE 'Illuminating' FINANCIAL TIMES Why is Africa often perceived as a single country? What role did African soldiers play in the Second World War? Who else led the charge against Apartheid in South Africa? How did an African man become one of the wealthiest people in history? It's a Continent unravels these untold stories and...

Nationality is the most important legal mechanism sorting and classifying the world's population today. An individual's place of birth or naturalisation determines where he or she can and cannot be and what he or she can and cannot do. Although this system may appear universal, even natural, Will Hanley shows that it arose just a century ago. In Identifying with...

Eloquent and powerful - Françoise Vergès Debates around restitution and decolonising museums continue to rage across the world. Artefacts, effigies, and ancestral remains are finally being accurately contextualised and repatriated to their homelands. Fifteen Colonial Thefts amplifies these discussions, exploring the history of colonial violence in Africa through the prism of fifteen African belongings—all looted at the height of the...

What happens when death becomes the ultimate marker of one’s commitment to one’s freedom? What happens when the opposite of freedom is not unfreedom but death, not slavery but mortality? How are we to think of the right to life when a political demand for dignity and honour might be more important than life itself? Dying for Freedom explores these...

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived programme, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. Crown and Charter was originally published in 1974.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived programme, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. Crown and Charter was originally published in 1974.

Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the "New World." Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so...

Diamonds have long been bloody. A new history shows how Germany's ruthless African empire brought diamond rings to retail display cases in America—at the cost of African lives. Since the late 1990s, activists have campaigned to remove "conflict diamonds" from jewellery shops and department stores. But if the problem of conflict diamonds—gems extracted from war zones—has only recently generated attention,...

An extraordinary work, decades in the making: the first atlas to illustrate the entire scope of the transatlantic slave trade Winner of the Association of American Publishers' 2010 R.R. Hawkins Award and PROSE Award “A monumental chronicle of this historical tragedy.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times Between 1501 and 1867, the transatlantic slave trade claimed an estimated 12.5 million Africans...

This book brings together archaeological and linguistic evidence to provide a sweeping global history of ancient Africa, tracing how the continent played an important role in the technological, agricultural, and economic transitions of world civilisation. Christopher Ehret takes readers from the close of the last Ice Age some ten thousand years ago, when a changing climate allowed for the transition...

This book brings together archaeological and linguistic evidence to provide a sweeping global history of ancient Africa, tracing how the continent played an important role in the technological, agricultural, and economic transitions of world civilisation. Christopher Ehret takes readers from the close of the last Ice Age some ten thousand years ago, when a changing climate allowed for the transition...

In this concise history of Ethiopia, Harold Marcus surveys the evolution of the oldest African nation from prehistory to the present. This study demonstrates that there is more to Ethiopia's existence than colonial logic. It shows how geography, economics, and culture have served to unite Ethiopians against fractionalization. For the updated edition, Marcus has written a new preface, two new...

Sankoré is a dynamic, interactive, mid-weight eurogame designed for one to four players, set in the 14th-century Timbuktu. The game captures the rise in fortunes of the prestigious University of Sankoré. Tasked by the emperor, Mansa Musa, with spreading knowledge throughout West Africa, players must each manage a prestigious school within the Sankoré Madrasa as this great university is raised...

‘It is a glorious book: an education and an invitation. There is such life in its pages, and such food!’ Nigella Lawson A culinary expedition celebrating cooking from across the African continent Africana travels the continent showcasing its vibrant and varied cuisines that are rich in flavour, diverse in culture, and steeped in tradition. Combining recipes passed down the generations...

A leading public intellectual gives his authoritative and personal account of the tragic postcolonial fate of Uganda, his homeland. In 1972, when Mahmood Mamdani came home to Uganda, he found a country transformed by "an orgy of violence." Two years earlier, with support from the colonial powers of Great Britain and Israel, Idi Amin had forcefully cemented his rule. He...

Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said probes migrant labour's role in shaping the history of the Suez Canal and modern Egypt. It maps the everyday life of Port Said's residents between 1859, when the town was founded as the Suez Canal's northern harbour, and 1906, when a railway connected it to the rest of Egypt. Through groundbreaking research, Lucia...

Ghana has been a crucial site of encounters between the West and Africa and a historic centre for twentieth-century Pan-African independence movements. Today, it has also emerged as an important node of technology-driven development in the Global South. Ghana's activist software developers and digital diaspora are redefining the role of technology, not simply as a means for economic growth, but...

