The essays in this important new collection explore the diverse, unexpected, and controversial ways in which the idea of civil society has recently entered into populist politics and public debate throughout Africa. In a substantial introduction,...

The Assassination of Lumumba unravels the appalling mass of lies, hypocrisy and betrayals that have surrounded accounts of the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba—the first prime minister of the Republic of Congo and a pioneer of African unity—since it...

In Neoliberal Frontiers, Brenda Chalfin presents an ethnographic examination of the day-to-day practices of the officials of Ghana’s Customs Service, exploring the impact of neoliberal restructuring and integration into the global economy on Ghanaian...

Religious NGOs are important sources of humanitarian aid in Africa, entering where the welfare programs of weakened states fail to provide basic services. As collaborators and critics of African states, religious NGOs occupy an important structural and...

The untold story of America's attempt to forge a nation from scratch, from europhric birth to heart-wrenching collapse.South Sudan's independence was celebrated around the world—a triumph for global justice and an end to one of the world's most...

"Why are you learning Zulu?" When Mark Sanders began studying the language, he was often asked this question. In Learning Zulu, Sanders places his own endeavors within a wider context to uncover how, in the past 150 years of South African history, Zulu...

The question was: would he hang?In 1963, when South Africa's apartheid government charged Nelson Mandela with planning its overthrow, most observers feared that he would be sentenced to death. But the support he and his fellow activists in the African...

A characteristically unconventional and engaging work, Carmel Schrire’s Tigers in Africa: Stalking the Past at the Cape of Good Hope interweaves such diverse themes as colonial slavery and apartheid, human and carnivore evolution, and science and romance...

In The Doctor Who Would Be King Guillaume Lachenal tells the extraordinary story of Dr. Jean Joseph David, a French colonial army doctor who governed an entire region of French Cameroon during World War II. Dr. David—whom locals called “emperor”—dreamed...

In this new edition of Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, C. L. R. James tells the history of the socialist revolution led by Kwame Nkrumah, the first president and prime minister of Ghana. Although James wrote it in the immediate post-independence period...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERLooking to rebuild after a painful divorce, Alexandra Fuller turns to her African past for clues to living a life fully and without fearA child of the Rhodesian wars and of two deeply complicated parents, Alexandra Fuller is no...

Born in 1900 in French West Africa, Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ was one of the towering figures in the literature of twentieth-century Francophone Africa. In Amkoullel, the Fula Boy, Bâ tells in striking detail the story of his youth, which was set...