East Africa (History)

In this wide-ranging history of the African diaspora and slavery in Arabia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Matthew S. Hopper examines the interconnected themes of enslavement, globalization, and empire and challenges previously held conventions regarding Middle Eastern slavery and British imperialism. Whereas conventional historiography regards the Indian Ocean slave trade as fundamentally different from its Atlantic counterpart, Hopper’s study argues that both systems were influenced by global economic forces. The author goes on to dispute the triumphalist antislavery narrative that attributes the end of the slave trade between East Africa and the Persian Gulf to the efforts of the British Royal Navy, arguing instead that Great Britain allowed the inhuman practice to continue because it was vital to the Gulf economy and therefore vital to British interests in the region.

Hopper’s book links the personal stories of enslaved Africans to the impersonal global commodity chains their labor enabled, demonstrating how the growing demand for workers created by a global demand for Persian Gulf products compelled the enslavement of these people and their transportation to eastern Arabia. His provocative and deeply researched history fills a salient gap in the literature on the African diaspora.

Some 2,500 years ago along the western shores of Victoria Nyanza, Bantu-speaking iron workers began to practise their industry in the area today known as Buhaya. This article examines the archaeological evidence for the history of iron technology in Buhaya from that earliest period until the present century. Of particular interest is the destructive impact of iron production and agricultural settlement on the forest resources of the region. Between 200 B.C. and A.D. 0, iron-producing communities appeared along the shores of Victoria Nyanza. In the first half of the first millennium A.D., iron production and settlement increased dramatically, with hundreds of sites scattered across the landscape as far as Lake Ikimba, about 25 km. to the west of Victoria Nyanza. Charcoal excavated from iron-smelting furnaces near Kemondo Bay show that wet, gallery forests grew along the lake shore at that time, and that the smelters used a wide variety of species of wood for their industry. These forests quickly disappeared, and by A.D. 400 iron producers were exploiting secondary regrowth and less accessible swamp forests. The pollen record and the sedimentary evidence show that forests in the interior also shrank rapidly at the same time and that the area experienced a severe erosion event in the late fifth century A.D., shortly before a decline in iron smelting during the seventh century. Abandonment of the region - except for the littoral of Victoria Nyanza - followed in the second half of the first millennium A.D. Some of the Rutaran-speaking population then moved to the grassy plains of southern Uganda. Archaeological evidence shows that the region, partly reforested, was quickly reoccupied during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries A.D. According to evidence from historical linguistics, the new occupants brought more cattle and a larger number of varieties of bananas than their predecessors. Thereafter iron technology prospered again, but employed techniques that were more fuel efficient. The development of more centralized political control over iron-producing groups in the seventeenth century later also helped to conserve resources. By the time Europeans entered Buhaya in the late nineteenth century, the region had become dependent upon imports of iron for many of its needs and had once again become widely deforested.

Despite the many assets the continent possesses, tourism in Africa has mostly operated below its potential, and its often poorly planned development has had irreversible negative consequences for both people and the environment. In order to develop sustainable forms of tourism, respectful of the rich natural and cultural African heritage, industry leaders and policy makers must consider the broader historical and socioeconomic contexts in which tourism is implanting itself. Inspired by an anthropological perspective, this article takes Tanzania as a case study. Tourism in this East African country, as in other African countries, is firmly embedded in encompassing—and sometimes conflicting—processes of localization, nationalization, regionalization, and globalization. Only by having a solid understanding of how these different scales are connected, disconnected, and reconnected, and by taking into account the interests of all stakeholders involved, can we begin to build an integrated African hospitality industry that is sustainable as well as economically beneficial. Archival records and recent ethnographic data are combined to show the kinds of challenges and opportunities this poses in the case of Tanzania.

