African research & documentation最新文献

{"title":"The Standard: a repository of African sports history","authors":"M. Sikes","doi":"10.1017/s0305862x00019166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305862x00019166","url":null,"abstract":"An Exceptional Enterprise On 15 November 1902, Asian entrepreneur Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee launched the African Standard in Mombasa with the support of editor and reporter W.H. Tiller (Kahaso, 1995). As a contractor for railway supplies, Jeevanjee had become wealthy through the construction of the Kenya-Uganda Railway (Patel, 1997). According to one account, \"Ever an enterprising man...Jeevanjee conceived of the idea of starting a newspaper in Mombasa. In due course, the African Standard was born\" (Kahaso, 1995). The newspaper continued to publish weekly reports despite changing its headquarters, ownership and title within its first ten years as a press. Jeevanjee, who had little experience as a journalist, soon sold his paper to two British businessmen. New owners Meyer and Anderson then in 1905 renamed the paper the East African Standard (Odonde, 1995). Five years later, after the seat of government moved from Mombasa to Nairobi, the newspaper's headquarters followed. The East African Standard became a daily service and through successfully competing with or absorbing its rival newspapers, it established itself as the colony's leading newspaper (Carter, 1968). Until independence, it served as the \"voice of European settlers\" and for many years, it was the only large circulation English daily (Carter, 1968; Ogonda, 1992). Significantly, the East African Standard (hereafter referred to as The Standard) forged an unbroken streak of reporting for over one hundred years, \"from pre-independence, through Uhuru, to post-independence\" (Tetley, 1995). Presently known as The Standard, it is Kenya's oldest, and second largest, daily newspaper. Why should the establishment and the history of The Standard matter to scholars who are interested in the history and politics of sport in Africa? As this article will suggest, Kenya's oldest newspaper contains a wealth of source material through which to study sport in Kenya. The ubiquity of sports in newspapers is easily recognised; however, historians have not investigated its place in African media. Nor in this context has the sports section as a specific genre of journalistic writing been examined. The assessment of The Standard as a source, which comprises the remainder of this essay, could be extended to other public news sources across the continent, making it a useful exercise to share with researchers of African sport and African history. The history, censorship, authors, production and content of this newspaper will be discussed. In addition, it will consider what this source has to say about aspects of life as a female athlete in Kenya: namely, how age and gender impinge on athletic participation. In short, a discussion of sports coverage within The Standard demonstrates the range of historical evidence contained within African news sources and suggests that it would be fruitful to use print media to investigate the sports history of African countries. It should be noted from the outset, however, that The ","PeriodicalId":89063,"journal":{"name":"African research & documentation","volume":"1 1","pages":"61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56841737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Film Archives: A Decaying Visual History","authors":"David W. Forbes","doi":"10.1017/s0305862x00017702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305862x00017702","url":null,"abstract":"The Communication Revolution and Modern Life The 20th Century saw a movement from the Industrial Revolution to what we could call the Communication Revolution, and perhaps a newer revolution in the past 20 years, which we could characterise as the Information Revolution. The Communication Revolution began with the discovery of photography (and shortly thereafter, cinema) at the end of the 19* Century. The Lumiere brothers in France, Edward Muybridge in England, and Thomas Edison in America explored the possibilities of moving and still images. Rapid expansion of technology and opportunity saw the rise of revolutionary cinema in Russia, and the emergence of Hollywood - the beginnings of an industry that today engulfs our world with images. The ability of a flickering image in a darkened room to quickly capture the imaginations of people led to the rise of cinema. Beginning as a representational medium that replaced painting, it rapidly evolved into an entertainment, with its image capture, reproduction and dissemination in a way unimaginable even 25 years ago. Modern life would be incomprehensible without photography, video and cinema, all of which can now be accessed, produced, controlled and propagated by anyone with access to the internet. Our world has changed forever, and, more importantly, the way we see it. The creation of images used to be the domain of a small group of experts, now probably nearly half of the world's population make their own images. The development of computers during the early and middle 20th Century began to change the way information was stored, processed