Precolonial Communities in Postcolonial Africa: The Resilience of Indigenous Groups in Contemporary Politics

This collection takes on one of the most important and vexing issues in African development - the role played by African states in under-development on the continent - and shows how empowering resilient precolonial communities offers under-explored routes forward. Rather than comparing African states to states elsewhere, this book takes a unique bottom-up approach and compares how major ethnic communities within Africa have developed over time under various state systems.It begins with an investigation into major precolonial societies and the way in which they were affected by the slave trade and colonialism.It then offers individual case studies from the length and breadth of the continent, and in so doing, provides a near-comprehensive account of historical African community and state formation, including coverage of under-researched peoples such as the central African Fang, as well as of the Kongo, Benin, Akan, Wolof, Kikuyu, Shona, Oromo, and Zulu communities.Each case study analyz