This article looks at the history of post-war state-building in South Sudan through a study of one of the region’s many return migration projects. South Sudan was arguably the subject of the first state-led mass repatriation campaign of twentieth-century Africa, after the first civil war that escalated in 1963 and ended in 1972 with the Addis Ababa Agreement. Using archival material from the newly reformulated South Sudan National Archives in Juba, this paper examines this comparatively forgotten post-war return and reconstruction project in South Sudan from 1969 to 1974. In this period, civil war ideas, staff, and techniques were recycled into an apparently benevolent and ‘peace-building’ project of Relief, Repatriation and Rehabilitation. The returns management project set out where the returning citizens of Sudan should go, how they should settle, live, and relate to the state. This study argues that this project developed and entrenched particular wartime state ideas of its imagined South Sudanese population, and the nature of its compact with its society. It argues for a longer view of the continuities of war- and peacetime population control, as a way to explore postcolonial ideas of ‘good government’. The return and resettlement period also demonstrates the South Sudanese populations’ expanding repertoire of engagement as post-war citizens: return migration and resettlement projects are good opportunities for people to reformulate their skills and tactics of negotiating, approaching, cheating, and avoiding a ‘new’ state.

This forum article explores the major intellectual trajectories in the historical archaeology of Eastern Africa over the last sixty years. Two primary perspectives are identified in historical archaeology: one that emphasizes precolonial history and oral traditions with associated
archaeology, and another that focuses mostly on the era of European contact with Africa. The latter is followed by most North American practice, to the point of excluding approaches that privilege the internal dynamics of African societies. African practice today has many hybrids using both approaches. Increasingly, precolonial historical archaeology
is waning in the face of a dominant focus on the modern era, much like the trend in African history. New approaches that incorporate community participation are gaining favor, with positive examples of collaboration between historical archaeologists and communities
members desiring to preserve and revitalize local histories.

This essay reflects on the importance of cloth as a medium of transregional economic and social engagement. Additionally, it highlights the ways in which complementary processes of alteration in multiple locales have augmented cloth’s socioeconomic value. Specifically, the history of textiles in the Indian Ocean region evidences the vitality of cloth as an object imagined, fabricated, and creatively adapted. A holistic view of cloth as an economic object reveals the intertwined processes not only of weaving, circulation, exchange, and adornment but also alteration, unraveling, reweaving, and other forms of reassembly. By recognizing cloth as a highly dynamic socioeconomic object we gain insight into the creation and augmentation of value as well as how the process of adding value connects producers and consumers, often through circuitous transregional routes. Ultimately, cloth is an apt metaphor for the changing Indian Ocean world: diverse threads of social and economic relation woven together to form a discernible fabric, while this fabric has been altered, elaborated, and reimagined for new social and economic demands. In the present as in the past, cloth expresses the Indian Ocean as a matrix of inter-societal relationships and a dynamic idea.

This article demonstrates some of the conceptual limitations of the Other in the analysis of cross-cultural encounters by interrogating early modern Portuguese ideas about Swahili-speakers. Portuguese authors imagined Muslims of the East African coast as "after our fashion," and the intimate, though conflicted relationships that developed between these two groups illustrate the legacies of such perceptions. The essay challenges the notion that Luso-Swahili relations were entirely antagonistic and suggests instead that Portuguese interpretations of Swahili-speakers as familiar allowed some East Africans to maintain, and even further, their commercial and political interests. Since Portuguese administrators in East Africa became dependent on the Swahili as a result of the conceptual categories they employed, we should more closely scrutinize the role and legacies of preconceptions in cross-cultural interaction.

The Khōjā of Tanzania, Discontinuities of a Postcolonial Religious Identity attempts to reconstruct the development of Khōjā religious identity from their arrival to the Swahili coast in the late 18th century until the turn of the 21st century. This multidisciplinary study incorporates Gujarati, Kacchī, Swahili, and Arabic sources to examine the formation of an Afro-Asian Islamic identity (jamatī) from their initial Indic caste identity (jñāti) towards an emergent Near Eastern imaged Islamic nation (ummatī) through four disciplinary approaches: historiography, politics, linguistics, and ethnology. Over the past two centuries, rapid transitions and discontinuities have produced the profound tensions which have resulted from the willful amnesia of their pre-Islamic Indic civilizational past for an ideological and politicized ‘Islamic’ present. This study aims to document, theorize, and engage this theological transformation of modern Khōjā religious identities as expressed through dimensions of power, language, space, and the body.

