Nineteenth-century European representations of Africa are notorious for depicting the continent with a blank interior. But there was a time when British writers filled Africa with landed empires and contiguous trade routes linked together by a network of rivers. This geographical narrative proliferated in fictional and nonfictional texts alike, and it was born not from fanciful speculation but from British interpretations of what Africans said and showed about themselves and their worlds. Investigations of the representation of Africa in British texts have typically concluded that the continent operated in the British imagination as a completely invented space with no meaningful connection to actual African worlds, or as an inert realm onto which writers projected their expansionist fantasies. With African Impressions, Rebekah Mitsein revises that narrative, demonstrating that African elites successfully projected expressions of their sovereignty, wealth, right to power, geopolitical clout, and religious exceptionalism into Europe long before Europeans entered sub-Saharan Africa. Mitsein considers the ways that African self-representation continued to drive European impressions of the continent across the early Enlightenment, fueling desires to find the sources of West Africa’s gold and the city states along the Niger, to establish a relationship with the Christian kingdom of Prester John, and to discover the source of the Nile. Through an analysis of a range of genres, including travel narratives, geography books, maps, verse, and fiction, Mitsein shows how African strategies of self-representation and European strategies for representing Africa grew increasingly inextricable, as the ideas that Africans presented about themselves and their worlds migrated from contact zones to texts and back again. The geographical narratives that arose from this cycle, which unfolded over hundreds of years, were made to fit expansionist agendas, but they remained rooted in the African worlds and worldviews that shaped them.

Encompassing black-and-white linoleum cuts made at community art centres in the 1960s and 1970s, resistance posters and other political art of the 1980s, and the wide variety of subjects and techniques explored by artists in printships over the last two decades, printmaking has been a driving force in contemporary South African artistic and political expression. Impressions from South Africa: 1965 to Now, published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, introduces the vital role of printmaking through works by more than twenty artists in the Museum's collection. The volume features prints by John Muafangejo and Dan Rakgoathe, a selection of posters produced for anti-apartheid coalitions in the 1980s, and nuanced political work by SueWilliamson, Norman Catherine andWilliam Kentridge. The book features many more recent projects, demonstrating the contemporary relevance of the medium in South Africa today. The work, presented in a generous plate section, is contextualized in an introduction by Judith B. Hecker, and accompanied by brief biographies of the artists, a timeline of relevant events in South African history, and a selected bibliography.

The first of Roussel's two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth chapter. A veritable literary melting pot, Roussel's groundbreaking text makes ample use of wordplay and the surrealist techniques of automatic writing and private allusion.

Post-apartheid South African elections have borne an unmistakable racial imprint: Africans vote for one set of parties, whites support a different set of parties, and, with few exceptions, there is no crossover voting between groups. These voting tendencies have solidified the dominance of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) over South African politics and turned South African elections into 'racial censuses'. This book explores the political sources of these outcomes. It argues that although the beginnings of these patterns lie in South Africa's past, in the effects apartheid had on voters' beliefs about race and destiny and the reputations parties forged during this period, the endurance of the census reflects the ruling party's ability to use the powers of office to prevent the opposition from evolving away from its apartheid-era party label. By keeping key opposition parties 'white', the ANC has rendered them powerless, solidifying its hold on power in spite of an increasingly restive and dissatisfied electorate.

In one of the first analyses of contemporary IndianAfrican relations, this detailed book draws upon a collection of case studies that explore interrelated topics such as trade, investment, development aid, civil society relations, security, and geopolitics. While China's relationship to Africa has been thoroughly examined, knowledge and analysis of India's role in Africa has until now been limited. This book fills the gap and compares and contrasts India to China s role as a rising global power in the African continent. "

The first major synthesis of African archaeobotany in decades, this book focuses on Paleolithic archaeobotany and the relationship between agriculture and social complexity. It explores the effects that plant life has had on humans as they evolved from primates through the complex societies of Africa, including Egypt, the Buganda Kingdom, southern African polities, and other regions. With over 30 contributing scholars from 12 countries and extensive illustrations, this volume is an essential addition to our knowledge of humanity’s relationship with plants.

"This volume appraises distinguished black poets whose careers began to flower between the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, a period of militant integration, and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, a decade of militant separatism. Most of these writers were children of the Renaissance, then young adults during World War II, and finally middle-aged artists during the Korean conflict. The poets examined include Melvin Tolson, Robert Hayden, Dudley Randall, Margaret Esse Danner, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks. The interpretive focus shifts from characterization and stylistic evolution to dialectic voices, prophecy, attitude toward the opposite sex, and the theme of recreation. As editor Miller notes, the poets balance mimetic and apocalyptic theories of literature. In Freudian terms they play id against superego; in Derridean terms they reconstruct ethical and phenomenological values aesthetically. Through ballad, sonnet, and free verse, they are the poets of memory, protest, tradition, and cultural celebration"--Book jacket.

This report focuses on the chronology and geography of collective violence against migrant entrepreneurs since South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994. The overall aim of the research was to document and create a chronological account of attacks on migrant businesses, to categorise the types and frequency of attacks and to map the locations where such events occurred.