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"... an excellent, comprehensive account of the Ethiopian revolution... essential for anyone who wishes to understand revolutionary Ethiopia." -- Perspective

"This masterly history deals with the Emperor and the Dergue... on their own terms.... [Keller] buttresses his analysis with careful and useful detail." -- Foreign Affairs

"Keller's analytic grasp of the complex features of Ethiopian history and society from a wide range of sources is remarkable." -- African Affairs

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Scherrer examines the ethnicized conflicts, periodic war, and genocide in Rwanda and Burundi. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda may have resulted in the murder of a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu, while the mass killings in Burundi, especially in 1993 when some 200,000 Hutu and Tutsi were killed, and the current ongoing war in the Congo appear to have the potential to escalate into another round of genocide in the region. Scherrer explores the background to the conflicts as well as what the international community might do to break this tragic cycle of violence and despair. ... Read more

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Although there have been momentous changes in South Africa's recent political history, the spatial remnants of apartheid and the planning ideas which underpinned it remain to confound post-apartheid city planners. This book draws on detailed case study
material from one South African town, Port Elizabeth, to illustrate the relationship between the state, power, economy and spatial practices.


The racialised character of the urban order which emerged under apartheid meant that, together with the routine capacities of the state to govern, the domination of African people and their exclusion from political power were also effectively secured by
means of the spatial organisation of the city.Aspects of the strong relationship between modernity and racism are teased out in this study of the South African city, as are the general links between spatial form and state power. This book demands
attention from everyone concerned with the spatial politics of urban development.
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This study of transnational trade between Central Africa and Europe focuses on the lives of individual traders from Kinshasa and Brazzaville who operate across national frontiers and often outside state laws. Excluded from other social and economic opportunities, participation by traders in this international second economy challenges and resists the constraints on their lives in both Africa and Europe. Their trading activities are unmeasured, unrecorded, often outside or on the margins of the law, and are sustained by complex networks through which their commodities are circulated. Who are these traders? What strategies do they have, not only to survive but to shine? What kind of networks do they rely on? And what implications does their trade have for globalization? The authors consider these and other questions in this study.Published in association with the International African Institute North America: Indiana U Press ... Read more

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This lively book shows benefit from jets and mobile phones.
Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law is about globalization as practiced by Congolese traders who operate a thriving second economy linking Central Africa and Europe. She investigates the transnational trade between Central Africa and Europe by focusing on the lives of individual traders from Kinshasa and Brazzaville, who operate across national frontiers and often outside the law. Challenging the boundaries of anthropology, Janet MacGaffey follows complex international networks to examine the ways in which the African second economy has been extended transnationally and globally on the margins of the law. Who are these traders? What strategies do they have, not only to survive but also to shine? What kinds of networks do they rely on? What implications does their trade have for the study of globalization? The personal networks of ethnicity, kinship, religion, and friendship constructed by the traders fashion a world of their own. From Johannesburg to Cairo and from Dakar to Nairobi as well as in Paris, the Congolese traders are renowned and envied. This lively book shows that it is not just the multinationals that benefit from jets and mobile phones.

Crossing boundaries, in more ways than one
"Congo-Paris" is a fine example of the recent trend in anthropology away from the localized study of communities and towards analysis that transcends geographic boundaries.Not that this study is "multi-sited" (to use the dominant buzzword):MacGaffey and Bazenguissa conducted their fieldwork for the book entirely in Paris, interviewing dozens of subjects from both Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa.But Paris is just one venue in these transnational subjects' life histories as they range back and forth across national, legal, commercial, and cultural frontiers.

While the authors set out to validate the Congolese quest for relief from political and economic hardship at home, the image they present of this loosely-defined community of traders will do nothing for its image abroad.These individuals define themselves through the act of quietly circumventing the rules (particularly import duties and immigration laws), resisting governmental authority without manifesting any visible signs of dissent.This is understandable, given the corrupt and authoritarian Congolese regimes of recent decades.But the transnational traders' ethos of stealthy noncompliance extends to their overseas existence as well, with the result in these Parisian cases being a gamut of criminal activity from smuggling and apartment squatting to drug dealing and theft."Model immigrants" they are not, regardless of whether their behavior represents a survival strategy.One wonders just how representative this underworld is of the larger community of Congolese living in Paris, and whether those Congolese living more lawful existences there object to being tarred with this brush of illegality.