Since its rise to a prominent position as a key approach to understanding and explaining African politics, governance, and political economy, a number of critiques have been published on neopatrimonialism and its perspective
on African politics. This essay contributes to the emerging criticism of the neopatrimonial approach by addressing one of the key arguments of the theory concerning the intrinsic nature of African politics, its cultural underpinnings, and the ideas which form the basis of democracy and politics for the common
good in Africa. Although the underpinnings and ideational basis exist and are central to the dynamics of African politics, the neopatrimonial approach has treated them as nonexistent. In its discussion, this essay also describes the
sources and vital influence of African ideas on democracy and the common in African states.

This essay is an inquiry into the cultural domestication of globally circulating objects and symbols before colonialism. It seeks to reveal the efficacy of cross-societal performances of similarity—a strategy of appeal that I call 'similitude'—by demonstrating how the strategic uses of imported consumer goods and cultural symbols by the people of Mutsamudu in the Comoros Islands affected British relationships to Mutsamuduans. Islanders adopted the materiality and social discourses of English gentility and through these claimed a moral proximity to the English, which they in turn used to leverage appeals for economic and military assistance. By exploring the case of Mutsamuduan strategies of Englishness we can better appreciate how cultural appropriations in even seemingly marginal locales have historically affected global interrelation.

After J. C. Smuts (1870-1950) managed to unseat J.B.M. Hertzog (1866-1942) as Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa it was clear that the country would enter the Second World War on the side of Great Britain. In spite of extensive changes and an increased budget the Union Defence Force (UDF) found itself in a state of war on 7 September 1939 with a Permanent Force of only 5400 men with limited training and antiquated equipment. While Hitler’s armies conquered Western Europe the Springboks prepared to go North and spite of trepidations about the might of Mussolini’s East African Empire the First South African Infantry Division set sail for East Africa in mid-July 1940.  In 5 short months Mussolini’s East African Empire had been torn to shreds. Victorious in every major engagement, the South Africans embarked for Egypt in June 1941. Here they encountered similar logistical problems as was prevalent before they embarked for East Africa. With two divisions in the field and a third in training UDF planners had a trying time marshalling enough motorised transport to enable the Springboks to keep pace with the increased mobility that was a hallmark of desert warfare. Expecting to build on their success over the Italians the South Africans confidently went into battle but by November 1941 the Fifth South African Infantry Brigade was annihilated and the victors of East Africa badly mauled. Fighting low-moraled Italian armies in the bush and mountains of Abyssinia was quite easy, beating the Germans in the desert would be a different story altogether.

From modest beginnings as the speech of a small group of mixed farmers, Swahili has become the lingua franca of millions of people in Eastern Africa and beyond (Lewis et al. 2015). How did this extraordinary transformation begin? This chapter outlines what is known (and not known) about the origins and initial development of the Swahili language and its dialects, and what this tells us in turn about the history of its speakers. It is based largely on research in historical and comparative linguistics undertaken since the 1970s and continuing through to the present. The potential contribution of research of this kind to understandings of the African past is well established (Nurse 1997; Blench 2006), and the Swahili-speaking world has already been the subject of important studies (including Nurse and Spear 1985; Nurse and Hinnebusch 1993). Needless to say, this work is neither exhaustive nor unproblematic. As we shall see, many gaps in our knowledge remain, while current research suggests that major revisions might be made to existing reconstructions of Swahili linguistic and cultural history.

The East African Community (EAC) exemplifies the contradiction of independent Africa's efforts to champion regional integration and the idea of pan-Africanism, whilst maintaining the nation-state model left from colonialism. EAC I, 1967-1977, ultimately collapsed due to its inability to create a regional institutional framework that could supplant the nationalist tendencies of its member states' leaders; and failing to adopt a people-centred inclusive approach to its structure and actions. The resultant human security issues suffered throughout post-colonial East Africa at their essence have been caused by the victorious nationstate's continued failure to offer this inclusive citizenship to its peoples. Despite the EAC II's, 2001-present, espoused people-centred reincarnation, it too has so far failed to create the inclusive citizen, or peoplecentred approach to its development and so risks the continued insecurity of its people.

"The State and Raw Commodities in Madagascar"

Chronic political instability defines the current crisis of Madagascar’s government. So does the expansion of contraband, particularly commodities – precious woods, minerals, and so forth. For example, in northern Madagascar rosewood seizures regularly feature in newspaper gossip columns. The uncontrolled export of such products, especially rosewood, sandalwood, ebony and palisander, creates a substantial gap in Malagasy national finances. Such exports also degrade the island’s ancient woodlands. Such exports may appear to be a new phenomenon, but they are not. This short article does not pretend to be exhaustive, but it does lay out some keys to better understanding the relationships between Malagasy governments and international traders.

Reflection on African consumer interests promises to enrich our understanding of Africa’s position within emerging global hierarchies. Specifically, attention to African cultures of consumption before colonial rule can sharpen our understanding of why--by what social and cultural rationales--Africans engaged in regional and global exchanges that sowed social strife, adversely affected local ecologies, and gave rise to slave-plantation complexes in East and West Africa. While Africa’s global trade relationships created few opportunities for long-term capital accumulation on the continent, the consumer goods acquired through them were vital to position, belonging, and authority in most African societies. At the same time, the consumer demands of Africans shaped global economic relationships well into the colonial era, sometimes in ways that colonial administrations could not easily control.

African states have been seen to struggle with the implementation of democracy, both before and after they adopted multiparty electoral systems, from the 1990s onwards. Many states continued to be dominated by a single party and opposition parties have found it difficult to establish themselves as regime parties dominate the political competition. The neo-patrimonial literature, as the most widely used framework for analysing African politics, explains this in terms of a misuse of state power and corrupt electoral practises favouring the ruling parties. This thesis argues that African politics cannot be adequately understood using a neo-patrimonial framework, because this framework discounts the possibility of African political thought and the development of a political organisation in Africa as a basis for democracy and public good politics. In the case of Tanzania it is argued that the continued electoral success of CCM (Chama Cha Mapinduzi) cannot be explained either by the misuse of state power or corrupt election practices, and that the explanation lies in the capacity of CCM to use a legitimacy narrative to build a political organisation and the continued mobilisation of the party and the electorate on the basis of ‘public good politics’ founded on the ideas of the independence movement. It analyses the way in which the regime built legitimacy and popular support between 1961 and 1985 and how the regime party used this legacy of legitimacy to control the transition to a multi party system. It demonstrates that the continued high levels of electoral support for the regime party CCM rested on a successful legitimacy narrative developed during the multi-party era and linked to the ideology of the independence movement rather than the factors indicated by the Neo-patrimonial literature. Contrary to the argument of neo-patrimonial approaches, which posits a pessimistic view of the capacity of African states to evolve into democracies, this thesis argues that the case of Tanzania indicates that a form of African public good politics and the building of a political community can be a foundation for the development of democratic government.

