African history Books

The Library of Trinity College Dublin dates back to the establishment of the College in 1592 and is the largest library in Ireland. Its extensive collection of journals, manuscripts, maps and music reflects over 400 years of academic development and...

One small East African country embodies the battered history of the continent: patronised by colonialists, riven by civil war, confused by Cold War manoeuvring, proud, colorful, with Africa's best espresso and worst rail service. Michela Wrong...

‘A lyrical investigation … both powerful and transcendent’ CHIGOZIE OBIOMA‘Acutely observed, hauntingly rendered and deeply affecting’ AMINATTA FORNA‘Both epic and intimate’ MARGO JEFFERSONAn astonishing search for a missing person, the hidden tragedies...

For decades, most anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements identified radical change with capturing state power. The collapse of statist projects from the 1970s fostered both neo-liberalism and a global crisis of left and working-class politics...

Abducted and forced to fight with the Lord's Resistance Army at the age of twelve, Norman Okello describes a journey into inhumanity and back to forgiveness and loveUganda's civil war with Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army has raged since the 1980s,...

Three leading Africa scholars investigate the social forces driving the democratic transformation of postcolonial states across southern Africa. Extensive research and interviews with civil society organizers in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Zambia, Malawi,...

Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama"A powerhouse drama. . . . Lynn Nottage's beautiful, hideous and unpretentiously important play [is] a shattering, intimate journey into faraway news reports."-Linda Winer, Newsday"An intense and gripping new...

In 1901, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, sent an expedition to the German colony of Togo in West Africa, with the purpose of transforming the region into a cotton economy similar to that of the post-Reconstruction American South...

Since 2017, Mozambique has been confronted with a jihadi insurgency. This book looks at the origins of that insurgency, and the broader and longer history of the relationship between Islam and politics in the country. Did Mozambique's Muslim...

This is an analytical history of the role Tigrinya-speakers have played and are still playing in the history of Ethiopia and Eritrea, from Tigray's very ancient incipience to the origins of today's tragically fratricidal war.Drawing...

Tales Things Tell offers new perspectives on histories of connectivity between Africa, Asia and Europe in the period before the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century. Reflected in objects and materials whose circulation and reception defined...

Behind a gruesome ISIS beheading video lies the untold story of the men in orange and the faith community that formed these unlikely modern-day saints and heroes.In a carefully choreographed propaganda video released in February 2015, ISIS militants...

Seven books in total: six Volumes from the series Architectural Guide plus one volume from the Basics series:Book 1. Theorising Architecture in Sub-Saharan Africa. Perspectives, Questions, and ConceptsISBN 978-3-86922-081-9Book 2: Western Africa from the...

What are the right questions to ask when seeking out the spirit of a nation?In November 2017, the people of Zimbabwe took to the streets in an unprecedented alliance with the military.  Their goal, to restore the legacy of Chimurenga, the...

An Exploration of Imhotep-Architect of the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, High Priest of Ra, and Royal Astronomer-as Well as His Influence as the True Father of African Civilization.In this groundbreaking book, Egyptologist Robert Bauval and astrophysicist...

What do you get when dare-devil Jihadists, mad English missionaries and proud, stubborn, warring natives meet in a clash?Nigeria.Formation: From Jihad to Amalgamation tracks the unlikely series of events and characters that turned a collection of...

When South Sudan's war began, the Beatles were playing their first hits and reaching the moon was an astronaut's dream. Half a century later, with millions massacred in Africa's longest war, the continent's biggest country split in two.It was an...

The Zambezi is the fourth-longest river in Africa, and one of the continent's principal arteries of movement, migration, conquest and commerce. In this book, historian Malyn Newitt quotes rarely used Portuguese sources that throw vivid light on...

When Stephen Ellis died in July 2015, African Studies lost one of its most prolific, provocative and celebrated scholars. Given the scale and uniqueness of his contribution, it is perhaps surprising that a collection of his writings did not appear during...

The most secretive, repressive state in Africa is haemorrhaging its citizens. In some months as many Eritreans as Syrians arrive on European shores, yet the country is not convulsed by civil war. Young men and women risk all to escape. Many do not...

This book presents rare evidence about the lives of three African women in the sixteenth century--the very period from which we can trace the origins of global empires, slavery, capitalism, modern religious dogma and anti-Black violence. These features...

