In A Tapestry of African Histories: With Longer Times and Wider Geopolitics, contributors demonstrate that African historians are neither comfortable nor content with studying continental or global geopolitical, social, and economic events across the superficial divide of time as if they were disparate or disconnected. Instead, the chapters within the volume reevaluate African history through a geopolitically transcendent lens that brings African countries into conversation with other pertinent histories both within and outside of the continent. The collection analyzes the pre- and post-colonial eras within African countries such as Kenya, Malawi, and Sudan, examining major historical figures and events, struggles for independence and stability, contemporary urban settlements, social and economic development, as well as constitutional, legal, and human rights issues that began in the colonial era and persist to this day.
Author(s): Nicholas K. Githuku
Publisher: Lexington Books
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 389
City: Lanham
A Tapestry of African Histories
Contents
Foreword
Introduction: The Future of History: Transtemporal, Transnational across Geographical Borders
1 On Writing Kenya’s History
2 From the Upper Delaware River to the Banks of the Monongahela via Lake Victoria
3 Myth and Reality in the Forging of a Kenyan National History: Oginga Odinga’s Heroism
4 Daniel arap Moi: A Challenge for Historians
5 Ainsworth after Dark: The Pied Piper of African Development in Colonial Kenya, 1895–1920?
6 Challenge to African Democracy: The Activism and Assassination of Pio Gama Pinto
7 Eastlands, Nairobi: Memory, History, and Recovery
8 Plagues and Pestilences in Late Nineteenth-Century Samburuland
9 The Evolution of Imperial Social Development Policy and Practice in British Sudan: A Comparative Case Study of the Gezira and Zande Schemes
10 Illusions about a Boom in Cotton Production in Southern Nyanza during the Depression, 1929–1939
11 Community Development in Post-Independence Malawi: Deciphering Some Local Voices
12 Regime Policing and the Stifling of the Human Rights Agenda: Late Colonial and Postcolonial Malawi, 1948–Present
13 The Constitution and Change-the-Constitution Debate in Independent Kenya, 1963–2002
14 The Building Bridges Initiative Déjà Vu: “A Whitewash Process Taking Us Forward by Taking Us Backwards”
15 House of Mlungula—“Norms in the Margins and Margins of the Norm”: Of Computer “Glitches, ”Moving Human Fingers and Illicit Financial Flows
Index
About the Contributors