Following South African entry into the Second World War on 6 September 1939, the Union Defence Force (UDF) transformed from an ageing peacetime defence force into a modern armed force capable of projecting offensive power. During the interwar period a certain state of melancholia had existed in the UDF in terms of military innovation, which resulted in muddled thinking in the UDF in terms of armoured warfare and mechanisation. The offensive potential of armoured forces was simply not understood by the South African defence planners, with the result that there was only a token armoured force in the UDF in September 1939. The South African entry into the war was the impetus for the development of a viable armoured force within the UDF, and the South African Tank Corps (SATC) was established in May 1940. Changes in both the nature and organisational structure of the South African defence establishment followed. The Italian presence in Abyssinia and Italian Somaliland was seen as a direct threat to the neighbouring British East African territories, and South Africa deployed to Kenya during June 1940, soon after the Italian declaration of war. The South African deployment to East Africa was the first deployment of the UDF in a situation of regular war since the First World War. Despite the doctrine that underpinned the South African deployment of armoured forces in East Africa, the SATC units soon learned that the accepted doctrine, borrowed from the British War Office during the interwar period, was but a mere guide to offensive employment. The story of the South African deployment to East Africa during the war is used as a lens through which to investigate the role and employment of both the UDF armoured cars and light tanks. By separately discussing the Allied offensives through Italian Somaliland and southern Abyssinia during 1940-1941, the tactical and operational employment of the South African armour during this time becomes paramount when evaluated against their successes and failures. The nature of the opposing Italian forces in East Africa, the ever-changing topography and climate of the theatre of operations, and the nature of the South African offensive operations throughout the campaign, all combined to shape the novel way in which the armoured cars and tanks of the SATC were employed throughout 1940-1941. The operational experiences that the UDF gained during the campaign in East Africa shaped the further deployments of South African armour to North Africa, Madagascar and Italy during the remainder of the war.

Der Beitrag unternimmt einen Brückenschlag zwischen Kolonialgeschichte, einer politisch-ökologisch informierten Umweltgeschichte und den human-animal studies und argumentiert für ein ökologisch erweitertes Verständnis der Kontaktzonen deutscher Kolonialherrschaft in Ostafrika, das auch die Präsenz nicht-menschlicher Akteure mit einschließt. Ausgehend von einem relationalen Verständnis tierischer agency wird die politische Ökologie der Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen in der Kolonie und der Anteil wilder Tiere an den politischen und sozialen Aushandlungsprozessen zwischen Kolonisierern und Kolonisierten untersucht. Als analytische Rahmen dienen hierfür die Diskurse und Praktiken der Zähmung, der Jagd und des Naturschutzes. Illustrieren die Versuche der Zähmung von Elefanten oder der Kreuzungszüchtung sogenannter „Zebroiden“ das zwischen Hybris und Hilflosigkeit oszillierende utopische Potenzial des deutschen Kolonialprojekts, so diente das jagdliche Töten wilder Tiere der Performanz des kolonialen Herrschaftsanspruches wie auch der Formierung kolonialer Identitäten und Männlichkeiten. Die Etablierung des kolonialen Wildschutzregimes basierte schließlich auf einer über die körperliche Präsenz von Großwild vermittelten Gleichsetzung von Wild und Wildnis, die existierende humanökologische Verhältnisse ignorierte. Die Konsequenzen einer fragmentierten Naturschutzgeographie wie auch ständiger sozialer Konflikte um den Schutz des afrikanischen Großwilds prägen die Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen in Ostafrika bis in die Gegenwart.

The ethnographic record indicates that disposal of the dead by leaving their corpses in the bush was once a widespread feature of mortuary practice in East Africa, practised by many Bantu as well as non-Bantu speakers. The following notes describe an interesting variation upon this practice, recorded (and still remembered) among different groups of Bantu speakers in what is now south-west Tanzania. Whereas most peoples known to have disposed of their dead in this way appear to have done so in any convenient spot away from habitation, the Sangu and others referred to below “threw away” their dead in particular sites designated for this purpose. These sites for communal disposal are recognisable by their common names and, though no longer used in quite the same way, are still feared through their association with death.

It is well-established that there is an ever-present relationship between warfare and the physical environment. Throughout history, key elements of geography have served as decisive factors in the conduct and outcome of military operations at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war. In each area of military operations, a number of geographic characteristics, unique to that area, combine to create a distinctive operational environment. The elements making this operational environment unique, provide useful tools in the study of the historical impact of climate and terrain on warfare. The deployment of South African troops to the East African theatre during 1940, afforded the Union Defence Force (UDF) the opportunity to test its military capabilities under operational conditions against the Italians in Ethiopia and Somaliland. This shows that the East African operational environment, best described as complex and hybrid, distinctly influenced the operational deployment of the UDF throughout the campaign. From the sprawling deserts of the Northern Frontier District to the coastal plains of Somaliland and the mountainous bastions of central and northern Ethiopia, the East African climate and terrain served as key determinants during the planning and execution of the South African and Allied military operations throughout the campaign. This paper evaluates the influence of climate and terrain on the South African military deployment in East Africa during 1940-1941.

