African Archaeology, Volume 91 This book is an original study of very large pots in parts of Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria. Found in excavations and surface fieldwork, they have been attributed to the So, a group of pre-Islamic inhabitants of the area before the sixteenth century AD, who have become mythologised as giants. Originally for burial, in some cases the pots have been dug up by villagers and reused: for brewing beer or as dye pits for indigo cloth. The book focuses on a group of these pots that survived until the late twentieth century in villages in a small part of Borno, north-eastern Nigeria. With the passage of time and terrorist activities in the region, their fate is now unknown and the photographs from 1963 to 1993 reproduced in this book have become a major archive of an unusual pottery group.

For more than a century, historians and writers on Africa have almost invariably associated the name Mlozi with all the cruellest excesses of the central and east African slave trade during the nineteenth century. That Mlozi bin Kazbadema was a significant slaver who conducted his trade according to all the brutal conventions of his period is beyond dispute. His subsequent botched hanging at the end of a British-sponsored rope, following a drum-head trial of questionable legality, has been generally regarded as well-deserved and a fitting, if muscular, exemplar of Pax Britannica in action. In The End of the Slaver, a title taken from recollections of Mlozi's hanging by the medical missionary Dr. Kerr Cross, author David Stuart-Mogg examines Mlozi's life and milieu and carefully weighs the often conflicting evidence apparent between official military and government reports and the largely unpublished private letters and diaries written at the time by those who participated in Mlozi's downfall and elimination. Stuart-Mogg's carefully evaluated findings call into serious question the altruism and philanthropy that the ultimate, and inevitable, victors of the struggle accorded their actions and their undoubtedly laudable ultimate objective - the eradication of slavery in British Central Africa. Referring to this book as 'an unusually stimulating study, Professor Shepperson recommends that The End of the Slaver deserves to be widely-read, not only by those whose primary interest is in the history of Malawi but also by students of slavery and the anti-slavery movements in the nineteenth century - and, indeed by all who are concerned with man's inhumanity to man.

The king of Mankon, in the western highlands of Cameroon, is an agricultural engineer by training, a businessman, and a prominent politician on the national stage. He partakes in the “return of the kings” in the forefront of an African public space. This book analyses the principles of the sacred kingship which lie at the core of the king’s different roles. While showing that the king’s body acts as a container of bodily substances transformed into unifying ancestral life-essence by appropriate means, and bestowed upon its subjects, it develops an innovative approach to bodily and material cultures as an essential component of the technologies of power. In so doing, it departs significantly from previous approaches to sacred kingship.

In The Objects of Life in Central Africa the history of consumption and social change from 1840 until 1980 is explored. By taking consumption as a vantage point, the contributions deviate from and add to previous works which have mainly analysed issues of production from an economic and political perspective. The chapters are broad-ranging in temporal and geographical focus, including contributions on Congo, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Angola. Topics range from the social history of firearms to the perception of the railway and include contributions on sewing machines, traders and advertising. By looking at the socio-economic, political and cultural meaning and impact of goods the history of Central Africa is reassessed.

The complete Cambridge History of Africa aims to present the most comprehensive and up-to-date synthesis of historical development on the African continent and will be valuable to both students and teachers of African history.

Western attitudes to Africa have been influenced to an extraordinary degree by the arts and artefacts that were brought back by the early collectors, exhibited in museums, and celebrated by scholars and artists in the metropolitan centres. The contributors to this volume trace the life history of artefacts that were brought to Europe and America from Congo towards the end of the nineteenth century, and became the subjects of museum displays. They also present fascinating case studies of the pioneering collectors, including such major figures as Frobenius and Torday. They discuss the complex and sensitive issues involved in the business of 'collecting', and show how the collections and exhibitions influenced academic debates about the categories of art and artefact, and the notion of authenticity, and challenged conventional aesthetic values, as modern Western artists began to draw on African models.

This volume brings together a variety of studies that are engaged with notions of gender in different African localities, institutions and historical time periods. The objective is to expand empirical and theoretical studies that take seriously the idea that in order to understand gender and gender relations in Africa, we must start with Africa.

A comprehensive history of the relationship between Africa and the United States Toyin Falola and Raphael Njoku reexamine the history of the relationship between Africa and the United States from the dawn of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the present. Their broad, interdisciplinary book follows the relationship's evolution, tracking African American emancipation, the rise of African diasporas in the Americas, the Back-to-Africa movement, the founding of Sierra Leone and Liberia, the presence of American missionaries in Africa, the development of blues and jazz music, the presidency of Barack Obama, and more.