Bound For Africa is the story of one man’s introduction to Africa at a time when much of the continent was in the grips of Cold War skirmishing between the free world and opposing communist forces of China and the Soviet Union. The author, frayed from three years of service in the Vietnam War, traveled to Africa intending to become a rural policeman in a quiet area of what was then Rhodesia. The counterinsurgency war flared soon after, a conflict which bore many of the same characteristics of the country he had just left. Asked to train new police recruits, Hubbard explains his assimilation into the force and Rhodesian society and tells of the challenges and satisfaction of leading and training young Africans – while providing an insider’s view of how the war was fought in the early days. Bound For Africa is a very personal story that recounts the frustrations living in the shadows of a political settlement which always seemed to be just beyond reach and the attitudes and spirit of the broad racial mixture which formed the national security forces. It will appeal to readers with an interest in the history of what is today Zimbabwe, a less-known chapter of a tragically unsuccessful war.

Diverging from the studies of southern African migrant labor that focus on particular workplaces and points of origin, Bound for Work looks at the multitude of forms and locales of migrant labor that individuals—under more or less coercive circumstances—engaged in over the course of their lives. Tracing Mozambican workers as they moved between different types of labor across Mozambique, Rhodesia, and South Africa, Zachary Kagan Guthrie places the multiple venues of labor in a single historical frame, expanding the regional historiography beyond the long shadow cast by the apartheid state while simultaneously exploring the continuities and fractures between South Africa, southern Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. Kagan Guthrie’s holistic approach to migrant labor yields several important conclusions. First, he highlights the importance of workers’ choices, explaining not just why people moved but why they moved in the ways they did: how they calculated the benefits of one destination over another, and how they decided when circumstances made it necessary to move again. Second, his attention to mobility gives a much clearer view of the mechanisms of power available to colonial authorities, as well as the limits to their effectiveness. Finally, Kagan Guthrie suggests a new explanation for the divergent trajectories of southern and sub-Saharan Africa in the aftermath of World War II.

Whereas most studies of migration focus on movement, this book examines the experience of staying put. It looks at young men living in a Soninke-speaking village in Gambia who, although eager to travel abroad for money and experience, settle as farmers, heads of families, businessmen, civic activists, or, alternatively, as unemployed, demoted youth. Those who stay do so not only because of financial and legal limitations, but also because of pressures to maintain family and social bases in the Gambia valley. ‘Stayers’ thus enable migrants to migrate, while ensuring the activities and values attached to rural life are passed on to the future generations.

Maritime History, Rhode Island

"Born to an orphan train child, Anna escaped her troubled roots as a Chicago nurse, but big-city glamour was not for her. After a blind, seven-year correspondence, she married a South African rancher, moved to the banks of the Orange River, then homesteaded in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Anna and her husband made the bricks for their home, battled the leopards and baboons that threatened their crops, · and negotiated the terms of daily existence with Natives. Tragedy led them to Mt. Selinda Mission where they labored to improve medicine and agriculture for all Rhodesians. Through Anna's letters, we share the tragedy and inspiration of her African journey"--Page 4 of cover

Bound Lives chronicles the lived experience of race relations in northern coastal Peru during the colonial era. Rachel Sarah O'Toole examines how Andeans and Africans negotiated and employed casta, and in doing so, constructed these racial categories. Royal and viceregal authorities separated "Indians" from "blacks" by defining each to specific labor demands. Casta categories did the work of race, yet, not all casta categories did the same type of work since Andeans, Africans, and their descendants were bound by their locations within colonialism and slavery. The secular colonial legal system clearly favored indigenous populations. Andeans were afforded greater protections as "threatened" native vassals. Despite this, in the 1640s during the rise of sugar production, Andeans were driven from their assigned colonial towns and communal property by a land privatization program. Andeans did not disappear, however; they worked as artisans, muleteers, and laborers for hire. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Andeans employed their legal status as Indians to defend their prerogatives to political representation that included the policing of Africans. As rural slaves, Africans often found themselves outside the bounds of secular law and subject to the judgments of local slaveholding authorities. Africans therefore developed a rhetoric of valuation within the market and claimed new kinships to protect themselves in disputes with their captors and in slave-trading negotiations. Africans countered slaveholders' claims on their time, overt supervision of their labor, and control of their rest moments by invoking customary practices. Bound Lives offers an entirely new perspective on racial identities in colonial Peru. It highlights the tenuous interactions of colonial authorities, indigenous communities, and enslaved populations and shows how the interplay between colonial law and daily practice shaped the nature of colonialism and slavery.