Africans: The History of a Continent

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Cambridge University Press, 13 août 2007
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In a vast and all-embracing study of Africa, from the origins of mankind to the AIDS epidemic, John Iliffe refocuses its history on the peopling of an environmentally hostile continent. Africans have been pioneers struggling against disease and nature, and their social, economic and political institutions have been designed to ensure their survival. In the context of medical progress and other twentieth-century innovations, however, the same institutions have bred the most rapid population growth the world has ever seen. Africans: The History of a Continent is thus a single story binding living Africans to their earliest human ancestors.
 

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Africans: the history of a continent

Avis d'utilisateur  - Not Available - Book Verdict

Iliffe, an eminent African historian at Cambridge, offers a far-ranging survey of Africa from the development of the human species to the South African elections of 1994. He writes in a thematic ... Consulter l'avis complet

Africans: the history of a continent

Avis d'utilisateur  - Not Available - Book Verdict

Iliffe, an eminent African historian at Cambridge, offers a far-ranging survey of Africa from the development of the human species to the South African elections of 1994. He writes in a thematic ... Consulter l'avis complet

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Table des matières

10 Colonial change 19181950
219
11 Independent Africa 19501980
251
12 Industrialisation and race in South Africa 18861994
273
13 In the time of AIDS
288
Notes
317
Further reading
329
Index
345
Droits d'auteur

9 Colonial invasion
193

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Page 140 - The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers.
Page 38 - Perform the sacrifice - have pity on your baby! ' Hilarianus the governor, who had received his judicial powers as the successor of the late proconsul Minucius Timinianus, said to me; 'Have pity on your father's grey head; have pity on your infant son. Offer the sacrifice for the welfare of the emperors.
Page 21 - I defended the husbandless widow. I established the son and heir on the seat of his father. I gave [bread to the hungry], water to the thirsty, meat and ointment and clothes to him who had nothing. I relieved the old man, giving [him] my staff, and causing the old women to say, "What a good action!
Page 182 - The shameful and unjust proceedings with reference to the freedom of our slaves; and yet it is not so much their freedom that drove us to such lengths, as their being placed on an equal footing with Christians, contrary to the laws of God and the natural distinction of race and religion, so that it was intolerable for any decent Christian to bow down beneath such a yoke ; wherefore we rather withdrew in order thus to preserve our doctrines in purity.
Page 108 - Casembe had twenty thousand trained soldiers, watered his streets daily, and sacrificed twenty human victims every day. I could hear nothing of human sacrifices now, and it is questionable if the present Casembe could bring a thousand stragglers into the field. When he usurped power five years ago, his country was densely peopled ; but he was so severe in his punishments — cropping the ears, lopping off the hands, and other mutilations, selling the children, for very slight offences, that his subjects...
Page 336 - C. Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (London, 1979).
Page 49 - It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed.
Page 42 - Longinus was welcomed with great joy; "and immediately upon his arrival he spake unto the king and to all his nobles the word of God, and they opened their understandings, and listened with joy to what he said; and after a few days...
Page 139 - When our slaves are aboard we shackle the men two and two, while we lie in port, and in sight of their own country, for 'tis then they attempt to make their escape, and mutiny; to prevent which we always keep centinels upon the hatchways, and have a chest full of small arms, ready loaden and prim'd, constantly lying at hand upon the quarter-deck, together with some granada shells; and two of our quarter-deck guns, pointing on the deck thence, and two more out of the steerage...
Page 49 - This was the situation until, in the middle of the fourteenth century, civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence.

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À propos de l'auteur (2007)

John Iliffe is Professor of African History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St. John's College. He is the author of several books on Africa, including A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge, 1979) and The African Poor: A History (Cambridge, 1988), which was awarded the Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association of the United States.

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