Charles Ambler

Liquor and labor in Southern Africa

In June 1976 political demonstrations in the black township of Soweto exploded into an insurrection that would continue sporadically and spread to urban areas across South Africa. In their assault on apartheid the youths who spearheaded the rebellion attacked and often destroyed the state institutions that they linked to their oppression: police stations, government offices, schools, and state-owned liquor outlets. In Soweto alone during the first days of the revolt protestors smashed and burned eighteen beerhalls and a similar number of bottle stores; as the rebellion spread more were destroyed. This study sets out to demonstrate that liquor outlets were not simply convenient symbols of oppression. The anger that launched gasoline bombs into beerhalls across South Africa had specific origins in deep and complicated struggles over the control of alcohol production and consumption in South Africa. Conflict over alcohol has continuously intruded upon the lives of the black residents of southern African towns, cities, and labor compounds and upon the rural communities to which these people traced their origins. Yet the subject has received little systematic scholarly attention until now. In Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa scholars explore the complex relationship between alcohol use and the emergence of the modern urban-industrial system. In examining the role of alcohol in social control and the state, they also reveal the vibrant subcultures nurtured in beerhalls and underground shebeens and expose the bitter conflicts over alcohol that run along the fault lines of age, gender, class, and ethnicity.

The Mau Mau War in Perspective

Although Mau Mau was militarily crushed in the mid-fifties, the struggle for land rights was only contained in Kenyas post-independence era. Kikuyu squatters on European estates who formed the backbone of this movement are the main subject of this book. Furedi breaks new ground in following the story of the participants of the rural movement during the decade after the defeat of Mau Mau. New archival sources and interviews provide exciting material on the mechanics of decolonisation and on the containment of rural radicalism in Kenya. North America: Ohio U Press; Kenya: EAEPBR>

A School in the Interior African Studies: Engagement and Interdisciplinarity

Abstract: This article explores the intellectual traditions of African studies, focusing on the central principles of interdisciplinarity and commitment to social and racial justice. Tracing the origins of the field to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African is t intellectuals such as Edward Blyden, it investigates these traditions historically and in the context of contemporary practice. Against the backdrop of concerns for the future of area studies, the author finds a vibrant field—both inside and beyond its traditional boundaries.

The Renovation of Custom in Colonial Kenya: the 1932 Generation Succession Ceremonies in Embu

The role of custom and tradition in the development of colonial rule in Africa has received little attention from scholars. Historians of colonial Kenya, particularly, have focused on the powerful transforming impact of the colonial state and economy and on the growth of opposition movements; they have had little to say about the processes through which previously autonomous societies negotiated their incorporation into the Kenya state. Yet by the 1920s and 1930s that state had acquired a substantial degree of popular legitimacy. ‘Customary’ institutions and rituals played an important part in the development of that legitimacy. This essay examines the institution of the genealogically defined ‘generation’ in the Embu-Mbeere area in colonial central Kenya and the ceremonies held in 1932 to mark the transition from one generation to the next. These ceremonies attracted considerable attention because they provided the occasion for the proclamation of rules, supported by the British administration, relating to the bitter issue of genital mutilation in female initiation. But this was not a crude case of the manipulation of custom. The attempt to reform female initiation was part of a larger process, of which the rituals of generation succession were elements, of building the ideological basis of a new ‘tribe’ in a society previously characterized by local autonomy and collective authority. As investigation of the succession ceremonies makes clear, the notion of a tribe dominated by appointed chiefs and identified with an exclusive territory lay at the centre of this ideology.

Population Movement, Social Formation, and Exchange: Central Kenya in the Nineteenth Century

The expansion of agricultural society across central Kenya was accomplished gradually over several centuries through the repeated establishment of small farming settlements beyond the boundaries of population centers. Although independent these new communities did not develop in isolation. The distinctions among local economies stimulated regular trades in basic agricultural produce and labor. The resulting intricate networks of interdependence cut across ethnic and geographical boundaries drawing small farming societies - as well as neighboring groups of hunters and pastoralists - into a complex regional system. During the nineteenth century this system shaped and was in turn shaped by the rapid expansion of farming settlement. Historians dealing with pre-colonial eastern Africa have generally treated population movement and the development of exchange structures as separate even consecutive phenomena; an examination of the experience of nineteenth-century central Kenya makes clear however that a critical interrelationship existed between the localized processes of social formation and the evolution of a larger system of exchange. (excerpt)

Guinea-Bissau: Micro-State to “Narco-State”

heavily Euro-American source base can deliver. The intentionality of Ivorian authorities in seizing upon the American “script” to needle the French is not clear. Moreover, it was a strategy with clear limits. For example, despite American, German and Italian funding, to complete the San Pedro project Abidjan was still forced to seek French assistance. With the exception of key ministers and the wonderful archival find of politician Kouamé Binzème’s correspondence (48–51), the cast of Ivorian characters is far more restrained than that of the American and French technocrats. A gesture towards Ivorian society’s engagement with American popular culture might have expanded on the scripts of the “good life” adopted by political elites. The promise of interviews with “people who ... underwent the discipline” (17) of development initiatives is only partially fulfilled; few individual voices emerge. Bamba seeks to redress this imbalance by recovering intellectual Ivorian discourses that have been neglected in the literature. Overall, African Miracle both advances our understanding of postcolonial Ivory Coast and serves as an urgent reminder to specialists that particular histories happen in truly global contexts. Today, locals refer to the ambitious Cité administrative as, simply, les Tours. It is as if, like the discrete development projects in this admirable monograph, there is an acknowledgment that the pieces did not add up to a whole. Modernization, avidly sought, planned and dubbed by a host of Ivorian, French and American actors, was itself the mirage.

A dangerous medium? : book feature

The editors of this volume have been instrumental in focusing these debates on film in Africa - first in an important conference that they organised at Cape Town in 2002 (and the publications that flowed out of it) and now with this volume of essays devoted to examination of films that explore aspects of African history.

Conflict and accommodation in Western Kenya : the Gusii and the British, 1907-1963

The Gusii people of Kenya, Africa, were the last major Kenyan ethnic group to be conquered by the British. This is an account of their experience under colonial control and a portrayal of their strong and steadfast resistance. Illustrated with maps and tables.