An epic story of a Bedouin family’s survival and legacy amid their changing world in the unforgiving Sahara Desert. Ahmed is a camel herder, as his father was before him and as his young son Abdullahi will be after him. The days of Ahmed and the other families in their nomadic freeg are ruled by the rhythms of changing seasons, the needs of his beloved camel herd, and the rich legends and stories that link his life to centuries of tradition. But Ahmed’s world is threatened—by the French colonizers just beyond the horizon, the urbanization of the modern world, and a drought more deadly than any his people have known. At first, Ahmed attempts to ignore these forces by concentrating on the ancient routines of herding life. But these routines are broken when a precious camel named Zarga goes missing. Saddling his trusted Laamesh, praying at the appointed hours, and singing the songs of his fathers for strength, Ahmed sets off to recover Zarga on a perilous journey that will bring him face to face with the best and the worst of humanity and test every facet of his Bedouin desert survival skills.

At the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games (held in 2021 due to COVID-19), the fifty-four African countries that participated finished the tournament with the lowest medal haul for any continent, continuing a historic trend since the inception of the modern Games in 1896. Reflecting this relative lack of sporting success, African Olympians—aside from elite Kenyan distance runners—rarely register in the minds of even the most dedicated followers of the Games. Yet for all their seeming invisibility on the Olympic landscape, African states, athletes, and officials have long been “winning” at the Olympics, albeit often far removed from the medal podium. Africa and the Olympics shows how African actors have achieved these nonsporting victories and examines how they have used the Olympics to engage in transformative political activity, realize social mobility, and enhance the quality of life for individuals, communities, and entire nations. In tracing these historical and contemporary processes and the motivations that underlie them, the book complicates reductive notions of the Olympics as solely a sporting competition and instead considers Africa’s engagement with the Games as a series of opportunities to improve personal, communal, ethnic, national, and even continental plights. If few sports fans have thought extensively about Africa and the Olympics, scholars have been only slightly more engaged with the subject. Most of this scholarship focuses on the International Olympic Committee’s ban of apartheid South Africa from 1964 to 1988. Other works that consider the Olympics more broadly tend to deal with Africa only summarily, further reducing its already low profile. As a result, the academic literature resembles a patchwork of circumscribed studies dispersed in a range of fields and disciplines. Not since the publication of Africa at the Olympics almost fifty years ago has a single volume featured a comprehensive history of the continent and the Games. This book both updates and expands previous work and, most importantly, reframes the analytical engagement with this topic.

Africa Every Day presents an exuberant, thoughtful, and necessary counterpoint to the prevailing emphasis in introductory African studies classes on war, poverty, corruption, disease, and human rights violations on the continent. These challenges are real and deserve sustained attention, but this volume shows that adverse conditions do not prevent people from making music, falling in love, playing sports, participating in festivals, writing blogs, telling jokes, making videos, playing games, eating delicious food, and finding pleasure in their daily lives. Across seven sections—Celebrations and Rites of Passage; Socializing and Friendship; Love, Sex, and Marriage; Sports and Recreation; Performance, Language, and Creativity; Technology and Media; and Labor and Livelihoods—the accessible, multidisciplinary essays in Africa Every Day address these creative and dynamic elements of daily life, without romanticizing them. Ultimately, the book shows that forms of leisure and popular culture in Africa are best discussed in terms of indigenization, adaptation, and appropriation rather than the static binary of European/foreign/global and African. Most of all, it invites readers to reflect on the crucial similarities, rather than the differences, between their lives and those of their African counterparts. Contributors: Hadeer Aboelnagah, Issahaku Adam, Joseph Osuolale Ayodokun, Victoria Abiola Ayodokun, Omotoyosi Babalola, Martha Bannikov, Mokaya Bosire, Emily Callaci, Deborah Durham, Birgit Englert, Laura Fair, John Fenn, Lara Rosenoff Gauvin, Michael Gennaro, Lisa Gilman, Charlotte Grabli, Joshua Grace, Dorothy L. Hodgson, Akwasi Kumi-Kyereme, Prince F. M. Lamba, Cheikh Tidiane Lo, Bill McCoy, Nginjai Paul Moreto, Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué, James Nindi, Erin Nourse, Eric Debrah Otchere, Alex Perullo, Daniel Jordan Smith, Maya Smith, Steven Van Wolputte, and Scott M. Youngstedt.

