James MacQueen (1778–1870) was a British geographer and also one of the most outspoken critics of the methods of the British anti-slavery campaign in the 1820s and 1830s. Although he never visited Africa, he became an acknowledged expert on the continent, through reading all available accounts, ancient and modern, as well as interviewing slave merchants while managing a sugar plantation in th…
James MacQueen (1778–1870) was a British geographer fascinated by the problem of the River Niger. He set out to try to establish (on the basis of accounts by explorers, traders and missionaries), that one and the same river flowed continuously through Africa and into the Atlantic Ocean, thus challenging long-established beliefs that African rivers either disappeared into the sand or terminate…
Ruth Finnegan’s Oral Literature in Africa was first published in 1970, and since then has been widely praised as one of the most important books in its field. Based on years of fieldwork, the study traces the history of storytelling across the continent of Africa.
Cinematic Independence traces the emergence, demise, and rebirth of big-screen film exhibition in Nigeria. Film companies flocked to Nigeria in the years following independence, beginning a long history of interventions by Hollywood and corporate America. The 1980s and 1990s saw a shuttering of cinemas, which were almost entirely replaced by television and direct-to-video movies. However, after…
Although violent conflict has declined in northern Uganda, tensions and mistrust concerning land have increased. Residents try to deal with acquisitions by investors and exclusions from forests and wildlife reserves. Land wrangles among neighbours and relatives are widespread. The growing commodification of land challenges ideals of entrustment for future generations. Using extended case studie…
A common story of teachers from the Global South portrays them as deficient, unreliable and unprofessional. However, this book uses an innovative Capability Approach/Critical Realist lens to reveal the causal links between teachers' constrained capabilities and their 'criticised' behaviours and offer nuanced, creative strategies for improvements.
"The story of the University of Westminster is the fifth volume in a series of titles exploring the University's long and diverse history. This book celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the institution gaining university status, the right to award its own degrees and to participate in publicly funded research. Drawing on extensive research conducted in the University of Westminster Archiv…
Johan Ludwig Krapf (1810–81), a German-born member of the Church Missionary Society in East Africa, is regarded as the founder of Swahili studies in Europe. Having pursued an interest in Oriental culture from an early age, he first went to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) as a missionary. During his travels in Africa, he became the first European to see Mount Kenya; but he also considered the potential o…
This book is the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to Chakali, a Southwestern Grusi language spoken by less than 3500 people in northwest Ghana. The dictionary offers a consistent description of word meaning and provides the basis for future research in the linguistic area. It is also designed to provide an inventory of correspondence with English usage in a reversal index. The concepts u…
"This research project examines how various political events and factors influence the composition of senior government elites in a range of African states. Using a newly created dataset of African cabinet ministers, this thesis creates a number of metrics to measure elite volatility and ethnic, regional and political representation. These metrics are used to assess leader and regime strategies…