This book constitutes an important contribution to the study of religion in Africa as it traces the often painful changes that occurred among the Bemba-speaking women of Zambia since the arrival of the Western Missionaries. The author offers us his life-long search for the bed-rock of traditional religion as a basis for genuine cultural/religious development.

African women's history is a topic as vast as the continent itself, embracing an array of societies in over fifty countries with different geographies, social customs, religions, and historical situations. In African Women: Early History to the 21st Century, Kathleen Sheldon masterfully delivers a comprehensive study of this expansive story from before the time of records to the present day. She provides rich background on descent systems and the roles of women in matrilineal and patrilineal systems. Sheldon's work profiles elite women, as well as those in leadership roles, traders and market women, religious women, slave women, women in resistance movements, and women in politics and development. The rich case studies and biographies in this thorough survey establish a grand narrative about women's roles in the history of Africa.

Invisible Agents shows how personal and deeply felt spiritual beliefs can inspire social movements and influence historical change. Conventional historiography concentrates on the secular, materialist, or moral sources of political agency. Instead, David M. Gordon argues, when people perceive spirits as exerting power in the visible world, these beliefs form the basis for individual and collective actions. Focusing on the history of the south-central African country of Zambia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, his analysis invites reflection on political and religious realms of action in other parts of the world, and complicates the post-Enlightenment divide of sacred and profane. The book combines theoretical insights with attention to local detail and remarkable historical sweep, from oral narratives communicated across slave-trading routes during the nineteenth century, through the violent conflicts inspired by Christian and nationalist prophets during colonial times, and ending with the spirits of Pentecostal rebirth during the neoliberal order of the late twentieth century. To gain access to the details of historical change and personal spiritual beliefs across this long historical period, Gordon employs all the tools of the African historian. His own interviews and extensive fieldwork experience in Zambia provide texture and understanding to the narrative. He also critically interprets a diverse range of other sources, including oral traditions, fieldnotes of anthropologists, missionary writings and correspondence, unpublished state records, vernacular publications, and Zambian newspapers. Invisible Agents will challenge scholars and students alike to think in new ways about the political imagination and the invisible sources of human action and historical change.

Little has been published about African women artists to date. This is due to a general Western hegemony over the construction of histories and discourses, but also to discrimination against women across national borders. This publication attempts to fill some of the gaps and explore the patterns underlying these dynamics. It brings together research on the practices and lives of women from different African countries, from modernist artists to independence activists to contemporary voices. These proceedings emerge from the symposium "Reclaim: Narratives of African Women Artists," organised by AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions in partnership with the Ecole du Louvre as part of the Africa2020 Season. They are a contribution to the revalorisation of the role of African women artists in cultural history, but also to broader reflections on the mechanisms of knowledge production both in Africa and in the West.

This exhaustive exploration of the sociocultural, political, and economic roles of African women through history demonstrates how African women have shaped—and continue to shape—their societies. Women play essential, critical roles in every society; African women south of the Sahara are certainly no different. Women's Roles in Sub-Saharan Africa adds significantly to our understanding of the ways in which women contribute to the fabric of human civilization. This book provides an in-depth exploration of African women's roles in society from precolonial periods to the contemporary era. Topical sections describe the roles that women play in family, courtship and marriage, religion, work, literature and arts, and government. Each of the six chapters has been structured to elucidate women's roles and functions in society as partners, as active participants, as defenders of their status and occupations, and as agents of change. Authors Nana Akua Amponsah and Toyin Falola present a thought-provoking work that looks at the complicated victimhood/powerful-female paradigm in women and gender studies in Africa, and challenge ideological interest in African historiography that privilege male representation.

Prologue : a breakthrough for Mr. Zulu -- Introduction : Pentecostalism as promise, Pentecostalism as problem -- Boom and bust, revival and renewal -- Making moving happen -- Becoming Pentecostal on the Copperbelt -- Ritual and the (un)making of the Pentecostal relational world -- Prosperity, charisma, and the problem of gender -- On the potential and problems of Pentecostal exchange -- Mending mother's kitchen -- The circulation of Copperbelt saints -- Conclusion : worlds that flourish

This collection of essays focuses upon the religion and ritual of the Kuria people of East Africa, but uses this material to raise wider comparative and cross-cultural issues regarding broad themes in eastern Bantu religions as well as western assumptions about religion and individual personhood.

In Africa religion is very much embedded in the social structure and the organisation of the peoples of that continent. That is why we will obtain a clear starting point for the eventual articulation of an 'African spirituality of religious life' by examining closely how religious life is evolving on the ground in the everyday experience of religious women. After considering how the political and Church culture fostered the 'inculturation' of Catholic institutions, this ethnographic work documents the unfolding African expression of the Sisterhood among women religious in the former-Zaire. Areas examined are: perception of the sister in terms of the people; incorporation of newer members; understanding of community life; local models of social relationships which affects sisters among themselves; dynamics of group decision-making; expression and resolution of social conflict.

During the twentieth-century, Christendom shifted its centre of gravity to the Southern Hemisphere, Africa becoming the most significant area of church growth. This volume explores Christianity’s advance across the continent, and its capturing of the African imagination. From the medieval Catholic Kingdom of Kongo to a transnational Pentecostal movement in post-colonial Zimbabwe, the chapters explore how African agents – priests and prophets, martyrs and missionaries, evangelists and catechists – have seized Christianity and made it theirs. Emphasizing popular religion, the book shows how the Christian ideas and texts, practices and symbols, which have been adapted by Africans, help them accept existential passions and empower them through faith to deal with material concerns for health and wealth, and to overcome evil.

This volume explores the multiple meanings and implications of lobola in Southern Africa. The payment of lobola (often controversially translated as ‘bridewealth’) is an entrenched practice in most societies in Southern Africa. Although having a long tradition, of late there have been voices questioning its relevance in contemporary times while others vehemently defend the practice. This book brings together a range of scholars from different academic disciplines, national contexts, institutions, genders, and ethnic backgrounds to debate the relevance of lobola in contemporary southern African communities for gender equality.