Such moral qualms aside, I give "Congo-Paris" high marks for its thorough and penetrating analysis of its subjects, a very difficult group to interview given its members' legal status and clandestine activities.No doubt its success owes much to the collaboration between MacGaffey (British) and Bazenguissa (Congolese).The book also skillfully negotiates the difficult and shifting theoretical territory of anthropology to bring outside perspectives to bear on its subjects.Finally, it makes a strong case for redefining anthropology in the context of ongoing processes of globalization.I suspect that we will be seeing a good many more studies like this one in the future. ... Read more

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In the early decades of the 20th century, the South African government created state-owned corporations to develop a stable industrial base for white rule. These enterprises, which control electricity, steel, and the bulk of heavy industry, still exist today. This book examines the formation and evolution of these companies and the role they might now play in reshaping the country's battered economy and in better reflecting the changing realities of a new society. Nancy L. Clark describes how state corporations were developed in South Africa to off-set the economic dominance of the gold mining industry, to provide some autonomy from foreign producers, and to create jobs for Afrikaner workers. During their early operations in the 1920s and 1930s, however, in order to survive economically, the corporations had to depend on capital from the mining industry, forge marketing agreements with foreign manufacturers, and hire cheaper African workers in place of whites - workers who became increasing expensive to control and suppress.Through their struggles to balance the conflicting demands of the gold industry, the white political community, and the African workforce, the managers of the state corporations fashioned labour policies - the use of unskilled African labour and highly trained white technicians to oversee them - that were later borrowed by the architects of apartheid and that made the expansion of state-sanctioned racial discrimination economically feasible in the latter half of the 20th century. ... Read more

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The coming of the British to the Cape Colony in 1795 signaled the start of an uneasy relationship with the Cape Dutch people, giving rise to the Great Trek in the 1830s and, at the end of the century, finding expression in the Anglo-Boer War. Based upon extensive research of contemporary published works in the South African and British press, this book follows the public view held by Britons of the Afrikaners. Dissimilarities in lifestyle and outlook upon progress and development form a central theme of the work. The book traces differences of opinion among Englishmen themselves, both in South Africa and Great Britain, and discusses the Afrikaner psyche in regard to land encroachment and the methods employed to subjugate black nations. The narrative singles out the reasons for indignation and resentment felt by English-speaking persons generally towards the Afrikaner republics, propelling British imperialists and Afrikaner nationalists upon a collision course. It closes with the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War, having exposed the underlying racial dynamics which would come to dominate the dealings between both the English and Afrikaners and whites and blacks during the twentieth century. ... Read more

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This analysis of South Africa's postapartheid security system moves beyond a realist discussion of interacting states to examine southern Africa as an integrated whole. Despite South Africa's manipulation of state structures and elites in the region for its own ends, the text argues, the suffering endured under the apartheid regime drew the region together at the popular level, and economic factors such as the use of migrant labor reinforced the process of integration. Exploring how the region is changing today-as transnational solidarity and a single regional economy remove the distinctions between national and international politics-the book explores whether South African domination can finally be overcome and considers what sort of cosmopolitan political arrangement will be appropriate for southern Africa in the new century. ... Read more

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While depicting the horrors of apartheid, this volume also proposes a constructive process designed to enable a free South Africa to avoid lapsing into a cycle of new oppression. The authors demonstrate a challenge that they believe can and must be met by the efforts of the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission. Nelson Mandela says in his Foreword to this book: 'The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is a milestone on the freedom road, and this book illuminates the journey. It presents a necessary perspective on our unfolding future. North America: St Martin's Press; South Africa: David Philip ... Read more

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This book predicts the current genocide of the Afrikaners
The authors of this chilling book, all ultra-radical Marxist-communists who had been in exile for many years from South Africa up to 1992, outline the reasons why the current ANC-government of South Africa is actively engaging in a witch-hunt against all 3-million Afrikaners -- due to what they view as 'the crime of apartheid".

In this radical Marxist-communist viewpoint expounded here by Kader Asmal, the former minister of education, and his co-authors, all Afrikaners must be punished as he views them all as inevitably "guilty" by association as a group -- just because they are Afrikaners. This fact is borne out by subsequent events, showing that of the 3-million Afrikaners, 440,000 now live in permanent poverty and in daily danger of being murdered - because the ANC-government has passed laws which deliberately bar access to any work for Afrikaners, in spite of their excellent work ethic and high level of education. Even the current younger Afriknaer generation born after 1994, (when apartheid was voluntarily ended by the last Afrikaner president F W de Klerk) is suffering this fate. Thousands of Afrikaner families are being murdered in the cities and the countryside, often by large armed gangs of black youths who frequently do not steal anything at all.

