This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This module is meant to introduce students to the key processes and dynamics of sub-Saharan African history during the past two centuries. The course covers three chronological periods: the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial eras. In their study of the pre-colonial period students, will especially familiarize themselves with the changing nature of African slavery and the nineteenth-century reconstruction of political authority in the face of economic, environmental and military challenges. The colonial period forms the second section of the course. Here, students will gain an understanding of the modalities of the colonial conquest, the creation and operation of colonial economies and the socio-cultural engineering brought about by European rule. The study of the colonial period will end with an analysis of African nationalisms and decolonisation. In the final part of the course, students will develop an understanding of the challenges faced by independent African nations. The nature of the post-colonial African state will be explored alongside such topical issues as the Rwandan Genocide and the African AIDS epidemic.
J. Iliffe Africans: The History of a Continent, 1995
B. Freund The Making of Contemporary Africa: The Development of African Society since 1800, 1998 edition
P. Chabal & J.-P. Daloz Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument, 1999
F. Cooper Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present, 2002
P. Nugent Africa since Independence: A Comparative History, 2004
The Cambridge History of Africa, vols. 5 to 8
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
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