Daughter of a Hausa farmer and Koranic teacher, Baba became Mary Smith's friend in 1949, when M. G. and Mary Smith were engaged in fieldwork in Nigeria. In daily sessions for several weeks Baba dictated her life story, which Mrs. Smith has translated from the Hausa. The old woman's memories reached back to the days of slave raids and interstate warfare before the British occupation, and she has left a fascinating and valuable record of Hausa life in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Baba describes Hausa male-oriented society from a woman's point of view, narrating not only her own life history but stories of other women who were close to her. She tells of Hausa domestic life, farming, and slavery, and explains the Hausa institutions of bond friendship, adoption, polygynous marriage, and kinship, showing how, in a society that permits easy and frequent divorce, children are not exclusively dependent on their biological parents for emotional support. First published in 1945 and now reissued with a new foreword by Hilda Kuper, this autobiography of a shrewd, humorous, and courageous personality remains a classic in the field of African studies and a uniquely valuable account of a Muslim society in West Africa.

Focussing on the problems of change and resistance to change that mark the African sub-continent, this book examines Africa's place in the world from earliest times. It considers the nature of its peoples in their prehistoric development, the ways in which their cultures were oriented, and the ways in which these cultures guided their reactions to European ideas. It also assesses the human responses to industrial, technological and economic changes and the re-discovery by the Africans of African culture. Originally published in 1962.

Documenting the changes occurring since the 1984 study, this edition provides a collection of life histories from the women of Mutira. Two new introductory chapters frame the life histories within the context both of significant macro-level transitions in Kenya and current thinking on gender.

How have different forms of colonialism shaped societies and their politics? William F. S. Miles focuses on the Hausa-speaking people of West Africa whose land is still split by an arbitrary boundary established by Great Britain and France at the turn of the century. In 1983 Miles returned as a Fulbright scholar to the region where he had served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1970s. Already fluent in the Hausa language, he established residence in carefully selected twin villages on either side of the border separating the Republic of Niger from the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Over the next year, and then during subsequent visits, he traveled by horseback between the two places, conducting archival research, collecting oral testimony, and living the ethnographic life. Miles argues that the colonial imprint of the British and the French can still be discerned more than a generation after the conferring of formal independence on Nigeria and Niger. Moreover, such influences persist even in the relatively remote countryside: in the nature of economic transactions, in local education practices, in the practice of Islam, in the operation of chieftaincy. In Hausaland as throughout the world, the border illuminates the vital differences between otherwise similar societies.

In an era of globalization, private markets are expected to dominate the distribution of goods worldwide. Yet surprisingly little empirical work is conducted on them. The sensitive and secret nature of trading information, the complexity of real markets and the lack of official data other than that on price can all cause problems. This book seeks to overcome these in examining arguably the most difficult markets of all - agricultural markets under conditions of underdevelopment. Case-studies from nine countries covering all three underdeveloped continents offer a comprehensive overview of the lessons to be learnt from field experience.