(...)
Kader Asmal also describes in great detail how and why the ANC-government will conduct an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Afrikaner nation once it has taken over power - all under the guise of 'fair resource redistrïbution" and "retribution for apartheid's criminal governance..."

This ethnic-cleansing campaign against Afrikaners -- which besides the ongoing murder and rape campaign, also includes a large number of other human rights violations ranging from long-term imprisonment of innocent Afrikaners, denial of voting rights to a million Afrikaners during the last election, laws to suppress the Afrikaner language in education and in public and denial of all survival means for Afrikaner families.
This entire pattern of race-based suppression of the Afrikaner is indeed outlawed under the UN genocide convention.
One of the co-authors of the genocide convention, the American jurist Dr Gregory Stanton, of "Genocide Watch", and who is the world's foremost expert on genocide, warned in 2002 that the ethnic cleansing campaign targetting Afrikaners was rapidly nearing the penultimate stage of genocide. His report can be found on the Genocide Watch website.

(...)

The ANC's violence-driven 'land reform' programme in South Africa, which targets mainly its small number of Afrikaner farmers who occupy only 6% of South Africa's total land surface, (yet produce all of the country's excess food,)has already resulted in the deaths of almost 1,800 farmers.

Yet the western news media, which has highlighted the murders of 12 Zimbabwean commercial farmers in great detail, somehow has seen fit to practically ignore the ongoing slaughter of Afrikaners on their farms and in the towns of South Africa.

This book is a chilling must-read for people who are concerned about the survival of the Afrikaner minority in South Africa.
(...)

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As the uncertain peace following the end of the Cold War dawns upon the world, the role of the United Nations in becoming a major factor in solving conflict and bringing stability is moving to the forefront of world attention. This book, in great detail, describes the intervention of the United Nations in the Congo (now Zaire). At the time, this intervention was the largest in the history of the United Nations. As the threats to international peace seem to mushroom, this superb book details the players, the actions, the emotions and the accomplishments of this crucially significant historical achievement. ... Read more

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The Congo is rich in minerals and agricultural potential. What keeps it from emerging as a viable, even prosperous, state?


During four centuries of the slave trade, the Portuguese alone claimed over 13.25 million lives. Then, King Leopold II of Belgium took the Congo as his own fiefdom in 1876, and the exploitation of the populace was even more horrendous. The Belgian Congo was ruled by the Church and the State in cooperation with private companies. Education peaked at the secondary level, to deter the Congolese from aspiring to leadership roles. In many cases, children were taken at an early age and impressed into King Leopold s army, the Force Publique.

Independence in 1960 did not end the conflict with Belgium, but it did bring a new chaos as the local population struggled to run their fledgling country. When the stakes are so high, division and conflict are easily provoked.

Under the influence of ambitious leaders and outside interests, the problems escalated. Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister (and suspected of communist leanings), was assassinated. After five years of turmoil, Colonel Mobutu rose to power with help from the US.

Mobutu ruled the country (then calledZaire ) through a one-party state that co-opted the people with fanciful slogans and empty promises. It was also a police state whose reach extended into every school and every village. Atrocities were committed to strike fear into the people; furthermore, Mobutu s response to the genocide in Rwanda was to allow the Hutu genocidaires to take up residence in Zaire. This led to clashes with the Zairian Tutsis and with Rwanda and Burundi.

Interference by outside powers who covet Congo s resources only exacerbates regional rivalries. Today, every intervention in the name ofassistanceseems to raise new questions about motives and allegiances, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of people continue to be at risk.

The Tragic State of the Congo: From De-Colonization to Dictatorship traces the Congo s recent history, from Mobutu to Kabila, with details of the 1999 Lusaka Cease-fire Agreement and the inadequacy of the resources provided to secure it; discusses relations with the global powers and with neighbors like Rwanda, Uganda and Angola, the Clean Diamond Trade Act of 2003, and the 2005 draft Constitution; and explores the goals of the current transitional government and the hopes invested in it. ... Read more

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Useful and Well-Researched
This well-researched and heavily-footnoted history of the Congo provides the reader a solid understanding of the many forces at work in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Of particular note are the discussions of establishment of a more-or-less modern constitutional government and the various threats to it today.The author also clearly lays out who did what to whom in the aftermath of Mobutu's fall, valuable information to have when trying to understand what's happening in the DRC today.

Dave Donelson, author of Heart of Diamonds: A Novel of Scandal, Love and Death in the Congo

best text on Congo - both compact and comprehensive
The author lucidly creates both an historical timeline and a conceptual web of Congolese history. The long series of simple, declarative sentences both recapitulates a half-century of serious scholarship, with nearly a footnote per sentence, and offers new insights into the current crisis, as local and "international" forces and factions regroup after Mobutu. An invaluable Epilogue integrates the latest U.N. and U.S. actions and prospects, plus an Appendix of author's interesting correspondence with "locals," give some sense of "what is to be done" to avoid the old "internationalist" cycle: the cheapest possible extraction of minerals, with least possible regard for the locals - who may someday both own and control their own destiny. ... Read more

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The definitive account of early twentieth-century exploitation in the world’s only privately owned colony.

In the early twentieth century, the worldwide rubber boom led Britishenterpreneur Lord Leverhulme to the Belgian Congo. Warmly welcomed bythe murderous regime of King Leopold II, Leverhulme set up a privatekingdom reliant on the horrific Belgian system of forced labor, aprogram that reduced the population of Congo by half and accounted formore deaths than the Nazi Holocaust. In this definitive, meticulouslyresearched history, Jules Marchal exposes the nature of forced laborunder Lord Leverhulme’s rule and the appalling conditions imposed uponthe people of Congo. With an extensive introduction by Adam Hochschild,Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts is an important and urgently needed account of a laboratory of colonial exploitation.

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Fine study of the brutality of colonial rule
In this fascinating book, introduced by Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost and Bury the Chains, Jules Marchal shows in detail the atrocities that colonialism brought to the Congo. The Congo was and is cursed with great natural riches - palm oil, rubber, copper, tin, gold, uranium, coltan, timber and diamonds.

Marchal was a Belgian diplomat who served in the Congo. He spent 20 years researching forced labour there, producing four volumes on the 19th century, when King Leopold of Belgium owned the Congo, and three volumes covering 1910 to 1945. This volume examines the role of William Lever, the soap magnate from Port Sunlight in Liverpool who later became Lord Leverhulme. His company, Lever Brothers (now part of Unilever), exploited the Congo's palm oil to make soap.

In the late 19th century, Belgium forced men to get the oil by taking the women hostage. This gross exploitation caused a 50% death rate - ten million Congolese people were killed. King Leopold destroyed much of the evidence, ordering the Congo State archives to be burned.

In the 20th century, the Belgian state still forcibly recruited Congolese workers including women and children as young as five, and used prison to reinforce compulsory labour contracts, renewed automatically. Lever helped to enforce this vile system. Marchal describes `the triangle of State, Catholic missions and companies'. The practice of forced labour continued until independence in 1960. There was similar serfdom in Portugal's Angola, Germany's Cameroons and France's Equatorial Africa.

The exploiters made a show of philanthropy but in reality, as a director of the Compagnie du Kasai said, "You must remember that we are a commercial company not a philanthropic enterprise, and that our shareholders will not ask us if we have taken good care of the natives but what dividends we have earned them."

Naturally, the Congolese people constantly rebelled against their oppressors. In the 1931 revolt, 550 were killed, and Belgian forces tortured to death many prisoners. Only one Belgian soldier was killed, since "we have got the Maxim gun and they have not."

Still today, the Congo's riches attract predators. Since 1997, four million Congolese have been killed in wars for resources, in which a US-British ally, the Rwandan state, has repeatedly attacked the Congo.

... Read more

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In this book, Robert Harms makes an important advance toward recovering the history of the people of the rain forest by telling the story of the Nunu, who live in and around swampy floodplains of the middle Zaire River.Using concepts drawn from game theory, Professor Harms explores the changing relationship between nature and culture among the Nunu. Picturing Nunu society as animated by a never-ending competition among lineages and households, he traces how the competition pushed people into new environments, and how adaption to the new environment, in turn, led to new forms of competition. ... Read more