The Making of the African Road offers an account of the long-distance road in Africa. Being a latecomer to automobility and far from saturated mass mobility, the African road continues to be open for diverging interpretations and creative appropriations. The road regime on the continent is thus still under construction, and it is made in more than one sense: physically, socially, politically, morally and cosmologically. The contributions to this volume provide first-hand anthropological insights into the infrastructural, economic, historical as well as experiential dimensions of the emerging orders of the African road. Contributors are: Kurt Beck, Amiel Bize, Michael Bürge, Luca Ciabarri, Gabriel Klaeger, Mark Lamont, Tilman Musch, Michael Stasik, Rami Wadelnour.

As early as the 1910s, African drivers in colonial Ghana understood the possibilities that using imported motor transport could further the social and economic agendas of a diverse array of local agents, including chiefs, farmers, traders, fishermen, and urban workers. Jennifer Hart's powerful narrative of auto-mobility shows how drivers built on old trade routes to increase the speed and scale of motorized travel. Hart reveals that new forms of labor migration, economic enterprise, cultural production, and social practice were defined by autonomy and mobility and thus shaped the practices and values that formed the foundations of Ghanaian society today. Focusing on the everyday lives of individuals who participated in this century of social, cultural, and technological change, Hart comes to a more sensitive understanding of the ways in which these individuals made new technology meaningful to their local communities and associated it with their future aspirations.

He concludes with a vivid assessment of the problems facing South Africa in the new era.

In addition to providing a vivid account of life on the road and imparting new insight into the daily existence of working musicians, this book illustrates how the fundamental issue of race influenced Albert's life, as well as the music of the era."

Introduction: Crossing the black earth -- The roads into Igbø Ilø : the making of an Ọhọri identity -- Roads to subversion : displaying independence and displacing authority in the early colonial era -- Going to the greens seller : Ọhọri communal expansion in the 1920s and 1930s -- "It has become a joy to go to Tollou" : reinterpreting the tools of French colonial développement -- Cementing identities : negotiating independence in a changing landscape -- Conclusion: Breathing with the road

Definitive and gripping narrative history of the Communist Party of South Africa.

“For anyone who wants to understand how the African economy really works, The Bright Continent is a good place to start” (Reuters). Dayo Olopade knew from personal experience that Western news reports on conflict, disease, and poverty obscure the true story of modern Africa. And so she crossed sub-Saharan Africa to document how ordinary people deal with their daily challenges. She found what cable news ignores: a continent of ambitious reformers and young social entrepreneurs driven by kanju—creativity born of African difficulty. It’s a trait found in pioneers like Kenneth Nnebue, who turned cheap VHS tapes into the multimillion-dollar film industry Nollywood. Or Ushahidi, a technology collective that crowdsources citizen activism and disaster relief. A shining counterpoint to conventional wisdom, The Bright Continent rewrites Africa’s challenges as opportunities to innovate, and celebrates a history of doing more with less as a powerful model for the rest of the world. “[An] upbeat study of development in Africa . . . The book is written more in wonder at African ingenuity than in anger at foreign incomprehension.” —The New Yorker “A hopeful narrative about a continent on the rise.” —The New York Times Book Review