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Swaziland—recently renamed Eswatini—is the only nation-state in Africa with a functioning indigenous political system. Elsewhere on the continent, most departing colonial administrators were succeeded by Western-educated elites. In Swaziland, traditional Swazi leaders managed to establish an absolute monarchy instead, qualified by the author as benevolent and people-centred, a system which they have successfully defended from competing political forces since the 1970s. This book is the first to study the constitutional history of this monarchy. It examines its origins in the colonial era, the financial support it received from white settlers and apartheid South Africa, and the challenges it faced from political parties and the judiciary, before King Sobhuza II finally consolidated power in 1978 with an auto-coup d’état. As Hlengiwe Dlamini shows, the history of constitution-making in Swaziland is rich, complex, and full of overlooked insight for historians of Africa.
Swaziland--recently renamed Eswatini--is the only nation-state in Africa with a functioning indigenous political system. Elsewhere on the continent, most departing colonial administrators were succeeded by Western-educated elites. In Swaziland, traditional Swazi leaders managed to establish an absolute monarchy instead, a system which they have successfully defended from competing political forces since the 1970s. This book is the first to study the constitutional history of this monarchy. It examines its origins in the colonial era, the financial support it received from white settlers and apartheid South Africa, and the challenges it faced from political parties and the judiciary, before King Sobhuza II finally consolidated power in 1978 with an auto-coup d'état. As Hlengiwe Dlamini shows, the history of constitution-making in Swaziland is rich, complex, and full of overlooked insight for historians of Africa.
This book examines Ghana’s Pan-African foreign policy during Nkrumah’s rule, investigating how Ghanaians sought to influence the ideologies of African liberation movements through the Bureau of African Affairs, the African Affairs Centre and the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute. In a world of competing ideologies, when African nationalism was taking shape through trial and error, Nkrumah offered Nkrumaism as a truly African answer to colonialism, neo-colonialism and the rapacity of the Cold War powers. Although virtually no liberation movement followed the precepts of Nkrumaism to the letter, many adapted the principles and organizational methods learnt in Ghana to their own struggles. Drawing upon a significant set of primary sources and on oral testimonies from Ghanaian civil servants, politicians and diplomats as well as African freedom fighters, this book offers new angles for understanding the history of the Cold War, national liberation and nation-building in Africa.
This book provides a collection of chapters that critically explore the making and development of Africa’s independence constitutions through the different phases in their full generality. Since independence, various constitutions from African countries have undergone a succession of changes, triggered by either the domestic or international environment or both. These processes constitute autonomous epochal ‘waves’ or ‘phases’ of constitution-making which need to be unpacked, historicised and explored in a systematic manner. This work, intended as a distinctive object of positive analysis, historicizes the independence constitutions of selected African states on either a country-specific or a comparative basis. A historical approach to the continental study of constitutions is rare, meaning the continental coverage of the book is justified by Africa’s rich diversity reflected in its multiple monarchical and colonial backgrounds. The book is of interest to academics interested in having a panoramic view of Africa's constitutional development from a historical perspective.
A major reassessment of the end of the British empire, focusing on the period after 1945, first published in 2007.
Does the African continent want to be economically and socially sustainable as well as environmentally safe? What is the role of culture and how does it shape development strategies? In New African Thinkers: Culture at the Heart of Sustainable Development, the authors argue that culture - defined broadly as the way of life, system of values and controls, and modes of practice and expression - lies at the heart of a re-imagined Africa as a place of prosperity and socio-economic well-being, integration, and self-determination. By contextualizing the discourse of development, the authors hope to influence policy and practice towards shifting the narrative from 'one size fits all' to a more morally justified and socially diverse model.
CD contains the entire text of the five volume set.
This book reveals how conventional anthropology has consistently imposed European ideas of the "natural" nuclear family, women as passive object, and class differences on a continent with a long history of women with power doing things differently. Amadiume argues for an end to anthropology and calls instead for a social history of Africa, by Africans.