Africa's Past, Our Future by Kathleen R. Smythe

Author:Kathleen R. Smythe [Smythe, Kathleen R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Africa, General
ISBN: 9780253016614
Google: e_bjCQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2015-07-06T01:10:03+00:00

Suggestions for Further Reading

Philip Curtin, Steven Feierman, Leonard Thompson, and Jan Vansina, African History: From Earliest Times to Independence (New York: Longman, 1995). One of the earliest books on African history, this was first published in 1978. It covers African history in three broad time periods: prior to 1500, between 1500 and the late 1800s, and from the colonial period to the present.

Stephen Ellis and Gerrie Ter Haar, Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). The authors examine Africans’ religious ideas—belief in the invisible, spirit world that has an influence on the visible, human world—as essential elements of power and authority. It is a rich study that opens up what are often rather narrow definitions of religion and politics both in Africa and in the rest of the world.

Holly Elisabeth Hanson, Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2003). Hanson is interested in the way in which reciprocal obligations shaped the Bugandan state. Like Kodesh’s book, this book examines the ways in which the king’s authority was bounded by others’ authority and actions.

Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2003). Using oral traditions and historical documents, Hawthorne recreates the history of a decentralized society during the Atlantic slave trade era, noting the ways in which they adapted to significant economic and political changes.

Neil Kodesh, Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Healing in Buganda (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). Kodesh examines the role of public healing in community and political life in Buganda history. He situates his work within the growing literature on heterarchy and political power.

Wyatt MacGaffey, “Changing Representations in Central African History,” Journal of African History 46, no. 2 (2005): 189–207. MacGaffey examines how scholars have narrowed or simplified African states and social structures to make them sound like Western narratives of history.

T. C. McCaskie, “Denkyira in the Making of Asante c. 1660–1720,” Journal of African History 48, no. 1 (2007): 1–25. Using the history of Denkyira, McCaskie shows how oral traditions allow for a close examination of local history and culture, complicating previous ideas about state formation and ethnicity.

Roderick J. McIntosh, Ancient Middle Niger: Urbanism and the Self-Organizing Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Roderick McIntosh surveys the decades of work that he and his team have undertaken in the Inner Niger Delta, with particular attention to the cultural norms that governed settlement, such as urban clusters and ecological resilience.

Susan Keech McIntosh, “Pathways to Complexity: An African Perspective,” in Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa, ed. Susan Keech McIntosh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–30. This is one of many reports the McIntoshes made of their work in and around Jenne-jeno, in which they emphasize the evidence for heterarchy rather than hierarchy.

D. T. Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, trans. G. D. Pickett (Harlow, U.K.: Pearson Longman, 2006). This is the most widely published version of this oral tradition in Europe and the United States.

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