The first, and only, authorised and authenticated collection of correspondence spanning the 27 years Nelson Mandela was held as a political prisoner. While incarcerated in South Africa in four prisons as a sentenced prisoner between 1962 and 1990, Mandela wrote hundreds of letters to loved ones, followers, prison authorities, and government officials, documenting his plight as the most prominent political...

These narratives recount the harrowing experiences of Englishmen abducted by the Barbary pirates of North Africa. After being sold into slavery, the narrators succeeded in returning to their homeland where their stories were printed. Never before available in a modern, annotated edition, these tales describe combat at sea, extraordinary escapes, and religious conversion. They also illustrate the power, prosperity, and...

The first serious full-length biography of former Ugandan president Idi Amin, modern Africa’s most famous dictator. "A nuanced and sophisticated examination of one of the most misunderstood, and caricatured, figures in modern African history. . . . Gripping, empathic, and deeply researched."—Richard Reid, University of Oxford “Sharply written, forensically researched. . . . A meticulous re-examination of Amin’s life.”—Paul Kenyon,...

This biography of “African explorer” Richard Dorsey Mohun, written by one of his descendants, reveals how American greed and state power helped shape the new imperial order in Africa. Richard Dorsey Mohun spent his career circulating among the eastern United States, the cities and courts of Europe, and the African continent, as he served the US State Department at some...

W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the leading figures of Pan-African thought and activism in the twentieth century. As a sociologist, Du Bois wrote much about the historical and social circumstances of African Americans while often acknowledging the African historical background of much of African American, or Negro, culture. In 1946, Du Bois published The World and Africa,...

In this World War II military history, Rommel's army is a day from Cairo, a week from Tel Aviv, and the SS is ready for action. Espionage brought the Nazis this far, but espionage can stop them if Washington wakes up to the danger. As World War II raged in North Africa, General Erwin Rommel was guided by an uncanny...

In this groundbreaking work, the essayist and critic Adéwálé Májà-Pearce delivers a mordant verdict on Nigeria’s crisis of democracy. A mosaic of ethnic and religious groups, the most populous country in Africa was fabricated by British colonisers at the turn of the twentieth century. When Nigerians went to the polls to vote in the 2023 elections, they had experienced a...

“[A] vivid travelogue.” New Statesman “Has much to offer.” The Spectator "Sparks the imagination." BBC History Magazine "A fascinating study." BBC History Revealed Magazine “Essential reading." All About History "Valiant, valuable and entertaining." Times Literary Supplement The greatest river in the world has a long and fascinating history. Professor Terje Tvedt, one of the world's leading experts on the history...

An unforgettable journey into the forgotten history of medieval Africa From the birth of Islam in the seventh century to the voyages of European exploration in the fifteenth, Africa was at the centre of a vibrant exchange of goods and ideas. It was an African golden age in which Ghana, Nubia, and Zimbabwe became the crossroads of civilisations, and where...

Happy Valley was the name given to the Wanjohi Valley in the Kenya Highlands, where a small community of affluent, hedonistic white expatriates settled between the wars. While Kenya's early colonial days have been immortalised by farming pioneers like Lord Delamere and Karen Blixen, and the pioneering aviator Beryl Markham, Happy Valley became infamous under the influence of troubled socialite,...

The people of the Congo have suffered a particularly brutal experience of colonial rule; and, following independence in 1960, external interference by the United States, the rapacious and dictatorial regime of Mobutu, and periodic warfare which even now continues fitfully in the East of the country. But the Congolese people have not taken these multiple oppressions lying down. They have...

The Grosvenor was one of the finest East Indiamen of her day, a grand three-masted square-rigger of 741 tons bristling with 26 cannon. When she ran aground on the treacherous coast of south-east Africa, an astonishing number of her crew and passengers, including women and children, reached the shore safely. But the castaways were hundreds of miles from the nearest...

On October 11th, 1899, long-simmering tensions between Britain and the Boer Republics - the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic - finally erupted into the conflict that would become known as the Second Boer War. Two days after the first shots were fired, a young writer by the name of Winston Churchill set out for South Africa to cover...

