INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES最新文献

{"title":"Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia","authors":"W. Allen","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-6910","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-6910","url":null,"abstract":"Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia. By Bronwen Everill. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. vii, 232; maps, photographs, bibliography, index. $85.00There are just a few comparative studies on Africa's pioneer colonies for erstwhile enslaved Africans in Great Britain and the United States. This dearth makes Everill's book special. It is a rare analysis of British and American anti-slave trade campaigns in Sierra Leone and Liberia respectively. Her central argument is refreshing. Contrary to the historiography that traces anti-slave trade strategies directly to London and Washington, D.C., Everill contends that Sierra Leoneans and Liberians adapted those policies to specific, perceived realities. These policies, she asserts, constitute British and American imperialism, as they involved territorial annexations and the diffusion of British and American ideas and material cultures. This nuanced interpretation-stemming from what is obviously the connection \"between imperialism and humanitarianism\"-makes Everill's comparative study thought provoking.The book's seven chapters, along with an Introduction and an Epilogue, are well knit. Chapter 1 reviews the transatlantic interconnections that gave rise to Liberia and Sierra Leone. The next two chapters focus on the core of the anti-slavery strategy-\"Civilization, Commerce, and Christianity\"-and the evolutions of privileged classes in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Unsurprisingly, in both cases the colonists showed strong attachment to the material cultures in their former homes. Everill makes an interesting contrast here. One result of the 3C's was that the Sierra Leonean elite became more incorporated into the British Empire, thereby consolidating that cohort's British identity; however, this was hardly true of Liberians. Institutions that pulled Sierra Leoneans into the British imperial orbit-commercial, religious, educational, etc.-seem to have alienated Liberians from their American \"Empire.\" Everill notes that this was so because \"Liberia had fewer ties to American 'strategic interests' (p. 147). For example, while Sierra Leone's imperial connections provided access directly to various British businesses, Liberia's merchants generally carried out their American transactions through special contacts via the American Colonization Society, founder of Liberia. Research into Liberia's nineteenthcentury sugar industry fully supports Everill's findings. Sale of sugar to the United States, along with acquisition of sugarcane mills by prominent Liberian planters, was conducted essentially through \"friends of colonization. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"47 1","pages":"163"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71142079","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":"Gordon and the Sudan: Prologue to the Mahdiyya, 1877-1880","authors":"J. Spaulding, Alice Moore-Harell","doi":"10.2307/3097523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3097523","url":null,"abstract":"Contemporary Review \"sheds new light on a chapter of British Imperial History that has been neglected by historians for far too long\" \"welcome addition to the Sudan literature\" - International Journal of African Historical Studies \"The superbly researched and clearly written Gordon and the Sudan provides fresh insight into this crucial period of Gordon\"s life and this important era in the history of the Turco-Egyptian Sudan. It makes an important contribution of the Gordon historiography and deserves a large readership.\" - Military History","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"34 1","pages":"461"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2013-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/3097523","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68750101","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 in the Sudan: History, Documents, and Commentary","authors":"Mohamed Ibrahim Nugud, Asma Mohamed Abdel Halim, Sharon Barnes","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-5163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-5163","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2013-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71145915","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 Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa","authors":"Fiona Vernal","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-6331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-6331","url":null,"abstract":"The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa. By Richard Elphick. Reconsiderations in Southern African History. