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Social scientists examining contemporary Africa take considerable pains to resist portraying Africa as nothing more than a land of victims unable to escape historical cycles of war, exploitation and tyranny. However, children are still frequently conceptualised as passive...

Building on the foundational work of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, the essays in this collective volume offer a picture of the late colonial period in Zambia. The volume is based on untapped archival material and sources that have emerged in recent years and throws new...

This book expands and redefines the approach to the study of political elites through an interrogation of political elite formation in the context of the provincial legislature of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, over the period 1994-2004. The period covers two successive...

This volume, which is dedicated to the Dutch legal scholar Gerti Hesseling (1946-2009), examines issues of law, land dispute and conflict mediation in Africa. The focus is on how citizens, State institutions and concerned (inter)national actors attempt to find solutions to...

Facing coal provides an environmental history of changing ideas around South African coal-based pollution, focusing on Witbank, where the scars of mining are etched deep into the land. The essence of this book is its link between local and global repercussions of past and...

Decentralization by devolution is the means to transfer the responsibilities for service provision to the grassroots levels in Tanzania. The aim of this policy is to deal with the stagnation in the development of, among other things, secondary education. Despite this policy,...

Physical mobility of people from place to place as individuals or as groups is essentially horizontal, potentially limitless, and generally motivated by the desire and ambition to take advantage of new opportunities for self or group advancement. This mobility is the basis of...

Will people in drylands be forced to migrate due to climate change and environmental degradation? And what impact does migration have on the environment and development in the migrants' home and destination areas? These are some of the questions this study tries to...

The 1992 Boipatong massacre has been widely recognized as a key moment in the South African transition. The massacre is also frequently cited as an example of state complicity in the political violence that shook the country during a period of negotiation and reform. Yet,...

Based on rich and wide-ranging data, the thesis describes the sensitive issue of the contemporary emancipation trajectories of agro-pastoralist Fulbe in Central Mali. It explores how people are currently dealing with hierarchies they inherited from past master-slave relations...

The recent conflict in Côte d'Ivoire has led to the militarization of many young civilians on both belligerent sides, especially in the west of the country. What is of particular interest is that many of these youths have assumed a function of 'commuting'...

In this inaugural address the author, director of the African Studies Centre Leiden since 2010, first gives an impression of how Africans themselves perceive change and development, based on recent research in Ghana and Burkina Faso. He then presents some positive statistical...

Most of what is written about Africa is framed in terms that have been out of date for years. Too often it is seen as heading for either disaster or salvation; the realities are more subtle, more complicated than this binary opposition suggests. The continent has over the...

In Ethiopia, as in other parts of Africa, relations between Christians and Muslims show a new dynamic under the impact of both state policies and global connections. Religious identities are becoming more dominant as people’s primary public identity, and...

In 1916 a warlord named Oorlog - 'war', in Afrikaans - moved into the Kaokoveld in the far north-west of what is now Namibia, and drove off the original inhabitants. Shortly after, Oorlog was formally recognized as a chief by the newly established South African...