INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES最新文献

{"title":"Nachituti's Gift: Economy, Society and Environment in Central Africa","authors":"K. A. Hoppe","doi":"10.5860/choice.44-2840","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.44-2840","url":null,"abstract":"Nachituti's Gift: Economy, Society and Environment in Central Africa. By David M. Gordon. Africa and the Diaspora: History, Politics, Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 304; 14 illustrations. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Nachituti's Gift is a finely crafted history of the fisheries of southern Lake Mweru from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, located in their regional economic and political contexts. But while David Gordon uses local people's changing relationships to fisheries as a touchstone, his primary interest is in broader questions of central Africans' understandings of and strategizing around resource use and ownership. In the oral tradition of the people living in the Luapula river valley south of Lake Mweru, in the late eighteenth century, Nachituti was the sister of a local Shila ruler, Nkuba. After Nkuba murdered Nachituti's son, she sought revenge on her brother by inviting the eastern Lunda to conquer the Luapula valley. After the Lunda conquest and her brother's execution, Nachituti presented the Lunda king with a basket of earth and a pot of water representing the natural resources of the river valley. Local people have understood and deployed this story (and adjusted and contested it) to define reciprocal and ambiguous relationships between political control over local people and local control of fisheries resources. The meanings of the story, problematizing Western ideas about power and private property as they do, frame David Gordon's history of the fishing economy in the Lualuba valley. This is a powerful portrayal of the complexity, fluidity, and subtlety of Lake Mweru fishers' production strategies. Central components of these strategies include dependable supplies of nets and boats and people being more vital than cash; the importance of close involvement in the entire commodity chain, from fishing to processing to transportation and marketing; and that social and economic investments are closely bound. As environmental history, the text includes discussions of spawning grounds and the relationships between changing fishing technology and species. But David Gordon is primarily interested in changing economic and social relationships in the practices and businesses of fishing. This is a story of relative success and resilience, of taking advantage of opportunities as opposed to losing them or never having many to begin with. David Gordon's chapter on the Chisense fishery (a small anchovy-like fish) emphasizes a recent commercial boom in this fishery and, in particular, women's successful involvement in this growing economic opportunity. But I imagine, as with similar fisheries in other central African lakes, this is also a fishery of poverty, as Chisense can be purchased in extremely small amounts, and caught and processed with the simplest of equipment. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"40 1","pages":"158"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71114267","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":"Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery","authors":"E. Elbourne","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-0543","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-0543","url":null,"abstract":"Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery. By Deirdre Coleman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xv, 273; 14 illustrations. $75.00 cloth. The fantasy of the colony as a Utopian new world capable of remaking its inhabitants was a common phenomenon in the romantic age from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. In Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery, Deirdre Coleman shows brilliantly not only how widespread the phenomenon was but also how diverse its manifestations were. The idea of the moral colony had deep roots in late eighteenth-century British culture, and interacted in important ways with the abolitionist movement, Coleman argues. The title Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery is a little misleading. This book focuses more on romantic colonization than it does on its relationship to the British abolitionist movement- perhaps not surprisingly, given its timeframe of 1770 to 1800. The book comprises a series of discrete studies. Romantic Colonization opens and closes with discussions of the foundation of New South Wales, including what Coleman tellingly terms the \"etiquettes of colonization and dispossession.\" A second section examines Henry Smeathman, an entomologist in West Africa who saw the termite colonies he explored as models for imperial greatness. An abolitionist colonial projector, Smeathman argued for a West African colony settled by freed slaves and founded on \"rational commerce\" that would act as a beacon to Africa (despite Smeathman's own earlier moment of apostasy as he temporarily lapsed into support for slavery, perhaps bolstered by his polygamous marriages into African slaving families). A fascinating subsequent chapter looks at Swedenborgian ideas about Africa as a lost paradise, tellingly followed by an examination of the early years of the evangelical colony of Sierra Leone and the troubled relationships between colonial masters and their recalcitrant black loyalist subjects. Here, as elsewhere, the juxtaposition of plans that were never put into effect with those that were compels us to take more seriously the ideas behind the unrealized projects, and also highlights the profoundly unrealistic elements in the plans that did lead to real colonies. In this light, the flaws in romantic views of both Sierra Leone and New South Wales are glaringly apparent; the price of miscalculation was paid by black settlers and, most brutally, by indigenous Australians. Although there is much more to the book than an examination of romanticism and anti-slavery, this is not to say that the work does not shed light on abolitionism. Romantic Colonization points to the blurred lines between free and unfree labor, even in the colonial imagination. Debates over labor and the quest for alternatives to slavery are a leitmotif of the book. