Download or read book The Creation of the Zulu Kingdom 1815 1828 written by Elizabeth A. Eldredge and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-30 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This scholarly account traces the emergence of the Zulu Kingdom in South Africa in the early nineteenth century, under the rule of the ambitious and iconic King Shaka. In contrast to recent literary analyses of myths of Shaka, this book uses the richness of Zulu oral traditions and a comprehensive body of written sources to provide a compelling narrative and analysis of the events and people of the era of Shaka's rule. The oral traditions portray Shaka as rewarding courage and loyalty, and punishing failure; as ordering the targeted killing of his own subjects, both warriors and civilians, to ensure compliance to his rule; and as arrogant and shrewd, but kind to the poor and the mentally disabled. The rich and diverse oral traditions, transmitted from generation to generation, reveal the important roles and fates of men and women, royal and subject, from the perspectives of those who experienced Shaka's rule and the dramatic emergence of the Zulu Kingdom.

Download or read book Popular Politics in the History of South Africa 1400 1948 written by Paul S. Landau and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-20 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 offers an inclusive vision of South Africa's past. Drawing largely from original sources, Paul Landau presents a history of the politics of the country's people, from the time of their early settlements in the elevated heartlands, through the colonial era, to the dawn of Apartheid. A practical tradition of mobilization, alliance, and amalgamation persisted, mutated, and occasionally vanished from view; it survived against the odds in several forms, in tribalisms, Christian assemblies, and other, seemingly hybrid movements; and it continues today. Landau treats southern Africa broadly, concentrating increasingly on the southern Highveld and ultimately focusing on a transnational movement called the 'Samuelites'. He shows how people's politics in South Africa were suppressed and transformed, but never entirely eliminated.

Download or read book A History of African Societies to 1870 written by Elizabeth Isichei and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-04-13 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Dust Rose Like Smoke written by James O. Gump and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1876 Lakota and Cheyenne warriors annihilated Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn. Three years later and half a world away, a British force was wiped out by Zulu warriors at Isandhlwana in South Africa. In both cases the total defeat of regular army troops by forces regarded as undisciplined barbarian tribesmen stunned an imperial nation. Although the similarities between the two frontier encounters have long been noted, James O. Gump’s book The Dust Rose Like Smoke is the first to scrutinize them in a comparative context. “This study issues a challenge to American exceptionalism,” he writes. Viewing both episodes as part of a global pattern of intensified conflict in the latter 1800s resulting from Western domination over a vast portion of the globe, Gump’s comparative study persuasively traces the origins and aftermath of both episodes. He examines the complicated ways in which Lakota and Zulu leadership sought to protect indigenous interests while Western leadership calculated their subjugation to imperial authority. The second edition includes a new preface from the author, revised and expanded chapters, and an interview with Leonard Little Finger (great-great-grandson of Ghost Dance leader Big Foot), whose story connects Wounded Knee and Nelson Mandela.

Download or read book The Other Zulus written by Michael R. Mahoney and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-04 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed history explaining how and why, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, Africans from the British colony of Natal transformed their ethnic self-identification, constructing and claiming a new Zulu identity.

Download or read book The Cambridge History of South African Literature written by David Attwell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page 1451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South Africa's unique history has produced literatures in many languages, in both oral and written forms, reflecting the diversity in the cultural histories and experiences of its people. The Cambridge History offers a comprehensive, multi-authored history of South African literature in all eleven official languages (and more minor ones) of the country, produced by a team of over forty international experts, including contributors from all of the major regions and language groups of South Africa. It will provide a complete portrait of South Africa's literary production, organised as a chronological history from the oral traditions existing before colonial settlement, to the post-apartheid revision of the past. In a field marked by controversy, this volume is more fully representative than any existing account of South Africa's literary history. It will make a unique contribution to Commonwealth, international and postcolonial studies and serve as a definitive reference work for decades to come.

