Mediations of Violence in Africa: Fashioning New Futures from Contested Pasts

This book analyses the violence of recent African wars from the perspectives of African people who experienced and witnessed it. Central to it are the words of (male) Somali poets, Zulu singers, impoverished Kenyan youth, and white South African war veterans, as well as men and women trying to refashion their lives and relationships in post-war Mozambique and Rwanda. Purposefully interdisciplinary, this volume brings together scholarly approaches ranging from cultural and medical anthropology, social/cultural history, and cultural and performance studies.

Lidwien Kapteijns (Ph.D., University of Amsterdam) is Professor of History at Wellesley College. Her published work focuses on Sudanese and Somali history and includes Women’s Voices in a Man’s World: Women and the Pastoral Tradition in Northern Somali Orature (1999).

Annemiek Richters, physician and medical anthropologist, is Professor of Culture, Health and Illness at Leiden University Medical Center and the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, The Netherlands. Her publications focus on gender, violence and trauma, and on intercultural health care.