As the result of centuries of transregional commerce by Muslim merchants and the attendant networks developed by Muslim scholarly families, Islam was well established in the Sahel and Upper Guinea Coast by the seventeenth century. Commercial markets, Muslim states and Islamic institutions developed during a long, generally peaceful process of...
This working paper surveys Islamic organizations, movements, and ideologies in Nigeria, roughly identifying them along the lines of Islamic traditionalism, Sufi orders (turuq lit. pathways), Salafi/Wahhabi revivalism2 modernist and insurgent Islam(ism), trado-Islamic and Christo-Islamic syncretism and deviant “Islamic” cultism. Previous academic studies of Nigerian Islam were often limited to the...
The apparent interest today in Nigerian visual culture has necessitated this paper. Therefore, its
primary focus shall be on the status of visual data from the burgeoning ephemera as a source of
historical knowledge. Using selected visual illustrations in the posters, cartoons and photographs
that were at the core of...
This paper examines participation in the public economy among two groups of African women, the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria and the Baganda of central Uganda, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The analysis considers many kinds of economic activity other than growing food for one’s own family, including independent income-generating...
Contemporary pattern of relationship between European Union and Africa-Caribbean and
Pacific countries reflects more than two centuries of unequal exchange. Unequal exchange
between the North and the South denotes the falling terms of trade for underdeveloped countries,
while correspondingly increasing the terms of trade for the developed countries. It has...
How could so many students of one scholar, one who is not immediately
remembered for his work on the arts, have produced so much major research on African
and African-American arts and artists in virtually all media? This question became the
genesis of this panel; but before turning to our...
Within Kenya’s political scene, racial and ethnic identities play a crucial role in creating division
in Muslims’ political engagement. Since independence, the racial and ethnic antagonism among
them has weakened a united Muslim’ voice whenever political issues concerning the community
arose. As Kenya was preparing for independence, a section of...
Writing this keynote address has been a fraught and sobering experience, heightened by
an acute feeling of stepping outside my scholarly comfort zone in east and central African
history before the 19th century CE. The discomfort encouraged me to shift positions, in this case
from that of a scholar writing...