Böcker i Africa in World History-serien

Swahili was once an obscure dialect of an East African Bantu language. Today more than one hundred million people use it: Swahili is to eastern and central Africa what English is to the world.

Stones of Contention explores the major developments in the remarkable history of Africa's diamonds, from the earliest stirrings of international interest in the continent's mineral wealth in the first millennium A.D. to the present day.

A story with the power to change how people view the last years of colonialism in East Africa, The Boy Is Gone portrays the struggle for Kenyan independence in the words of a freedom fighter whose life spanned the twentieth century's most dramatic transformations. Born into an impoverished farm family in the Meru Highlands, Japhlet Thambu grew up wearing goatskins and lived to stand before his community dressed for business in a pressed suit, crisp tie, and freshly polished shoes. For most of the last four decades, however, he dressed for work in the primary school classroom and on his lush tea farm.The General, as he came to be called from his leadership of the Mau Mau uprising sixty years ago, narrates his life story in conversation with Laura Lee Huttenbach, a young American who met him while backpacking in Kenya in 2006. A gifted storyteller with a keen appreciation for language and a sense of responsibility as a repository of his people's history, the General talks of his childhood in the voice of a young boy, his fight against the British in the voice of a soldier, and his long life in the voice of shrewd elder. While his life experiences are his alone, his story adds immeasurably to the long history of decolonization as it played out across Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

Africa's art of cooking is a key part of its history. This title describes how the ingredients, the practices, and the varied tastes of African cuisine comprise a body of historically gendered knowledge practiced and perfected in households across Africa's diverse human and ecological landscape.

From Accra and Algiers to Zanzibar and Zululand, Africans have wrested control of soccer from the hands of Europeans, and through the rise of different playing styles, the rituals of spectatorship, and the presence of magicians and healers, have turned soccer into a distinctively African activity.

An engaging social history of foreign tourists dreams, the African tourism industrys efforts to fulfill them, and how both sides affect each other.Since the nineteenth century, foreign tourists and resident tourism workers in Africa have mutually relied upon notions of exoticism, but from vastly different perspectives. Many of the countless tourists who have traveled to the African continent fail to acknowledge or even realize that skilled African artists in the tourist industry repeatedly manufacture authentic experiences in order to fulfill foreigners often delusional, or at least uninformed, expectations. These carefully nurtured and controlled performances typically reinforce tourists reductive impressionsformed over centuriesof the continent, its peoples, and even its wildlife. In turn, once back in their respective homelands, tourists accounts of their travels often substantiate, and thereby reinforce, prevailing stereotypes of exotic Africa. Meanwhile, Africans staged performances not only impact their own lives, primarily by generating remunerative opportunities, but also subject the continents residents to objectification, exoticization, and myriad forms of exploitation.