The Postcolonial State and Its Discontents
How the promise of independence collided with the realities of power. These works trace patronage and the politics of the belly, authoritarian rule and state collapse, civil war and genocide, and the long reckoning with corruption and impunity across the independent state.
Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism
Mahmood Mamdani
Colonialism split Africans into citizens and subjects, and independence kept the divide.
Read why it mattered →On the Postcolony
Achille Mbembe
Power in the postcolony rules through spectacle, excess and grotesque intimacy.
Read why it mattered →The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly
Jean-Francois Bayart
Politics as appetite: power pursued through patronage and the belly.
Read why it mattered →The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence
Martin Meredith
Fifty years of independence, from the hopes of 1960 to their unraveling.
Read why it mattered →It's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower
Michela Wrong
An anti-corruption czar blows the whistle on his own government.
Read why it mattered →We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
Philip Gourevitch
The title comes from a letter Tutsi pastors wrote before they were killed.
Read why it mattered →Warlord Politics and African States
William Reno
When rulers stop governing and run the state as a racket.
Read why it mattered →Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles
Richard Dowden
Thirty years of reporting distilled into portraits of a continent.
Read why it mattered →The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide
Gerard Prunier
Tracing a genocide back through the politics that produced it.
Read why it mattered →Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, 1963-2011
Daniel Branch
Half a century of Kenyan politics, swinging between hope and despair.
Read why it mattered →More from the library