INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES最新文献

{"title":"Irregular Connections: A History of Anthropology and Sexuality","authors":"M. Epprecht","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-4117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-4117","url":null,"abstract":"Irregular Connections: A History of Anthropology and Sexuality. By Andrew P. Lyons and Harriet D. Lyons. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Pp. 419. $60.00/£45.95 cloth; $29.95/£22.95 paper. Africanist scholars often rely heavily upon anthropologists for evidence about cultural practices, especially around topics like sexuality and gender relations. Many of us admire (and increasingly try to emulate) anthropologists' personal courage, dedication to fieldwork, and linguistic skills. But are we always appropriately careful in separating anthropologists' ostensibly scientific methodologies and observations from their personal subjectivity and political views? The sad example of the psychologist Phillipe Rushton, among many others, suggests otherwise, and also suggests where lack of due care can lead. Rushton notoriously argued that there was a direct correlation between supposedly large penis size, high promiscuity, and low intelligence among \"Africans\" (presumably this did not include African women).1 Writing in the 1990s, he based his theory in part on \"evidence\" naively drawn from a piece of virtual pornography published nearly a century earlier (Jacobus X, Untrodden Fields of Anthropology, 1898). Andrew and Harriet Lyons have drawn on over two decades of study in and about Africa to craft this impressive, thought-provoking book. They analyze numerous examples of the sometimes shockingly shoddy scholarship that was used to make (but also sometimes to refute) racist, misogynist, and homophobic arguments about sexuality to North American and British audiences. Irregular Connections should help gird us non-anthropologists with a more rigorously critical understanding of their (and by extension, our) disciplines. The aims are, first, to analyze moral snares and methodological pitfalls that influenced the study and representation of sexuality in anthropology as a professional field of study, and second, to reflect on what we can learn from this history in order to make future scholarship on sexuality less problematic. A central argument quickly emerges. From the very beginnings in the mid-eighteenth century, European and then American anthropologists \"conscripted\" select, sometimes completely fabricated evidence about various \"natives\" and \"primitives\" in order to advance their specific ideals and preferences against the prevailing wisdom of the day in their own societies. These included greater sexual freedom for white women, companionate marriage, eugenics, tolerance of homosexuality, the proper role of masturbation and prostitution, and much more. This is a persuasive argument, pioneered, I would say, by Rudi Bleys in his Geography of Perversion (a book to which the Lyons do not give much attention or credit). It closely follows the careers of some of the most prominent anthropologists in history right up to the present, linking their scholarship to struggles that were taking place in their personal lives, to struggles within the academy,","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"38 1","pages":"379"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2005-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71105801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of the Pilgrim's Progress","authors":"Paul S. Landau","doi":"10.5860/choice.41-5753","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-5753","url":null,"abstract":"The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of the Pilgrim's Progress. By Isabel Hofmeyr. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 314. $65.00/£42.95 cloth, $22.95/£14.95 paper. John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress of 1678 is about the voyage of a character called \"Christian\" through a landscape filled with labeled, aphoristic traps, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, the Slough of Despond, etc., with compatriots named Faith and Hopeful and so on. It's heavy handed and repetitive, a sort of inferior C. S. Lewis, a dated book, in other words, by the usual standards of the nineteenth century, the era of Trollope and George Elliot and Yeats and Shaw. Isabel Hofmeyr's account of Pilgrim's Progress's international expansion into something else, on the other hand, is elegant and readable. Her task is to chart the vectors in which Bunyan's moralistic fable became enmeshed in different colonial and postcolonial projects. In hundreds of languages the world over Pilgrim's Progress appears to have ranked second only to the Bible in influence. As it moved, it changed. The Portable Bunyan begins with a visual example of such change. In the frontispiece of the original Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan is napping, as befits a \"vagabond.