Seminar Reading and Questions
Seminar A: Introduction
- Explain the paradigm shifts within the study of African history that have taken place over the past five decades.
- Was Trevor-Roper correct to assert that African history was the analysis of ‘the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes’?
Seminar B: Eastern Africa before Colonialism
- Discuss the significance of slavery to the Eastern African region.
- Explain the strength of statecraft in present-day Uganda during the period prior to colonial rule.
- To what extent was Eastern Africa integrated into an Indian Ocean world?
Seminar C: Scramble or Conquest?
- Which is a more accurate description of the establishment of European rule in Eastern Africa; scramble or conquest?
- Explore the impact of the establishment of European rule upon African communities.
Seminar D: Ethnicity
- To what extent were ethnicities invented during the colonial period?
- Using a specific example, explain the changing nature of ethnicity over the duration of the period examined by this course.
Seminar E: The Civilising Mission?
- What was the civilising mission?
- Why did missionary-led attempts in Kenya to restrict the practice of clitoridectomy cause such controversy?
Seminar F: Settlers, Race and Empire
- Is ‘parasites in paradise’ an accurate description of settler relations with indigenous communities in Eastern Africa?
- Did the nature of colonialism in states without sizeable settler populations differ from that in Kenya?
Out of Africa to be shown to whole class at some point in this week. The film will then be discussed in the seminar groups. In preparation for the class please read: David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of the Empire (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London: 2005), pp.77-86 and sufficient reading from listed under the ‘Settler Colonialism’ lecture so as to be able to discuss the film and its representation of colonial Kenya.
Seminar G: Visit to Modern Record Centre
Seminar H: Late-Colonialism and its Legacies
- To what extent should we understand post-independence political debate as post-colonial?
- Explain the collapse of the first generation of multi-party systems after independence.
- What effects have structural adjustment programmes had on political and social life in Eastern Africa?
Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (Yale University Press, New Haven: 1994), chapter 8. Either: Daniel Branch & Nicholas Cheeseman, ‘The Politics of Control in Kenya: Understanding the Bureaucratic-Executive State, 1952-78’, Review of African Political Economy, 33, 107 (2006), pp.11-31. OR Leander Schneider, ‘Colonial Legacies and Postcolonial Authoritarianism in Tanzania: Connects and Disconnects’, African Studies Review, 49, 1 (2006), pp.93-118.
Seminar I: Nationalism
- What is nationalism?
- To what extent should we understand late-colonial politics as nationalist?
- Did Europe ‘under-develop’ Africa?
- Is Young correct to assume development was supplanted by kleptocracy as the guiding principle of statecraft?