New Books in African Studies

By Marshall Poe

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently publ... more

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How many episodes does New Books in African Studies have?

The podcast currently has 901 episodes available.

New Books in African Studies episodes:

October 30, 2014 Amy Evrard, “The Moroccan Women’s Rights Movement” (Syracuse University Press, 2014)
Amy Evrard‘s first book, The Moroccan Women’s Rights Movement (Syracuse University Press, 2014), examines women’s attempts to change their patriarchal society via their movement for equality and rights. At the center of Evrard’s book is the 2004 reform of the Family Code known as the Mudawwana, in which Moroccan women made important gains in marriage, divorce, and custody rights. Combining historical analysis of legal codes, nuanced surveys of the complicated political arena, and richly developed stories of individual women, Evrard demonstrates how women’s integration is stymied by poverty and illiteracy, as well as by nationalist and anti-modernization forces. At the same time, women activists are learning how to navigate among political and civic actors to achieve their goals, and in the process, convincing more and more Moroccan women of their rights.

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1h 6min
October 10, 2014 Ernest Harsch, “Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary” (Ohio UP, 2014)
Thomas Sankara, often called the African Che Guevara, was president of Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa, until his assassination during a military coup that brought down his government. Although his time in office was relatively short, Sankara left an indelible mark on his country’s history and development. But as Ernest Harsch explains in his engaging biography, Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary (Ohio University Press, 2014), Sankara’s influence extends beyond Burkina Faso. Sankara was a moral force and an ardent spokesman for African dignity and struggle against neocolonial forces and Western economic domination. Harsch traces Sankara’s life from his student days to his recruitment into the military, his early political awakening, and his increasing dismay with his country’s extreme poverty and political corruption. Sankara and his colleagues initiated economic and social policies that shifted Burkina Faso away from dependence on foreign aid and toward a greater use of the country’s own resources to build schools, health clinics, and public works. Although Sankara’s sweeping vision and practical reforms won him admirers both within and without Burkina Faso, a combination of domestic opposition and factions within his own government and the army led to his assassination in 1987.
Harsch has written the first English-language book that relates the story of Sankara’s life and achievements. Based on extensive firsthand research in Burkina Faso as well as interviews with Sankara himself, this brief biography will give this neglected hero of the African revolution the attention he deserves.

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1h 13min
October 03, 2014 Todd Cleveland, “Stones of Contention: A History of Africa’s Diamonds” (Ohio University Press, 2014)
“Diamonds are forever” or “Blood diamonds”–the one a pithy marketing slogan showing how diamonds encapsulate enduring love and commitment and the other a call to conscience about the violence and suffering the quest for diamonds has entailed throughout Africa, the supplier of the majority of the world’s diamonds. In his engagingly written and concise history, Stones of Contention: A History of Africa’s Diamonds (Ohio University Press, 2014), Todd Cleveland looks at the scope and complexity of the African diamond industry and trade from the earliest expressions of international interest in the continent’s mineral wealth to the present day. He highlights the experiences of Africans and their involvement in the mining and processing of diamonds. From artisanal miners working alluvial deposits to company miner workers in South Africa to armed rebels in West Africa to successful industrial operations in Botswana and Namibia, Cleveland provides a panoramic and balanced perspective on both the history and the moral issues involved in assessing diamonds in Africa and their consumption globally. He examines efforts to regulate the diamond trade and offers reasons for optimism that out of these “stones of contention” programs for meaningful, equitable and effective economic and political development may emerge.

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49min
October 02, 2014 Rebecca Rogers, “A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story” (Stanford UP, 2013)
In the early 1830s, the French school teacher EugÃ©nie Luce migrated to Algeria. A decade later, she was a major force in the debates around educational practices there, insisting that not only were women entitled to quality education, but that women’s education served a fundamental role in the French mission in the colonies. “Woman is the most powerful of all influences in Africa as in Europe,” she wrote in 1846, the year after she founded a school for the instruction of indigenous Muslim girls.
In A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story: Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria, Rebecca Rogers (Stanford University Press, 2013), a Professor at the UniversitÃ© Paris Descartes and an expert in the history of the French educational system, lucidly explores Luce’s work in the field, bringing a wealth of precise details– everything from what the lessons in the school room were like to prize-giving ceremonies and hygiene inspections. But Rogers also lets the reader in on the questions that remain about Luce’s own life.
Rogers notes that while “EugÃ©nie Allix’s efforts to establish and finance her school have left ample traces in the colonial archives,” there are many details of her life that are not present and which can only be lightly sketched. For example, “[C]ivil registers offer tenuous insight into EugÃ©nie’s social network during her first decade of life in Algeria”… The circumstances of her second marriage “have left no trace in the archival record”… It’s an interesting meditation on the limitations of archives– how the story that is told of the life after is dependent upon the letters and signatures and red tape that the people of history have left behind them, as well as the moves the biographer must make to fill those gaps.
So often the stories of women in history become the stories of all the men they knew and yet, in this case, the archive itself prevents that. As Rogers writes, the men in her life “[b]oth shaped her life in ways the biographer can only imagine” and yet the biographer is left to imagine precisely because the proof is not there. “She appears in the colonial archives as very much an independent woman,” which represents a rather refreshing reversal, almost as unique today as it would’ve been in the 19th century: a woman whose story stands solely on her work.

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33min
September 23, 2014 Deborah Mayersen, “On the Path to Genocide: Armenia and Rwanda Reexamined” (Berghahn Books, 2014)
I live and work in the state of Kansas in the US. We think of ourselves as living in tornado alley and orient our schedules in the spring around the weather report. Earthquakes are something that happen somewhere else.
Recently, however, our southern neighbor, Oklahoma, has been rocked repeatedly by minor earthquakes. Why this is so has been the subject of endless speculation. In the midst of this speculation, one occasionally hears reference to the fact that major earthquakes are frequently preceded by a series of minor earthquakes that can, after the fact, be seen as signs that something big is coming. All too often, however, this is only recognizable in retrospect.
Genocide studies has something of an earthquake problem. Countless books (well, I suppose you could count them, but you get the point) have proposed theories of causation and prediction. Many of these books lay out a thoughtful, historically rich set of signs that indicate genocide is possible. All too often, however, these theories suggest ways of predicting when genocides are likely, but not ways of predicting the speed at which conflicts accelerate or die down, nor a way to discern which crises will explode and which will be resolved more or less peacefully.
Deborah Mayersen has set out to try to move us toward a solution of the earthquake problem. In her new book On the Path to Genocide: Armenia and Rwanda Reexamined (Berghahn Books, 2014), she lays out a theory explaining what makes political crises explode and to identify key points at which the pace of events accelerates dramatically. Using Rwanda and Armenia as her case studies, she examines a rich set of causal factors to craft a thoughtful explanatory framework. Her work is careful, historically informed and theoretically elegant. It may not be the end of the story. But it is an important step in helping expand our understanding of the ways crises become genocide.

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1h 5min
September 13, 2014 What Do We Now Know About the Rwandan Genocide Twenty Years On?
In 1994 I was in graduate school, trying hard to juggle teaching, getting started on my dissertation and having something of a real life.
The real life part suffered most of all. But every once in a while, the world around me would startle me out of my cave and remind me that life was proceeding without me.
The genocide in Rwanda was one of these events. Along with the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, it made me question whether academics was a meaningful career choice and what I could and should do right then, in the midst of massive violence against innocents.
And then, by the time I had actually started thinking hard about it, the genocide in Rwanda was over. As most people now know, something like 800,000 people were killed in about a hundred days.
July was the 20th anniversary of the end of the genocide. To mark that occasion, we’re going to depart from the usual format of the show. Instead of interviewing an author about his or her book, we’re going to spend an hour or so thinking more broadly about events in Rwanda and how we now understand them. Three experts on the Rwandan genocide will help us do so: Lee Ann Fujii, Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf. During the discussion we’ll move from the motivations of the killers to the ways in which the genocide has been remembered (or not) to what movies and books they would recommend for people who want to learn more.
The podcast is, however, to some degree inspired by a single book, Alison des Forges remarkable Leave None to Tell the Story, published in 1999. The book is a tour de force of careful research and analysis and set the direction for research on Rwanda. Nevertheless, it is fifteen years old. Since then, we’ve had hundreds of studies examining the genocide and its aftermath.
So today w’re going to spend a few minutes assessing that new research, using the broad question of “What do we know about Rwanda 20 years after the genocide?” I hope you enjoy the discussion.

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1h 10min
July 30, 2014 Toby Green, “The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
Slavery was pervasive in the Ancient World: you can find it in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In Late Antiquity , however, slavery went into decline. It survived and even flourished in the Byzantine Empire and Muslim lands, yet it all but disappeared in Medieval Western and Central Europe.
Then, rather suddenly, slavery reappeared in the West, or rather in Western empires. By the early sixteenth century, Portuguese traders had laid the foundations of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. They bought or captured slaves in West Africa and then transported and sold those slaves to plantation owners in European-controlled regions in the New World (especially Brazil, the Caribbean Basin, and Mexico).
How, one might well ask, did the trans-Atlantic slave trade emerge so quickly, seemingly from nothing? In his fascinating book The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), historian Toby Green addresses this question. His answer is subtle and multi-faceted, but it might be boiled down to this: the Portuguese traders didn’t build the slave trade, they joined it, expanded it and, ultimately, transformed it. Listen in.

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44min
July 18, 2014 Samuel Totten, “Genocide by Attrition: The Nuba Mountains of Sudan” (Transaction Publishers, 2012)
Most of the authors I’ve interviewed for this show have addressed episodes in the past, campaigns of mass violence that occurred long ago, often well-before the author was born.
Today’s show is different.
In his book Genocide by Attrition: The Nuba Mountains of Sudan (Transaction Publishers, 2012), Samuel Totten addresses the violence against the people of the Nuba Mountains of the Sudan. This violence was part of a broader civil war and unrest in the Sudan in the 1980s and 90s. Totten makes a convincing case that, in the Nuba, it reached a level reasonably labeled genocidal. To demonstrate this, Totten provides a succinct but thorough history of the conflict. But the heart of the book is a series of interviews with victims of the tragedy. Totten collected the interviews himself and uses them to demonstrate the nature and consequences of the conflict.
Our interview won’t stop with the book, however, for conflict has recently broken out again in the region. Scholars differ about how to label the new violence (Totten himself prefers to avoid calling the new fighting genocidal). But there’s no question many of the human tragedies of the 80s and 90s have reemerged. Totten has written extensively about this new conflict. We’ll use of one these articles, from the recent issue of Genocide Studies International, as the basis for our discussion of current events.
Totten has been active in the field of genocide studies since its inception and brings an enormous wealth of information and passion to the subject. I trust the interview will convey his commitment to his discipline and to the victims of the violence he studies.
Also. I talked with Sam this week and he tells me he’s just finished a major revision of the book we discussed in this interview, almost doubling its length. The second edition will presumably be out soon.

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1h 25min
July 07, 2014 Donovan Chau, “Exploiting Africa: The Influence of Maoist China in Algeria, Ghana, and Tanzania” (NIP, 2014)
Donovan Chau is the author of Exploiting Africa: The Influence of Maoist China in Algeria, Ghana, and Tanzania (Naval Institute Press, 2014). Chau is an associate professor of political science at California State University.
Chau examines China’s role in Algeria, Ghana, and Tanzania from the 1950s to the 1970s. China used its limited diplomatic, intelligence, and economic means to shape events and to exploit its relationships to gain lasting influence on the continent. Chau argues that it is critical to understand the nature and character of China’s historical actions in Africa in order to properly grasp the nation’s current and future policies. Rather than merely looking forward, he argues that we must look backward to comprehend the true nature of China in Africa.

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35min
June 20, 2014 James Copnall, “A Poisonous Thorn in Our Hearts: Sudan and South Sudan’s Bitter and Incomplete Divorce” (Hurst, 2014)
July 2011 saw that rarest of events – an attempt to resolve a conflict in Africa by the redrawing of borders. It saw the birth of South Sudan as a fully fledged country after decades of conflict going back to the days of independence. It is obviously far too early to say whether this radical surgery on Sudan has been a success, and fighting has continued in various ways over the last three years, including between Juba and Khartoum. But, as James Copnall‘s terrific book A Poisonous Thorn in Our Hearts: Sudan and South Sudan’s Bitter and Incomplete Divorce (Hurst, 2014) suggests, it is not too early to see how this momentous event has affected the lives of many of those in both of the Sudans.
James’ approach, no doubt echoing the storytelling that he did as the BBC’s Khartoum correspondent, has been to pick out a handful of people on both sides of the border – including a tea seller, nomads, and a businessman – and ask what the changes have meant to them. As well as giving the redrawing of an international border a human face (or several) this also teases out some of the big issues with the subject, not least the continued interconnectedness of the Sudans. It also, I am pleased to say, makes this a particularly enjoyable book to read, as well as an informative one, and one that I recommend without hesitation to anybody interested in Africa, and not just those looking at Sudan.

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46min

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How many episodes does New Books in African Studies have?

The podcast currently has 901 episodes available.

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