The Journal of African History articles from July 1996

The Journal of African History archives from July 1996

Secular power and religious authority in Muslim society: the case of Songhay.
July 1, 1996... In a 1964 paper entitled 'Religion and state in the Songhay empire, 1464-1591',(1) I examined the way in which the dynamic of the Songhay rulers' relationship to religious authorities, both indigenous and Islamic, changed during Songhay's...

Rounding up spinsters: gender chaos and unmarried women in colonial Asante.
July 1, 1996... In March of 1933, the District Officer's 'Quarterly Report' for the Mampong District in Asante contained a rather strange entry for the town of Effiduasi. 'Becoming alarmed at the amount of venereal disease spread in the town by unattached...

What's in a drink? Class struggle, popular culture and the politics of akpeteshie (local gin) in Ghana, 1930-67.
July 1, 1996... Wunni ntramma na wo se nsa nye de When you do not have cowry shells, you say wine is not sweet (Twi Proverb). Social revolutions or movements of popular protest often begin innocuously. They are initially preoccupied with...

The flowing eye: water management in the upper Kuruman valley, South Africa, c. 1800-1962.
July 1, 1996... In Kuruman, on the border of South Africa's northern Cape and Northwest provinces, the most reliable source of water is not the heavens but the earth. The region receives less than 15 inches of rain per year. The low and erratic rainfall has...

Explaining surgical evangelism in colonial Southern Africa: teeth, pain and faith.
July 1, 1996... LAUGHTER AND PAIN The sun is about to rise in Molepolole, a town of rondavels and wood posts, storefronts and dirt paths set in the reddish, loamy earth of the southern Kalahari in eastern Botswana. It is mid July 1905. As the first light of...

Poor women and nationalist politics: alliances and fissures in the formation of a nationalist political movement in Salisbury, Rhodesia, 1950-6.
July 1, 1996... The expression of gender relations in the politics of African Salisbury in the 1950s was influenced by a highly competitive urban labor market and compounded by residential segregation, state intervention and demographic pressures. The...

The Founding of the Castelo Sao Jorge da Mina: An Analysis of the Sources.
July 1, 1996... In 1482 Diogo de Azambuja, sent by the King of Portugal, founded the fortified trading centre of Sao Jorge da Mina, known today as Elmina, close to Cape Coast on the Costa da Mina (Gold Coast, modern Ghana). This foundation constituted an...

Terms of Trade and Terms of Trust: The History and Contexts of Pre-Colonial Market Production Around the Upper Zambezi and Kasai.
July 1, 1996... This dense book seeks to challenge colonial and contemporary discourses on the alleged economic backwardness of the peoples of the Upper Zambezi and Kasai by examining what it calls the history and contexts of pre-colonial market production in...

Les Africaines: Histoire des femmes d'Afrique noire du XIXe au XXe siecle.
July 1, 1996... Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch boldly offers her history of African women to a postmodern world fragmented to the point that for some the category 'woman' no longer exists. Sensitive to her position, she carefully and frequently argues the...

Les missionaires a la rencontre de l'Afrique au XIXe siecle (Cote des Esclaves et pays yoruba: 1840-1891).
July 1, 1996... The subject of Bernard Salvaing's study is rather precisely the attitudes of missionaries (and particularly European ones, though many if not most missionaries in this region were actually Africans) to their encounter with Africa rather than...

Marie-Joseph Bonnat et les Ashanti: journal (1869-1874).
July 1, 1996... Blessed by source material is the historian of Asante. Doubly blessed is the student of the reign of the tenth asantehene Kofi Kakari (1867-74). In the Basel Mission is a barely used 825-page foolscap manuscript diary entitled Tagebuch...

Anioma: A Social History of the Western Igbo People.
July 1, 1996... Professor Don C. Ohadike has been writing about the western Igbo people for twenty years. His previous books and articles span a wide variety of themes, and are strikingly even-handed in their approach: the struggles of the early Catholic...

'We Spend Our Years as a Tale That Is Told': Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom.
July 1, 1996... This book's stated aim is to demonstrate, in Karin Barber's words, 'simultaneously the historicity and the textuality of texts' (p. 2) with respect to a series of historical narratives collected in the small Ndebele-speaking chieftaincy of...

Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa: c. 1860-1910.
July 1, 1996... Studies of migrant labour in southern Africa have tended to divide between those concerned with Africans at the workface, in Kimberley, Johannesburg or other mines and plantations of the region, and those describing the communities they left...

Divided Sisterhood: A History of Nursing in South Africa.
July 1, 1996... Professor Shula Marks begins her study of the history of nursing in South Africa with a question that she was frequently asked during the course of her research, 'But why nursing?' The question, seems to imply that she might well have directed...

Colonialism, Health and Illness in French Equatorial Africa: 1885-1935.
July 1, 1996... It is with satisfaction and sadness that one welcomes the publication of Rita Headrick's work on the colonial health service and African illness in French Equatorial Africa - satisfaction that the results of exemplary research are now available...

The Scattering Time: Turkana Responses to Colonial Rule.
July 1, 1996... Warfare in Africa remains, whenever the news media deign to look at the continent, one of the most popular themes around which to structure contemporary reporting. Similarly, political scientists have examined the role of the military to better...

Thus Ruled Emir Abbas: Selected Cases from the Records of the Emir of Kano's Judicial Council.
July 1, 1996... This volume is a contribution to a project for the translation of African historical sources which 'has its roots in a recognition of the importance of primary sources, both as a teaching tool, and as a foundation for further research' (p....

Prophet Harris, The 'Black Elijah' of West Africa.
July 1, 1996... David Shank's three-volume, 1980, Aberdeen doctoral thesis on the Prophet Harris has long been spoken of with great respect by the relatively few people who have read it. It is very good to have it published at last, and the abridger, Jocelyn...

The Scriptures of the amaNazaretha of EKuphaKameni.
July 1, 1996... The Church of the amaNazaretha was founded in Natal around 1911 by Isaiah Shembe - one of the most remarkable religious figures in the history of South Africa. As a popularly acknowledged prophet, Shembe succeeded in moulding elements of...

Twentieth-Century South Africa.
July 1, 1996... The production of general survey texts on South African history is a contested matter. Not only are publishers competing to produce texts that will be prescribed in schools and universities, but the very notion of the history text-book is...

The Internationalization of Colonialism: Britain, France and Black Africa, 1939-56.
July 1, 1996... John Kent's study of Anglo-French relations in black Africa between 1939 and 1956 focuses on an aspect of European policy-making that has, until recently, been little studied. It examines why there was a perceived growing need, in both London...

African Decolonization.
July 1, 1996... Much has been written about the dismantling of the European colonial empires in Africa, so that the case for a new text is not a particularly compelling one, unless the story offers new insights, or it is refreshingly told. The availability of...

Obote: A Political Biography.
July 1, 1996... Apollo Milton Obote, former President of Uganda, must be among the most enigmatic of Africa's nationalist leaders. It was essentially Obote's negotiating skills as president of the Uganda People's Congress (UPC) that were responsible for the...

Colonial Psychiatry and the African Mind.
July 1, 1996... This useful book is a detailed and wide-ranging social history of colonial psychiatry. McCulloch analyses theories about 'primitive' personality ('ethnopsychiatry') developed between about 1900 and 1960 in colonial French and British Africa....

Namibia's Liberation Struggle: The Two-Edged Sword.
July 1, 1996... This collection of essays is controversial and provocative, but also compulsive reading for anybody interested in the lengthy struggle for Namibian independence. The democratic structures of contemporary Namibia have been placed on a pedestal...

Allies in Adversity: The Frontline States in Southern African Security, 1975-1993.
July 1, 1996... This book deals with one of the fundamental questions in Africa's search for meaningful political and economic integration; how small states with limited resources promote change in their regional neighbourhoods. In particular, it examines the...

In the Time of Cannibals: The Word Music of South Africa's Basotho Migrants.
July 1, 1996... This is no ordinary book. At first glance, its brief - an analysis of a performance genre, lifela or self-praises of Basotho migrants - is not unusual. Within the field of oral performance studies/ethnomusicology, there are a number of ventures...

Zaire.
July 1, 1996... The World Bibliographical Series of Clio Press has a proven record of service and this volume is no exception to the rule. The Zaire companion falls within the usual range of approximately 800 entries, all faultlessly compiled, abstracted and...

The Benefits of Famine: A Political Economy of Famine and Relief in Southwestern Sudan, 1983-1989.
July 1, 1996... That famines cannot be explained away as natural disasters has long been argued by social scientists, perhaps culminating in Amartya Sen's (1981) demonstration that Food Availability Decline is neither prerequisite nor sufficient for famine to...