{"title":"Africa And The Diaspora: History Politics Culture","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"antecedents-to-modern-rwanda-book-j-vansina-9780299201241","title":"Antecedents to Modern Rwanda","description":"To understand the genocide and other dramatic events of Rwanda's recent past, one must understand the history of the earlier realm. Jan Vansina provides a critique of the history recorded by early missionaries and court historians and provides a bottom-up view, drawing on hundreds of grassroots narratives. He describes the genesis of the Hutu and Tutsi identities, their growing social and political differences, their bitter feuds, revolts, and massacres, and the relevance of this dramatic history to the post-genocide Rwanda of today.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49577775005969,"sku":"GOR013681268","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50483350733073,"sku":"CIN0299201244G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50529183629585,"sku":"CIN0299201244VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0299201244.jpg?v=1763477492"},{"product_id":"defeat-is-the-only-bad-news-book-alison-liebhafsky-des-forges-9780299281441","title":"Defeat Is the Only Bad News","description":"A Rwandan proverb says “Defeat is the only bad news.” For Rwandans living under colonial rule, winning called not only for armed confrontation, but also for a battle of wits—and not only with foreigners, but also with each other. In Defeat Is the Only Bad News, Alison Des Forges recounts the ambitions, strategies, and intrigues of an African royal court under Yuhi Musinga, the Rwandan ruler from 1896 to 1931. These were turbulent years for Rwanda, when first Germany and then Belgium pursued an aggressive plan of colonization there. At the time of the Europeans’ arrival, Rwanda was also engaged in a succession dispute after the death of one of its most famous kings. Against this backdrop, the Rwandan court became the stage for a drama of Shakespearean proportions, filled with deceit, shrewd calculation, ruthless betrayal, and sometimes murder. Historians who study European expansion typically focus on interactions between colonizers and colonized; they rarely attend to relations among the different factions inhabiting occupied lands. Des Forges, drawing on oral histories and extensive archival research, reveals how divisions among different groups in Rwanda shaped their responses to colonial governments, missionaries, and traders. Rwandans, she shows, used European resources to extend their power, even as they sought to preserve the autonomy of the royal court. Europeans, for their part, seized on internal divisions to advance their own goals. Des Forges’s vividly narrated history, meticulously edited and introduced by David Newbury, provides a deep context for understanding the Rwandan civil war a century later.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50038218916113,"sku":"CIN0299281442G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0299281442.jpg?v=1763478861"},{"product_id":"naming-colonialism-book-osumaka-likaka-9780299233648","title":"Naming Colonialism","description":"What's in a name? As Osumaka Likaka argues in this illuminating study, the names that Congolese villagers gave to European colonizers reveal much about how Africans experienced and reacted to colonialism. The arrival of explorers, missionaries, administrators, and company agents allowed Africans to observe Westerners' physical appearances, behavior, and cultural practices at close range - often resulting in subtle yet trenchant critiques. By naming Europeans, Africans turned a universal practice into a local mnemonic system, recording and preserving the village's understanding of colonialism in the form of pithy verbal expressions that were easy to remember and transmit across localities, regions, and generations. Methodologically innovative, \"\"Naming Colonialism\"\" advances a new approach that shows how a cultural process - the naming of Europeans - can provide a point of entry into economic and social histories. Drawing on archival documents and oral interviews, Likaka encounters and analyzes a welter of coded fragments. The vivid epithets Congolese gave to rubber company agents - 'the home burner', 'Leopard', 'Beat, beat', 'The hippopotamus-hide whip' - clearly conveyed the violence that underpinned colonial extractive economies. Other names were subtler, hinting at derogatory meaning by way of riddles, metaphors, or symbols to which the Europeans were oblivious. 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Popular culture here emerges as a heterarchical force that shaped lasting multidirectional connections across and between Ruvuma and their neighbors. As both a subject and a strategy for analysis, the history of popular fashion shifts how we view histories of small, decentralized societies as they encounter larger economies. Felber-Seligman demonstrates that this has implications for our understanding not only of trade but of material culture, community, gender, and family.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51595274944785,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51595275075857,"sku":"NGR9780299350406","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0299350401.jpg?v=1763479987"},{"product_id":"mau-mau-s-children-book-david-sandgren-9780299287849","title":"Mau Mau's Children","description":"In 1963 David P. 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The resulting stereotypes influenced, in turn, how colonial and postcolonial court officials decided age-of-consent and other sex crime cases. Court rituals thus legally transformed girls into women by ruling on their sexual maturity, and boys into men by sentencing them to corporal punishment marking their acceptance of sexual responsibilities.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52099640819985,"sku":"NGR9780299352004","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780299352004.jpg?v=1757086696"},{"product_id":"religious-entanglements-book-david-maxwell-9780299337544","title":"Religious Entanglements","description":"The Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM) was one of the most successful classical Pentecostal missions in Africa. 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Jelmer Vos shows that both Africans and Europeans were able to forward differing social, political, and economic agendas as Kongo’s sacred city of São Salvador became a vital site for the expansion of European imperialism in Central Africa. Kongo people, he argues, built on the kingdom’s long familiarity with Atlantic commerce and cultures to become avid intermediaries in a new system of colonial trade and mission schools.  Vos underlines that Kongo’s incorporation in the European state system also had tragic consequences, including the undermining of local African structures of authority—on which the colonial system actually depended. 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The people who wrote these letters had emerged from the religious, social, and educational institutions established by the Church Missionary Society, the preeminent Anglican mission in the Atlantic Nigerian region following the imposition of British colonial rule. Abiodun, recruited to be a civil servant in the colonial Department of Agriculture, became a leader of a prominent family in Ibadan, the dominant YorÙbÁ city in southern Nigeria. Reading deeply in these letters, Vaughan realized he had a unique set of sources to illuminate everyday life.   Letter writing was a dominant form of communication for Western-educated elites in colonial Africa, especially in Nigeria. Exposure to the modern world and a growing sense of nationalism were among the factors that led people to begin exchanging letters, particularly in their interactions with British colonial authorities. 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