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Pp. vii, 437; map, tables, bibliography, index. $40.00 cloth, $40.00 E-book.What would happen if you took the theme of religion and probed its impact on the history of racial discourse, racism, and race relations in South Africa? The result would be Richard Elphick's long-awaited and magisterial, The Equality of Believers. From the role of liberalism, nationalism, Christian universalism and humanism, and the emergence of independent African churches to the contours of segregation, industrialization, and apartheid, Elphick uses the theme of religion to revisit some of the major questions that have preoccupied historians of nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa. The book is divided into three parts, spanning eighteen chapters. The early chapters sketch broadly the protagonists and antagonists of pioneer evangelism, the cultural chauvinism of European missionaries, and the pressures of indigenization. Black and white interlocutors queried whether spiritual and social equality were indeed axiomatic. Afrikaners voted with their feet and issued deafening refutations of gelykstelling (equalization of races), yet even among those missionaries who answered a resounding \"yes,\" few were ready to relinquish their paternalistic roles. Part two investigates the fusing of the lexicon of gelykstelling with the \"Social Gospel,\" the \"Native Question\" and segregation, developments that signaled how secularization would come to influence racial and evangelical discourses. The tum-of-the-century and interwar periods witnessed new alliances between secular and missionary organizations and reinforced missionary roles in shaping the discourse on settler colonialism, empire, and missions.The final section shows how a sometimes vague, but malleable notion of segregation gave way to assaults on the Cape franchise and on African education inter alia, and led to a more clearly delineated and concrete plan to implement apartheid It cannot be overstated that the history of race relations in South Africa is neither synonymous with nor a prelude to the inexorable march to apartheid after 1948. The Equality of Believers thus provides a welcome reconsideration of the relationship between Afrikaner nationalism, Calvinism, neo-Calvinism, the missiology of the Dutch Reformed Church, and apartheid ideology. Elphick engages in a nuanced analysis of the divergent views that hounded liberal interpretations out of the DRC establishment as it evolved into a volkskerk, underwent the paroxysms of Afrikaner nationalism, and retooled segregation ideology (pp. 3, 50). The verdict is a stinging indictment of liberals who failed to come up with a robust vision for multiracial South Africa, or at least one that could counter the \"strenuous\" intellectual work of apartheid ideologues","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"46 1","pages":"344"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2013-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71142403","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 History of Malawi 1859-1966","authors":"G. Macola","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-3999","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-3999","url":null,"abstract":"A History of Malawi 1859-1966. By John McCracken. Woodbridge, UK: James Currey, 2012. Pp. xviii, 485; maps, photographs, bibliography, index, glossary. $99.00/£60.John McCracken is one of the masters of Africanist historiography, and this awe-inspiring book represents the summation of a life devoted to the study of Malawi's colonial past. The author of Politics and Christianity in Malawi, 1875-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)-a classic that still merits re-reading as a pioneering analysis of the politics and socioeconomic consequences of African conversion-and of countless influential articles on, inter alia, the histories of Malawian colonial agriculture, conservationism, and policing, McCracken has now delivered his long-awaited magnum opus.Written with McCracken's trademark lucidity and attention to detail, A History of Malawi is explicitly modeled on A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), whose author, John Iliffe, was McCracken's contemporary in Cambridge in the late 1950s, and later, colleague in the heyday of the history department of the University of Dar es Salaam. At a time in which global history is all the rage, the unashamedly national framework of A History of Malawi and its understated theoretical ambitions may raise some eyebrows. A close reading of the book, however, shows that McCracken successfully avoids the pitfalls of both nationalist history (\"too narrowly\" focused on \"nation-building\" movements and institutions [p. 3]) and of its \"once fashionable 'underdevelopment' alternative\" (which \"oversimplifies the impact of capitalism\" in Malawi and other imperial peripheries [p. 4]). Rather, what McCracken's approach foregrounds is the dynamic interplay between imperial action and African agency in the shaping of the modem history of a country where widespread economic deprivation and grassroots resourcefulness were-and are-inextricably entwined with one another.Following in the footsteps of his one-time mentor, Terence Ranger, McCracken's understanding of African agency is sufficiently subtle and ecumenical as to make room for much more than overt political resistance to the colonial order. Thus, although religiousand nationalist-inspired revolts occupy a prominent place in the narrative (McCracken devotes one chapter to the Chilembwe Rising and as many as four to African politics between 1943 and 1964, the year