Empire in Africa : Angola and its neighbors / David Birmingham.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Birmingham, David.

Series:

Research in international studies. Africa series ; no. 84.

Ohio University research in international studies. Africa series ; no. 84

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Colonies.

History.

Angola--History.

Angola.

Portugal--Colonies--Africa--History.

Portugal.

Africa.

Physical Description:

ix, 190 pages : 1 map ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

Athens : Ohio University Press, [2006]

Summary:

In this lucid, incisive book, David Birmingham takes the reader through Angola's troubled past, from Portuguese colonization to independence and the long civil war that followed. In eleven wide-ranging essays, Empire in Africa: Angola and Its Neighbors examines Angola's experience of colonialism and compares it with that of Angola's neighbors in the Belgian Congo, French Equatorial Africa, and the Dutch settlements at the Cape of Good Hope and in the Transvaal.

Chapters on the role of merchants and missionaries, liquor and migrant labor, Luanda's tradition of street carnivals, and attempts by South Africa's apartheid regime to topple regional Marxist governments all work to illuminate Birmingham's major themes of war, religion, gender, and politics.

It was not until 1975 that Angola was finally free of Portuguese dictatorship. For almost thirty years after that, the nation endured endemic warfare as the warring parties used Angola's oil and diamond revenues-which might have been used to rebuild a farming economy, schools, and hospitals-to buy guns from the Cold War superpowers. For the first decade of its independence Angola replaced Vietnam as a field in which an international war by proxy was conducted.

Empire in Africa illuminates how Angola went from colony to independence, how in the 1990s the Cold War legacy turned to civil war, and how peace finally dawned in 2002.

Contents:

The idea of empire

Wine, women, and war

Merchants and missionaries

A Swiss community in highland Angola

The case of Belgium and Portugal

Race and class in a "fascist" colony

The death throes of empire

Destabilizing the neighborhood

Carnival at Luanda

The struggle for power

A journey through Angola.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 175-184) and index.

ISBN:

0896802485

OCLC:

62282064