Patrice Lumumba was a leader of the independence struggle, as well as the country’s first democratically elected prime minister, in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After a meteoric rise in the colonial civil service and the African p

Elizabeth Schmidt‘s Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2013) depicts the foreign political and military interventions in Africa during the periods of decolonization (1956-75) and the Col

[Cross-posted from New Books in American Studies] A kind of biography of the town of Annamaboe, a major slave trading port on Africa’s Gold Coast, Randy J. Sparks‘s book Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave TradeÂ

[Cross-posted from New Books in Technology] Words have meaning. More specifically, the definitions attached to words shape our perspective on, and how we categorize, the things that we encounter. The words of “technology” and “innovation” are exe

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Cathy L. Schneider is the author of Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). She is associate professor in the School of International

In her imaginative and scrupulous book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Ohio University Press, 2014), historian Michelle Moyd writes about the askari, Africans soldiers recruited in

[Cross-posted from New Books in Alcohol, Drugs, and Intoxicants] Khat, the fresh leaves of the plant Catha edulis, is a mild psycho-stimulant. It has been consumed in Yemen, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia for over one thousand years. Khat consumpt

[Cross-posted from New Books in French Studies] “History doesn’t repeat itself,” so the saying goes, “but it does rhyme.”  This is particularly true in the recent history of the Middle East. As James D. Le Seuer, author of Algeria Since 1989

Olufemi Taiwo’s unremittingly honest and daring book, Africa Must be Modern: A Manifesto (Indiana University Press, 2014), confronts the reluctance, if not outright hostility, of many Africans to embrace modernity. He shows how this hostility has stifle

[Cross-posted from New Book in Gender Studies] Amy Evrard‘s first book, The Moroccan Women’s Rights Movement (Syracuse University Press, 2014), examines women’s attempts to change their patriarchal society via their movement for equality and rights