\" \"Christian,\" his dreamed-of \"pilgrim,\" walks up a path in the background. When the book came out in SiNdebele in 1902, Bunyan's eyes are wide open in the frontispiece, as the pilgrim behind him has become an African schoolboy. As Hofmeyr explains, in South Africa it was inappropriate for a white man to sleep in public places: only a black man could be a tinker! Isabel Hofmeyr has given us not only a translational history of this Bunyan, but even more, an archaeology of Bunyanisms in the aftermath of empire, a history of Bunyanism \"waft[ing] out from mission stations like clouds of confetti\" (p. 62), being possessed and remade according to local circumstance, and reemerging in incipient nationalist discourses (including \"Englishness\"). The how of its literary remaking is Hofmeyr's concern, from its innocuous beginnings as a demotic low-culture tract, through its Atlantic dissemination, and on into Ngugi's and others' ironic occupation of the text or parts therein. \"Christian\" was an intermediary to \"Christ,\" and also a cipher for any penitent, an almost rote mechanism for self-discipline. For mission-educated Africans, Giant Despair's Dungeon might become, metaphorically, the situation of the Coloured classes, or the vehicle for an attack in Umteteli waBantu on black elites who cannot \"scale the Hill\" because they keep slipping on \"carpets of cash.\" It was \"de-allegoricized and re-allegoricized.\" To me, the most interesting part of The Portable Bunyan is about the meaning of literacy and texts. Pilgrim's Progress itself came from a semiliterate world, and Christian and his allegorical companions struggle with their own reading and writing and verbal explaining. In their world, as in South Africa at the turn of the cent","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"38 1","pages":"340"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2005-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71100970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Slavery and Beyond: The Making of Men and Chikunda Ethnic Identities in the Unstable World of South-Central Africa, 1750-1920","authors":"Josephine C. Miller","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-2356","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-2356","url":null,"abstract":"Slavery and Beyond: The Making of Men and Chikunda Ethnic Identities in the Unstable World of South-Central Africa, 1750-1920. By Alien F. and Barbara S. Isaacman. Portsmouth N.H.: Heinemann, 2004. Social History of Africa Series. Pp. xii, 370, maps, figures, photographs. $99.95 cloth, $29.95 paper. Allen Isaacman has been writing about the Zambezi valley for 30 years, often in collaboration with Barbara Isaacman, and this study brings together many themes previously introduced around the history of the \"Chikunda,\" the slave militias formed in the 18th century by Afro-Goan-Portuguese warlords, whose 19th-century descendants became the dominant ivory hunters and slave raiders of the area and then reacted in a variety of ways in the generation who had to come to terms with Portuguese and British colonial rule. Followers of these two formative figures in post-Salazar Mozambican historiography will recognize the prazo \"estate\" holders who recruited the original chikunda warriors, their status as \"slaves,\" and the opportunities for themselves that these fugitives from the power of others created in the middle Zambezi area as \"transfrontiersmen,\" their services as porters and canoemen along the river, and the enlistments of some in the early colonial military in Mozambique and (present-day) Malawi. All these moments have appeared over the years in articles and chapters, often written in collaboration with Alien Isaacman's able students at the University of Minnesota. The extensive research supporting this integrated narrative goes back to the late 1960s and includes thorough use of archives in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia (as well as Portugal and Britain) and the Isaacmans' characteristic and effective reliance on personal narratives of residents of the region, collected in well over a hundred interview sessions dating over the full span of their investigations and including a great many new ones conducted in 1997-98. What else is new is the sophisticated and careful integration of all this material around two issues of identity, as the title indicates: the term chikunda has had many and often contradictory meanings, as \"slave\" (thus shameful), as \"warrior\" (thus powerful), quintessentially \"male\" (thus proud), and as fully \"ethnic\" (female and young, as well as adult male) communities of several different \"characters\" in various parts of the valley and its environs. The Isaacmans offer a sophisticated theoretical basis for understanding ethnicity (and by extension the other kinds of identities conveyed by the label \"Chikunda\") as social boundary setting in response to rapidly changing circumstances. They then follow the decades of ivory trading, hunting, intervals of drought, and eventual colonial intervention in the distinct parts of the area, and the differing responses of various groups of chikunda to them, leading to the recent array of meanings attached to, and sometimes claimed by their modern descendants. This supple and detailed ha","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"68 1","pages":"351"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2005-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71103929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Sacred Trust: The League of Nations and Africa, 1929-1946","authors":"B. Digre","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-6014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-6014","url":null,"abstract":"A Sacred Trust: The League of Nations and Africa, 1929-1946. By Michael D. Callahan. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004. Distributed by International Specialized Books Service, Portland, Oregon. Pp. x, 197, appendices. $69.50. The mandate system of the League of Nations introduced a new level of international oversight to European colonialism in Africa. Focusing on the 1930s, Michael Callahan's new study examines the operation and influence of this innovation on imperialism. It carries forward the analysis he began in his earlier book, Mandates and Empire: The League of Nations and Africa, 1914-1931 (1999). Callahan argues that the mandate system provided a significant force for the reform and internationalization of Anglo-French colonialism. Drawing on Wilsonian principles, the mandates advanced the idea of trusteeship rather than colonial annexation. The author contends that they led to a decline in militarism, an increase in commercial equality (though this generally refers to equal opportunities for expatriates in the mandates), and greater concern for the interests of Africans. Accompanying the \"sacred trust\" represented by the mandates was a new form of colonial accountability before the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) in Geneva. This in turn forced a broader reexamination of European imperialism. Callahan's analysis reveals the dual nature of these relationships as colonial officials, experts, and interest groups influenced the PMC. Its agenda of gradual reforms shaped not only policies in the mandates but also the general culture of colonialism. The author bases his assessments on thorough research in British and French archives, extensive use of published primary sources, including League documents, and wide reading of secondary sources. This is a valuable study, but some of its interpretations are problematic. The research is limited by a European colonial perspective. European colonial officials report to a PMC led by men who were often former European colonial officials. Further, the desire to prevent a return of the mandates to Germany provided an incentive to emphasize the reforms that were being introduced. Petitions from the mandated territories do offer some African views on issues before the Commission. Additional African perspectives, such as those found in West African newspapers, could have provided the work with further insights on such topics as indirect rule and the Ethiopian crisis as well as on self-determination-a Wilsonian principle largely absent from contemporary Western considerations in Africa. In Africa, the study focuses on the British and French mandates in Tanganyika, Togo, and Cameroon. This selection provides a comparative basis for examining the policies of the two major European colonial powers, and the author is able to show examples of reforms introduced under the mandate system. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"55 1","pages":"370"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2005-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71107068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Journey of Hope: The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s","authors":"A. Beyan","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-5454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-5454","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"110 1","pages":"761-762"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71106957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia","authors":"W. Allen","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-2355","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-2355","url":null,"abstract":"The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia. By Claude A. Clegg III. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. xi, 330; 39 illustrations, 4 maps, 7 figures, 4 tables, notes, index, bibliography. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. At last scholars are beginning to focus on a much larger segment of AfricanAmericans who emigrated to Liberia in the nineteenth century. Claude Clegg's The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia, is part of an emergent literature that gives voice to the obscure immigrants historians are wont to characterize simply as \"free Negroes.\" This history-from-below approach is a refreshing departure from the current historiography with its fixation on the American Colonization Society (ACS) and the elite \"merchant princes\" and politicians who dominated Liberia. The subject of Clegg's study is 2,030 black North Carolinians repatriated to Liberia by the ACS and some independent colonization societies. While the North Carolinians represented a small percentage of the estimated 18,000 black emigrants from the United States, they nonetheless constituted the third largest number from the twenty-eight or so states that contributed colonists. The book is organized into eight chapters, along with an introduction that briefly traces the origins of the American colonization movement. A short epilogue summarizes the political turmoil that has bedeviled Liberians since 1980. In the first two chapters, the author illustrates how Quakers in North Carolina, who were actively involved in holding and selling slaves, had a change of heart in the late 170Os. The turnaround by this Christian denomination provided the initial organized impulse for manumission in that state. This apparent humanitarianism of the Quakers later melded with northern antislavery sentiments and a growing national interest to relocate free blacks outside the United States, to form the ACS in 1816; Liberia was established six years later as a refuge for free blacks. Chapters 3-4 discuss immigration and the ACS's attempt to promote Liberian colonization to an apprehensive black population. Chapter 5 is the heart of the book. Here, the author broadens his thesis-i.e., \"The Price of Liberty.