The International African Institute (IAI) aims to promote the scholarly study of Africa's history, societies and cultures. The institute realizes its aims primarily by means of scholarly publishing. Read more about us.
The IAI publishes the long established and prestigious journal, Africa, the annual Africa Bibliography, the International African Library series, the African Arguments series; and the Readings in… series, for use in tertiary level teaching of African studies.
NEWS
Africa article awarded inaugural AEGIS Gerti Hesseling prize
The IAI is proud to announce that Kojo Amanor’s article ‘Family values, land sales and agricultural commodification in south-eastern Ghana’, published in Africa 80(1), 2010 was awarded the inaugural Gerti Hessling prize for the best article published in an African studies journal by an African scholar at the AEGIS ECAS conference held in Uppsala in June 2011. Kojo Amanor is Associate Professor at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana.
The full statement from the jury is available here.
Full text of the article is available by following this link to Cambrigde Journals.
The award ceremony can also be viewed at Cambridge Journals, click here to see the video.
Africa 2010 Impact Factor
Thomson Reuters (ISI) has recently released its Impact Factor data for 2010. Africa’s Impact Factor is now 0.824, ranking the journal as the 3rd highest African studies journal in the Area Studies category and 7/60 journals in this category overall. In the Anthropology category, the journal is ranked 36/75 journals.
Africa – ‘African local intellectuals’ strand – call for papers
The aim of this strand of the journal is to introduce and analyse texts – whether oral, manuscript or print – produced by authors outside the literary or academic mainstream. Such texts might include notebooks, diaries, letters, local works of history, philosophy or literature, performed or written poetry, newspaper serials and a host of other forms.
To coincide with the journal’s move to journal Cambridge University Press in 2011, we are taking this opportunity to re-launch the ‘African local intellectuals’ strand and invite further contributions. Read more ...
IAL book scoops Amaury Talbot prize
Ramon Sarro’s The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast: iconoclasm done and undone has been declared the joint-winner of the 2009 Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology. The Institute extends its congratulations to the author.
ASAUK Writing Workshop in Nigeria
14 September 2011, Osun State University (UNIOSUN), Osogbo, Nigeria
The IAI is pleased to be supporting a writing workshop aiming to assist young scholars to prepare material for publication in international journals. For further details see the workshop PDF.
IAI launches new special issue:
Print Cultures, Nationalisms and Publics of the Indian Ocean
Africa. Journal of the International African Institute
With guest editors Isabel Hofmeyr and Preben Kaarsholm
Monday 28 February 2011, 6pm, Brunei Gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
For further details, see the invitation (PDF).
Click here to see some photos of the event.
Africa Bibliography is now available as an online searchable database. Sign up to a 15-day free trial. See http://africabibliography.cambridge.org/.
Digitisation of Africa Bibliography
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The IAI is pleased to announce that from 2011 this unique and comprehensive reference work will be available as a searchable online database. Six volumes from 2004/5 to 2009/10 (current volume) are being published initially, with all previous volumes from 1984 being added by 2012. Subsequent new annual volumes will be published in both online and print formats. |
The online bibliography has been developed by the IAI together with Cambridge University Press. It fulfills the Institute’s long-held ambition to adapt this major reference work and contribution to African studies scholarship to the modern information era, making it more readily available to students and scholars throughout the world.
For further details see the Africa Bibliography page or download the publicity flyer (PDF) or press release (PDF).
International African Library series moves to Cambridge University Press
From 2011, the International African Library monograph series is to be published by Cambridge University Press. The first book in the series, volume 41 being published by Cambridge in January 2011, is a study of war and the crisis of youth in Sierra Leone by Krijn Peters. The next book is the series, forthcoming in 2011, is AIDS, Politics and Music in South Africa by Fraser McNeill.
IAI and Cambridge University Press
The International African Institute is pleased to announce that from 2011 its journal Africa will be published for the Institute by Cambridge University Press. The journal will include an archive of all issues from 1928. For further details, please see the press release or the publicity leaflet (PDF).
New publications
Getting Somalia Wrong? Faith, War and Hope in a Shattered State
Mary Harper
Somalia is a comprehensively failed state, representing a threat to itself, its neighbours and the wider world. In recent years, it has become notorious for the piracy off its coast and the rise of Islamic extremism, opening it up as a new 'Southern front' in the war on terror. At least that is how it is inevitably presented by politicians and in the media. Mary Harper argues however that viewing Somalia through the prism of al-Qaeda risks further destabilizing the country and the entire Horn of Africa, She also shows that Somalia is far from being a failed society: in reality, alternative forms of business, justice, education and local politics have survived and even flourished.
The most accessible and accurate account available of the contemporary Somali world, pirates and all. – Ioan Lewis
Mary Harper is Africa Editor for BBC World Service News.
Published for the IAI by Zed Books.
ISBN 978-1842779330, 139 pp, February 2012.
AIDS, Politics, and Music in South Africa
Fraser G. McNeill
This book offers an original anthropological approach to the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, demonstrating why AIDS interventions in the former homeland of Venda have failed – and possibly even been counterproductive. It does so through a series of ethnographic encounters, from kings to condoms, which expose the ways in which biomedical understanding of the virus have been rejected by – and incorporated into – local understandings of health, illness, sex and death. The policy implications are clear: African worldviews must be taken seriously if AIDS interventions in Africa are to become successful.