and distributed. As computers became more powerful, people began to use them more and more for image capture and manipulation. The \"analogue\" or non-digital way of doing things had to be translated into \"digital formats\" leading to a rapid surge in technological changes to speed this process. Editing moved from physically cutting strips of film and glueing them together to a non-linear process, an electronic cut-and-paste scenario. The video camera has developed from a primitive machine into a very sophisticated piece of electronic wizardry that today challenges the centuryold dominance of 35mm film as the acquisition medium of choice. The rapid leaps video has made in the past 20 years alone probably surpass all the technological advances in film and image production during the past century. Truly, we have put the world into a box. Today, video is ubiquitous, from home security surveillance to scientific study, from CNN to home videos on YouTube, from traffic and military satellite pictures to snaps of our children and pets - and it is proliferating rapidly. We never know who is recording the world we are in at any present moment, with what purpose, what technology, and, more importantly for this conference, if and how it will be preserved, what is worthy of preservation, who will decide that, and how will the money be found to preserve it, and in what form will it ","PeriodicalId":89063,"journal":{"name":"African research & documentation","volume":"1 1","pages":"37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56841032","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mlozi of Central Africa: Trader, Slaver and Self-Styled Sultan, the end of the Slaver, by David Stuart-Mogg; with a foreword by George Shepperson. Blantyre, Malawi: Central Africana Limited, 2010. 157 + xiv pp. ISBN 978-9990814-25-5. £14.95.","authors":"J. Mackenzie","doi":"10.1017/s0305862x00019646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305862x00019646","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":89063,"journal":{"name":"African research & documentation","volume":"1 1","pages":"41"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56842279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"English Literature in Southern Africa: NELM at 30","authors":"L. Grant","doi":"10.1017/s0305862x00020951","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305862x00020951","url":null,"abstract":"Vision The National English Literary Museum champions the cause of the humane values such as tolerance, acceptance and inclusivity so nobly and memorably embodied in our literature. All South Africans who write creatively and imaginatively in English have a place in our museum, irrespective of their origin, mother tongue, personal convictions or age. Furthermore, all South Africans appreciate the significance of this body of work and its contribution to world literature. Mission To maintain and extend the nation's leading collection of southern African English literary heritage and to serve as a source of expertise through exemplary research, conservation, exhibitions and public programmes. The National English Literary Museum (NELM) is one of South Africa's greatest treasures (website: http:/ /www.ru.ac.za/nelm). Tucked away in the university town of Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape, NELM collects all creative writing by southern African authors who write in English, and in the following genres: novels, short stories, plays, essays, poetry, theatre, television and film scripts, autobiography, travel, letters, memoirs and diaries. Critical writing on the authors and their works is also collected, as well as writings on related subjects such as literary history, censorship and literary awards. These materials are collected in all formats: books, study guides, theses, literary manuscripts, press clippings and audio-visual material. This article will provide an overview of NELM's history, its collections, research and outreach programmes, satellite museums and finally, a look to the future. NELM's beginnings Nothing much, if anything, had been done about collecting and conserving South African literature in English until 1960, when a professor from Texas visited South Africa and, with considerable success, persuaded some local writers to donate or sell their literary manuscripts to his library. One of the collections of manuscripts which ended up in American hands was that of Herman Charles Bosman. Professor Guy Butler, himself a noted author and the major force behind the drive to teach South African literature at university level, organised a counter-offensive and in 1972 Rhodes University's Institute for the Study of English in Africa sponsored the foundation of the Thomas Pringle Collection for English in Africa, with the express purpose of collecting books and manuscripts illustrating the role of English as a language of South Africa. Many literary friends of Butler contributed their manuscripts, typescripts, scrapbooks, press-clippings and other memorabilia to this project. In July 1974 the National English Documentation Centre was established as an independent body. This then became the National English Literary Museum and Documentation Centre and in 1980, the National English Literary