This omnibus edition brings together concise and up-to-date biographies of Steve Biko, Emperor Haile Selassie, Patrice Lumumba, and Thomas Sankara. African Leaders of the Twentieth Century will complement courses in history and political science and serve as a useful collection for the general reader. Steve Biko, by Lindy Wilson Steve Biko inspired a generation of black South Africans to claim their true identity and refuse to be a part of their own oppression. This short biography shows how fundamental he was to the reawakening and transformation of South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century and just how relevant he remains. Emperor Haile Selassie, by Bereket Habte Selassie Emperor Haile Selassie was an iconic figure of the twentieth century, a progressive monarch who ruled Ethiopia from 1916 to 1974. The fascinating story of the emperor¹s life is also the story of modern Ethiopia. Patrice Lumumba, by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja Patrice Lumumba was a leader of the independence struggle in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Decades after his assassination, Lumumba remains one of the heroes of the twentieth-century Africanindependence movement. Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary, by Ernest Harsch Thomas Sankara, often called the African Che Guevara, was president of Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa, until his assassination during the military coup that brought down his government. This is the first English-language book to tell the story of Sankara’s life and struggles.

For over two centuries, Western scholars have discussed African philosophy and culture, often in disparaging, condescending terms, and always from an alien European perspective. Many Africans now share this perspective, having been trained in the western, empirical tradition. Makinde argues that, particularly in view of the costs and failings of western style culture, Africans must now mold their own modern culture by blending useful western practices with valuable indigenous African elements. Specifically, Makinde demonstrates the potential for the development of African philosophy and even African traditional medicine. Following the lead of a number of countries with government policies of incorporating indigenous medicine with orthodox Western medicine, Makinde argues that traditional African practices should be taken seriously, both medically and scientifically. Further, he charges African scholars with the responsibility of investigating these and other elements of traditional African culture in order to dispel their mystery and secrecy through modern research and useful publications.

From Accra and Algiers to Zanzibar and Zululand, Africans have wrested control of soccer from the hands of Europeans, and through the rise of different playing styles, the rituals of spectatorship, and the presence of magicians and healers, have turned soccer into a distinctively African activity. African Soccerscapes explores how Africans adopted soccer for their own reasons and on their own terms. Soccer was a rare form of “national culture” in postcolonial Africa, where stadiums and clubhouses became arenas in which Africans challenged colonial power and expressed a commitment to racial equality and self-determination. New nations staged matches as part of their independence celexadbrations and joined the world body, FIFA. The Confédération africaine de football democratized the global game through antiapartheid sanctions and increased the number of African teams in the World Cup finals. In this compact, highly readable book Alegi shows that the result of this success has been the departure of huge numbers of players to overseas clubs and the growing influence of private commercial interests on the African game. But the growth of women’s soccer and South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 World Cup also challenge the one-dimensional notion of Africa as a backward, “tribal” continent populated by victims of war, corruption, famine, and disease.

African Video Movies and Global Desires is the first full-length scholarly study of Ghana’s commercial video industry, an industry that has produced thousands of movies over the last twenty years and has grown into an influential source of cultural production. Produced and consumed under circumstances of dire shortage and scarcity, African video movies narrate the desires and anxieties created by Africa’s incorporation into the global cultural economy. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research conducted in Ghana over a ten-year period, as well as close readings of a number of individual movies, this book brings the insights of historical context as well as literary and film analysis to bear on a range of movies and the industry as a whole. Garritano makes a significant contribution to the examination of gender norms and the ideologies these movies produce. African Video Movies and Global Desires is a historically and theoretically informed cultural history of an African visual genre that will only continue to grow in size and influence.

An innovative contemporary history that blends insights from a variety of disciplines to highlight how a storied African cancer institute has shaped lives and identities in postcolonial Uganda. Over the past decade, an increasingly visible crisis of cancer in Uganda has made local and international headlines. Based on transcontinental research and public engagement with the Uganda Cancer Institute that began in 2010, Africanizing Oncology frames the cancer hospital as a microcosm of the Ugandan state, as a space where one can trace the lived experiences of Ugandans in the twentieth century. Ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, patient records, oral histories, private papers from US oncologists, American National Cancer Institute records, British colonial office reports, and even the architecture of the institute itself show how Ugandans understood and continue to shape ideas about national identity, political violence, epidemics, and economic life. Africanizing Oncology describes the political, social, technological, and biomedical dimensions of how Ugandans created, sustained, and transformed this institute over the past half century. With insights from science and technology studies and contemporary African history, Marissa Mika’s work joins a new wave of contemporary histories of the political, technological, moral, and intellectual aspirations and actions of Africans after independence. It contributes to a growing body of work on chronic disease and situates the contemporary urgency of the mounting cancer crisis on the continent in a longer history of global cancer research and care. With its creative integration of African studies, science and technology studies, and medical anthropology, Africanizing Oncology speaks to multiple scholarly communities.

