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  3. African Identities: Past and Present

African Identities: Past and Present is a distinctive new book series which publishes cutting-edge work on the multivalent processes through which collective identities in Africa have come into being, the work they are made to do, and the varied investments that historical and contemporary actors have made in them. Books in this series unpack the contingent, flexible, fluid, and interactive nature of collective African identities, while also exploring how the boundaries of these identities are circumscribed, expanded, or otherwise challenged in ways that emphasize their constructed nature. Fostering critical conversations about the epistemological dilemmas and intellectually fraught politics of writing about such contingent categories of being in Africa is a key aim of the series.

  • General Editors: Toyin Falola, University of Texas, Austin, Carina Ray, University of Michigan

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9 results in African Identities: Past and Present

Building the African Nation
  • The African Association and Pan-Africanism in Twentieth Century East Africa
  • Ethan R. Sanders
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    01 June 2026
  • How did people in East Africa come to see themselves as 'Africans', and where did these concepts originate from? Utilizing a global intellectual history lens, Ethan Sanders traces how ideas stemming from global black intellectuals of the Atlantic and others shaped the imaginations of East Africans in the early twentieth century. This study centres on the African Association, a trans-territorial pan-Africanist organization that promoted global visions of African unity. No mere precursor to anti-colonial territorial nationalism, the organization eschewed territorial thinking and sought to build a continental African nation from the 1920s to the 1940s, at odds with later forms of nationalism in Africa. Sanders explores in depth the thought of James Aggrey, Paul Sindi Seme, and Julius Nyerere, three major twentieth-century pan-Africanists. This book rethinks definitions of pan-Africanism, demonstrating how expressions of both practical and redemptive pan-Africanism inspired those who joined the African Association and embraced an African identity.

Slavery, Resistance, and Identity in Early Modern West Africa
  • The Ethnic-State of Gajaaga
  • Makhroufi Ousmane Traoré
  • Published online:
    16 November 2023
    Print publication:
    30 November 2023
  • 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.

Performing Power in Nigeria
  • Identity, Politics, and Pentecostalism
  • Abimbola A. Adelakun
  • Published online:
    24 August 2023
    Print publication:
    07 September 2023
  • For decades, Pentecostalism has been one of the most powerful socio-cultural and socio-political movements in Africa. Performing Power in Nigeria explores how Nigerian Pentecostals mark their self-distinction as a people of power within a social milieu that affirmed and contested their desires for being. Their faith, and the various performances that inform it, imbue the social matrix with saliences that also facilitate their identity of power. Using extensive archival material, interviews and fieldwork, Abimbola A. Adelakun questions the histories, desires, knowledge, tools, and innate divergences of this form of identity, and its interactions with the other ideological elements that make up the society. Analysing the important developments in contemporary Nigerian Pentecostalism, she demonstrates how the social environment is being transformed by the Pentecostal performance of their identity as the people of power. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa
  • Race, Childhood, and Citizenship
  • Rachel Jean-Baptiste
  • Published online:
    25 May 2023
    Print publication:
    08 June 2023
  • Despite increasingly hardened visions of racial difference in colonial governance in French Africa after World War I, interracial sexual relationships persisted, resulting in the births of thousands of children. These children, mostly born to African women and European men, sparked significant debate in French society about the status of multiracial people, debates historians have termed 'the métis problem.' Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research in Gabon, Republic of Congo, Senegal, and France, Rachel Jean-Baptiste investigates the fluctuating identities of métis. Crucially, she centres claims by métis themselves to access French social and citizenship rights amidst the refusal by fathers to recognize their lineage, and in the context of changing African racial thought and practice. In this original history of race-making, belonging, and rights, Jean-Baptiste demonstrates the diverse ways in which métis individuals and collectives carved out visions of racial belonging as children and citizens in Africa, Europe, and internationally.

Decolonizing African Knowledge
  • Autoethnography and African Epistemologies
  • Toyin Falola
  • Published online:
    23 June 2022
    Print publication:
    14 July 2022
  • Addressing the consequences of European slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism on African history, knowledge and its institutions, this innovative book applies autoethnography to the understanding of African knowledge systems. Considering the 'Self' and Yoruba Being (the individual and the collective) in the context of the African decolonial project, Falola strips away Eurocentric influences and interruptions from African epistemology. Avoiding colonial archival sources, it grounds itself in alternative archives created by memory, spoken words, images and photographs to look at the themes of politics, culture, nation, ethnicity, satire, poetics, magic, myth, metaphor, sculpture, textiles, hair and gender. Vividly illustrated in colour, it uses diverse and novel methods to access an African way of knowing. Exploring the different ways that a society understands and presents itself, this book highlights convergence, enmeshing private and public data to provide a comprehensive understanding of society, public consciousness, and cultural identity.