Museum (NELM) became a Declared Cultural Institution under the national government. NELM also collects English literature and criticism about that literature fr","PeriodicalId":89063,"journal":{"name":"African research & documentation","volume":"1 1","pages":"25-36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56842681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Library-To-Library and Librarian-Academic Partnerships: The University of Malawi, The University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and Michigan State University","authors":"P. Limb","doi":"10.1017/s0305862x00021087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305862x00021087","url":null,"abstract":"Introduction University partnerships are a growing focus of African Studies programmes,2 often underpinning much project rhetoric. Yet, the vagaries of funding and administration can render projects ineffective or less effective, projects that in any case often neglect libraries. This can be a fatal flaw in project planning because libraries in the North tend to form one of the, if not the, major nerve centres of a university; never more so than today, when the physical library 'neurons' now comprise not just books and journals but a mass of hardware and software. Some administrators make the mistake of imagining 'the library' only in terms of bricks and mortar, and neglect the crucial role of libraries and librarians in identifying, acquiring, classifying and making accessible a wide range of important information resources and related services. In most African countries, neglect of libraries due to limited resources and sometimes policy has had a baneful impact. Therefore, university development projects or partnerships on Africa that neglect libraries and information services do so at their own peril. The case study experiences that I briefly outline below suggest that closer attention to the detail of partnerships and the building of new alliances, not just between librarians in the North and in Africa, but also between academics and librarians in our respective universities can help to improve the effectiveness of African partnerships. Problems of limited resources and administrative decisions can still limit their effectiveness, but such projects can offer a potentially useful way to help render disinterested assistance to libraries in Africa whilst at the same time improving the knowledge and understanding of African libraries by both librarians and academics in the North. Over the years, there have been some very useful, largely ad hoc contacts with, or assistance to, African libraries and archives. To give just three examples: by the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme, by Nordic material aid in Lusaka and Dar es Salaam, or USAID's construction of Malawi's Bunda College. Nordic grants helped improve library superstructure. Attempts to coordinate efforts over the years by INASP, the Africana Librarians Council (ALC), and Cooperative Africana Microfilm Project (CAMP) have provided some mentoring, limited book donations, useful preservation projects, and successful lobbying of publishers for better access for African libraries. More recently, there have been efforts to improve African universities' information infrastructure, for instance by the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa and UbuntuNet.3 The need for more effective partnerships has never been more urgent than in today's tight global economy that continues to hit African libraries very hard. I argue that the building of partnerships that combine focused, one-to-one links with wider coordination are one effective way modestly to help lay the foundation for improved","PeriodicalId":89063,"journal":{"name":"African research & documentation","volume":"1 1","pages":"13-21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56842766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Making Headway: the introduction of Western civilization in colonial Northern Nigeria; by Andrew Barnes. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2009. xii +330 pp. ISBN 9781580462990. £55.","authors":"A. Kirk-Greene","doi":"10.1017/s0305862x00021038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305862x00021038","url":null,"abstract":"Making Headway: the introduction of Western civilization in colonial Northern Nigeria; by Andrew Barnes. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2009. xii +330 pp. ISBN 9781580462990. £55. This is a remarkably detailed study, deeply researched and highly informative, of what in retrospect can be interpreted as the cultural 'opening up' of the Northern Nigerian emirates from 1900 onwards by the two principal groups of European actors, the British colonial administrators and the European (and American) missionaries. For Barnes the administrative promotion of Western culture was rooted in an identifiably aristocratic past, while the missionaries, Protestant and Catholic were guided by their own concepts of evangelism. Yet by no means was this a joint program of cultural imposition. More often than not, the two groups operated in marked competition rather than in close co-operation in their single programme on how, using Barnes' subtitle, to introduce Western civilisation. Indeed, he argues