IAI

Africa – new journal issues

For details of the current issue, see Edinburgh University Press .

Africa – Editorial update

Africa has recruited a co-editor and established an Editorial Advisory Board. Read the full editorial details here.

Africa: Impact Factor

The ISI Thomson Impact Factor of the IAI’s flagship journal Africa has risen to 0.636, the highest on record. Africa is ranked 29 out of 61 journals in the Anthropology category and 11 out of 38 in the Area Studies category. The Cited Half-Life remains at the maximum 10 years.

Special issue: Interpreting Land Markets in Africa

Edited by Jean-Philippe Colin and Philip Woodhouse.

Land is of fundamental concern in economic and political development; however, empirical studies remain sparse. These papers address the role of the state in the reform of customary land rights, customary land tenure, and ‘informal’ transactions, as well as questions relating to discourses of fairness or justice of land access, and the linkage of land rights to autochthony, ethnicity and citizenship.

This volume focuses on the study of knowledge in Africa. From the perspective of Africa as a self-confident, forward-looking centre of knowledge-production, the authors engage with knowledge in practice, and a multiplicity of channels for the constitution of knowledge and the negotiation of expertise are explored. See the full Table of Contents.

Africa Bibliography 2008

Edited by T. A. Barringer.

A new volume of the institute’s leading bibliographical instrument in African studies, published in December 2009, is available. The opening article in this year’s volume considers what might be the role of bibliographies in increasing structured access to the plethora of scholarly information to, within and from Africa in the current information era, which has exacerbated the gap between developed and developing countries’ access to information for research and education. In an attempt to provide at least a partial answer to this question, Susan Murray provides a case study of African Journals OnLine (AJOL).

Read the essay here.

See Edinburgh University Press for further details.

Obafemi Awolowo published in North American and Nigerian editions.

Obafemi Awolowo and the Making of Remo by Insa Nolte, a monograph in the International African Library series has been published in North America by Africa World Press. For further details, see Africa World Press.

A Nigerian edition is being published in 2010 by BookBuilders: Editions Africa, based at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. A group of citizens from Remo are supporting the publication. For further details, contact sk111(AT)soas.ac.uk.

International African Library titles win book prizes.

Two books published in the International African Library series have won major awards in 2009.

David Pratten: Man Leopard Murders: history and society in colonial Nigeria has been awarded the Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology awarded by the Royal Anthropological Institute for works published in 2007. Click here for details.

Ben Jones: Beyond the State in Rural Uganda has been selected as the winner of the 2009 Elliott P. Skinner Book Award presented by the Association for Africanist Anthropology. Click here for details.

The International African Institute extends its warm congratulations to both scholars.

Awolowo book launch

In the centenary year of the birth of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the International African Institute, in collaboration with the Obafemi Awolowo Foundation, and Edinburgh University Press launched Obafemi Awolowo and the Making of Remo: the Local Politics of a Nigerian Nationalist by Insa Nolte, at an event at SOAS in October 2009. Guest speakers were Professor J.D.Y. Peel, General Editor, International African Library series, and Dr Olatokunbo Awolowo Dosumu, Executive Director, Obafemi Awolowo Foundation. See invitation (PDF) for further details.

The launch was reviewed by the Nigerian Tribune ‘Arts and Review’ section. Read the review here (PDF). Reproduced by permission of the Nigerian Tribune.

Remembering
John Middleton, Honorary Fellow, IAI

John Middleton (1921–2009) The Institute notes and commemorates the sad and irretrievable loss of John Middleton who passed away on 27 February 2009 at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Read more.

Aidan Southall

The Institute wishes to acknowledge the death of Aidan Southall, in May 2009, aged 88. Aidan Southall was internationally renowned for his work on the Nilotic-speaking Alur of northern Uganda. His first book, Alur Society, was a path-breaking approach to historical ethnography. It proposed the thesis of the segmentary state which in turn was adopted by countless scholars thereafter, and which fuelled later anthropological and historical interest in the evolution of the state.

Alur Society. A Study in Processes and Types of Domination was re-published in 2004 for the IAI by LIT Verlag with an extensive new Introduction by David Parkin.

