A Companion to African History

William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, Nwando Achebe, William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, Nwando Achebe

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119267850, 9780470656310
• eBook ISBN: 9781119063506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Covers the history of the entire African continent, from prehistory to the present day

A Companion to African History embraces the diverse regions, subject matter, and disciplines of the African continent, while also providing chronological and geographical coverage of basic historical developments. Two dozen essays by leading international scholars explore the challenges facing this relatively new field of historical enquiry and present the dynamic ways in which historians and scholars from other fields such as archaeology, anthropology, political science, and economics are forging new directions in thinking and research. 

Comprised of six parts, the book begins with thematic approaches to African history—exploring the environment, gender and family, medical practices, and more. Section two covers Africa's early history and its pre-colonial past—early human adaptation, the emergence of kingdoms, royal power, and warring states. The third section looks at the era of the slave trade and European expansion. Part four examines the process of conquest—the discovery of diamonds and gold, military and social response, and more. Colonialism is discussed in the sixth section, with chapters on the economy transformed due to the development of agriculture and mining industries. The last section studies the continent from post World War II all the way up to modern times.

• Aims at capturing the enthusiasms of practicing historians, and encouraging similar passion in a new generation of scholars
• Emphasizes linkages within Africa as well as between the continent and other parts of the world
• All chapters include significant historiographical content and suggestions for further reading
• Written by a global team of writers with unique backgrounds and views
• Features case studies with illustrative examples

In a field traditionally marked by narrow specialisms, A Companion to African History is an ideal book for advanced students, researchers, historians, and scholars looking for a broad yet unique overview of African history as a whole.

Chapter One
Introduction: Identities and (Mis)Representations

William H. Worger

This book grew organically. Rather than start with a list of conventional “trios” – social/economic/political, precolonial/colonial/postcolonial, chronological/regional/thematic – we began by asking a talented group of scholars researching, writing, and teaching African history to contribute chapters on topics that they considered most relevant, most intriguing, and most exciting for themselves for the state of the field today and for the future, at least for the next 10 years or so. The depth and breadth of work contained in these chapters captures those enthusiasms.

The title of this introduction, “Identities and (Mis)Representations,” reflects a common theme that emerged individually and organically in each of the chapters. A focus on Africans as ordinary people, actors in their own lives, and full of the same complicated sets of motives, responses, desires, and emotions that affect all of us in our own lives becomes clear throughout the collection. But with this focus comes a caution – that often we know too little about Africa and Africans because we still fail to use many sources readily available in vernacular languages, that often we fail to include the speakers of those languages as our colleagues and not just as our sources, and that often we still fail to write for audiences composed of the people that we study.

And, in particular, we still have to struggle with countless misrepresentations of Africa and Africans. Listening to an National Public Radio commentator reporting from Nairobi on the 2017 Kenyan elections and the “need to understand” that democratic elections dated back only 10 years in a country that had won its independence more than half a century before, and that all political conflict was based in fundamental “tribal differences,” is a reminder that our scholarly work far too often has had little wider impact beyond academia. Why else do we need a website ironically named “Africa is a Country” to remind us that Africa is made up of 54 different countries with myriad cultures, especially when we have thousands of troops positioned in secret US military bases throughout the African continent, unknown even to members of the US administration? The chapters in this book demonstrate the energy with which scholars in their everyday lives combat stereotypes, often with little success, but with relentless determination all the same.

The book is divided into six sections, with boundaries that are not hard and fast but that often overlap and are porous. There is a movement from the most individual to wider connections, to community, nation, and the world, but this is not assumed to be a one‐way process, and that sense of the cross‐cutting nature of history will become clear in reading the chapters individually and collectively. Some of the chapters offer detailed case studies restricted in time and/or place, and most reflect on issues continent‐wide, though with illustrative examples provided so that the analyses are always well founded in a body of studies.

Part I: The personal

In Part I the authors of the four chapters examine the ways in which Africans see themselves as individuals, in relationship to each other and to society at large. Overcoming the stereotypes engendered under colonialism, Africans now weigh the meanings of sexuality, masculinity, and race on their own terms.

The most intimate identities through sexuality and sexual practices is the subject of Marc Epprecht’s chapter, both in a historical context and as it relates to fundamental contemporary issues of sexual rights, sexual health, and human rights (Chapter 2). Epprecht provides an overview of European accounts written primarily in the nineteenth century that sought to identify African sexual practices, often perceived at the time as differing from those of Europeans and as representing the backwardness and “savagery” of societies conceived as being in need of European control and improvement. He then moves on to consider the ways in which Africans sought to counter, by arguing against in writing and by acting out in practice, the heritage of colonial norms of heterosexuality carried over into the era of independence by state actors within Africa as well as by international organizations such as the World Health Organization and the World Bank.

In Chapter 3 Stephan F. Miescher takes the topic of sexuality a step further through his examination of African men’s understanding of themselves as masculine. He provides a close reading of studies written since the 1990s that examine the issue of men and masculinity: What do these terms mean? How have they been applied? How has being a man changed in Africa over the past 100 years? His chapter discusses conceptual issues, focusing especially on the differences articulated by recent scholars between terms such as “masculine,” “masculinity,” and “manhood” and on the multitude of ways in which colonialists and colonialism sought to remake men, especially through missionary‐controlled education and wage labor, and the ways in which Africans responded to their changing social and economic situations.

Turning to African views of themselves as subjects of colonial rule, Nimi Wariboko examines how self‐perceptions changed through encounters with Christianity and with colonialism in Chapter 4. Wariboko focuses in particular on three issues he identifies as most important in the literature he surveys: the “weight of blackness” and the development of “‘rationalistic’ competitive individualism,” both formed especially during the colonial era, and “how precolonial African personhood shapes the postcolonial Christian world after enduring the weight of blackness under colonialism and after passing through the dogged efforts of colonial mission to make it Western.” He concludes by arguing that, as a result of these encounters, psychological duality has been “enforced” in many “individuals whose personhood is both African and not African … There is now an other within the African self.”

In Chapter 5, Nicola Ginsburgh and Will Jackson examine the mirror situation of the white colonists who identify as both European and African. These “white Africans” have the conviction that they can become “truly African” as well as “remain apart,” echoing the phenomenon of dual identity discussed in Wariboko’s chapter. Looking especially at Algeria, Portuguese Africa, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, and Kenya, the authors argue that there was a distinct attitude toward Africanness under white rule in the settler colonies that aimed to erase the indigenous presence through a cult of separation. Yet it is now commonplace for one settler group, white South Africans, to refer to themselves as African, as a way of appropriating what during the apartheid era they had repudiated as the “Third World” and yet now embrace as part of their newly found identity in the Global South. The chapter raises questions of what it means to be a settler, a migrant, and indeed an African, especially in continuing struggles over environmental resources in these countries.

Part II: Women’s roles in institutions of power

In Part II, the three authors re‐examine the ways in which African women have been seen historically through institutions of power, and they overturn many preconceptions of the subordination of women. In two chapters, by Nwando Achebe and Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, analysis of work in African languages that has not previously been consulted, provides an important key to understanding women’s ability to wield considerable power.

Ndlovu’s examination of “Women, Authority, and Power in Precolonial Southeast Africa” (Chapter 6) provides a fascinating example of the use of indigenous language sources to shed completely new light on an area and period in South African history that has previously made very little use of such sources. Ndlovu uses a case study, that of Queen Mother Ntombazi of the Ndwandwe people who, like other women in the Zulu and other southern African kingdoms, were full participants in power and politics. He argues that knowledge of Ntombazi, oral and written, was deliberately scrubbed from the historical record by nineteenth‐century cultural brokers, and that this erasure, this intentional forgetting, was perpetuated in twentieth‐century historical novels written in the vernacular, which identified Ntombazi as a cruel witch and instead celebrated Shaka as a national icon in an era when Africans were subjected to white racism and oppression. Readers of this chapter too will have different experiences of comprehension, because Ndlovu leaves all his quotes from isiZulu (which include versions of the language from the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries) in the vernacular, believing that the closest understanding can come only if we appreciate the languages of expression. But, as an aid to comprehension for all, he ensures that the paragraphs in which the isiZulu quotes are embedded themselves explain the material quoted.

Nwando Achebe in her chapter on “Love, Courtship and Marriage in Africa” (Chapter 7) investigates the history of an emotion – love – and a relationship – marriage – which are often written about in transactional terms by scholars of Africa, both in the past and in the present. Achebe sketches out a new path, starting with analysis of the vocabulary of love, loving, sexual attraction, and courtship, the words themselves used in indigenous languages throughout Africa. And she discusses the various practices by which people courted one another, how they developed their relationships, and how they married in various ways, including woman‐to‐woman marriages. Her chapter concludes with an extensive discussion of sources, what she refers to as the Love, Courtship, and Marriage Archive, including examples of Nigerian love literature, poems, songs, and academic studies.

Claire Robertson’s chapter on “Slavery and Women in Africa” starts by showing how more recent studies of women and slavery in Africa have overturned many stereotypes about women and about slavery (Chapter 8). Such studies have shown that the predominance of men in the Atlantic slave trade had more to do with the value of women in production in Africa and less with European assumptions about men’s supposed higher capacity for agricultural labor, and also demonstrate that slavery was more a continuum of various statuses of being unfree and not just a single immutable status defined by chattel slavery. Robertson also examines the ways in which slaveholding changed during colonialism – ending in some societies, continuing in others, taking on new forms in yet others – and concludes with a discussion of the problem of contemporary slavery in a world in which women often lack access to key resources and are particularly vulnerable to the downsides of the world market economy. She finishes with the comment that in the world today there are millions of slaves, nearly all of them women. In other words, while African women had negotiated their terms of slavery in the past, today slavery has become gendered more than ever.

Part III: Family and community

African communities were organized according to many different principles, whether through kinship, ethnicity, race, religion, or, in the recent past, nation. The chapters in Part III demonstrate that these categories were flexible rather than fixed, and that Africans defined themselves and others in ways that protected and enhanced their communities. Rather than existing in static formations, communities were fluid and adaptable.

James Giblin begins his chapter on kinship in a modest way, suggesting that you may be tempted to skip it, as with most book chapters on kinship, and then shows us exactly why and how central kinship is to understanding African relationships from historic times to the contemporary world of WhatsApp (Chapter 9). For historians in particular, Giblin makes the case that understanding kinship – as relationships, as discourse, and as a cultural construction rather than simply as a matter of biological descent – provides a way to understand the creative ways in which people define themselves and others. The key contribution of Giblin’s examples of his own research, and his discussion of the work of others, is to separate kinship from the arid discussions of older anthropological texts and “background” chapters in history dissertations, and to show it as a living, breathing, and vital part of daily life, full of rich information for social historians.

In Chapter 10 Michael Mahoney, like Giblin, tackles what might seem a well‐worn concept in African studies – ethnicity – but with his focus on southern Africa he also breathes new life into the term. In particular, he demonstrates the ways in which Africans themselves used ethnicity as a source of pride and a feeling of belonging, rather than to label and divide. His examination of the scholarship brings into focus especially work done in sociolinguistics and archaeology as well as in history, and also emphasizes the importance of language as source material – narratives, figures of speech, and much else – in explaining how and why people identify themselves and others. But Mahoney’s discussion of ethnicity is not limited to Africans; he extends his examination of South Africa to include discussion of the development of ethnic identities by whites, Indians, and “coloureds” in that country’s fraught history, especially during the apartheid years. He concludes with a discussion of ethnicity in the rest of southern Africa – Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe – and warns that in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Part I: The Personal
• Part II: Women’s Roles in Institutions of Power
• Part III: Family and Community
• Part IV: Africans and Their Environment
• Part V: Africans and the World
• Part VI: African Self‐Representations
• Index
• End User License Agreement