of independence), central themes running through many of the book's sixteen substantive chapters also include: the inculturation of Christianity-a process that began earlier and had probably more profound effects in Malawi than elsewhere in British-controlled Central Africa; the experiences of Malawian labor migrants-whom McCracken rightly refuses to cast in the role of powerless victims shorn of ambitions and freedom of action; and the odds-defying emergence of independent African cash-crop producers in a politico-economic context skewed in favor of the interests o","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"46 1","pages":"329"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2013-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71141270","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 Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature","authors":"Megan Feifer","doi":"10.1017/chol9781107007031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/chol9781107007031","url":null,"abstract":"The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature. Edited by Ato Quayson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 1399. $350.Ato Quayson' s introduction to The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature stakes the claim that the collection offers an overview of the \"most productive\" ways in which postcolonial literature in the field \"has been produced and may be discussed\" (p. 23). More specifically, instead of functioning as an anthology that solely consolidates the \"encyclopedia of themes or geographical subjects\" of postcoloniality into one location, the essays provide a purview of the historiographie and rhetorical questions critical to the discipline of postcolonialism.In response to antecedent work found in collections like The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (Routledge, 2006), and Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism, edited by Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair (Rutgers University Press, 2005), Quayson' s edited collection presents essays that assist in defining postcolonial literature and history. Those contained in the book \"trace stylistic and thematic developments,\" while examining \"neglected relationships\" across and within local, national, and transnational communities\" (pp. 2526). Thus, at the forefront of the two- volume collection are the most pertinent issues circulating within the discourses surrounding the field.Each prudently selected essay addresses what Quayson insists on as the required \"urgency\" of establishing \"universal terms\" with which one can read and study postcolonial literature. Through a historiographie tracing of the legacies of colonialism (pre-, post-, and neo-), Quayson 's introduction maintains the necessity of analyzing what he defines as colonial space-making, in order to tease out the resonance of colonialism across a multitude of nations and geographic landscapes.The volumes are divided into thirty-six chapters, complete with a chronology of historical, political, literary, and cultural events relative to colonial endeavors, as well as, a substantial bibliography instructive for both the novice and the proficient postcolonial scholar. In addition, the concluding chapter outlines the \"Key Journals and Organizations\" that \"have shaped the contours of the field of postcolonial studies\" (p. 1155).The essays contained in Volume 1 are \"largely composed of national, hemispheric or geographically oriented chapters\" across genres of \"slave narratives, travel writing, missionary writing and auto/biography\" (p. 23). Essays like Carpio' s \"Postcolonial Fictions of Slavery,\" Griffiths' \"Postcolonialism and Travel Writing,\" and MudimbeBoyi's \"Missionary Writing and Postcolonialism,\" explore both colonial legacies and lineages, in addition to the meaning making of such experiences across a multitude of genres. The inclusion of selections such as Savory's \"Postcolonialism and Caribbean Literature,\" Al-Musawi's \"Postcolonialism ","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"46 1","pages":"164"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57147594","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":"Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio","authors":"Joey Power","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-6954","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-6954","url":null,"abstract":"Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio. By Harri Englund. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 201 1 . Pp. 294. $70/£52 cloth, $24.95/£16.99 paper, $20.95/£14.99 E-Book.