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"40 1","pages":"379"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71107916","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":"Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation","authors":"P. Naylor","doi":"10.5860/choice.30-4593","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.30-4593","url":null,"abstract":"Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation. Second edition. By John Ruedy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 325; 7 maps. $21.95 paper. The pioneering \"first generation\" of American historians studying Algeria's modern period prominently included, among others, Alf Andrew Heggoy, David C. Gordon, and Richard and Joan Brace. John Ruedy, professor emeritus of Georgetown University, bridged that generation with an emerging generation of historians through his teaching and books, notably Land Policy in Algeria (1967) and especially Modern Algeria (1991). His comprehension, contribution, and, above all, his clarity are most appreciated in a relatively understudied field. Indiana University Press wisely asked Professor Ruedy to produce a second edition of Modern Algeria, which remains the best historical survey of the country in English. The book studies Algeria's political, social, and economic history from the Ottoman era to the contemporary period. In his preface to the first edition of Modern Algeria (included in the second edition), Ruedy identified himself within the \"liberal school of Algerian historiography\" (p. xi) headlined by Charles-Andre Julien and Charles-Robert Ageron. The College de France's Jacques Berque was also an influence and taught Ruedy at the University of California-Los Angeles. (Berque fondly recalls his \"senior student\" in Memoires des deux rives [Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989, 218].) In his second preface, Ruedy reflects on Algeria's unfulfilled endeavors in its modern history to create a \"consensus regarding national identity.\" As disclosed by such self-defining documents as the Algiers Charter (1964), the National Charter (1976), and four constitutions, Algeria has sought to answer \"the question of who Algerians are and where they wish to proceed\" (p. ix). That question is still being addressed. In the new edition, Ruedy left the first seven chapters unchanged, revised the eighth, and seamlessly added a ninth entitled \"Insurgency and the Pursuit of Democracy.\" This chapter studies the tragic conflict in Algeria that commenced after the cancellation of the second round of parliamentary elections in January 1992 and the dismantling of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). Approximately 150,000 Algerians have lost their lives since 1992 in what many have called, especially in the popular press, a \"civil war.\" Ruedy characterizes the conflict as \"an insurgency, since, in spite of its toll, only a small minority of Algerians supported the Islamists' resort to war and the number of their combatants peaked at no more than 25,000\" (p. 257). He explains that the violence \"was far more than the result of confrontation between Islamists and security forces.\" It included intra-Islamist assaults, clan conflicts, and indiscriminate killings. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"39 1","pages":"550"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2006-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71042688","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":"Liberia: The Violence of Democracy","authors":"J. Yoder","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-6805","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-6805","url":null,"abstract":"Liberia: The Violence of Democracy. By Mary H. Moran. The Ethnography of Political Violence Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. 190; 15 illustrations. $49.95 /£32.50. In Liberia: The Violence of Democracy, anthropologist Mary Moran uses a grassroots perspective to analyze the political violence that has gripped Liberia over the last several decades. Drawing on her field research of the early 1980s, her previously published work on southeastern Liberia, her extensive links to Liberians in America, and her \"virtual fieldwork\" through the internet and e-mail, Moran challenges prevailing notions that Liberia and Africa are irrationally violent and lack democratic traditions. Claiming that Liberia has a \"fully modern,\" albeit non-western form of democracy (p. 6), Moran rejects popular writer Robert Kaplan's description of Africa as the home of a chaotic and anti-liberal \"New Barbarianism.