Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History最新文献

{"title":"Fire in African Landscapes","authors":"Simon Pooley","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.984","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.984","url":null,"abstract":"Fires have burned in African landscapes for more than a hundred million years, long before vertebrate herbivores trod the earth and modified vegetation and fire regimes. Hominin use of lightning fires is apparent c.1.5 million years ago, becoming deliberate and habitual from c. 400 thousand years ago (kya). The emergence of modern humans c. 195 kya was marked by widespread and deliberate use of fire, for hunting and gathering through to agricultural and pastoral use, with farming and copper and iron smelting spreading across sub-Saharan Africa with the Bantu migrations from 4–2.5 kya. Europeans provided detailed reports of Africans’ fire use from 1652 in South Africa and the 1700s in West Africa. They regarded indigenous fire use as destructive, an agent of desiccation and destruction of forests, with ecological theories cementing this in the European imagination from the 1800s. The late 1800s and early 1900s were characterized by colonial authorities’ attempts to suppress fires, informed by mistaken scientific ideas and management principles imported from temperate Europe and colonial forestry management elsewhere. This was often ignored by African and settler farmers. In the 1900s, the concerns of colonial foresters and fears about desiccation and soil erosion fueled by the American Dust Bowl experience informed anti-fire views until mid-century. However, enough time had elapsed for colonial and settler scientists and managers to have observed fires and indigenous burning practices and their effects, and to begin to question received wisdom on their destructiveness. Following World War II, during a phase of colonial cooperation and expert-led attempts to develop African landscapes, a more nuanced understanding of fire in African landscapes emerged, alongside greater pragmatism about what was achievable in managing wildfires and fire use. Although colonial restrictions on burning fueled some independence struggles, postcolonial environmental managers appear on the whole to have adopted their former oppressors’ attitudes to fire and burning. Important breakthroughs in fire ecology were made in the 1970s and 1980s, influenced by a movement away from equilibrium-based ecosystems concepts where fires were damaging disturbances to ecosystems, to an understanding of fires as important drivers of biodiversity integral to the functioning of many African landscapes. Notably from the 1990s, anthropologists influenced by related developments in rangeland ecology combined ecological studies with studies of indigenous land use practices to assess their impacts over time, challenging existing narratives of degradation in West African forests and East African savannas. Attempts were made to integrate communities (and, to a lesser extent, indigenous knowledge) into fire management plans and approaches. In the 2000s, anthropologists, archeologists, geographers, historians, and political ecologists have contributed studies telling more complex stories about human","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131383996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Preservation of African Websites as Historical Sources","authors":"Marion Frank-Wilson","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.690","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.690","url":null,"abstract":"The advent of the World Wide Web has changed traditional ways of communicating research and has increased opportunities for authors from the global South to disseminate knowledge, thus bypassing the “gate-keeping” system in the traditional peer-reviewed journal literature of the global North. Increasingly, content from and about Africa is produced and disseminated on the web. Content is all-encompassing and ranges from cultural and artistic creations to political as well as economic information and government publications and statistics. The web makes it possible not only to produce knowledge but also to provide public access to and increase interaction with information and historical sources. While the potential of the web to democratize knowledge production was recognized by librarians, archivists, and researchers on Africa early on, there is also an awareness that the web as medium for historical research may in fact deepen the digital divide and perpetuate longstanding inequalities, linking it to debates about the politics of archiving and related questions of cultural imperialism.\u0000 With the average age of a website estimated at seventy-five days, there is agreement among researchers and archivists that important web content is disappearing every day, and that future historical research depends on efforts to preserve and archive websites now. Nevertheless, while analyses and discussions about the importance of preserving African web content have emerged in the literature since the early 2000s, actual efforts to preserve and archive African web contents as historical resources have been relatively few and sporadic. Rather than relying on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which automatically preserves websites through a web crawler but that cannot be depended on to archive every hyperlink or even every subpage or new version of existing pages, libraries and archives use the Internet Archive’s subscription-based tool Archive-It as a way to capture web content at a selective, deep, subpage level. Creating such curated, archived digital collections, however, connects web archiving with concerns and issues raised in the scholarly literature about the politics of archiving and who ultimately has the right to decide which websites will be preserved as part of a country’s digital history. Moreover, specific characteristics of the web as a medium pose additional, more practical challenges for its use in historical research. Issues related to funding, scalability, availability of metadata, and archival documentation, which would include information about functionality, website versions, dead links, provenance, as well as contextual information, are all factors that have yet to be addressed when creating web archives. The need to develop practices, policies, and documentation to guide web archiving has therefore been stressed by both archivists and historians. Ultimately, the preservation of African websites for historical research can best be acco","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133006028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Roman Libya at the Time of Septimius Severus (193–211 CE)","authors":"D. Calì","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1048","url":null,"abstract":"The acclamation of the African-born Septimius Severus on April 14, 193 ce, as twenty-first ruler of the Roman Empire, had an enormous impact on the provinces of North Africa and particularly on those territories which nowadays correspond to modern Libya. The emperor’s systematic plan of military consolidation along the border, administrative and fiscal reassessment of minor centers, restoration of social order, and urban renovation of the major cities all resulted in the unprecedented modernization of this part of the Roman provincial system. The Severan period represented the cultural climax of Roman Libya and was a period during which African citizens exerted enormous influence as elected officials at various levels of the imperial administration. Nevertheless, while Libya was for the Greeks a clear geopolitical and cultural entity, in Roman times, despite the reformative actions of Septimius Severus, which targeted first and for the most part Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, the concept of Roman Libya remained a utopia.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"90 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114227172","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Muslim Brotherhoods in West African History","authors":"Mauro Nobili","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.171","url":null,"abstract":"Muslim Sufi brotherhoods (ṭuruq, sing. ṭarīqa) are ubiquitous in contemporary Islamic West Africa. However, they are relative latecomers in the history of the region, making their appearance in the mid-18th century. Yet, Sufism has a longer presence in West Africa that predates the consolidation of ṭuruq. Early evidence of Sufi practices dates to the period between the 11th and the 17th centuries. By that time traces of the Shādhiliyya and the lesser-known Maḥmūdiyya are available between the Atlantic Ocean and Lake Chad, but it was the activities of the Kunta of the Qādiriyya and of al-ḥājj ‘Umar of the Tijāniyya that led to the massive spread of Sufi brotherhoods in the region. The authority of leaders of ṭuruq did not disappear with the imposition of European colonialism. In fact, the power of those leaders who adjusted to the novel political situation further consolidated thanks to their role as mediators between their constituencies and the colonial government. Eventually, the end of the colonial period did not signal the decline of ṭuruq in West Africa. Conversely, during the postcolonial years, Sufi brotherhoods continued flourishing despite the secular nature of West African independent states and the increasing tension with a plethora of equally rising Salafi movements.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122698340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Socialist Regimes and Economic Planning","authors":"Bonny Ibhawoh","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.758","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.758","url":null,"abstract":"Between 1950 and the mid-1980s, several African countries adopted socialist systems of government. In the first decades of independence, socialism appealed to some African leaders both as a political ideology and as an economic system. Socialism represented the promise of a new anti-imperial, revolutionary, and independent path to national and continental development. The socialist policies adopted in African countries included centralized state control of the economy, collectivization of land and agriculture, the nationalization of key sectors of the economy, and public sector–led social development. From Ghana to Algeria, and from Tanzania to Egypt, these socialist policies brought significant economic and social changes with mixed results. The end of the Cold War in the 1990s, and the wave of pro-democracy movements that followed, signaled the end of socialist experimentation in Africa. However, the legacies of socialist economic planning persist across the continent.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"113 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114504574","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Women in Gabon","authors":"C. Griffiths","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.540","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.540","url":null,"abstract":"Gabon, a small oil-rich country straddling the equator on the west coast of Africa, is the wealthiest of France’s former colonies. An early period of colonization in the 19th century resulted in disease, famine, and economic failure. The creation of French Equatorial Africa in 1910 marked the beginning of the sustained lucrative exploitation of Gabon’s natural resources. Gabon began off-shore oil production while still a colony of France. Uranium was also discovered in the last decade of the French Equatorial African empire. Coupled with rich reserves in tropical woods, Gabon has achieved, since independence in 1960, a higher level of export revenue per capita of population than any other country in sub-Saharan Africa in the postcolonial era.\u0000 However, significant inequality has characterized access to wealth through paid employment throughout the recorded history of monetized labor. While fortunes have been amassed by a minute proportion of the female population of Gabon associated with the ruling regime, and a professional female middle-class has emerged, inequalities of opportunity and reward continue to mark women’s experience of life in this little-known country of West Central Africa.\u0000 The key challenge facing scholars researching the history of women in Gabon remains the relative lack of historical resources. While significant strides have been made over the past decade, research on women’s history in Francophone Africa published in English or French remains embryonic. French research on African women began to make a mark in the last decade of colonization, notably with the work of Denise Paulme, but then remained a neglected area for decades. The publication in 1994 of Les Africaines by French historian Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch was hailed at the time as a pioneering work in French historiography. But even this new research contained no analysis of and only a passing reference to women in Gabon.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"117 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127027019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"South African Film Since Apartheid","authors":"Cara Moyer-Duncan","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1105","url":null,"abstract":"Following South Africa’s historical multiracial elections in 1994, a Black majority government came to power, which almost immediately identified the film industry as an important part of their effort to transform one of the most racially and economically unequal countries in the world. The government considered access to culture a basic human right and saw cinema as one way to strengthen the new democracy, by promoting national unity and contributing to economic development. In 1999, through parliamentary legislation, it created the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency responsible for promoting the development of a national cinema. This signaled the possible start of a dynamic, socially engaged, and financially viable film industry that could enliven filmmaking within South Africa and across the African continent.