\"Let their money take them to hospital,\" said an interviewee over twenty -five years ago when discussing how he felt about Africans who gained money through the opportunities afforded by colonial capitalism but who did not share that bounty with others. Their stinginess \"disappointed\" people, but it also exposed them to witchcraft accusations, or as implied above, could endanger their physical lives. The remark hinted at a moral economy that made possible a clearer understanding of the nature of nascent capitalism in colonial Malawi in exposing attitudes towards the acquisition of wealth and its fair distribution.When reading Harri Englund 's recent book, I was time and again reminded of this experience. The book is an ethnography of the Chichewa language radio program, Nkhani Zam'maboma (News from the Districts), which has been broadcast by the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) since 1998. The program's inception followed the democratization of Malawian political life after the fall of the totalitarian Malawi Congress Party regime led by the late Dr. Hastings Banda in 1996, and coincided with renewed interest in raising consciousness of and about human rights. The ten-minute programs are broadcast at the end of the day. They consist of five to ten stories that draw on real tales submitted to MBC from a public tutored in reading between the lines of aural and written text after thirty years of critical listening under autocracy. Coming from the poor themselves and focusing on socioeconomic injustices and the abuse of power, Englund argues, the program is a forum through which Malawians engage in moral debate outside of the narrow confines of human rights talk which has all too often conflated equality and sameness and defined freedom as individual freedom. By contrast, in the world of Nkhani Zam'maboma, hierarchy and mutual obligations are the stuff of social, economic, and political order. Far from being incompatible with equality, it is equality that is at the basis of these stories and the claims implicitly made in them. It is this equality that gives people license to criticize their social/political seniors. So, instead of seeing equality as an elusive goal or ideal (as in Uberai thought and human rights talk), Englund argues that equality is at the basis of claim making and conversations about justice and fairness.This book builds on ideas introduced in his 2006 monograph, Prisoners of Freedom, which provided a critique of human rights activism that has failed to address the continued existence of socioeconomic inequalities in Malawian life. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"84 1","pages":"449"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2012-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71138280","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":"An Ethiopian Magical Manuscript at the University Library of Cluj, Romania (BCU, MS 681)","authors":"B. Burtea, A. Papahagi","doi":"10.5167/UZH-75800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5167/UZH-75800","url":null,"abstract":"The University Library of Cluj (Biblioteca Centrala Universitara) owns an important number of incunabula, early printed books, and (mainly Western) manuscripts, all included in the \"Gheorghe Sion\" special collections department. The card catalogue of the collection labels MS 68 1 as a \"Coptic manuscript,\" but no further information is offered. Upon examination of the manuscript, we were able to ascertain that the codex was in fact an Ethiopian book of magic. The book is written on thick vellum of a small, square format (75 ? 70 mm, text: 50 ? 55 mm). According to Siegbert Uhlig, the main authority on Ethiopian palaeography and codicology, this is the smallest book size in that culture.1 Small book sizes dominate in Uhligs periods VI and VII, spanning the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. However, square formats tend to disappear after the eighteenth century,2 which makes it possible that our manuscript belongs to that period. Moreover, according to Stefan Strelcyn and David Appleyard, most surviving Ethiopian magical texts fall into the period stretching precisely from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.3 The codex amounts to 53 unnumbered folios, bound into irregular groupings, as follows4: I2+1 (first fol. blank), 26-46, 5 610\"2 (lacks the last two fols.), 76, 84-94, 106. The pages exhibit visible drypoint ruling and prickings in the margins. The text layout varies between one (fols. 2r, 4r-53v) and two columns (fol. 3rv); fol. 2r accommodates 17 lines of text; fols. 3r-53v mainly 12, but sometimes 10-11 lines. The only color in the manuscript is the red of rubrics; The binding of the manuscript consists of two bare wooden boards (78 ? 70 mm), tooled with a geometric pattern (Figure 2). The cover decoration has a hatched frame, inside of which is drawn an \"X-form\"- Sergew Hable Selassie's pattern nr 5.6 The book has been preserved together with its leather case (mahdar, Figure 3).7 The carrying case is of a simple type, as it does not contain an inner and an outer box. The book's decoration is extremely modest. The only ink drawing in the manuscript occupies fol. 2v (Figure 4), and belongs to one of the most frequent types of illustration in magical scrolls and books.8 According to the best survey of the literature, this type of drawing has generally been described as a \"face in an eight-pointed star.\" 9 Some scholars believe that this magical figure represents a net to catch demons, \"the secret king,\" leader of all demons,10 or \"an eight-pointed star with the face of Satan.