In late October 1890, a British force led by Admiral Fremantle assaulted and subdued the East African town of Witu, the mainland capital of the Nabahani rulers of Pate; five years later, the entire region and the adjacent coastal islands came under British administration. One of the great tragedies suffered as a result of Admiral Fremantle's initial attack was the loss of the original manuscript of the history of Pate, The Book of the Kings of Pate.
This historical work in its various forms is representative of a living historical tradition developed in the coastal city-states of East Africa and is considered one of the important literary treasures of their culture and society. It also stands as the most important indigenous source for Swahili history, the history of the Swahili language, its dialects, and its written tradition. The four Arabic-Swahili versions (manuscripts 177, 321, 344, and 358 of the Library of the University of Dar es Salaam) presented here in The Pate Chronicle add significantly to the growing pool of information available about Pate and East Africa before the era of European colonialism.

Scholars who study peasant society now realize that peasants are not passive, but quite capable of acting in their own interests.  But, do coherent political ideas emerge within peasant society or do peasants act in a world where elites define political issues?  Peasant Intellectuals is based on ethnographic research begun in 1966 and includes interviews with hundreds of people from all levels of Tanzanian society.  Steven Feierman provides the history of the struggles to define the most basic issues of public political discourse in the Shambaa-speaking region of Tanzania.  Feierman also shows that peasant society contains a rich body of alternative sources of political language from which future debates will be shaped.

A case study on how twentieth-century urban capitalism created a new food system for Mombasa’s working class. In the early twentieth century, East Africans lived primarily in rural areas, cultivating most of the food they consumed. By the start of the twenty-first century, though, millions of people lived in cities, where they purchased their food from markets and eateries. This transformation reflects broader historical shifts in food production, preparation, and consumption throughout the world from a rural subsistence model to a commercial system. Preparing the Modern Meal explores this economic revolution in Mombasa, Kenya, and examines the experiences of those who migrated from rural settings to an Indian Ocean town where they became dependent on the capitalist market for their daily meals. The change to a commercial food system reshaped the culinary culture of East Africa. In rural communities, diets were diverse and varied with the seasons. Conversely, Mombasa’s commercial supply chains, which steadily delivered staples like maize meal, wheat flour, tea, and meat, led to a more uniform urban cuisine that remained consistent throughout the year. Urbanization also altered gender roles in cooking. In rural households women prepared the food, but in Mombasa many workers lived in all-male housing and had to cook for themselves. Some even took up cooking as a profession, thus expanding the role of men in the culinary domain. In addition to these themes, Preparing the Modern Meal reviews the emergence of new businesses, particularly those of street food vendors who provided affordable meals in residential neighborhoods and to nearby workplaces. However, these makeshift eateries often clashed with the vision for commerce in a modern city held by municipal officials, who often sought to eliminate these businesses through fines, arrests, and demolition campaigns. Through the lens of food, this book explores the conflicts between elite ideas about urban modernity and the actual ways that poor communities made their lives work in an unequal city.

In 1950, as a young bride, Margaret Laurence set out with her engineer husband to what was then Somaliland: a British protectorate in North Africa few Canadians had ever heard of. Her account of this voyage into the desert is full of wit and astonishment. Laurence honestly portrays the difficulty of colonial relationships and the frustration of trying to get along with Somalis who had no reason to trust outsiders. There are moments of surprise and discovery when Laurence exclaims at the beauty of a flock of birds only to discover that they are locusts, or offers medical help to impoverished neighbors only to be confronted with how little she can help them. During her stay, Laurence moves past misunderstanding the Somalis and comes to admire memorable individuals: a storyteller, a poet, a camel-herder. The Prophet’s Camel Bell is both a fascinating account of Somali culture and British colonial characters, and a lyrical description of life in the desert.
 

This selection of Arabic and English translations illuminates the changes of eighteenth-century government in the northern Nile Valley of Sudan, and provides reliable chronological points of reference for the history of the region.
The documents offered in this volume, including charter grants of land and privilege, administrative letters, judicial rulings, and other official government records, date form 1702 to 1820. This period marks the apogee of the wealth, power, and geographical extent of the realm of the Funji kings of Sinnar who reigned over much of the Sudan from about 1500 until the Turkish colonial conquest of 1821.
These records document with concrete precision and eloquence the dissolution of the agrarian social order of an old African kingdom under the corroding influence of intrusive Mediterranean commercial practices and culture. They reveal the Sudan's legacy of a traditionally weak government vulnerable to manipulation or conquest by foreign powers and a divided and impoverished society dominated by a minority of urban interests.

In this study of Hutu refugees from Burundi, driven into exile in Tanzania after their 1972 insurrection against the dominant Tutsi was brutally quashed, Liisa Malkki shows how experiences of dispossession and violence are remembered and turned into narratives, and how this process helps to construct identities such as "Hutu" and "Tutsi."

Through extensive fieldwork in two refugee communities, Malkki finds that the refugees' current circumstances significantly influence these constructions. Those living in organized camps created an elaborate "mythico-history" of the Hutu people, which gave significance to exile, and envisioned a collective return to the homeland of Burundi. Other refugees, who had assimilated in a more urban setting, crafted identities in response to the practical circumstances of their day to day lives. Malkki reveals how such things as national identity, historical consciousness, and the social imagination of "enemies" get constructed in the process of everyday life. The book closes with an epilogue looking at the recent violence between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi, and showing how the movement of large refugee populations across national borders has shaped patterns of violence in the region.