This thesis is a sustained meditation on the relationship between embodiment, memory and cultural creativity in the black diaspora. It seeks to generate a theoretical vocabulary outside the stale polarisation between essentialism and anti-essentialism. Using the phenomenology of lived experience, I contend that black diasporic memory and identity are actively constructed within each present. I argue that bodily expression is part of a broader set of cultural strategies of self-definition, self-maintenance and self-preservation. In the case of the black diaspora, the past is evoked, invoked and provoked into existence once again through each expression of embodiment. A key concern in the thesis is therefore to highlight the active capacity of the body to recreate its world and in the process empower, renew and re-orient itself in the face of adversity and oppression. Rather than succumb to an account of black diasporicity as either a history of pain or the background of cultural hybridity, I argue that the pleasures and pains of black diasporicity are different aspects of the same ongoing phenomenon. Through the example of Jamaican dancehall culture, I show how the adorned, transgressive dancing body of dancehall women creates a dynamic of eroticised autonomy in an otherwise hostile environment. In sum, my thesis provides an analysis of the dynamics of diasporic identity and the antiphonies of continuity and discontinuity.

By the end of the Seventeenth century, when the Dutch settlement at the Cape was already firmly established, and the foundation had thus been laid for the present political dominance of the white man in the country, Africa south of the Kunene Okavango and Zambesi Rivers was inhabited by a considerate. number of different native peoples On the basis of racial, linguistic and cultural distinction, these can all be classified into four main stocks, commonly known as the Bushmen, the Hottentots, the Bergdama and the Bantu respectively. The Bushmen are a short, brownish-yellow people, with certain peculiar and racial characteristics, they all speak languages of a uniform, well-defined and easily recognizable type, phonetically remarkable especially for the great prevalence of click consonant; and they practice neither agriculture nor pastoralism, but live in small separate commutative which lead a nomadic hunting and collecting existence.

This thesis seeks to assess the relevance of existing theories about the origins of nationalism and investigate more specifically the claim that nationalism is rooted in ethnicity. It does so by examining the cases of Eritrea and Somaliland, which proclaimed their independence in May 1991 after seceding from the states to which they were formerly united. Having explained in the introduction why International Relations needs to take a closer look at the causes of nationalism, the second chapter proceeds to review some of the main theories about the origins of nationalism. It retraces the history of the primordialist-modernist debate, discusses the main contentions of the ethnonationalist approach and presents some of the factors singled-out by recent scholarship as propitious for the emergence of nationalism. Given that most of the theories about the origins of nationalism presented in chapter two centre on Europe, chapter three surveys the literature on the rise of nationalism in Africa i_n order to determine whether any additional factors need to be considered before analysing Eritrea and Somaliland. Chapter three also includes a discussion of the anthropological literature on ethnicity in Africa and questions the ethnonationalist claim that ethnic groups are pre-modern. Using as a framework the factors identified previously, chapter four offers a historical account of the emergence of nationalism in Eritrea. Chapter five does the same for the case of Somaliland. As the analysis provided in chapters four and five illustrate, the claim that nationalism and secession have ethnic roots is not empirically substantiated by the cases of Eritrea and Somaliland. The thesis concludes by discussing the practical implications of these fmdings with regard to the right of secession and proposals for boundary adjustment in Africa. It also highlights the ways International Relations may contribute to our understanding of the causes of nationalism.

Despite the heightened focus on the effects of war on girls, they are still being inappropriately grouped under the larger rubric of ‘women’ or ‘females’. Since the distinctions in girls’ and women’s war experiences are not yet well understood (McKay, 2006), this research argues that gender analysis is crucial to effective development as it relates to young soldiers. It also advocates a distinct analytical focus on girls who exit armed forces as young women (at times as a result of having children). This thesis is about formerly abducted girls in Acholi sub region, northern Uganda. As adolescents and teenagers, they were abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army and many returned to their villages with children fathered by the fighters. This thesis systematically looks at their socio-economic reintegration process, experiences and progress over the years. Through a series of 57 in-depth and 12 group interviews, this qualitative study explores long-term reintegration from the participants’ perspectives. The study identifies and analyses the central themes in their lives, including: physical and mental scars of abduction and life in captivity, stigmatisation, marriage complexities, and economic hardships. To date, the growing body of reintegration literature has focused on the first one or two years after exiting an armed group, and long-term reintegration studies are still limited. Therefore, through these themes, the thesis contributes to the conceptualisation of reintegration and understanding of the participants’ past and current life situations.

This thesis represents part of my Ethnological research carries out in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in the years 1926 and 1927. After having worked for three months in the area between the White and Blue Niles, mainly amongst the Ingassana People of the Tabi Hills, and later for some seven weeks on the West Bank of the Nule, amongst the Moro Peoples, I arrived in that part of the Bahr-el-Ghazal Province which is inhabited by the Azande towards the end of March 1927. I left for England at the end of August, thus completing a residence of five months amongst the Azande. The Thesis is arranged in two books. The first book is a condensed analysis of the structure of Zande society. In the second book I have taken native customer or institutions, divination, magic, dancing and obscene songs, and I have en-deavoured to interpret them by showing their contexts, associa-tions and functions. It is by the method exemplified in the second book of this thesis that I hope to explain one by one the institutions of the Azande. In the parts on magic and obscenity I have used the comparative method of analysis. It is this method which must eventually be applied to all institu-tions if Social Anthropology is to put forward general state-ments, or laws, and so take its place in the ranks of other inductive sciences.

The thesis, supervised by Jean Lafontaine, focussed on migration from the Comoro Islands near Madagascar, to Zanzibar and the East African Swahili coast, between the 1830s and the 1970s. Comorians had shared a common history and culture with the Swahili for many centuries; in colonial East Africa, chance offered them a unique ‘racial’ and employment niche which evaporated abruptly after 1964 and East African independence. They had suddenly to reassess marriage, residence and self-definition strategies, and their implications for the future. The thesis addressed ethnic identity (which had focussed excessively on its immutability) and demonstrated its adaptability to changing political and economic context. The study also attempted to escape from timeless, fixed-location ethnography, and followed links which led to data-collection in several East African and Comorian locations. Finally, by following Comorian choices over 150 years, the thesis made a contribution to an understanding of broader Swahili history which demands similar light-footed mobility through time and space for the processes of change to be understood. Gill Shepherd completed her PhD at a time when university recruitment was a standstill. Instead she built a career in tropical forest policy at London’s Overseas Development Institute, and focussed on rights for forest peoples.