From the beginning of European involvement in Africa and the Middle East to the present, working with indigenous irregular forces has been, and remains, an integral part of engagement in these regions. This article examines one aspect of this relationship: the command pathways that allowed these relationships to function. By comparing the command pathways of cases in Palestine Mandate and the Horn of Africa during the Second World War, the author explores the structures that led to success and shows the importance of such cooperation. He then applies the lessons gained to suggest a way forward for contemporary operations.

"If a door is shut, attempts should be made to open it; if it is ajar, it should be pushed until it is wide open. In neither case should the door be blown up at the expense of those inside."

The above quotation was made by the Late Father of Our Nation, Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere (from his Stability and Change in Africa speech given to the University of Toronto, Canada, 2 October 1969), which in one way or another it entails the importance of opening up the doors (political and socio-economic) in Africa particularly in East African Countries by any possible means so as to develop the social, political and economic strength of the region. In order for the East Africa Community to exist effectively these doors must be completely opened in order to allow those obstacles which prohibit other from developing such as trade barriers and other to vanish.
The paper covers the historical background of the Community on the aspect of its legal institutions and various challenges and opportunities which the lawyers are facing in the Community.
For the purpose of this paper, the term, ‘Community’ means The East African Community and the term ‘Treaty’, means the East Africa Community Treaty of 1999.

MA Thesis in Maritime History (Faculty of Letters, Lisbon University FLUL, 2014) - revised version

The present thesis Shipwrecks of the “Carreira da Índia” (1595-1623) – Sources
for the Study in Portuguese Maritime History deals with factors which caused losses of
ships of the Carreira da Índia which linked the European metropolis Lisbon with its
Goa based Estado da Índia between 1595 and 1623. Although Portuguese-Asiatic
shipping was formally separated from the Habsburg Empire during the Union of the
Two Iberian Crowns (1580-1640), the European policies of the Spanish Kings,
especially towards the United Provinces and the Netherlands had its influence and
effects on the Portuguese side.
Shipwrecks, either on the outward bound or homeward bound voyages had
occurred for various reasons since the early days of the Carreira da Índia yet the
emergence of the two private European Companies, the Dutch United East India
Company (founded in 1602) and the British East India Company (founded in 1600)
were a new momentum by which’s characteristics of concurrence and struggle for
supremacy of the European-Asiatic spice trade, losses of Portuguese ships were caused
by planned and executed military operations as well.
Focusing on the geographical region of the Mozambique Channel in which the
losses have taken place, the thesis combines a historiographical approach with records
of underwater archaeology analyzing questions related to the political environment and
planed military operations in which shipwrecks have occurred as well as causes of
shipwrecks observing ship building and design modifications and effects related to
economic patterns such as the monetary flows of the Portuguese outward bound
shipping during the period of observation.

Naufragios da Careira da Índia (1595-1623)

For a long period of time, a general belief has reigned in the academic and non-academic circles that Somalis are an extremely exceptional people, in that theirs is a homogeneous society composed of men and women from one eponymous father from Arabia, celebrating monoculturality, monolinguality as well as monotheologicality! In the background of all the said shared commonalities, this study intends to argue that the Somali people have a composition of various communities of distinct ethnic background, with each ethnic community practising its own distinct mode of living and culture in the midst of a conglomeration of multi-ethnogenic societies. Therefore, subsequent to the believed universality of Somali culture and origin, the study aims at clarifying the vagueness of Somaliness or Somali citizenship, and that distinct identities, ethnicities and cultures are categorized or marginalized in the melting-pot of Somaliness. The core theme, however, is to put in the limelight the social situation of the Jareer/Bantu people amidst the racialist nature of pastoral Somaloid stock. Relatively, the study intends to investigate the subject by focusing on some basic questions such as:-

(a) Does Somalia constitute a homogeneous society of Arab origin?