\" In addition, she challenges academics such as Nicholas Van de Walle, Jean-Francois Bayart, Stephen Ellis, William Reno, Amos Sawyer, and Caroline Bledsoe who contend that autocracy, ethnic exclusivity, patrimonialism, patron-clientalism, secrecy, and age- or gender-based hierarchies define African politics. Reviewing the records of the Doe and Taylor regimes, Moran argues that many of Liberia's woes can be traced to the politics of the cold war and the amoral forces of the global market place. Recalling Liberian history from 1847 through the Tubman era, Moran contends that Liberians have a long tradition of democratic elections and a constitutional form of government. Citing her own experiences among the Glebo (a Kwa/Kruan-speaking group that includes the Kru, Krahn, Bassa, and Grebo), Moran argues that Liberians have well established habits and institutions of democracy such as checks and balances on leaders, and the recognition that everyone (even women and youth) have a right to express their political views. Looking at popular culture, for example newspaper cartoons, Moran persuasively demonstrates that Liberians actively contest identity markers that define who is civilized, who deserves prestige, and who should be obeyed. Finally, discussing the role of violence in West Africa, Moran rejects the view that violence is an expression of non-democratic and irrational anarchy. Violence, she says, is simply one end of a continuum of communication; violence is one way to express legitimate grievances. In short, Moran believes that Liberians possess the resources needed to build a healthy political future. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"39 1","pages":"545"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2006-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71113038","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":"Black Africans in Renaissance Europe","authors":"J. Thornton","doi":"10.5860/choice.44-1160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.44-1160","url":null,"abstract":"Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Edited by T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xvii, 417; 67 illustrations. $110.00. The European dimension of the African diaspora has been much less well studied than its American one, just as later periods are better known than earlier periods. This lavishly illustrated volume promises to contribute to the better understanding of the position and role of Africans in Europe during the Renaissance, here defined as roughly 1400-1600 with the \"Age of Discoveries\" forming its end period rather than its beginning. The editors have brought together scholars whose work covers the entire period, and includes art historians, literary scholars, historians, and anthropologists. Needless to say, there is no clearly defined theme in the book, though perhaps a steady examination of the way in which Africans were perceived by their European hosts or masters recurs frequently throughout the volume. In general, writers who have taken this perspective elaborate the now familiar theme of demonization, marginalization, and disparagement that is increasingly revealed in most studies of this topic in the late medieval and early modern world. The book takes four broad themes to organize its chapters. In the first section, devoted to conceptualizing Black Africans, Kate Lowe reviews the formation of the image of Africans in Europe, expanding the argument long made for the English to other parts of the continent on the development of negative stereotypes. Jean Michel Massig studies without much comment on either the potential reality or the possible impact of the appearance of lip plugs in some of the African figures in a mid- sixteenth-century world map. Jeremy Lawrance focuses on several texts (published in an appendix) of insulting exchanges between Africans found in Spanish literature. Anu Korhonon discusses English attitudes toward skin coloring, finding that black or African skin was not well regarded. Jorge Fonseca compares the impressions of the humanist traveler Cleynaerts about the African presence in Portugal with the reality revealed in contemporary social history documents, suggesting that he and other literary figures tended to exaggerate their presence. The second section ostensibly examines Africans specifically at court, though the contributors do not always stick strictly to this theme. Paul Kaplan notes the presence of Africans in the artistic representations of various subjects in Italian court paintings. Annemarie Jordan examines court painting in Portugal to study the depictions of Africans, largely as servants and musicians. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"39 1","pages":"501"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2006-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71113511","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":"Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community","authors":"Shannon M. Jackson","doi":"10.5860/choice.44-0480","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.44-0480","url":null,"abstract":"Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community. By Mohamed Adhikari. Ohio University Research in International Studies, Africa Series no. 83. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. Pp. vii, 252. $24.00 paper. Mohamed Adhikari's most recent book explores the historical formation of the most complex and contested of identity positions in South Africa. His focus is on the political and conscious nature of Coloured identity, with particular focus on the period between Union (1910) and the era of Apartheid rule beginning in 1948. His central theme is that ambiguity has provided a stabilizing mechanism by which Coloured identity is sustained across different periods of South African history. Adhikari is offering an important and convincing challenge to those who would destabilize Coloured identity because of its racially hybrid origins, reify it for strictly racialist reasons, or deconstruct it for its nonracial political potential. The challenge is to offer insight into the capacity of an inherently unstable category to collectively cohere at the level of conscious conviction and unconscious practice. Adhikari is less interested in the unconscious domain of habituated meaning, focusing, instead, on self-making and instrumental social action. Almost all of the case studies and bodies of literature he reviews are analyzed in terms of the creative responses of political