that in the story of how Christianity came to the Northern emirates, the colonial government was motivated in its concept of Western civilisation by an entrenched and intransigent opposition to missionaries. Contrary to many interpretations of the colonial rule in Northern Nigeria, Barnes dismisses the belief that this virtual animosity was principally derived from a genuine empathy for Islam. So absorbed am I by the arguments (and authority) in this book that I have felt more like urging those interested in the initial cultural aims and the impact of the colonial administration and of the missionary presence just to go ahead and read the book rather than my attempting to summarise its scope and methodology in a short review. Let me just say that, however anxious researchers of the period and the theme may be to hurry on to the nitty-gritty core chapters like \"Indirect Rule as a Form of Cultural Transfer\" and \"Christian Missions and the Evangelization of the North\", in no way should they overlook the preliminary discussion of \"Theoretical Concerns\" and \"Historiography\" - the routinesque pages on historiography contain a firstclass analysis of the influential views of recent scholars like Robert Heussler, Ian Nicolson and Peter Tebenderana on their contrasting interpretations of the character and motives of British administrators in Northern Nigeria. Despite my enthusiasm for this book, with its insights into the working and the mind of colonial administrators and its wealth of new data on missionary attitudes and activities, and my admiration for the way Barnes has consulted lesser-known mission sources such as the SIM jounal Sudan Witness, the minutes of the serverai missionary conferences held in Jos in the 1920s and 1930s, and the unpublished Casaleggio manuscript in the World Mission administrative files, along with his valuably drawing attention to recent unpublished dissertations submitted both in Nigeria and beyond - despite all these merits, I am puzzled","PeriodicalId":89063,"journal":{"name":"African research & documentation","volume":"1 1","pages":"65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56842744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lozikeyi Dlodlo, Queen of the Ndebele: “A very dangerous and intriguing woman”, by Marieke Faber Clarke, with Pathisa Nyathi. Bulawayo: Amagugu, 2010. 310 pp. ISBN 978-0-7974-4266-5. ZIM$20.00. (Distributed outside Zimbabwe through African Books Collective.)","authors":"J. Pinfold","doi":"10.1017/s0305862x00021130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305862x00021130","url":null,"abstract":"Lozikeyi Dlodlo, Queen of the Ndebele: \"A very dangerous and intriguing woman\", by Marieke Faber Clarke, with Pathisa Nyathi. Bulawayo: Amagugu, 2010. 310 pp. ISBN 978-0-7974-4266-5. ZIM$20.00. (Distributed outside Zimbabwe through African Books Collective.) On the front cover of this consistently interesting and engaging book is a striking photograph of Lozikeyi Dlodlo, King Lobhengula's senior queen, and after his death Queen Regent of the Ndebele. Taken around 1910 by the missionary Bowen Rees, it shows her confident and assertive, sitting alone in front of her cattle enclosure. The sense of authority is palpable. Yet the majority of the standard historical reference works on Zimbabwe make no reference to her at all. It is the aim of this biography to show that she was not just one of Lobhengula's many queens, but was an important political player in her own right, who was the moving spirit behind the War of the Red Axe (the Matabele Rebellion) in 1896, and who subsequently encouraged the renaissance of the Ndebele nation through embracing western education and then turning it against the European settlers in what had become Rhodesia. After her death during the great 'flu epidemic of 1919, she remained an inspiration to Ndebele freedom fighters, and Marieke Clarke tells us that during the liberation war of the 1970s bullets from the opposing sides were symbolically placed by her grave. One of the problems of writing a biography of someone who has effectively been marginalised or ignored by mainstream history is the sources. In terms of the written record, this was almost entirely the creation of Europeans, most of whom had little or no understanding of Ndebele culture or politics and who therefore tended to underplay the role that royal women such as Lozikeyi played. Nevertheless Clarke makes good use of such written sources as do exist, and in particular of the papers of the trader and adventurer Johan Colenbrander, who was also Rhodes's interpreter at the Indabas with the Ndebele chiefs in 1896, and of the L.M.S. missionary Bowen Rees who was also fluent in isiNdebele and who got to know the Queen well over a long period of time. Bowen Rees's testimony is particularly important because as a Welshspeaking Welshman at a time when English cultural imperialism was being forced on the Welsh, he was able to empathise with another small nation suffering under the same oppressor. Incidentally, on the basis of the evidence produced here, both Colenbrander and Bowen Rees would benefit from biographies of their own. Both were active in Matabeleland over a long period of time and were held in high regard by the Ndebele themselves, yet