\" Quite often, North Carolinian slave masters made freedom for their bondspeople contingent on repatriation to Liberia. Naturally, slaves preferred freedom in unknown Liberia to continual enslavement in the United States. As it turned out, however, freedom meant an inescapable encounter with West Africa's virulent malarial epidemic, which resulted in the death of a large percentage of the newcomers. Chapter 6 explores the reasons behind the resurgence in emigration in the 185Os, following a precipitous decline throughout the 184Os. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"54 1","pages":"166"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71103443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Urban Experience in Eastern Africa C. 1750-2000","authors":"Andrew Ivaska","doi":"10.2307/3556935","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3556935","url":null,"abstract":"The Urban Experience in Eastern Africa c. 1750-2000. Edited by Andrew Burton. Azania, special volume xxxvi-xxxvii. Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa, 2002. Pp. ix, 264; 48 illustrations. $24.00/ £15.00 / Kenyan Shs.1,600 paper. In recent years Africanist literature has seen a surge in work on urban history. Arising out of broader trends in social and cultural history, this work has returned to and reinvigorated a terrain explored primarily by economic historians, geographers, and sociologists in the decades prior to the 1980s. The Urban Experience in Eastern Africa c. 1750-2000, edited by Andrew Burton and emerging out of an international conference held in Nairobi in 2000, not only exemplifies this new wave of urban history but also extends it in a number of topically unique and analytically productive directions. In addition to strong essays exploring colonial cities, the volume devotes considerable attention to precolonial urban forms and the social landscapes of small towns. Its geographical coverage is impressive (Eastern Africa being broadly interpreted here to encompass countries stretching from Ethiopia to Zimbabwe). Not least of its virtues, it brings together scholars based in Africa with colleagues working in North America, the United Kingdom, and Japan to showcase a breadth of methodologies and theoretical concerns. The collection is organized both thematically and broadly chronologically. Following Burton's well-written and comprehensive introduction tracing urban history in the region from the late eighteenth century onwards, the book is divided into four sections: precolonial urban centers, colonial order in urban East Africa, rural-urban interactions, and town life in colonial Nairobi and beyond. In extensively exploring topics that are too often given short shrift in African urban studies, the first and third sections -on precolonial urban formations and the importance to the urban experience of a rural and small-town scene-exhibit what are thematically the volume's most unique contributions. Giacomo Macola's examination of the royal capitals of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Eastern Lunda polities southwest of Lake Tanganyika is notable for his focus on the centrality of these capitals for the construction of a \"Lunda imperial mystique\" that was critical to maintaining royal power. Macola's paper nicely complements Richard Reid's comparative investigation of the relationship between warfare and towns in the Ethiopian highlands and Buganda in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with both contributions making interesting arguments about the place of the urban, both physically and ideologically, in precolonial power. And underlining the importance of the precolonial urban past to the histories of colonial town planning that followed, Abdul Sheriff traces a history of Zanzibar town's precolonial development, one that compellingly situates the notion of a strictly segregated town as a colonial fantasy at odds ","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"38 1","pages":"173"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3556935","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68717696","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Algeria's Bloody Years","authors":"S. Davis","doi":"10.1037/e664312010-001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/e664312010-001","url":null,"abstract":"Algeria's Bloody Years. A film directed by Malek Bensmafl, produced by Patrice Barrat with the BBC. New York: First Run/Icarus Films, 2003. Color, 59 minutes. $390; $75 rental. The documentary \"Algeria's Bloody Years\" chronicles the history of that nation since 1988, focusing primarily on the violent civil conflict between government forces and armed Islamic fundamentalist groups that has killed more than 100,000 Algerians since 1992. The documentary's real strength lies in its mix of shockingly honest interviews with army generals and the leaders of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), brutally graphic scenes of the aftermath of massacres in tiny villages,1 and archival footage of such crucial turning points in the nation's history as the assassination of President Boudiaf, which was televised live throughout the country in June 1992. This triple-pronged approach allows director Malek Bensma'il to recount Algeria's complex recent history quickly and powerfully. In the span of a few minutes he traces the beginnings of the violence triggered by the army's suppression of massive labor strikes in 1988, the rise in popularity of the fundamentalist FIS party during the brief period of relative freedom from 1988 