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Colonial rule shaped the map of Africa like no other event in history. New borders were delineated; explorers and colonial armies were getting into the interior of the continent in order to grab the "magnificent cake of Africa." Colonialism on the Margins of Africa examines less known and smaller or peripheral areas of Africa which played a significant role in the process of colonization of Africa by European powers. Due to diverse socio-economic, religious, ethno-linguistic, as well as politic...

This is Philip Efiong's account of the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War (1967-70). He was a key player during the event and second-in-command to the Biafran leader, General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu. The story begins with the coup d'etats of January and July 1966, and recounts ensuing ethnic and regional conflicts. After the first coup,Efiong is posted to State House as Principal Staff Officer and then to Kaduna as Acting Commander of the First Brigade. But the second coup is executed shortly after an...

Like Fela Kuti and Bob Marley, singer, composer, and bandleader Thomas Mapfumo and his music came to represent his native country's anticolonial struggle and cultural identity. Mapfumo was born in 1945 in what was then the British colony of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The trajectory of his career-from early performances of rock 'n' roll tunes to later creating a new genre based on traditional Zimbabwean music, including the sacred mbira, and African and Western pop-is a metaphor for Zimbabwe's evol...

Patricia Bamurangirwa was born in Rwanda in 1949. The outbreak of the civil war in the 1960s ended her education, and her family fled from Rwanda, first as refugees to the Congo and Uganda and later to Tanzania and Kenya. Deprived of an education and stable upbringing, Patricia has become interested in the reason behind the wars and violence Rwanda and its people suffered. She decided to write this book to set the record straight regarding the common myths about the history of Rwanda and its peo...

Archibald Wavell was born a few years before Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee and died shortly after the end of the Second World War (1883-1950). During that time the country in which he was born and brought up in changed beyond recognition, undergoing a fundamental revision in the attitudes, expectations, prejudices and hopes of the British people. His life epitomises that of a generation of famous men whose education and upbringing equipped them for a future that was to prove an illusion.At sev...

Focusing on individual political thinkers and beginning with indigenous African political thought, the book successively examines African nationalism, African socialism, populism and Marxism, Africanism and pan-Africanism, concluding with contemporary perspectives on democracy, development and the African state.

This work begins in August 1900 during the war in South Africa, when mounted Boer commandos ranging across the veldt superseded pitched battles of massed armies and heavy weaponry. Thanks to his flair for organisation, Baden-Powell is asked to create a mounted force with a combined military and police role, and will be answerable to the Commander-in-Chief and the civil High Commissioner. Rejecting Army models of command, Baden-Powell creates the South African Constabulary (SAC) with a small num...