This book explores a collective understanding of the perception and treatment of borders in Africa. The notion of boundary is universal as boundaries are also an important part of human social organization. Through the ages, boundaries have remained the ‘container’ by which national space is delineated and ‘contained’. For as long as there has been human society based on territoriality and space, there have been boundaries. With their dual character of exclusivism and inclusivism, states have proven to adopt a more structural approach to the respect of the former in consciousness of the esteem of international law governing sovereignty and territorial integrity. However, frontier peoples and their realities have often opted for the latter situation, imposing a more functionalist perception of these imaginary lines and prompting a border opinion shift to a more blurring form of representation and meaning in most African communities. This collective multidisciplinary effort of understanding how tangible and intangible borders have influenced Africa’s attitude and existence for ages is worthy in its own rights. The difference between what borders are and what they are not to a people is the mere product of their own estimations and practices, a disposition that leads the contributors to this book to study borders beyond states or nations and how borders are crossed or transferred from one point to the other for the convenience of their histories and being.

This book explores a collective understanding of the perception and treatment of borders in Africa. The notion of boundary is universal as boundaries are also an important part of human social organization. Through the ages, boundaries have remained the container by which national space is delineated and contained. For as long as there has been human society based on territoriality and space, there have been boundaries. With their dual character of exclusivism and inclusivism, states have proven to adopt a more structural approach to the respect of the former in consciousness of the esteem of international law governing sovereignty and territorial integrity. However, frontier peoples and their realities have often opted for the latter situation, imposing a more functionalist perception of these imaginary lines and prompting a border opinion shift to a more blurring form of representation and meaning in most African communities. This collective multidisciplinary effort of understanding how tangible and intangible borders have influenced Africas attitude and existence for ages is worthy in its own rights. The difference between what borders are and what they are not to a people is the mere product of their own estimations and practices, a disposition that leads the contributors to this book to study borders beyond states or nations and how borders are crossed or transferred from one point to the other for the convenience of their histories and being.

William Finnegan's compelling account of a year spent teaching in a colored high school, "across the line," in Cape Town, South Africa brings the irrationality and injustice of apartheid into focus for the American reader. A new preface, written after the author's observation of the historic 1994 elections evaluates the progress made--and not made--toward dismantling the apartheid system.

Interracial sex mattered to the British colonial state in West Africa. In Crossing the Color Line, Carina E. Ray goes beyond this fact to reveal how Ghanaians shaped and defined these powerfully charged relations. The interplay between African and European perspectives and practices, argues Ray, transformed these relationships into key sites for consolidating colonial rule and for contesting its hierarchies of power. With rigorous methodology and innovative analyses, Ray brings Ghana and Britain into a single analytic frame to show how intimate relations between black men and white women in the metropole became deeply entangled with those between black women and white men in the colony in ways that were profoundly consequential. Based on rich archival evidence and original interviews, the book moves across different registers, shifting from the micropolitics of individual disciplinary cases brought against colonial officers who “kept” local women to transatlantic networks of family, empire, and anticolonial resistance. In this way, Ray cuts to the heart of how interracial sex became a source of colonial anxiety and nationalist agitation during the first half of the twentieth century.

The award-winning debut by the acclaimed author of Cold New World. Named by The New York Times Book Review as a top ten nonfiction book of 1986, this seminal piece of cross-cultural journalism is an account of a white American's experience teaching black students in South Africaan account essential for its incisive coverage of the student anti-apartheid movement, as well as for the unpretentious charms of its prose.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Barbarian Days, this narrative nonfiction classic documents the rising inequality and cultural alienation that presaged the crises of today. “A status report on the American Dream [that] gets its power [from] the unpredictable, rich specifics of people’s lives.”—Time “[William] Finnegan’s real achievement is to attach identities to the steady stream of faceless statistics that tell us America’s social problems are more serious than we want to believe.”—The Washington Post A fifteen-year-old drug dealer in blighted New Haven, Connecticut; a sleepy Texas town transformed by crack; Mexican American teenagers in Washington State, unable to relate to their immigrant parents and trying to find an identity in gangs; jobless young white supremacists in a downwardly mobile L.A. suburb. William Finnegan spent years embedded with families in four communities across the country to become an intimate observer of the lives he reveals in Cold New World. What emerges from these beautifully rendered portraits is a prescient and compassionate book that never loses sight of its subjects’ humanity. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST NONFICTION SELECTION Praise for Cold New World “Unlike most journalists who drop in for a quick interview and fly back out again, Finnegan spent many weeks with families in each community over a period of several years, enough time to distinguish between the kind of short-term problems that can beset anyone and the longer-term systemic poverty and social disintegration that can pound an entire generation into a groove of despair.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “The most remarkable of William Finnegan’s many literary gifts is his compassion. Not the fact of it, which we have a right to expect from any personal reporting about the oppressed, but its coolness, its clarity, its ductile strength. . . . Finnegan writes like a dream. His prose is unfailingly lucid, graceful, and specific, his characterization effortless, and the pull of his narrative pure seduction.”—The Village Voice “Four astonishingly intimate and evocative portraits. . . . All of these stories are vividly, honestly and compassionately told. . . . While Cold New World may make us look in new ways at our young people, perhaps its real goal is to make us look at ourselves.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer