Africa is a continent gripped by civil wars and widespread famine. The causes of many of the continent's problems are deep rooted and can be traced to Africa's colonial past, when European powers divided the spoils of the continent into separate sovereign states. The African Inheritance examines the effect this "balkanization" of Africa has had, and is having, on the political and economic well-being of the continent. From a brief history of pre-colonial Africa and its subsequent European partition and inevitable decolonization, the book discusses the consequences of such an inheritance: small and weak states, destructive secessionist movements, irredentism and African imperialism. Attempts to tackle these problems and assert independent development are inhibited by the colonial inheritance.

Weaving sound historical research with rich ethnographic insight, An Impossible Inheritance tells the story of the emergence, disavowal, and afterlife of a distinctive project in transcultural psychiatry initiated at the Fann Psychiatric Clinic in Dakar, Senegal during the 1960s and 1970s. Today’s clinic remains haunted by its past and Katie Kilroy-Marac brilliantly examines the complex forms of memory work undertaken by its affiliates over a sixty year period. Through stories such as that of the the ghost said to roam the clinic’s halls, the mysterious death of a young doctor sometimes attributed to witchcraft, and the spirit possession ceremonies that may have taken place in Fann’s courtyard, Kilroy-Marac argues that memory work is always an act of the imagination and a moral practice with unexpected temporal, affective, and political dimensions. By exploring how accounts about the Fann Psychiatric Clinic and its past speak to larger narratives of postcolonial and neoliberal transformation, An Impossible Inheritance examines the complex relationship between memory, history, and power within the institution and beyond.

A major reassessment of the development of race and subjecthood in the British Atlantic Focusing on Jamaica, Britain’s most valuable colony in the Americas by the mid-eighteenth century, this book explores the relationship between racial classifications and the inherited rights and privileges associated with British subject status. Brooke Newman reveals the centrality of notions of blood and blood mixture to evolving racial definitions and sexual practices in colonial Jamaica and to legal and political debates over slavery and the rights of imperial subjects on both sides of the Atlantic. Weaving together a diverse range of sources, Newman shows how colonial racial ideologies rooted in fictions of blood ancestry at once justified permanent, hereditary slavery for Africans and barred members of certain marginalized groups from laying claim to British liberties on the basis of hereditary status. This groundbreaking study demonstrates that challenges to an Atlantic slave system underpinned by distinctions of blood had far-reaching consequences for British understandings of race, gender, and national belonging.

Examines the effect of Africa's colonial past on the present political and economic well-being of the continent. The consequences of such an inheritance are discussed: small and weak states, destructive movements and African imperialism.

This book examines the practice of widow inheritance in order to explore the intersection between power, gender and sexualities in Kenya. Using widow inheritance amongst the Luo of Kenya as a case study, the book explores the role of body politics in the construction of gendered subjects and nations. Widow Inheritance and Contested Citizenship in Kenya unpacks how 'respectable femininities' and 'wayward sexualities' become the 'sites' within which national and state politics are ritualized and where tensions resulting from non-hegemonic performances of both gender and sexuality are 'resolved'. The empirical research that underpins this book is qualitative and grounded in feminist methodology, challenging the erasure of women's narratives in hegemonic epistemologies. Widow Inheritance and Contested Citizenship in Kenya will be of interest to students and scholars of African gender studies and women's rights.

Studies of African economic development frequently focus on the daunting challenges the continent faces. From recurrent crises to ethnic conflicts and long-standing corruption, a raft of deep-rooted problems has led many to regard the continent as facing many hurdles to raise living standards. Yet Africa has made considerable progress in the past decade, with a GDP growth rate exceeding five percent in some regions. The African Successes series looks at recent improvements in living standards and other measures of development in many African countries with an eye toward identifying what shaped them and the extent to which lessons learned are transferable and can guide policy in other nations and at the international level. The second volume in the series, African Successes: Human Capital turns the focus toward Africa’s human capital deficit, measured in terms of health and schooling. It offers a close look at the continent’s biggest challenges, including tropical disease and the spread of HIV.