African Market Women, Market Queens, and Merchant Queens
Gracia Clark
In the open marketplaces found in cities and villages throughout Africa, women traders usually predominate. This gives women considerable weight as economic actors, because these ...
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Ancient Developments in the Middle Senegal Valley and the Inland Niger Delta
Alioune Dème
The study of West Africa has contributed to the expansion of comparative arid-lands floodplain prehistory, from both the data collection (cultural and historical) and the theoretical ...
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The Anlu Rebellion
Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué
From 1958 to 1961, Kom women in western Cameroon cast aside their regular domestic and agricultural duties to engage in a revolt against British administrative interference in ...
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Boko Haram: History and Context
Hilary Matfess
Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, better known as “Boko Haram,” is the most violent phenomenon of the Nigerian Fourth Republic. It is responsible not only for a regional food ...
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The Dakar School of African History
Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch
The Dakar School, as the historians of Cheikh Anta Diop University (the University of Dakar) were called, had a brief French antecedent in Yves Person, whose teachings communicated to ...
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Decolonization in French West Africa
Tony Chafer
Studies of French decolonization in West Africa have traditionally treated it as a planned and reasonably smooth process. It has therefore been portrayed as a successful decolonization ...
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Development of Plant Food Production in the West African Savannas: Archaeobotanical Perspectives
Katharina Neumann
The West African savannas are a major area of independent plant domestication, with pearl millet, African rice, fonio, several legumes, and vegetable crops originating there. For ...
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Digital Sources in Europe for African History
Marion Wallace
There are copious resources for the study of African history on the internet. They include manuscripts and documentary archives, maps, museum collections, newspapers, printed books, ...
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Food Production in the Forest Zone of West Africa: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives
Richard T. Chia and A. Catherine D'Andrea
Recent narratives on the origin of food production in the West African forest zone have replaced earlier diffusion-based models with viewpoints that emphasize the diversity of sources for ...
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Islamic Historical Sources: Manuscripts and Online
Amidu Olalekan Sanni
Of central interest here are the historical sources on Islam and Africa, the role and contributions of manuscripts to the narrative, and how the new cyber world has become a domain for ...
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Nationalism and Decolonization in Cameroon
Joseph Takougang
The union between the former French Cameroun and the British Southern Cameroons on October 1, 1961, to form the Federal Republic of Cameroon was a unique experiment in nation building and ...
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The Politics of Decolonization in French and British West Africa
Frederick Cooper
At the end of World War II, Britain and France tried to find new bases for the legitimacy of empire. Their hesitant moves created openings that African political movements exploited. ...
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Postcolonial States and Societies in West Africa
Ebenezer Obadare
Postcolonial West African history can be understood in terms of transitions across three successive eras: a post-independence era of high nationalism; the military era, characterized by ...
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The Sahel in West African History
Barbara Cooper
The Sahel or Sahil is in a sense the “coast” of the Sahara and its cities major “ports” in trade circuits linking long-standing regional exchange in the products of different ecozones to ...
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Samuel Ajayi Crowther: African and Yoruba Missionary Bishop
Andrew Barnes
Samuel Ajayi Crowther was a Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary bishop charged with evangelizing the territories that became modern Nigeria. Over the last decades of the 19th ...
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Socialist Politics in Lusophone Africa
Michael G. Panzer
From the 1950s through the 1970s, several liberation movements emerged in Lusophone Africa (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and the Cape Verde Islands) that ...
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The Soninke in Ancient West African History
Kassim Kone
The Soninke are an ancient West African ethnicity that probably gave rise to the much larger group that is called the Mande of which the Soninke are part. The Soninke language belongs to ...
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The Stone Age Archaeology of West Africa
Eleanor Scerri
In the early 21st century, understanding West Africa’s Stone Age past has increasingly transcended its colonial legacy to become central to research on human origins. Part of this process ...
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Stone Tools: Their Relevance for Historians and the Study of Historical Processes
Justin Pargeter
From at least 3.4 million years ago to historic periods, humans and their ancestors used stone as the raw material for tool production. Archeologists find stone tools on all the planet’s ...
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The Archaeology of Political Complexity in West Africa Through 1450 CE
Stephen Dueppen
Political complexity in archaeological research has traditionally been defined as socio-political differentiation (roles, statuses, offices) integrated through centralized systems of power ...
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