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Betr. den für die Basler Mission tätigen Euro-Afrikaner Carl Christian Reindorf und die Geschichte der Basler Mission an der Goldküste im 19. Jahrhundert.
PREFACE: The need to provide the West African students of History, with an objective analysis of the activities of the peoples who occupy the Western zone of the continent of Africa, has motivated this publication. This book has been specially prepared to meet the demands of the West African School Certificate examinations in history; the special history paper for candidates offering General Certificate of Education examinations at Advanced level; and the Higher School Certificate examinations. It has also been written to provide the general reader with a direct communion with the traditions and culture of our peoples.To the students and the general readers alike is addressed this note of warning: You must not expect all your historical problems to be solved solely by this book. Other books, journals and current magazines should be read to supplement and enrich your historical experience. In such a quest, you are bound to come across some other ideas about historical writing and the study of history; particularly our own history, African history. Some historians erroneously believe that African history consists of European activities in Africa. This is utterly nonsense and baseless. Such historians persist in their mistakes because their views of African history are based on the European Imperialist-colonialist activities in Africa during the 19th and the 20th centuries. These simple questions which destroy their myth and expose their error must be asked: Does it mean that there were no people in Africa before the advent of the Europeans? Did the Portuguese not find highly organised communities in Africa during their Atlantic exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries? Did such explorers not find Africans in useful and rewarding trade, and other economic activities? Were the people then without indigenous religion outside Christianity and Islam? Or, are we to regard the ancient Egyptian civilization as European? Or else, what then is history? No one would contest the fact that compact biographies of European nationalities can be compiled into a single book and called "History of European Activities in Africa". But it is the height of intellectual dishonesty to call such a compilation "a history of Africa". European influence in Africa is only a part of the foreign of our cultural relations. Therefore, it cannot be a substitute to the whole entity. Among other problems that may confront teachers, students and the general readers are the difficulties of securing adequate periodization and valid justification for our historiography. Here, some attempts may be made to evince some thoughts among other historians on these items. Recent research and archaeological excavations have increasingly pointed the way to an acceptable classification of the periods on African history along the following lines.1.Pre-Historic - Before 4000 BC 2. Ancient - 4000 BC - 300 A.D. 3. Medieval - 300 A.D. - 1800 A.D. 4. Modern - 1800 A.D. Upwards Much can be said in favour of this classification but would be fully expatiated upon in another work. The generalisation that African History heavily relies on the use of oral tradition for its primary source, and therefore its facts cannot be reliable is untrue and illogical. From periodization above, it is obvious that periods (1), (2), and partly (3) are likely to lean on oral tradition. The use to which African scholars have put oral tradition for the recovery of the past is sound and offers a novelty in the history of historiography. Cont.
Intended for those interested in the African continent and the diversity of human history, this work looks at Africa's past and reflects on the changing ways it has been imagined and represented. It illustrates key themes in modern thinking about Africa's history with a range of historical examples.
Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past offers a comprehensive assessment of new directions in the historiography of West Africa. With twenty-four chapters by leading researchers in the study of West African history and cultures, the volume examines the main trends in multiple fields including the critical interpretation of Arabic sources; new archaeological surveys of trans-Saharan trade; the discovery of sources in Latin America relating to pan-Atlantic histories; and the continuing analysis of oral histories. The volume is dedicated to Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias, whose work inspired the intellectual reorientations discussed in its chapters and stands as the clearest formulation of the book’s central focus on the relationship between political conjunctures and the production of sources. Contributors are: Benjamin Acloque, Karin Barber, Seydou Camara, Mamadou Diawara, Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias, François-Xavier Fauvelle, Nikolas Gestrich, Toby Green, Bruce Hall, Jan Jansen, Shamil Jeppie, Daouda Keita, Murray Last, Robin Law, Camille Lefebvre, Paul Lovejoy, Ghislaine Lydon, Carlos Magnavita, Sonja Magnavita, Kevin MacDonald, Thomas McCaskie, Ann McDougall, Daniela Moreau, Mauro Nobili, Insa Nolte, Abel-Wedoud Ould-Cheikh, Benedetta Rossi, Charles Stewart.
An authoritative and comprehensive study of the palm oil trade.
A groundbreaking history that puts early and medieval West Africa in a global context Pick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book, the first on this period of the region’s history in a generation, tells a different story. Interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, including Arabic manuscripts, oral histories, and recent archaeological findings, Michael Gomez unveils a new vision of how categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and caste emerged in Africa and in global history more generally. Scholars have long held that such distinctions arose during the colonial period, but Gomez shows they developed much earlier. Focusing on the Savannah and Sahel region, Gomez traces the exchange of ideas and influences with North Africa and the Central Islamic Lands by way of merchants, scholars, and pilgrims. Islam’s growth in West Africa, in tandem with intensifying commerce that included slaves, resulted in a series of political experiments unique to the region, culminating in the rise of empire. A major preoccupation was the question of who could be legally enslaved, which together with other factors led to the construction of new ideas about ethnicity, race, gender, and caste—long before colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Telling a radically new story about early Africa in global history, African Dominion is set to be the standard work on the subject for many years to come.
A revisionist account of African masquerade carnivals in transnational context that offers readers a unique perspective on the connecting threads between African cultural trends and African American cultural artifacts
Commercial Transitions and Abolition in West Africa 1630–1860 offers a fresh perspective on why, in the nineteenth century, the most important West African states and merchants who traded with Atlantic markets became exporters of commodities, instead of exporters of slaves. This study takes a long-term comparative approach and makes of use of new quantitative data. It argues that the timing and nature of the change from slave exports to so-called ‘legitimate commerce’ in the Gold Coast, the Bight of Biafra and the Bight of Benin, can be predicted by patterns of trade established in previous centuries by a range of African and European actors responding to the changing political and economic environments of the Atlantic world.
Explores empires of medieval west Africa.
" Assessing the potential benefits and risks of a currency union Leaders of the fifteen-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have set a goal of achieving a monetary and currency union by late 2020. Although some progress has been made toward achieving this ambitious goal, major challenges remain if the region is to realize the necessary macroeconomic convergence and establish the required institutional framework in a relatively short period of time. The proposed union offers many potential benefits, especially for countries with historically high inflation rates and weak central banks. But, as implementation of the euro over the past two decades has shown, folding multiple currencies, representing disparate economies, into a common union comes with significant costs, along with operational challenges and transitional risks. All these potential negatives must be considered carefully by ECOWAS leaders seeking tomeet a self-imposed deadline. This book, by two leading experts on economics and Africa, makes a significant analytical contribution to the debates now under way about how ECOWAS could achieve and manage its currency union, andthe ramifications for the African continent. "