to 1991, and the military's cancellation of national elections and assumption of power in 1992, once FIS victory at the polls seemed inevitable. The bulk of the film details the rise of competing armed guerilla fundamentalist groups, who quickly turned from the targeted assassination of policemen and soldiers to the killing of pro-democracy journalists, intellectuals, and white-collar professionals and then to the wide-scale massacre of common villagers throughout rural Algeria in attempts to ensure local loyalties. In addition Bensma'il depicts the military's equally brutal record of indiscriminate arrests, torture, and vengeful reprisals. Finally, \"Algeria's Bloody Years\" recounts the death of the vestiges of democracy during the 1990s-a decade when military generals working through the puppet civilian government ruled by decree, without regard for the constitution and only the slightest pretense of legality. Throughout the film, interviews highlight the intransigence of key figures on both sides of the fight, as well as the tragic impotence of the millions of average Algerians caught in the middle. Interview clips include Minister of Defense General Khalid Nezzar's unrepentant contention that there was \"no alternative\" to the army's shooting of several hundred labor protesters in 1988, and exiled FIS leader Mourad Dina's explanation that \"intellectuals of the left should have the courage of their convictions: they should say 'we are at war and some of us will pay with our lives'\" when asked about the fundamentalist group's assassinations of Algerian journalists, doctors, and university professors. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"38 1","pages":"150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57931341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Peasant Cotton Revolution in West Africa: Côte d'Ivoire, 1880-1995","authors":"J. Bingen","doi":"10.5860/choice.39-4736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.39-4736","url":null,"abstract":"The Peasant Cotton Revolution in West Africa: Cote d'Ivoire, 1880-1995. By Thomas J. Bassett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xix, 243; 29 plates (photos), 30 figures. $64.95. Thomas Bassett brings solid historical analysis, data from longitudinal farming systems surveys, insightful interpretations from current documents, and extensive interviews over time to weave an important story of African agrarian development and policy. This book convincingly achieves the author's goal of contradicting \"the dominant development narrative which portrays peasants as the simple recipients of technological innovations conceived and diffused by Western development experts\" (p. xiv). Current enthusiasts for introducing genetically modified cotton as a technological breakthrough for African development would do well to heed Bassett's sound advice \"to consider the temporal and social dimensions to innovation as much as the technological and institutional forms that an innovation assumes\" (p. 7). Unfortunately, most of these enthusiasts have little time for Bassett's indispensable historical lessons, institutional insights, and farmer-level understanding that could lead them to reconsider their current project. Others-from historians to practitioners-should readily welcome the rich harvest from the author's historical and development analyses. Those familiar with African agrarian history will welcome Bassett's careful use of colonial archives in the Cote d'Ivoire, Mali, Senegal, and France to substantiate a decidedly non-romanticized view of the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which \"African farmers' actions are constitutive of the institutional environment which in turn influences their activities.... \" (p. 3). The author's analysis nicely complements other historical studies of \"the interplay of local forces with the larger world economy.\"1 It also fills an important gap in understanding the role of cotton, not just coffee and cocoa, as cultures revolutionnaires in the history of the Cote d'Ivoire.2 In addition to the invaluable socioagronomice history of cotton varieties, Bassett's concepts of the \"rational peasant,\" \"compulsory development,\" and \"paternalistic development\" discourses successfully capture his richly documented story of the colonial debates and conflicts among and between administrators and businesses. Students of contemporary West African agrarian development should find such concepts useful tools to cut through current development rhetoric. By focusing on the broad sweep of social and political changes surrounding one crop from the late 1880s into the mid-1990s, Bassett persuasively demonstrates the significance and contribution of historical analysis to a richer understanding of current development efforts. A shorter period of study would have confirmed the generally accepted \"failure\" of colonial project and the inability of the \"repeated attempts\" by colonial administrators to intensify cotton cultivation over th","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"8 1","pages":"155"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71089612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Pan-African History: Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787","authors":"Linda Heywood","doi":"10.5860/choice.41-1919","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-1919","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"38 1","pages":"117"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71098263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}