\u0000 With the end of apartheid-era sanctions, South Africa re-entered the global market and the government embraced neoliberal policies. Consequently, the NFVF increasingly focused on the commercial possibilities of film. While government investments in the film industry have produced some positive results, deeply entrenched structural inequities remain an obstacle to Black filmmakers seeking access to the means of production, distribution, and exhibition. Moreover, in a country of about 55 million people in 2013, cinema was only accessible to about 10 percent of the overall population due to the cost and location of movie theatres. Despite these limitations, in the first two decades of democracy, there were notable developments in independent, popular, and documentary films. Although these categories are not fixed or static, they are a useful way of framing recent trends that offer insight into the South African film industry and the way its films represent the nation. There have also been significant changes in the realm of distribution and exhibition that have the potential to upend the traditional model of cinemagoing.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"51 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122845249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Colonialism in West Central Africa","authors":"F. Bernault","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.833","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.833","url":null,"abstract":"The article considers a large region comprising Chad, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Gabon, the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea.1 From the 1880s onwards, Central Africa was colonized by Spanish, French, German, Belgian, and Portuguese powers. Here Africans generally suffered a harsher kind of rule than in West Africa, as colonialism brought little capital and investments, and imposed brutal forms of extractive economy. Foreign powers, moreover, proved reluctant to dialogue with African elites. Yet, the colonial era was also a moment when Central Africans initiated radical political revolutions and capacious social changes, achieving independence in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout the period under consideration, moreover, important cultural creations in the form of music, popular painting, photography, and fashion became influential in the rest of Africa and beyond.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116111206","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Climate Change in Eastern Africa","authors":"R. Marchant","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1004","url":null,"abstract":"The climatology of East Africa results from the complex interaction between major global convergence zones with more localized regional feedbacks to the climate system; these in turn are moderated by a diverse land surface characterized by coastal to land transitions, high mountains, and large lakes. The main climatic character of East Africa, and how this varies across the region, takes the form of seasonal variations in rainfall that can fall as one, two, or three rainy seasons, the times and duration of which will be determined by the interplay between major convergence zones with more localized regional feedbacks. One of the key characteristics of East Africa are climatic variations with altitude as climates change along an altitudinal gradient that can extend from hot, dry, “tropical” conditions to cool, wet, temperate conditions and on the highest mountains “polar” climates with permanent ice caps. With this complex and variable climate landscape of the present, as scientists move through time to explore past climatic variability, it is apparent there have been a series of relatively rapid and high-magnitude environmental shifts throughout East Africa, particularly characterized by changing hydrological budgets. How climate change has impacted on ecosystems, and how those ecosystems have responded and interacted with human populations, can be unearthed by drawing on evidence from the sedimentary and archaeological record of the past six thousand years. As East African economies, and the livelihoods of millions of people in the region, have been clearly heavily affected by climate variability in the past, so it is expected that future climate variability will impact on ecosystem functioning and the preparedness of communities for future climate change.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"87 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126319284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Festac 77: A Black World’s Fair","authors":"A. Apter","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.798","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.798","url":null,"abstract":"From January 15 to February 12, 1977, Nigeria hosted an extravagant international festival celebrating Africa’s cultural achievements and legacies on the continent and throughout its diaspora communities. Named the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (or Festac 77), it was modeled on Léopold Senghor’s inaugural Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (World Festival of Black Arts, or Fesman) held in Dakar in 1966 but expanded its Atlantic horizons of Africanity to include North Africa, India, Australia, and Papua New Guinea. Festac’s broader vision of the Black and African world was further bolstered by Nigeria’s oil boom, which generated windfall revenues that accrued to the state and underwrote a massive expansion of the public sector mirrored by the lavish scale of festival activities. Festac’s major venues and events included the National Stadium with its opening and closing ceremonies; the state-of-the-art National Theatre in Lagos, with exhibits and dance-dramas linking tradition to modernity; the Lagos Lagoon featuring the canoe regattas of the riverine delta societies; and the polo fields of Kaduna in the north, celebrating the equestrian culture of the northern emirates through their ceremonial durbars.\u0000 If Festac 77 invoked the history of colonial exhibitions, pan-African congresses, Black nationalist movements, and the freedom struggles that were still unfolding on the continent, it also signaled Nigeria’s emergence as an oil-rich regional and global power. Festac’s significance lies less in its enduring impact than in what it reveals about the politics of festivals in postcolonial Africa.","PeriodicalId":166397,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126944162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}