they made very different choices, Colenbrander effectively selling out to Rhodes, something one senses Bowen Rees would never have considered doing. But however, important these written sources are, it is obvious from the outset that this book is to a large extent based on oral history and tradition. From the time, over tw","PeriodicalId":89063,"journal":{"name":"African research & documentation","volume":"1 1","pages":"73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56842888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Making Marmalade and Imperial Mentalities: the case of a Colonial wife","authors":"Kate Law","doi":"10.1017/s0305862x00019592","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305862x00019592","url":null,"abstract":"Miriam Cheales was born in Southern Rhodesia on the 28th October 1914 at Lincoln Farm in Beatrice, just south of Salisbury to Alan and Irene Cheales. They returned to England to deal with family business in the early 1920s and Miriam was brought up in rural Lincolnshire. After completing her education she undertook some training in basic physiotherapy, and served as a nurse during World War Two. In September 1945 Miriam married Frank Staunton. As Frank was also originally from Rhodesia, with his family farming substantial amounts of land they decided to return to Africa and Frank took a post as a native commissioner. Upon arrival in Southern Rhodesia, Staunton was both adjusting to married life and finding herself back at \"home\" despite the fact she rarely thought of herself as Rhodesian. Like many middle class colonial women, who had the drudgery of housework alleviated by the presence of black servants, Staunton became involved in voluntary work. As Deborah Kirkwood notes \"settler women took with them the Anglo-Saxon tradition of voluntary service and 'do gooding' so characteristic of British and American middle-class society\"2. Staunton became involved in the Federation of African Women's Clubs also known as the Homecraft movement which was an attempt, to \"teach groups of African women in the villages something about hygiene & health for themselves and their families\".3 Staunton devoted large amounts of her time to working within the women's clubs, noting in one letter to her brother that \"this FAWC is jolly nearly a full time job\".4 It is interesting to note the ambiguities surrounding Miriam Staunton's role in the clubs, when it is remembered that she was the wife of the local native commissioner, who was the 'man on the spot'.5 The ambiguity of the situation is further highlighted when it is remembered that most wives held conservative views and would not have socialised with African women on the scale that Staunton did. In his own memoirs Miriam's husband, Frank reflected on the fact that \"Miriam [was]... a bit too friendly towards the Africans\"6, as his superiors often commented on the level of socialising Miriam did with African women. She herself noted that we are rather pioneering in social relationships. Certainly I have the dear black sisters popping in to see me at all hours, which I would not have thought of 4 years ago. I am really fond of many of them as people... (Quite a number of Europeans have never met them on equal terms so to speak). 7 Staunton's papers are located in Rhodes House Oxford, and I spent a week using them in April 2009. Comprising just three cartons, the physical size of Staunton's papers cannot do them justice in what they can offer the women's and imperial historian alike. Staunton's papers primarily consist of letters she wrote to her mother and brother who remained in Britain, alongside various ephemera relating to the voluntary work she did within the Homecraft Movement. In this paper, I will be examining","PeriodicalId":89063,"journal":{"name":"African research & documentation","volume":"1 1","pages":"19"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56842216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, edited by Derek R. Peterson, Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 2010, x + 235 pp. ISBN (hardback) 978-0-8214-19014, $64.95 (paperback) 978-0-8214-1902-1, $20.95.","authors":"T. Barringer","doi":"10.1017/s0305862x00019634","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305862x00019634","url":null,"abstract":"Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, edited by Derek R. Peterson, Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 2010, x + 235 pp. ISBN (hardback) 978-0-8214-19014, $64.95 (paperback) 978-0-8214-1902-1, $20.95. This slim but rich volume refreshes well worn debates in the study of slavery and abolition (Did the abolition of slavery owe more to religion and idealism or to economic forces and self interest? How stand Eric Williams' arguments six decades after the publication of Capitalism and Slavery? What were the economic and social consequences of abolition? Does scholarship support or subvert the hagiography of abolitionism? Was abolition achieved more by elite politics or popular pressure? What was the role of slave and African agency? What of African complicity? Has there been an undue concentration on the upperclass and charismatic figure of Wilberforce?) It also opens up new debates and perspectives. In a masterly introduction, fuelled by