activists, intellectuals, and artists to platforms and changes in official policy and administrative structure. Adhikari succeeds in offering one of the most accessible frameworks for organizing the history behind Coloured identity to date. He does so without reducing the complexity that is the sine qua non of this category. His narrative is organized around the primary goal of assimilation and the structural constraints of a specifically Western Cape climate of political liberalism. It is the constant movement in and around the Janus-faced policies of British liberals rhetorically offering universal human rights, but practicing spatial and economic segregationism, that most notably shapes the contours of Coloured identity. The contradictions inherent in Cape liberalism keep Coloureds politically and culturally marginal as a group, all the while offering economic reward for disciplined and self-governing practice. Coloured leaders and political activists therefore compel the community to aspire to the higher goals of education, temperance, and self-restraint. They also generally compel political ideology to work within the dominant paradigm. The vigilant but thwarted pursuit of respectability is explored through several political organizations-the African Political/People's Organization (1902-mid1940s), the Teachers' League of South Africa (1913-1940), and the NonEuropean Unity Movement (1943-1963), to name a few. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"39 1","pages":"537"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2006-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71113319","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":"French Colonialism Unmasked, the Vichy Years in French West Africa","authors":"F. Quinn","doi":"10.1353/jmh.2007.0180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jmh.2007.0180","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"39 1","pages":"504"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2006-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/jmh.2007.0180","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66458821","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":"Ngecha: A Kenyan Village in a Time of Rapid Social Change","authors":"Andrea L. Arrington","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-5424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-5424","url":null,"abstract":"Ngecha: A Kenyan Village in a Time of Rapid Social Change. Edited Carolyn Pope Edwards and Beatrice Blyth Whiting. Lincoln, Nebr. and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Pp. 336. $60.00/£45.95. Africanist scholars are known for applying multidisciplinary approaches to the research and teaching of Africa, and Ngecha: A Kenyan Village in a Time of Rapid Social Change epitomizes the usefulness of such an approach. The authors of this study offer a blend of history, ethnography, anthropology, sociology, educational studies, and gender studies in a form accessible to scholars and students across a wide range of disciplines. This multidisciplinary study is further enhanced by the unique richness and depth that develops out of long-term research projects. Research for Ngecha began in the late 1960s when the rural Kenyan village of Ngecha was selected to be part of a wider scale study on child development in East and West Africa. Scholars involved in the project came from both Kenyan and U.S. universities and represent a variety of social science fields. Many of the chapters were written as collaborative pieces, and each chapter, though useful independent of one another, are woven together to form a surprisingly consistent and cohesive narrative and analysis. The first chapter \"Background and Contexts\" explains how the project was conceived and implemented. Chapters 2 and 3, \"The Village and Its Families\" and \"The Historical Stage,\" give background on Ngecha and introduce readers to the families involved in the study. Chapters 3 through 7 explode with ethnographic material on a wide range of issues reflected in the chapter titles: \"Women as Agents of Social Change,\" \"Changing Concepts of the Good Child and Good Mothering,\" \"The Teaching of Values Old and New,\" and \"Aging and Elderhood.\" The text ends with a focus on contemporary Ngecha in Chapters 8 and 9, \"The University as Gateway to a Complex World\" and \"Ngecha Today.\" Ngecha is an incredibly rich contribution to African studies research, and scholars from all disciplines should find value in the text. Although the research was conducted under the guise of a social science project focused on child development, the scope of this text is immense. Research began in 1968, just five years after Kenyan independence. This propitious timing allowed the researchers a first hand view of the transition from colony to modern, independent nation. Fortunately for the reader, the researchers took advantage of the uniqueness of this time period to look not just at child development, but at the changing cultural and social scene of a rural community as it adapted to the transforming national economy and postcolonial society. As the individual chapters intertwine, a localized narrative and analysis of change emerges and the depth and breadth of this impact is obvious. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"39 1","pages":"502"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2006-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71106896","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":"Child Soldiers in Africa","authors":"K. Sheldon","doi":"10.5860/choice.44-1677","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.44-1677","url":null,"abstract":"Child Soldiers in Africa. By Alcinda Honwana. Ethnography of Political Violence series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. 