Africa journal – special offers

The IAI in association with Edinburgh University Press is pleased to offer free access to the electronic edition of its journal Africa to libraries, research and educational and non-profit institutions in Africa. Click here for more information (PDF).

Deeply discounted subscriptions to the journal are available to ASAUK and Royal African Society members. Please contact journals[AT]eup.ed.ac.uk for further information.

African Arguments Online

African Arguments Online has been established to promote the IAI’s African Arguments series.

The International African Library

IAI author, Ben Jones, is providing in-depth background analysis to the Guardian’s ‘Katine’ development project in Uganda. Read more.

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.

New titles

Reaction to Conquest. Effect of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa. New introductions by James G. Ellison and Francis Wilson
Monica Hunter

This study by Monica Hunter Wilson, originally published in 1936, and reissued in a second edition in 1961, was one of the first to provide a detailed account of an African people in the process of change from rural cattle-raising tribesmen to urban and agricultural wage-earners in a European-dominated economic system. This new edition is published on the centenary of this pioneering anthropologist’s birth.

ISBN 9783894738754 c.350pp. 2009

Published for the IAI by LIT Verlag

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Climate Change in Africa
Camilla Toulmin

Within Africa, it is likely to be the continent's poorest people who are hit hardest by climate change. This accessible and authoritative study uses case studies to look at issues ranging from natural disasters to biofuels, from conflict to the oil industry.

Camilla Toulmin, with her long experience of working in rural Africa, her scholarship and her leadership of the IIED, is especially qualified to analyse and explain the issues and to point to the policies which the world must follow. This is very clear, reasoned and thoughtful book which will be of great importance in the crucial discussions which lie ahead. –Lord Stern of Brentford (Sir Nicholas Stern), Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Camilla Toulmin is Director of the International Institute for Environment & Development.

ISBN 9781848130159 160pp. Sept 2009

Published for the IAI by Zed Books.

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Struggles for Citizenship in Africa
Bronwen Manby

Hundreds of thousands of people living in Africa find themselves non-citizens in the only state they have ever known. Ultimately such policies can lead to economic and political disaster, and war. This book brings together new material from across Africa of the most egregious examples of citizenship discrimination, and makes the case for urgent reform of the law.

Ever more people in Africa are excluded from citizenship through a complex intertwinement of colonial categorizations and post-colonial political tricks, coupled with mounting xenophobia… Bronwen Manby and her team offer a deeper understanding of the complex backgrounds and striking variations involved, vividly evoking the plights of millions who have to do without any state protection. A most convincing testimony to the urgency of this issue. – Peter Geschiere.

Bronwen Manby works with the Africa Governance Monitoring and Advocacy Project (AfriMAP), an initiative of the Open Society Institute network's four African foundations.

ISBN 9781848133525, 208pp. Aug 2009

Published for the IAI by Zed Books.

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Readings in African Modernity
Edited by Peter Geschiere, Birgit Meyer, Peter Pels

Scholars have felt the urgency to understand modernity in present-day Africa, and have tried to make sense of these desires to ‘develop’. Yet, people often regard ‘modernity’ as an abomination as much as a blessing, and yearn nostalgically for a vanished past. These varied forms of modernity are the focus of this volume.

9780852558980, 240pp. Oct 2008, £15.95

Published for the IAI by James Currey Publishers.

Click here for further details and ordering information.

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Media and Identity in Africa
Edited by Kimani Njogu and John F M Middleton

Studies of the media in Africa, incorporating both African and international perspectives, are few. The thirty papers collected here were presented at a seminar organised and hosted by the Kenya-based Twaweza Communications and the International African Institute in Nairobi in 2004. Read more.

9780748635221, 320pp. Apr 2009

Published for the IAI by Edinburgh University Press .

Published in North America by Indiana University Press.

Click here for further details and ordering information.

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Obafemi Awolowo and the Making of Remo: the local politics of a Nigerian nationalist
Insa Nolte

This book examines the evolution of a distinctive Yoruba community, Remo, and the central role played in this process by the Remo-born Nationalist politician and Yoruba leader Obafemi Awolowo (1909–87). Read more.

ISBN 9780748638956 296pp.

Published for the IAI by Edinburgh University Press .

Click here for further details and ordering information.