Download or read book Terrific Majesty written by Carolyn Hamilton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since his assassination in 1828, King Shaka Zulu--founder of the powerful Zulu kingdom and leader of the army that nearly toppled British colonial rule in South Africa--has made his empire in popular imaginations throughout Africa and the West. Shaka is today the hero of Zulu nationalism, the centerpiece of Inkatha ideology, a demon of apartheid, the namesake of a South African theme park, even the subject of a major TV film. Terrific Majesty explores the reasons for the potency of Shaka's image, examining the ways it has changed over time--from colonial legend, through Africanist idealization, to modern cultural icon. This study suggests that "tradition" cannot be freely invented, either by European observers who recorded it or by subsequent African ideologues. There are particular historical limits and constraints that operate on the activities of invention and imagination and give the various images of Shaka their power. These insights are illustrated with subtlety and authority in a series of highly original analyses. Terrific Majesty is an exceptional work whose special contribution lies in the methodological lessons it delivers; above all its sophisticated rehabilitation of colonial sources for the precolonial period, through the demonstration that colonial texts were critically shaped by indigenous African discourse. With its sensitivity to recent critical studies, the book will also have a wider resonance in the fields of history, anthropology, cultural studies, and postcolonial literature.

Download or read book Resistance and Ideology in Settler Societies written by Tom Lodge and published by Raven Press (South Africa). This book was released on 1986 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Representing Bushmen written by Shane Moran and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed and compelling volume that contributes significantly to current trends in post-apartheid scholarship.

Download or read book Kingdoms and Chiefdoms of Southeastern Africa written by Elizabeth A. Eldredge and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History and oral traditions in southeastern Africa -- Oral traditions in the reconstruction of southern African history -- Shipwreck survivor accounts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries -- Founding families and chiefdoms east of the Drakensberg -- Maputo Bay peoples and chiefdoms before 1740 -- Maputo Bay, 1740-1820 -- Eastern chiefdoms of southern Africa, 1740-1815 -- Zulu conquests and the consolidation of power, 1815-21 -- Military campaigns, migrations, and political reconfiguration -- Ancestors, descent lines, and chiefdoms west of the Drakensberg before 1820 -- The Caledon River valley and the Basotho of Moshoeshoe, 1821-33 -- The expansion of the European presence at Maputo Bay, 1821-33 -- Southern African kingdoms on the eve of colonization.

Download or read book Power and Resistance in an African Society written by Les Switzer and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 1993 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine a history of the United States written from the perspective of the African-American community. Imagine that the story of this community is told not only from the viewpoint of its leaders--the middle-class elites--but also from the viewpoint of sharecroppers, industrial workers and others living on the margins of American culture. And finally, imagine that this is not only about political and economic relations but also about "race," class, gender, and religious relations, about the lived experiences of one community that both reflect and represent fundamental issues of power and resistance in an entire society. This is what Les Switzer has tried to do with his book Power and Resistance in an African Society. Scholars who have read it suggest that this is the first attempt to write a history of South Africa from the perspective of one subordinate community in South Africa. The reult is a transformed history "from below." The names, dates, events, and issues of conventional textbook history lose their meaning in the process of reconstructing a history that seeks to free the African from the domain of South Africa's ruling culture. The book also offers a unique contribution to African studies in sub-Saharan Africa, because it explores the material and symbolic manifestations of power and resistance in a pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial setting. The Ciskei region in the eastern Cape was selected as the case study. This was the historic zone of conflict between European and Bantu-speaking African in southern Africa--the Cape-Xhosa wars in this region lasting a century. The contemporary African nationalist movement in South Africa first emerged in a variety of organizational forms in the Ciskei during the 1870s and 1880s. The strategy of petitionary protest probably persisted longer here than anywhere else in South Africa in the post-colonial period, but popular resistance found a variety of windows outside organized African politics. The Ciskei, for example, was a focal point of rural resistance in the 1920s and early 1930s and again between the early 1940s and early 1960s. The gap between rural and urban dissidents in South Africa, moreover, was first bridged in the Ciskei and its environs during the 1952 Defiance Campaign. Finally, the Ciskei's segregated African reserve, where economic conditions were judged to be most serious, emerged as a primary site of struggle on South Africa's periphery during the 1970s and 1980s. The focus of this study is on the Xhosa-speaking peoples who lived in the Ciskei region in the first century after conquest. To highlight the linkages between regional and national issues, the Xhosa in the Ciskei are examined in the context of unfolding events in the Cape Colony and in the unified settler state of South Africa after 1910. A distinct plurality of voices would be formed in the complex interplay between color, consciousness, and class, as this community sought space for itself within the domain of South Africa's ruling culture.