202. $45.00/£29.50 cloth. Alcinda Honwana addresses a difficult and necessary topic in her survey of child soldiers in Africa. Though the title indicates a continent-wide discussion, the book is focused primarily on Angola and Mozambique, where she carried out interviews and surveys in the 1990s. Chapter 1 begins with a quick look at the history of the wars in Angola and Mozambique, followed by a chapter that places child soldiers into a much broader context with a succinct overview of children in war through history and around the world. The rest of the book returns to the focus on Angola and Mozambique, with occasional comparative references to child soldiers in West Africa or Asia. Honwana had privileged access to former child soldiers through her work with non-governmental organizations that were involved in rehabilitating and reintegrating child soldiers once peace was achieved in each country. In Mozambique she worked with \"Esperanca para Todos\" (Hope for All) on Josina Machel Island, while in Angola she was affiliated with the Christian Children's Fund. Thus, in addition to various published sources, she collected the horrific histories and experiences of many child combatants and others who had been swept up by hostilities. The book is arranged in a loosely chronological format, beginning with the most common ways in which young people were recruited and initiated into a life focused on violence. The next section investigates the special experiences of girls and young women who were rarely soldiers, but who were often an integral part of camp life, where they performed domestic chores and too frequently suffered rape and sexual abuse as the \"wives\" and girlfriends of the soldiers. Honwana next discusses the ways in which local communities and families used healing rituals to move returned child soldiers past the wartime experience and into a peaceful future. She ends the book with a discussion of how the world more generally can learn from these experiences to end the apparently spreading practice of recruiting very young boys and girls to fight and work in war. The book is a valuable resource, though there are some problems. It sometimes becomes repetitive, as so many children and young people followed similar paths of recruitment, especially compulsory enlistment, and later of healing. It can be difficult to read yet another account of a child forced to commit an atrocity as a way to break their ties to their own families and communities, but such repetition may be necessary to impress on readers the full horror of the experiences of many children. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"39 1","pages":"509"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2006-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71113926","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":"Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving \"Port,\" 1727-1892","authors":"Scott Brunger","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-6057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-6057","url":null,"abstract":"Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving \"Port,\" 1727-1892. By Robin Law. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. Pp. xi, 297; 5 maps. $49.95 cloth, $29.95 paper. Ouidah in French, Whydah in English, Fida in Dutch, and Ajuda in Portuguese originally was called Hueda, Peda, or Glehue depending on the local language. Robin Law has done careful local research integrating oral traditions and official archives from Benin, Britain, and France. Law's first chapter covers the origins of Ouidah until its conquest by the Kingdom of Dahomey in 1727. Facing competing local accounts of the founding of the town and without European documents to choose among them, Law proposes that religion may hold the key. Chapters 2 and 3 cover the Dahomian conquest. The Yovogan, \"Chief of the Whites,\" was supposed to control and tax the European forts, the local merchants, and the population. As such, he was the point of contact between the Kingdom of Dahomey and European traders. Since Law is arguing that Ouidah was not a neutral port of trade as proposed by Karl Polanyi but rather a dependency of Dahomey, the degree of control by the Yovogan was crucial. Out of thirteen officials in the first four decades, most were executed or deposed. While these punishments show that kings were attempting to assert control of their Yovogan and merchants, the incentives for Ouidah to become a neutral port of trade were very strong. Chapter 4 discusses the operation of the Atlantic slave trade. African kings had enough influence to force European powers to respect the neutrality of Ouidah, even during their wars. Though Britain outlawed the slave trade to its colonies in 1808 and France did so in 1818, the slave trade between Portuguese colonies South of the Equator and Brazil legally continued until 1839, when it was finally outlawed in Britain's treaty with Portugal. Chapter 5 shows that Francisco de Souza used his Portuguese nationality to prolong the slave trade in Ouidah. In this he had cooperation of the Yovogan. Even after Portuguese slave trading became illegal, de Souza continued it through his agents in other ports. Chapters 6 and 7 discuss the transition from slave trading to palm oil after 1840. Law argues that the palm oil trade did not interfere with the slave trade, but rather became a cover under which banned trading could continue. Slaves could be bought for easily transportable silver coins, which could then be exchanged for British manufactured goods imported for the palm oil trade. …","PeriodicalId":45676,"journal":{"name":"INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES","volume":"39 1","pages":"313"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2006-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71112093","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}