Bafana Kuzwayo is a young man with a weight on his shoulders. After flunking his law studies at the University of Cape Town, he returns home to Soweto, where he must decide how to break the news to his family. But before he can confess, he is greeted as a hero by family and friends. His uncle calls him “Advo,” short for Advocate, and his mother wastes no time recruiting him to solve their legal problems. In a community that thrives on imagined realities, Bafana decides that it’s easiest to create a lie that allows him to put off the truth indefinitely. Soon he’s in business with Yomi, a Nigerian friend who promises to help him solve all his problems by purchasing a fake graduation document. One lie leads to another as Bafana navigates through a world that readers will find both funny and grim.

Kibong’oto Hospital, opened in 1926, is an East African tuberculosis treatment center located on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. Its history is crucial to understanding tuberculosis in Tanzania and, more broadly, in Africa. With the hospital as a point of departure, Christoph Gradmann presents a history of this disease that engages with local and regional contexts rather than with international elite science and health policies.

The book addresses key questions about the African experience with tuberculosis:

• What did it mean to do clinical science on tuberculosis in colonial and postcolonial contexts?
• Along which trajectories did medical practice and research evolve in a place where international advances in medical science were sometimes heard of only faintly and where resources could be scarce?
• How did a large hospital with several hundred beds dedicated to the treatment of just one condition figure in the development of national and regional health systems?
• How did Kibong’oto Hospital, a pride of colonial health governance, transition after Tanzania gained independence?
• How did treating and researching tuberculosis change throughout the twentieth century in an African hospital dedicated to that condition?
• How did research at the hospital contribute to tuberculosis-control strategies on national and international levels?

The book is based on the hospital’s unique archive: its surviving library of thousands of case summaries. Since 1926, this library has documented an enormous number of patient lives, staff careers, diagnoses, treatments, clinical trials, and much more. For today’s readers, the library provides insight into a history of clinical medicine in Africa, for which very few comparable archives exist. Gradmann supplements this site-specific research with material from national and international archives, as well as interviews with former staff involved in that history. The book’s four chapters offer perspectives on colonial epidemiological research in the interwar years; on late colonial healthcare development plans and the arrival of modern drug therapies; on the role of a national tuberculosis hospital in a newly independent country; and on the history of tuberculosis control in an age of economic crisis, HIV, and emergent global health-treatment programs. Finally, Gradmann discusses what the history of a large hospital can add to today’s tuberculosis research, control policy, and historiography.

Available Light tells the story of an activist, an artist, a uniquely South African individual, and his community and family across the second half of the twentieth century. Omar Badsha was born in Durban, on the country’s southeastern coast in 1945. His was the third generation of his Gujarati family to call South Africa home. Before he turned five, the country’s white electorate had voted to institute apartheid to strip the rights and privileges of citizenship from most of the population, including Badsha’s Indian community and especially the country’s Black majority. By the time he turned fifteen, nonviolent protest against apartheid had been quashed; by the time he turned twenty, so too had the armed struggle to dislodge white supremacy within the country. The ongoing, resilient, and oft-rebuffed struggle against apartheid was a definitive factor in Badsha’s life.

Furthermore, Badsha was raised in a community where art—painting, carving, music, poetry, theater—was inseparable from other values, whether Islamic and conservative or radical and urgently committed. When Badsha struggled in school, he, like his father, turned to art to express what he otherwise had difficulty conveying. Art brought him into contact with people of disparate backgrounds from far beyond Durban. In time, his friendships with other artists helped him refine his voice, first in drawing and eventually in photography, and capture the political ethic by which he strove to live his life and which he shared with similarly committed artist-activists.

Daniel Magaziner chronicles how art and politics became intertwined in South Africa and explains what it takes to maintain a critical aesthetic approach to political crises in the past and present. The book tracks the personal and social costs that commitment can incur, while also appreciating how Badsha and others like him have maintained their vision of an equitable, transformed society even today, when the ideals that once animated the South African struggle are on the back foot worldwide.