Download or read book The Ndebele Nation written by Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2009 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries written by Amanda Porterfield and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American women played in important part in Protestant foreign missionary work from its early days at the beginning of the nineteenth century, enabling them not only to disseminate religious principles but also to break into public life and create expanded opportunities for themselves and other women. No institution was more closely associated with women missionaries that Mount Holyoke College. This book examines Mount Holyoke founder Mary Lyon and the missionary women trained by her. Porterfield sees Lyon and her students as representative of dominant trends in American missionary thought before the Civil War. She focuses on how their activities in several parts of the world--particularly northwest Persia, Maharashtra in western India, and Natal in southeast Africa--and shows that while their primary goals remained elusive, antebellum missionary women made major contributions to cultural change and the development of new cultures.

Download or read book Mfecane Aftermath written by Carolyn Hamilton and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea that the period of social turbulence in the nineteenth century was a consequence of the emergence of the powerful Zulu kingdom under Shaka has been written about extensively as a central episode of southern African history. Considerable dynamic debate has focused on the idea that this period – the ‘mfecane’- left much of the interior depopulated, thereby justifying white occupation. One view is that ‘the time of troubles’ owed more to the Delagoa Bay Slave trade and the demands of the labour-hungry Cape colonists than to Shaka’s empire building. But is there sufficient evidence to support the argument? The Mfecane Aftermath investigates the very nature of historical debate and examines the uncertain foundations of much of the previous historiography.

Download or read book Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth Century Africa written by Terence Ranger and published by Springer. This book was released on 1993-06-15 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes as its theme the ways in which governments legitimate their rule, both to themselves and to their subjects. Its introduction explores legitimacy and pre-colonial states, but the three sections of the book deal with colonial legitimacy, the question of legitimation in the transition from colonialism to majority rule, and the contemporary debate about accountability.

Download or read book Landscape Transformations and the Archaeology of Impact written by Warren R. Perry and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1999-11-30 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1984, Perry went to Swaziland, in southern Africa, to do archaeological fieldwork on the emergence of the Swazi state. He concentrated on the unsanctioned realms of the recent history, the Mfecane/Difaqane period, and soon discovered that no archaeology had been undertaken and that the official r.

Download or read book The Roots of Ethnicity written by Ronald R. Atkinson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-09-30 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Roots of Ethnicity, Ronald R. Atkinson argues that although colonial rule and its aftermath have played a major role in shaping the particular manifestations of ethnicity in Africa, many sociohistorical developments crucial to current expressions of ethnicity can be traced to a past long before the colonial period. Atkinson develops his argument through an exhaustive examination of the origins of the collective identity of the Acholi of present-day northern Uganda. His study makes clear that by the time of European conquest the essential foundations and the crucial parameters for the evolution of Acholi society and ethnic consciousness had long been established. In presenting his argument for the need to extend the existing scholarship on ethnicity in Africa beyond its twentieth-century focus, Atkinson provides what is perhaps the most detailed reconstruction and analysis yet available of the pre-1800 evolution of an African sociopolitical order. Beyond these contributions to the study of African history, The Roots of Ethnicity provides an extended case study in and a convincing argument for the use of oral sources in the reconstruction and interpretation of the African past. It will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology, history, and African studies, as well as to all those interested in ethnicity and the politics of identity.