wide reading and reflection, Derek Petersen shows that these debates resonated geographically far beyond Britain and chronologically well beyond the early eighteenth century. Drawing on his own specialist knowledge of east Africa he shows how the discourses of slavery, freedom and British values were taken into the bitter and still unresolved Ganda /Ngoro dispute over the \"lost counties\" - a theme developed in the sometimes chilling final chapter by Jonathan Glassman's deconstruction of myths and histories of slavery in Zanzibar and their echoes in racial violence and politics in twentieth century Zanzibar. Peterson summarises: This book is an effort to expand the temporal and geographic frame in which the history of abolitionism is conceived... Abolitionism was a theatre in which a variety of actors - slaves, African rulers, Caribbean planters, working-class radicals, African political entrepreneurs, Christian evangelicals - played a part. This varied cast of characters was not working from a script authored in London, The Atlantic was an echo chamber in which abolitionist symbols, ideas and evidence were generated from a variety of vantage points. This book highlights the range of political and moral projects in which the advocates of abolitionism were engaged, and in so doing it joins together geographies that are normally studied in isolation, (p. 17) The introduction is followed by seven essays, all by eminent scholars and all readable and thought provoking. …","PeriodicalId":89063,"journal":{"name":"African research & documentation","volume":"1 1","pages":"39"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56842235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Beyond the Malachite Hills: a life of colonial service and business in the new Africa, by Jonathan Lawley. London: I.B. Tauris, 2010. [xi] + 304 pp. ISBN 978-1-84885-049-1. £27.50.","authors":"J. Pinfold","doi":"10.1017/s0305862x00021026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305862x00021026","url":null,"abstract":"Beyond the Malachite Hills: a life of colonial service and business in the new Africa, by Jonathan Lawley. London: LB. Tauris, 2010. [xi] + 304 pp. ISBN 9781-84885-049-1. £27.50. Jonathan Lawley was born in India during the Raj, and he was educated in Kashmir, Britain, the then Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, before joining the Colonial Service in Northern Rhodesia. He served there as a District Officer and District Commissioner for nine years, including five in the newly independent Zambia before being required to retire. He subsequently worked on a mining project in Zaire, as well as undertaking many different business assignments and consultancies in countries as diverse as Morocco, Madagascar, Mauritius and Namibia. He is also a former Director of the Royal African Society. This memoir thus offers an account of a lifetime's engagement with Africa, encompassing a variety of roles. The early chapters present an evocative and nostalgic, even elegiac, account of central Africa in the last years of colonial rule, with stories of long safaris and fishing trips, meetings with chiefs and village elders, golf and other social gatherings at the ubiquitous club. Yet even this early in the book, there are hints that it has more to offer than the normal colonial memoir. Perhaps because of his unusual upbringing (having been taught, for example, by the renowned Eric Tyndale-Biscoe in Kashmir), race was for him, as he states \"not an issue\" (p.3), and he was shocked by the casual racism he found in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. Initially a supporter of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland and of the 'partnership' it was supposed to promote, he came to see that this was merely a fig leaf for white supremacy. As a DO in Northern Rhodesia he became aware not just of the political 'winds of change' leading to independence, but, more generally, of the need to be able to communicate with Africans in their own language and appreciate their point of view. From the conversations he records with his counterparts in Southern Rhodesia, the divergence in viewpoint between them is clear. Yet at the same time, he always seems to have had a hankering for Southern Rhodesia, a place he describes as \"special and surely with a special future if only whites could see the light\" (p. 9), and it is worthy of note that he, a civil servant in the front line state of independent Zambia, should have chosen to spend his honeymoon in UDI Rhodesia, even meeting Ian Smith along the way. On another subsequent visit to Rhodesia he was careful enough to ensure his passport did not receive the immigration stamp of the illegal regime. Eventually, some fifteen years later, Lawley got the chance to help establish the new non-racist state of Zimbabwe when he was appointed an election supervisor following the Lancaster House Agreement. Posted to a remote rural region, he was able to use his knowledge of the local language and his experience as a DO to good effect, winning the tru","PeriodicalId":89063,"journal":{"name":"African research & documentation","volume":"1 1","pages":"63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56842735","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}