McNeill's book brings fresh, illuminating, and, at times, revelatory material to a host of questions: the impact of chronic unemployment on the moral lives of the young; the politics of tradition in post-apartheid South Africa; and, of course, the highly contested meanings of HIV/AIDS. – Jonny Steinberg
Fraser McNeill is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Published for the IAI by Cambridge University Press.
ISBN: 9781107009912, c. 300pp, August 2011.
Africa's Odious Debts: How Foreign Loans and Capital Flight Bled a Continent
Leonce Ndikumana and James Boyce
The extent of capital flight from sub-Saharan Africa is remarkable: more than $700 billion in the past four decades. But Africa s foreign assets remain private and hidden, while its foreign debts are public, owed by the people of Africa through their governments. This book reveals the intimate links between foreign loans and capital flight. More than half of the money borrowed by African governments in recent decades departed in the same year, with a significant portion of it winding up in private accounts at the very banks that provided the loans in the first place. Meanwhile, debt-service payments continue to drain scarce resources from Africa, cutting into funds available for public health and other needs. The authors argue that African governments should repudiate these odious debts from which their people derived no benefit, and that the international community should assist in this effort.
James K. Boyce and Leonce Ndikumana are both professors of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Published for the IAI by Zed Books.
ISBN 9781848134591 160pp, October 2011
Congo Masquerade. The Political Culture of Aid Inefficiency and Reform Failure
Theodore Trefon
Congo Masquerade is about mismanagement, hypocrisy and powerlessness in what has proved to be one of Africa's most troublesome and volatile states. In this scathing study of catastrophic aid inefficiency, Trefon argues that whilst others have examined war and plunder in the Great Lakes region, none have yet evaluated the imported 'template format' reform package pieced together to introduce democracy and improve the well-being of ordinary Congolese. It has, the book demonstrates, been for years an almost unmitigated failure due to the ingrained political culture of corruption amongst the Congolese elite, abetted by the complicity and incompetence of international partners.
Theodore Trefon is a Congo expert specializing in the politics of state-society relations. He heads the Contemporary History Section of the Belgian Royal Museum for Central Africa.
Published for the IAI by Zed Books.
ISBN: 9781848138360, 160pp, September 2011
Africa Bibliography 2009
Edited and compiled by T. A. Barringer
A new volume of the institute’s leading bibliographical instrument in African studies, published in November 2010, is available.
See Edinburgh University Press for further details.
War and the Crisis of Youth in Sierra Leone
Krijn Peters
The armed conflict in Sierra Leone and the extreme violence of the main rebel faction – the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) – have challenged scholars and members of the international community to come up with explanations. Up to this point though, conclusions about the nature of the war and the RUF are mainly drawn from accounts of civilian victims or based on interpretations and rationalisations offered by commentators who had access to only one side of the war. The present study addresses this currently incomplete understanding of the conflict by focusing on the direct experiences and interpretations of protagonists, paying special attention to the hitherto neglected, and often under-age, cadres of the RUF. The data presented challenge the widely canvassed notion of the Sierra Leone conflict as a war motivated by ‘greed, not grievance’. Rather, it points to a rural crisis expressed in terms of unresolved tensions between landowners and marginalised rural youth – an unaddressed crisis of youth that currently manifests itself in many African countries – further reinforced and triggered by a collapsing patrimonial state.
Krijn Peters, a rural development sociologist by background, is a lecturer in the Department of Political and Cultural Studies at Swansea University, Wales.
Published for the IAI by Cambridge University Press.
ISBN: 9781107004191 c.270pp. January 2011
Special Issue: Print cultures, nationalisms and publics of the Indian Ocean
Edited by Isabel Hofmeyr and Preben Kaarsholm
The Indian Ocean region is becoming an increasingly important geo-political arena, and is making its presence felt across a range of disciplines. This special issue of Africa provides an overview of emerging trends in the rich field of Indian Ocean studies and draws out their implications for scholars of Africa. The focus is on the role of print and visual culture in constituting public spheres and nationalisms in, across and between the societies around the Ocean. The themes addressed unfold between Africa and India as well as along the African coast from KwaZulu-Natal to the Arab world. Special attention is paid to interaction between African and Indian nationalisms and to the transnational dynamics of Islam. Bringing in an Indian Ocean perspective, the contributions both extend debates on print culture, nationalism and publics within African studies, and demonstrate how research on the Indian Ocean can be enriched through insights from East and southern African studies.
Published for the IAI by Cambridge University Press.
ISSN 0001-9720, 172pp.Africa Vol 81 No. 1 February 2011
Chocolate Nations: Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa
Orla Ryan
Chocolate is one of the world's most everyday luxuries, yet the story behind the chocolate bar is rarely one of luxury. The crop provides a lifeline for millions of farmers in West Africa, which produces about 70% of the world's cocoa and is crucial to the economies of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. Chocolate Nations examines the causes of farmer poverty, placing the story of these producers in the context of the commodity producers' global battle to make more money from their crops. Includes accounts from cocoa farmers and chocolate industry insiders, and addresses such crucial issues as child labour, speculation and the ineffectiveness of Fair Trade as a catch-all solution.
Read a review of this book published in the Guardian here.
Published for the IAI by Zed Books.
ISBN: 9781848130050, c.200pp, Jan 2011
