Finalist for the African Studies Association 2016 Melville J. Herskovits Award A detailed ethnographic and historical study of the implications of fast-track land reform in Zimbabwe from the perspective of those involvedin land occupations around Lake Mutirikwi, from the colonial period to the present day. The Mutirikwi river was dammed in the early 1960s to make Zimbabwe's second largest lake. This was a key moment in the Europeanisation of Mutirikwi's landscapes, which had begun with colonial land appropriations in the 1890s. ButAfrican landscapes were not obliterated by the dam. They remained active and affective. At independence in 1980, local clans reasserted ancestral land claims in a wave of squatting around Lake Mutirikwi. They were soon evicted asthe new government asserted control over the remaking of Mutirikwi's landscapes. Amid fast-track land reform in the 2000s, the same people returned again to reclaim the land. Many returned to the graves and ruins of past lives forged in the very substance of the soil, and even incoming war veterans and new farmers appealed to autochthonous knowledge to make safe their resettlements. This book explores those reoccupations and the complex contests overlandscape, water and belonging they provoked. The 2000s may have heralded a long-delayed re-Africanisation of Lake Mutirikwi, but just as African presence had survived the dam, so white presence remains active and affective through Rhodesian-era discourses, place-names and the materialities of ruined farms, contour ridging and old irrigation schemes. Through lenses focused on the political materialities of water and land, this book reveals how the remaking of Mutirikwi's landscapes has always been deeply entangled with changing strategies of colonial and postcolonial statecraft. It highlights how the traces of different pasts intertwine in contemporary politics through the active, enduring yet emergent, forms and substances of landscape. Joost Fontein is Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa.

Following unprecedented violence in 2007/8, Kenya introduced two classic transitional justice mechanisms: a truth commission and international criminal proceedings. Both are widely believed to have failed, but why? And what do their performances say about contemporary Kenya; the ways in which violent pasts persist; and the shortcomings of transitional justice? Using the lens of performance, this book analyses how transitional justice efforts are incapable of dealing with how unjust and violent pasts actually persist. Gabrielle Lynch reveals the story of an ongoing political struggle requiring substantive socio-economic and political change that transitional justice mechanisms can theoretically recommend, and which they can sometimes help to initiate and inform, but which they cannot implement or create, and can sometimes unintentionally help to reinforce.

The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Politics surveys the intersection of heritage and politics today and helps elucidate the political implications of heritage practices. It explicitly addresses the political and analyses tensions and struggles over the distribution of power. Including contributions from early-career scholars and more established researchers, the Handbook provides global and interdisciplinary perspectives on the political nature, significance and consequence of heritage and the various practices of management and interpretation. Taking a broad view of heritage, which includes not just tangible and intangible phenomena, but the ways in which people and societies live with, embody, experience, value and use the past, the volume provides a critical survey of political tensions over heritage in diverse social and cultural contexts. Chapters within the book consider topics such as: neoliberal dynamics; terror and mobilisations of fear and hatred; old and new nationalisms; public policy; recognition; denials; migration and refugeeism; crises; colonial and decolonial practice; communities; self- and personhood; as well as international relations, geopolitics, soft power and cooperation to address global problems. The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Politics makes an intervention into the theoretical debate about the nature and role of heritage as a political resource. It is essential reading for academics and students working in heritage studies, museum studies, politics, memory studies, public history, geography, urban studies and tourism.

Echoing the edgy, disjunctive, ever-emergent city of Nairobi that it explores, Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency strives to be several things-in-the-making. It is a historically and anthropologically minded examination of a shifting cityscape, an experimental, collaborative exercise in curated juxtaposition and assemblage, and an interdisciplinary, subjunctive urban ethnography. It brings together curated interventions by twenty-seven artists, scholars, and writers to trace Nairobi’s becoming. Methodologically experimental and multimodal, it seeks to balance an appreciation of Nairobi’s fragmented character while also recognizing its contingent coherency. Nairobi Becoming curates an eclectic collection of different voices and interventions to evoke something of the city's manifold guises and historicities – an urban mosaic of partial experiences as well as dawning possibilities for future becomings. Assembling scholarship, literature, creative non-fiction, and visual art, the contributions are arranged around particular themes, while resisting the urge to develop a singular coherent voice. Security – in its various guises – is the linking thread, the point of articulation that connects apparently disparate elements of Nairobi life, from sex work to roadbuilding, goat markets to funerals. Security is here an analytical operator: a concept that refracts the seemingly diverse modalities of life in Nairobi, and, with the related domains of uncertainty and contingency, brings the city’s dynamics of fragmentation and coherence to the surface in surprising ways. If confronting Nairobi’s will to coherence amidst the strains of fragmentation is the empirical and analytical challenge of Nairobi Becoming, then it is through collaboration and juxtaposition, curation and contrast, and the messiness of assemblage, that this book chimes with the fraught multiplicities of a city-in-the-making. As such, this book is also an exploration of the inevitable tension that exists between curatorial intent and the possibility of allowing each contribution to stand for itself.

This first academic study of the history of modern sports in Ethiopia during the imperial rule of the 20th century argues that modern sports offers new possibilities to explore the meanings of modernity in Africa. Providing an in-depth analysis of the role of sports in modern educational institutions, volunteer organizations, and urbanization processes, the author shows how agents, ideas and practices linked societal improvement and bodily improvement.

In October 2016, the Ethiopian administration declared a State of Emergency in response to anti-Government demonstrations and mass riots. Officially said to result from subversive activities channelled from Eritrea, Egypt and diasporic populations in the West, the evidence in fact suggests that the riots stemmed from widespread internal dissatisfaction. Large-scale land dispossessions following bilateral deals with transnational agribusiness, damming of major rivers, construction of sugar estates and industry parks as well as urban sprawl have put pressure on agricultural and rural areas. Today, displacement, drought and widening inequalities surround fears of severe food shortages and political instability. Drawing on informant testimonies, court archives, field reports and other sources, the author examines these developments in Ethiopia's lake region. He shows how transformations over time in spatial politics, state-society relations and the organization of production and exchange have influenced the situation today, and reveals the impact of these changes on a population of smallholder farmers for which agriculture is not only the mainstay of the national economy but a way of life. Getnet Bekele is Associate Professor of History at Oakland University, MI, where he teaches African History and the Environmental and Economic History of Africa and the Global South.

This book explores what happened to the homelands – in many ways the ultimate apartheid disgrace – after the fall of apartheid. The nine chapters contribute to understanding the multiple configurations that currently exist in areas formerly declared "homelands" or "Bantustans". Using the concept of frontier zones, the homelands emerge as areas in which the future of the South African postcolony is being renegotiated, contested and remade with hyper-real intensity. This is so because the many fault lines left over from apartheid (its loose ends, so to speak) – between white and black; between different ethnicities; between rich and poor; or differentiated by gender, generation and nationality; between "traditions" and "modernities" or between wilderness and human habitation – are particularly acute and condensed in these so-called "communal areas". Hence, the book argues that it is particularly in these settings that the postcolonial promise of liberation and freedom must face its test. As such, the book offers highly nuanced and richly detailed analyses that go to the heart of the diverse dilemmas of post-apartheid South Africa as a whole, but simultaneously also provides in condensed form an extended case study on the predicaments of African postcoloniality in general. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies.