Social history of Africa

"Sandra Greene argues convincingly that gender and ethnicity in precolonial Africa can only be understood together. Her book focuses on the history of the Anlo-Ewe of southeastern Ghana over three centuries and demonstrates that the very factors that affected social constructions of gender also had profound implications for the construction of ethnic identities." "Greene documents the changes that occurred in ethnic boundaries as the community absorbed refugees, traders, and conquerors and later began to redefine the boundaries between insiders and outsiders. She then analyzes the way shifting ethnic definitions and competition for scarce resources affected gender relations. Clan elders increasingly sacrificed the interests of the young women under their authority in marital arrangements because of an increasing preference for clan endogamy. Greene explores the way some of these women were able to reassert their voices through membership in influential "outsider" religious orders. These new alignments formed a base of support from which Anlo women and a number of ethnic outsiders successfully challenged their own marginalization. Thus by the end of the nineteenth century, the boundary that separated insiders and outsiders in Anlo society and the ways in which men and women interacted had changed significantly." "Greene eschews simplistic analyses of oppression and agency. All in Anlo society are given a voice and allowed to speak from their own perspective, establishing a new and exciting standard for analyzing the history of social relations in precolonial Africa."--BOOK JACKET.

This interdisciplinary collection brings together some of the newest scholarship on the social history of agrarian change in Africa. It provides an important entry into the lived experiences of millions of Africans who cultivated cotton, often under duress, during the colonial period. The social history of cotton in Africa thus provides an opportunity to take a constant in the changing worlds of colonialism - cotton - and to explore the range of African experiences historically and geographically. By linking cotton and colonialism in this way, these eleven case studies open up new comparisons between different colonial agricultural policies, different labor regimes, and different forms of African response to colonial economic policies. This study of cotton in colonial Africa highlights both the way industrial capitalism sought to call forth tropical raw materials and the ways this colonial project was shaped by the dynamic local processes of production, exchange, social reproduction, and rural resistance.

"Violence has powerfully shaped the history and memory of the past in Matabeleland, from the wars of colonial conquest in the 1890s to the devastating post-colonial violence of the 1980s. The story told in this book concerns the remote, forested wilderness of the Shangani Reserve. It is the story of the settlement of a disease-ridden frontier and its transformation, first into the rural heartland of a nationalist movement, and later into a refuge for post-liberation 'dissidents'." "Silence has surrounded the history of this region of Zimbabwe, and this silence has produced a profound sense of exclusion from national memory. This book helps to break that silence and redress the imbalances of national history."--Back cover.