Axel Fleisch is a Professor of African Studies at the University of Helsinki. His focus is southern Africa, including African languages and historical linguistics. He is the author of Lucazi Grammar: A Morphosemantic Analysis (2000) and the co-editor of Grandmother's Footsteps: Oral Tradition and South-East Angolan Narratives on the Colonial Encounter (1999).
List of Maps, Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
Notes on Language
Introduction: Theories and Methods of African Conceptual History
Rhiannon Stephens and Axel Fleisch
Chapter 1. 'Wealth', 'Poverty' and the Question of Conceptual History in Oral Contexts: Uganda from c. 1000 C.E.
Rhiannon Stephens
Chapter 2. Conceptual Continuities: About 'Work' in Nguni
Axel Fleisch
Chapter 3. Tracking the Concept of 'Work' on the North Eastern Cape Frontier, South Africa
Anne Kelk Mager
Chapter 4. Understanding the Concept 'Marriage' in Afrikaans during the Twentieth Century
Marné Pienaar
Chapter 5. Male Circumcision among the Bagisu of Eastern Uganda: Practices and Conceptualizations
Pamela Khanakwa
Chapter 6. The Concept of 'Land' in Bioko: 'Land as Property' and 'Land as Country'
Ana Lúcia Sá
Chapter 7. Conceptualizing 'Land' and 'Nation' in Early Gold Coast Nationalism
Pieter Boele van Hensbroek
Chapter 8. An Untimely Concept: Decolonization and the Works of Mudimbe, Mbembe and Nganang
Pierre-Philippe Fraiture
Index
Employing an innovative methodological toolkit, Doing Conceptual History in Africa provides a refreshingly broad and interdisciplinary approach to African historical studies. The studies assembled here focus on the complex role of language in Africa's historical development, with a particular emphasis on pragmatics and semantics. From precolonial dynamics of wealth and poverty to the conceptual foundations of nationalist movements, each contribution strikes a balance between the local and the global, engaging with a distinctively African intellectual tradition while analyzing the regional and global contexts in which categories like "work," "marriage," and "land" take shape.