The Boer War of 1899-1902 was an epic of heroism and bungling, cunning and barbarism, with an extraordinary cast of characters including Churchill, Rhodes, Conan Doyle, Smuts, Kipling, Gandhi, Kruger, and Kitchener. The war revealed the ineptitude of the British military and unexpectedly exposed the corrupt underside of imperialism in the establishment of the first concentration camps, the shooting of...

A panoramic global history of Africa in the age of imperialism Africa's long nineteenth century was a time of revolutionary ferment and cultural innovation for the continent's states, societies, and economies. Yet the period preceding what became known as the Scramble for Africa by European powers in the decades leading up to World War I has long been neglected in...

This title includes a new Foreword by WM. Roger Louis. On 26 July 1956, the British Empire received a blow from which it would never recover. On this day, Egypt's President Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company, one of the gems of Britain's imperial portfolio. It was to be a fateful day for Britain as a world power....

Winner, James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference, History, and Scholarship 2023, Food Winner, Harriet Tubman Prize 2023 Slaves for Peanuts is described as 'a complex story crossing time and oceans' (National Public Radio). This prizewinning book by Jori Lewis deftly weaves together the natural and human history of a crop that transformed the lives of millions. 'With elegant prose...

For over four hundred years, thousands of African men and women were taken from their homeland and transported across the world to be sold into slavery. The history of this startling and horrific period is perennially important, and recent scholarship has sought to uncover the experiences of the slaves themselves in order to uncover the voices of its many victims....

This exploration of cultural resilience examines the complex fate of classical Egyptian religion during the centuries from the period when Christianity first made its appearance in Egypt to when it became the region's dominant religion (roughly 100 to 600 C.E.). Taking into account the full range of witnesses to continuing native piety—from papyri and saints' lives to archaeology and terracotta...

It was the war that changed everything, and yet it's been mostly forgotten: in 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia. It dominated newspaper headlines and newsreels. It inspired mass marches in Harlem, a play on Broadway, and independence movements in Africa. As the British Navy sailed into the Mediterranean for a white-knuckle showdown with Italian ships, riots broke out in major cities...

Ordering Africa provides the first comparative overview of the role of anthropology in colonial Africa. With essays exploring metropolitan research institutes, Africans as ethnographers, and the transnational features of knowledge production, this volume both consolidates and extends a range of new research questions focusing on the politics of imperial knowledge.

'The definitive work on the subject....This is the achievement of a masterly, first-rate historian' New York Times Book Review 'It's a brilliantly orchestrated book, wonderfully rich in detail, but at the same time roaring along at a heart-thumping pace...' Mail on Sunday 'A brilliant, breathless account that reads like the plot of an action movie.' Sunday Telegraph On 3 July...

This fascinating work challenges many of the accepted facts about the concentration camps run by the British during the South African War. The author demonstrates that much of what we have traditionally understood about these camps originates from the testimony which was solicited, selected and published by key women activists within Boer proto-nationalist circles. Using detailed archival evidence, she shows...

'A wonderful debut by a talented and exciting young historian' Peter Frankopan 'Simultaneously capacious and personal...a masterful achievement' Tom Holland 'Elegant and powerful, Pepera's magnificent book elevates our understanding of Africa's overlooked histories' Olivette Otele, author of African Europeans Motherland is a ground-breaking exploration of African culture and identity, told via Luke Pepera's journey through 500,000 years of history to...

A dramatic intellectual biography of Victorian jurist Travers Twiss, who provided the legal justification for the creation of the brutal Congo Free State. Eminent jurist, Oxford professor, advocate to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Travers Twiss (1809-1897) was a model establishment figure in Victorian Britain and a close collaborator of Prince Metternich, the architect of the Concert of Europe. Yet Twiss's...

The 1994 genocide of the Tutsi, an attempt to exterminate a minority people, was unprecedented in speed and scale, comparable to the genocide of the Armenians by Turkey and the Nazi Holocaust. But the violence continues today, as supporters of the racist ideology of Hutu Power continue to undermine the established version of events through systematic denial, propaganda, and fake...

This fourth edition of this best-selling core history textbook offers a richly illustrated, single volume, narrative introduction to African history, from a hugely respected authority in the field. The market-leading range of illustrated material from prior editions is now further improved, featuring not only additional and redrawn maps and a refreshed selection of photographs, but the addition of full colour...

A historical journey to unearth the Egypt of the imagination. Now available in paperback, Egyptomania takes us on a historical journey to unearth the Egypt of the imagination, a land of strange gods, mysterious magic, secret knowledge, monumental pyramids, enigmatic sphinxes and immense wealth. Egypt has always exerted a powerful attraction on the Western mind, and an array of figures...

