This groundbreaking book explores the history and the cultural context of family claims to power in the Bamako kafu, or state (located in contemporary Mali in West Africa), primarily during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Perinbam argues that the absence of precise information on the Bamako kafu's political status during this period empowered families to manipulate the myths, rituals, and ancestral legends?as well as belief systems?so that their claims to state power appeared incontrovertible. The French, on reaching the region, accepted these representations of power.Although the author's historical data focus mainly on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mythical recountings beyond this historical grid?ranging across approximately one thousand years and including large-scale migrations throughout the West African Sahel?provide insights into the processes by which many of these ethnic identities were subject to reconfiguration and reinvention. Within this historical-mythical matrix, Perinbam offers new insights into the reconstruction of Mande identities, their cultures (material and otherwise), political systems, and various social fields, as well as their past. Instead of rigid ethnic identities?sometimes identified in the historical and anthropological literature as ?Mandingo,? ?Malinke,? or ?Bambara??the author argues that variable ethnographic identities were more often than not mediated in accordance with a number of mythic and historical contingencies, most notably the respective states into which the families were drawn, as well as state formation, maintenance, and renewal, not to mention meaning sensitive to political, generational, and gender challenges. With the arrival of the French in the late nineteenth century and the Mande incorporation into the French colonial state, familial identities once more readjusted.The careful research and original scholarship of Family Identity and the State in the Bamako Kafu make it a significant contribution to the histories of West Africa, the African Diaspora, and the United States.

Landscapes, Sources and Intellectual Projects of the West African Past offers a comprehensive assessment of new directions in the historiography of West Africa. With twenty-four chapters by leading researchers in the study of West African history and cultures, the volume examines the main trends in multiple fields including the critical interpretation of Arabic sources; new archaeological surveys of trans-Saharan trade; the discovery of sources in Latin America relating to pan-Atlantic histories; and the continuing analysis of oral histories. The volume is dedicated to Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias, whose work inspired the intellectual reorientations discussed in its chapters and stands as the clearest formulation of the book’s central focus on the relationship between political conjunctures and the production of sources. Contributors are: Benjamin Acloque, Karin Barber, Seydou Camara, Mamadou Diawara, Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias, François-Xavier Fauvelle, Nikolas Gestrich, Toby Green, Bruce Hall, Jan Jansen, Shamil Jeppie, Daouda Keita, Murray Last, Robin Law, Camille Lefebvre, Paul Lovejoy, Ghislaine Lydon, Carlos Magnavita, Sonja Magnavita, Kevin MacDonald, Thomas McCaskie, Ann McDougall, Daniela Moreau, Mauro Nobili, Insa Nolte, Abel-Wedoud Ould-Cheikh, Benedetta Rossi, Charles Stewart.

Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than fifteen million people were uprooted from West Africa and enslaved in the Trans-Saharan and Transatlantic slave systems The state of Gajaage, located on the West African hinterland, offered a doorway to the Atlantic Ocean and played a central role in the wide-scale trade system that connected the histories of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Focussing on the Soninke of Gajaaga, Makhroufi Ousmane Traoré demonstrates how their resistance to the slave trades led to the formation of a united community bound by an awareness of identity. This original study expands our understanding of the various modes of resistance West Africans employed to stem the encroaching tide of Arab imperializing efforts, European mercantile capitalism, and the Atlantic slave trade, whilst also highlighting how ethnic and religious identities were constructed and mobilized in the region.

States of Marriage shows how throughout the colonial period in French Sudan (present-day Mali) the institution of marriage played a central role in how the empire defined its colonial subjects as gendered persons with certain attendant rights and privileges. The book is a modern history of the ideological debates surrounding the meaning of marriage, as well as the associated legal and sociopolitical practices in colonial and postcolonial Mali. It is also the first to use declassified court records regarding colonialist attempts to classify and categorize traditional marriage conventions in the southern region of the country. In French Sudan, as elsewhere in colonial Africa, the first stage of marriage reform consisted of efforts to codify African marriages, bridewealth transfers, and divorce proceedings in public records, rendering these social arrangements “legible” to the colonial administration. Once this essential legibility was achieved, other, more forceful interventions to control and reframe marriage became possible. This second stage of marriage reform can be traced through transformations in and by the colonial court system, African engagements with state-making processes, and formations of “gender justice.” The latter refers to gender-based notions of justice and legal rights, typically as defined by governing and administrative bodies as well as by socioxadpolitical communities. Gender justice went through a period of favoring the rights of women, to a period of favoring patriarchs, to a period of emphasizing the power of the individual—but all within the context of a paternalistic and restrictive colonial state.

Authors engage with contemporary anthropological, historical and archaeological perspectives to examine how ideas of self-understanding, belonging, and difference in ancient Africa were made and unmade in their intersection with other salient domains of social experience: states, landscapes, discourses, memory, technology, politics, and power.

An original, rigorously researched volume that questions long-accepted paradigms concerning land ownership and its use in Africa.

Is the phenomenon of state failure better understood through a focus on the regional context? To what extent may studies of regional security benefit from a focus on the capacities and vulnerabilities of the states involved? This title addresses these questions.