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First published in 1970. This vivid account of the missionary work of the Rev. Hope Masterton Waddell in the West Indies and Central Africa was first published in 1863. During his sixteen years in Jamaica he witnessed the slave revolt and the aftermath of the abolition of slavery. The mission helped former slaves adapt to freedom in new communities. In 1846 he left Jamaica for Calabar in West Africa (now part of Nigeria), and his narrative is one of the best European accounts of pre-colonial Africa. The mission was concerned with ending local practices such as polygamy, human sacrifice and witchcraft, and Waddell formed a close relationship with King Eyo. The book gives considerable detail about the history and culture of the area, as well as on the work of the mission. His work in Calabar is still commemorated there in the Hope Waddell Training Institute, Duke Town.
Winner of the Merle Curti Award Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize Longlisted for the Cundill Prize “Vincent Brown makes the dead talk. With his deep learning and powerful historical imagination, he calls upon the departed to explain the living. The Reaper’s Garden stretches the historical canvas and forces readers to think afresh. It is a major contribution to the history of Atlantic slavery.”—Ira Berlin From the author of Tacky’s Revolt, a landmark study of life and death in colonial Jamaica at the zenith of the British slave empire. What did people make of death in the world of Atlantic slavery? In The Reaper’s Garden, Vincent Brown asks t...
For writers and academics prominent in the field of the New Literatures in English today, the notion of return explodes into rich semantic difference to reveal the diversity of preoccupations underlying the use of the common tongue. From the Caribbean to Australia, Guyana to South Africa, India to Great Britain, literary, political and personal history collaborate in the poetic metamorphosis of an otherwise everyday experience. Now a state of being, now a reading rich with cross-cultural age, return draws from the collective memory, invokes revenants, digs up forgotten history, quests for roots. Just as it creates a dialogue with the past, textual or real, it negotiates turning points and pe...
The series Religion and Society (RS) contributes to the exploration of religions as social systems– both in Western and non-Western societies; in particular, it examines religions in their differentiation from, and intersection with, other cultural systems, such as art, economy, law and politics. Due attention is given to paradigmatic case or comparative studies that exhibit a clear theoretical orientation with the empirical and historical data of religion and such aspects of religion as ritual, the religious imagination, constructions of tradition, iconography, or media. In addition, the formation of religious communities, their construction of identity, and their relation to society and the wider public are key issues of this series.
In Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba, Ivor L. Miller shows how African migrants and their political fraternities played a formative role in the history of Cuba. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, no large kingdoms controlled Nigeria and Cameroon's multilingual Cross River basin. Instead, each settlement had its own lodge of the initiation society called Ékpè, or “leopard,” which was the highest indigenous authority. Ékpè lodges ruled local communities while also managing regional and long-distance trade. Cross River Africans, enslaved and forcibly brought to colonial Cuba, reorganized their Ékpè clubs covertly in Havana and Matanzas into a mutual-...