A Kirkus Reviews Best YA Book of 2022 A USBBY 2023 Outstanding International BookA 2022 Foreword INDIES Bronze Winner (Graphic Novels & Comics Category)Honorable mention, 2023 Children's Africana Book Awards2022 VLA Graphic Novel Diversity...

'This book explores settler colonial genocides in a global perspective and over the long dure. It does so systematically and compellingly, as it investigates how settler colonial expansion at times created conditions for genocidal violence, and...

Walter Rodney was a scholar, working class militant, and revolutionary from Guyana. Strongly influenced by Marxist ideas, he remains central to radical Pan-Africanist thought for large numbers of activists' today. Rodney lived through the failed though...

"A well-rendered and -documented tale of exploitation in the developing world" (Kirkus Reviews) with deep resonance in the present day In a book Paul Farmer called "a gem of a social history linking two countries stuck in uncomfortable embrace for well...

A pioneering work of interconnected perspectives, Children of the New World is a novel of insurgency and resistance by one of the Arab world's most distinguished woman writers."Assia Djebar's point of view is feminist and anti-colonial, but her novel is...

Thiscomparison of the political and social systems of Europe and black Africa from antiquity to the formation of modern states demonstrates the black contribution to the development of Western civilization.

Now in its 30th printing, this classic presents historical, archaeological, and anthropological evidence to support the theory that ancient Egypt was a black civilization.

The book reinterprets the role of the UN during the Congo crisis from 1960 to 1964, presenting a multidimensional view of the organisation. Through an examination of the Anglo-American relationship, the book reveals how the UN helped position this event...

It was the war that changed everything, and yet it's been mostly forgotten: in 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia. It dominated newspaper headlines and newsreels. It inspired mass marches in Harlem, a play on Broadway, and independence movements in Africa. As...

Will the freedom struggle end in a bloodbath? Only two men can avert it.Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid hero and first leader of the new South Africa, is an international symbol of the power of a popular movement to fight structural racism. But that...

An incisive and illuminating account of how, during the Algerian Revolution, the people of Algeria changed centuries-old cultural patterns and embraced certain ancient cultural practices long derided by their colonialist oppressors as primitive, in order...

This powerful collection of articles, essays, and letters spans the period between Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon's landmark manifesto on the psychology of the colonized and the means of empowerment necessary...

provides the first comparative overview of the role of anthropology in colonial Africa. With essays exploring metropolitan research institutes, Africans as ethnographers and the transnational features of knowledge production, this volume both...

This fascinating work challenges many of the accepted facts about the concentration camps run by the British during the South African War. The author demonstrates that much of what we have traditionally understood about these camps originates the...

How a nineteenth-century lawsuit over the estate of a wealthy Tunisian Jew shines new light on the history of belongingIn the winter of 1873, Nissim Shamama, a wealthy Jew from Tunisia, died suddenly in his palazzo in Livorno, Italy. His passing...

For decades, African nations have fought for the return of countless works of art stolen during the colonial era and placed in Western museums. In Africa's Struggle for Its Art, Bndicte Savoy brings to light this largely unknown but deeply important...

An up-close account of how Nigerians' self-reliance in the absence of reliable government services enables official dysfunction to strengthen state power.When Nigerians say that every household is its own local government, what they mean is that the...

Why violence in the Congo has continued despite decades of international intervention Well into its third decade, the military conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been dubbed a "forever war"-a perpetual cycle of war, civil unrest, and...

This concise edition of the biography of Walatta-Petros (1672) tells the story of an Ethiopian saint who lived from 1592 to 1642 and led a successful nonviolent movement to preserve African Christian beliefs in the face of European protocolonialism. This...

A groundbreaking history that puts early and medieval West Africa in a global context Pick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book, the first on this...

A comprehensive history of one of the world's deadliest jihadist groups Boko Haram is one of the world's deadliest jihadist groups. It has killed more than twenty thousand people and displaced more than two million in a campaign of terror that began in...

A dramatic intellectual biography of Victorian jurist Travers Twiss, who provided the legal justification for the creation of the brutal Congo Free State.Eminent jurist, Oxford professor, advocate to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Travers Twiss (18091897)...

In the centuries leading up to our own, the volume of traffic across Asian sea routes an area stretching from East Africa and the Middle East to Japan grew dramatically, eventually making them the busiest in the world. The result was a massive...