In the half-century between 1831 and 1881, three massive obelisks left Egypt for new lands. Prior to these journeys, the last large obelisk moved was the Vatican obelisk in 1586 – one of the great engineering achievements of the Renaissance. Roman emperors moved more than a dozen but left no records of how they did it. The nineteenth-century engineers entrusted...

Over 1500 years before the Empire Windrush docked on British shores, people of African descent were playing a significant and far-ranging role in British history. From the African soldiers on Hadrian’s Wall to the Black British intellectuals who made London a hub of radical, Pan-African ideas, their contributions have been vital. While there has been growing interest in this history,...

To secure a comfortable afterlife, ancient Egyptians built fortress-like tombs and filled them with precious goods, a practice that generated staggering quantities of artefacts over the course of many millennia, but one which has also drawn thieves and tomb-raiders to Egypt since antiquity. Drawing on modern scholarship, reportage, and period sources, this book tracks the history of treasure-seekers in Egypt...

A spine-tingling exploration of a venture as ancient as the pyramids themselves. To secure a comfortable afterlife, ancient Egyptians built fortress-like tombs and filled them with precious goods, a practice that generated staggering quantities of artefacts over the course of many millennia. This practice has also drawn thieves and tomb-raiders to Egypt since antiquity. Drawing on modern scholarship, reportage, and...

Walter Rodney was a scholar, working-class militant, and revolutionary from Guyana. Strongly influenced by Marxist ideas, he remains central to radical Pan-Africanist thought for many activists today. Rodney lived through the failed, though immensely hopeful, socialist experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, in Tanzania and elsewhere. A Revolutionary for Our Time critically considers Rodney's contribution to Marxist theory and history,...

This unique and rich collection of narratives, written or dictated by formerly enslaved Africans between 1820 and 1876, offers a rare snapshot of African voices in the history of slavery. Including narratives from the Atlantic and Indian Ocean trades, as well as testimonies from enslaved people who never left the African continent, it expands the chronological and geographical scope of...

A groundbreaking history that puts early and medieval West Africa in a global context. Pick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book, the first on this period of the region's history in a generation, tells a different story. Interweaving political and social...

Every time you try to say Africa is... the words crumble and break. From every generalisation you must exclude at least five countries. And just as you think you've nailed down a certainty, you find the opposite is also true. Africa is full of surprises. For the past three decades, Richard Dowden has travelled this vast and varied continent, listening,...

The incredible story of an Israeli mission that rescued 103 hostages from a hijacked jetliner. On July 27, 1976, Air France Flight 139 was hijacked by terrorists and flown to Entebbe Airport in Uganda. In the following agonising days, Israeli passengers were singled out and held hostage. A week later, on July 4, one hundred Israeli commandos raced 2,500 miles...

This concise edition of the biography of Walatta-Petros (1672) tells the story of an Ethiopian saint who lived from 1592 to 1642 and led a successful nonviolent movement to preserve African Christian beliefs in the face of European protocolonialism. This is the oldest-known book-length biography of an African woman written by Africans before the nineteenth century, and one of the...

On 21st November 2017, Robert Mugabe resigned as President of Zimbabwe after 37 years in power. A week earlier, the military had seized control of the country and forced him to step down as leader of the ruling Zanu-PF party. In this revised and updated edition of his classic biography, Stephen Chan seeks to explain and interpret Mugabe in his...

Moederland is a courageous and modern appraisal of what it means to be descended from the people who created the ultraracist apartheid system in South Africa. Illuminating its turbulent history through the lives of her female ancestors, it presents a history of South Africa like no other, told from the perspective of women long silenced in the historical narrative. It...

The epic 4000-year story of the world's greatest civilisation from a world-leading Egyptologist The history of Egypt is full of spectacular sites and epic stories, an evolving society rich in heroes and villains, inventors and intellectuals, artisans and pioneers. Now Professor Joann Fletcher pulls together the complete Story of Egypt — charting the rise and fall of the ancient Egyptians...

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...

A fresh and penetrating exploration of South Africa’s history, from the earliest known human inhabitation of the region to the present. “I did not think it was possible for a white person to write a history of South Africa which a black South African would find to be a fair and accurate account of a beautiful land and its people....