\"11 A more plausible interpretation posits a friendly figure, such as a Cherub or even God's face.12 We are tempted to interpret the drawing as a Cherub, or indeed as a stylized Theophany icon, both equally frequent in Ethiopian art.13 The apotropaic representation of icons would in any case be in keeping with the nature of Ethiopian magical syncretism. Magical writings in Ethiopian culture appear mainly in the form of scrolls, produced by healing dabtara","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"45 1","pages":"103-108"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2012-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70661433","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":"Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment","authors":"Cécile Accilien","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-0115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-0115","url":null,"abstract":"Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment. By Odile Cazenave & Patricia Celerier. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Pp. 246; bibliography, index. $55.00 cloth, $24.50 paper. Odile Cazenave and Patricia Celerier problematize the term \"engagement\" by examining it through historical, political, and social perspectives. Many African writers struggle to define themselves first and foremost as authors rather than solely on the basis of nation, culture, or geography. In their introduction, Cazenave and Celerier provide an overview of the concept of engagement, highlighting the historical context of the intellectual engage starting out with Emile Zola's seminal \"J'accuse\" to Sartre's ideologies when referring to a litterature engagee. In the context of Francophone African writers, one cannot discuss commitment and engagement without postcolonization. Therefore the authors bring to light a number of related issues dealing with Francophone literature, such as \"the origins of Black civilizations, the elaboration of a Black aesthetics, the question of authenticity and tradition, the role of or alite and vernacular African languages, the use of French and the function of the writer and critic\" (p. 7). Chapter 1, \"Enduring Commitments,\" focuses on the role of litterature engagee in Francophone African literatures. Analyzing the works of writers and critics such as Sembene Ousmane, Mongo Beti, Aminata Sow Fall, and Henri Lopes, the authors consider how the notion of engagement differs for various writers depending upon national/transnational, social, economic and political realities. Parallel to that and just as important is the role of the writer as an artist whose function is to be free to create. The second chapter, \"The Practice of Memory,\" stresses the importance of history for postcolonial writers. Among the various questions considered are: \"How do we remember?\" How should history be re-written by transforming myths and heroes? The chapter highlights the Duty of Memory Project on Rwanda and the way it pushed the participating writers \"to engage in a cultural and historical context mostly foreign to them\" (p. 56-58). The chapter brings to light complex issues of moral responsibility and justice, the links between memory and the engage writer, the difficulty of looking at the past when you only have traces, when \"official\" history has been manipulated, and the challenge for writers to re-create history in order to preserve memory by linking stories and histories. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"60 1","pages":"131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2012-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71134159","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":"Early Limits of Local Decolonization in São Tomé and Príncipe: From Colonial Abuses to Postcolonial Disappointment, 1945–1976","authors":"A. Keese","doi":"10.18452/13581","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18452/13581","url":null,"abstract":"The administration of Sao Tome's rural interior and of some coastal rural areas—home of at least one third of the archipelago's population—was mainly a two-man show in the early years after decolonization. While the crucial decisions about the future of the country's main economic activity and source of agricultural wealth (the cocoa plantations or rocas situated in these zones) were made at government level and in the president's office, and while these plantations formally had a strong degree of self-administration in the form of the Comissoes Administrativas Provisorias (Provisional Committees of Administration) later becoming the Comites de Accâo Politica (Committees of Political Action: both CAP), the control of everyday life lay in the hands of the labor inspectorate. Inspector-General Francisco Martins Xavier de Pina and his auxiliary, Americo Goncalves da Graca do Es pirito Santo, had an enormous task and held power over the lives of thousands of workers on the plantations. Both officials had been appointed during the transition phase before 12 July 1975, when Sâo Tome e Principe became an independent state.1 Struggling for a short time with the complicated bureaucratic heritage that had been left by the colonial admin istration, both officials rapidly established a routine of work. During 1976 the two officials were constantly active in visiting the different plantations, in hearing the complaints of laborers, plantation officials, and owners, and in processing information coming from the","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"44 1","pages":"373-392"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67681033","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}