(b) Do the Somali Bantu/Jareer suffer ethnic marginalization?

(c) Who is a Somali and by what criteria is the paradigm of Somaliness/Somalihood determined?

This dissertation explores narrative strategies of self-identity in autobiographies by six pioneering women writers, each of whom lost what has traditionally been woman’s place: her home. The accounts of emigration, expatriation, and exile by Anna Brownwell Jameson, Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Ada Cambridge, Isak Dinesen, and Alyse Simpson illustrate the implications of this loss, as each woman struggled to recover a sense both of home and of grounded identity. The writings span more than a hundred years, from the 1830s to the 1950s, and tell of lives lived in locations as different as Canada, Australia, and British East Africa (now Kenya), places that variously proved to be confining and/or liberating. By narrating the ways in which identity adapts to and is transformed by a new environment, these texts provide access to the construction and alteration of the self in relation to place. This study probes this process by using the concept of place, rather than the more conventional one of time, as the dominant category of analysis.
My readings are both intertextual and interdisciplinary: they rely on theorizing by sociologists and psychologists concerned with the relationship between place and identity, studies on the same subject by literary scholars, and formulations by women’s autobiography theorists. My investigation reveals, among other discoveries, that the gender-specific aspects of the process of adaptation persistently centre on the notion of homecoming and that they are articulated with reference to the figure of the mother.

"South Asian women began settling in the East African countries of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania in the late 19th century. They joined their husbands and other male relatives who first came as indentured laborers recruited by the British Crown and later transitioned into a subculture of traders. As traders, South Asians took near complete control of the East African economy which attracted the antagonism of colonial settlers and African aspirations. During the colonial period, due to the increasing wealth and westernization of South Asians in East Africa, the women in the diaspora began exiting the private domain and entering the public sphere. African antagonism after independence led to the exodus of the diaspora in the 1970s. In the 1990s, East African governments, caving into international pressure, allowed for the return of members of the diaspora promising an improved situation. However, South Asian returnees including women entrepreneurs and professionals witnessed and still continue to experience discrimination. Such a situation is partly the result of short-sighted policies stipulated by international aid agencies that allowed for the return of the diaspora and should not solely be attributed to the historical relationship between members of the diaspora and the greater African population. 
"

"This anthropological study describes a specific form of mediation, as it is practiced in Ethiopia (Northeast Africa) by members of the Oromo and Amhara ethnic groups. It introduces elders as male household-heads in their advanced ages, who settle conflicts and arrange marriages for the members of the junior generations. There are not only 'easy' cases dealt with, which one might assume to be too 'unimportant' for state courts or other juridical institutions but also aggravated cases that may affect the wider group or that have inter-ethnic dimensions. The study uses specific case studies of marriage, bride abduction, physical injury and homicide for illustration. Within the book, reference is made to speech-act-theory and the 'new ethnographic' approach related to it. Both rhetoric strategies and non-verbal means of communication are discussed, such as postures, gestures, spatial arrangements, numerical symbolisms, or the deliberate use of certain kinds of dress and of material objects. Special attention is paid to the use of ritual in mediation procedures. The book brings to light significant regularities that are inherent to the different types of elders' proceedings. Peculiar elements and phases can be distinguished that re-occur in all types of processes analysed in the study. This cannot exclusively be explained by reference to 'process', as a general idea of people negotiating law. It moreover hints to the existence of a formal 'procedure', which follows its own rules. Accordingly, a change of perspective 'from process to procedure' is suggested in the book's programmatic title.

http://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/title_2776.ahtml

Book Order US:
http://www.amazon.com/From-Process-Procedure-Aethiopistische-Forschungen/dp/3447066113/

Book Order Germany:
http://www.amazon.de/Process-Procedure-Mediation-Formality-Ethiopia/dp/3447066113/
http://www.buchhandel.de/detailansicht.aspx?isbn=9783447066112"