Performing Power in Nigeria
  • Identity, Politics, and Pentecostalism
  • Abimbola A. Adelakun
  • Published online:
    29 October 2021
    Print publication:
    11 November 2021
  • For decades, Pentecostalism has been one of the most powerful socio-cultural and socio-political movements in Africa. The Pentecostal modes of constructing the world by using their performative agencies to embed their rites in social processes have imbued them with immense cultural power to contour the character of their societies. Performing Power in Nigeria explores how Nigerian Pentecostals mark their self-distinction as a people of power within a social milieu that affirmed and contested their desires for being. Their faith, and the various performances that inform it, imbue the social matrix with saliences that also facilitate their identity of power. Using extensive archival material, interviews and fieldwork, Abimbola A. Adelakun questions the histories, desires, knowledge, tools, and innate divergences of this form of identity, and its interactions with the other ideological elements that make up the society. Analysing the important developments in contemporary Nigerian Pentecostalism, she demonstrates how the social environment is being transformed by the Pentecostal performance of their identity as the people of power.

Knowing Women
  • Same-Sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana
  • Serena Owusua Dankwa
  • Published online:
    07 January 2021
    Print publication:
    21 January 2021
  • Knowing Women is a study of same-sex desire in West Africa, which explores the lives and friendships of working-class women in southern Ghana who are intimately involved with each other. Based on in-depth research of the life histories of women in the region, Serena O. Dankwa highlights the vibrancy of everyday same-sex intimacies that have not been captured in a globally pervasive language of sexual identity. Paying close attention to the women's practices of self-reference, Dankwa refers to them as 'knowing women' in a way that both distinguishes them from, and relates them to categories such as lesbian or supi, a Ghanaian term for female friend. In doing so, this study is not only a significant contribution to the field of global queer studies in which both women and Africa have been underrepresented, but a starting point to further theorize the relation between gender, kinship, and sexuality that is key to queer, feminist, and postcolonial theories. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Abolition in Sierra Leone
  • Re-Building Lives and Identities in Nineteenth-Century West Africa
  • Richard Peter Anderson
  • Published online:
    09 January 2020
    Print publication:
    30 January 2020
  • Tracing the lives and experiences of 100,000 Africans who landed in Sierra Leone having been taken off slave vessels by the British Navy following Britain's abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, this study focuses on how people, forcibly removed from their homelands, packed on to slave ships, and settled in Sierra Leone were able to rebuild new lives, communities, and collective identities in an early British colony in West Africa. Their experience illuminates both African and African diaspora history by tracing the evolution of communities forged in the context of forced migration and the missionary encounter in a prototypical post-slavery colonial society. A new approach to the major historical field of British anti-slavery, studied not as a history of legal victories (abolitionism) but of enforcement and lived experience (abolition), Richard Peter Anderson reveals the linkages between emancipation, colonization, and identity formation in the Black Atlantic.

Making Identity on the Swahili Coast
  • Urban Life, Community, and Belonging in Bagamoyo
  • Steven Fabian
  • Published online:
    28 October 2019
    Print publication:
    07 November 2019
  • Situated at a crossroads of trade in the late nineteenth century, and later the economic capital of German East Africa, the thriving caravan and port town of Bagamoyo, Tanzania is one of many diverse communities on the East African coast which has been characterized as 'Swahili'. Seeking an alternate framework for understanding community and identity, Steven Fabian combines extensive archival sources from African and European archives alongside fieldwork in Bagamoyo to move beyond the category of 'Swahili' as it has been traditionally understood. Revealing how townspeople - Africans, Arabs, Indians, and Europeans alike - created a local vocabulary which referenced aspects of everyday town life and bound them together as members of a shared community, this first extensive examination of Bagamoyo's history from the pre-colonial era to independence uses a new lens of historical analysis to emphasize the importance of place in creating local, urban identities and suggests a broader understanding of these concepts historically along the Swahili Coast.