Paths In The Rainforests

Vansina’s scope is breathtaking: he reconstructs the history of the forest lands that cover all or part of southern Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, the Congo, Zaire, the Central African Republic, and Cabinda in Angola, discussing the original settlement of the forest by the western Bantu; the periods of expansion and innovation in agriculture; the development of metallurgy; the rise and fall of political forms and of power; the coming of Atlantic trade and colonialism; and the conquest of the rainforests by colonial powers and the destruction of a way of life. “In 400 elegantly brilliant pages Vansina lays out five millennia of history for nearly 200 distinguishable regions of the forest of equatorial Africa around a new, subtly paradoxical interpretation of ‘tradition.’” —Joseph Miller, University of Virginia “Vansina gives extended coverage . . . to the broad features of culture and the major lines of historical development across the region between 3000 B.C. and A.D. 1000. It is truly an outstanding effort, readable, subtle, and integrative in its interpretations, and comprehensive in scope. . . . It is a seminal study . . . but it is also a substantive history that will long retain its usefulness.”—Christopher Ehret, American Historical Review

This examination of the politics of ethnicity and nation-building in Africa stresses the trend towards subnationalist autonomy and away from a singular, state-centric system based on the Western model. Forrest ranges across the continent to explore a variety of subnational movements.

Employing an innovative methodological toolkit, Doing Conceptual History in Africa provides a refreshingly broad and interdisciplinary approach to African historical studies. The studies assembled here focus on the complex role of language in Africa’s historical development, with a particular emphasis on pragmatics and semantics. From precolonial dynamics of wealth and poverty to the conceptual foundations of nationalist movements, each contribution strikes a balance between the local and the global, engaging with a distinctively African intellectual tradition while analyzing the regional and global contexts in which categories like “work,” “marriage,” and “land” take shape.

This volume describes the agricultural and cultural history of the Gold Coast (now, Ghana) in the Atlantic era, exploring the historical significance of new food crops and culinary techniques from the Americas, Asia and elsewhere in Africa to the farmers who produced them and to everybody who ate.

Fernando Po, home to the Bantu-speaking Bubi people, has an unusually complex history. Long touted as the "key" to West Africa, it is the largest West African island and the last to enter the world economy. Confronted by both African resistance and ecological barriers, early British and Spanish imperialism foundered there. Not until the late nineteenth century did foreign settlement take hold, abetted by a class of westernized black planters. It was only then that Fernando Po developed a plantation economy dependent on migrant labor, working under conditions similar to slavery. In From Slaving to Neoslavery, Ibrahim K. Sundiata offers a comprehensive history of Fernando Po, explains the continuities between slavery and free contract labor, and challenges standard notions of labor development and progress in various colonial contexts. Sundiata's work is interdisciplinary, considering the influences of the environment, disease, slavery, abolition, and indigenous state formation in determining the interaction of African peoples with colonialism. From Slaving to Neoslavery has manifold implications. Historians usually depict the nineteenth century as the period in which free labor triumphed over slavery, but Sundiata challenges this notion. By examining the history of Fernando Po, he illuminates the larger debate about slavery current among scholars of Africa.

This comprehensive and detailed exploration of the African past, from prehistory to approximately 1870, is intended to provide a fully up-to-date complement to the Cambridge History of Africa. Reflecting several emphases in recent scholarship, it focusses on the changing modes of production, on gender relations and on ecology, laying particular stress on viewing 'history from below'. A distinctive theme is to be found in its analyses of cognitive history. The work falls into three sections. The first comprises a historiographic analysis, and covers the period from the dawn of prehistory to the end of the Early Iron Age. The second and third sections are, for the most part, organised on regional lines; the second section ends in the sixteenth century; the third carries the story on to 1870. A second volume, now in preparation, will cover the period from 1870 to 1995. This book attempts a more rounded view of African history than most of the other textbooks on the subject addressed to a (largely) undergraduate level student. Earlier histories have tended to ignore some of the current foci in the scholarly literature on Africa, generally not reflected in the textbooks: these include discussions of topical issues like ecology and gender. Isichei's book is also more radical.

Nowhere eise in the world did industrialized countries leave such early marks in the rainforest as in West Africa. Past and present developments here are in one way or the other significant for rainforests on other continents as weil. West Africa is a pioneer in both a good and a bad sense. This is reason enough to take a closer Iook at the history of moist tropical West Africa. Until recently, no one really seemed to be interested in the rainforests except for a few specialists. The world's scientific community neglected to study the incalculable riches of tropical forests, to make the public aware of them and their due importance. Although interdisciplinary research has been a popular topic for some decades now, it was not applied to just the most complex habitat on earth. Scientists from all fields studied only that which was easiest to record, seemingly blind to a myriad of details awaiting closer examination. Botanists wentabout establishing their herbariums and paid much too little attention to the vegetation as a whole, or to the significance of useful plants for local populations. Zoologists, too, busied themselves with collecting and describing species. Anthropologists, on the other hand, tended to overlook faunal details: in their ignorance of the animal world, they wrote of tigers and deer in Africa. And finally, foresters saw neither the forest nor the trees for the timber - and even confused rainforests with monocultures of fir trees.

Since the mid-twentieth century, sustained contact between Inuit and newcomers has led to profound changes in education in the Eastern Arctic, including the experience of colonization and progress toward the re-establishment of traditional education in schools. Heather McGregor assesses developments in the history of education in four periods � the traditional, the colonial (1945-70), the territorial (1971-81), and the local (1982-99). She concludes that education is most successful when Inuit involvement and local control support a system reflecting Inuit culture and visions.