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Book Cover
E-book
Author Iliffe, John.

Title The African poor : a history / John Iliffe
Published Cambridge [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1987

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Description 1 online resource (ix, 387 pages)
Series African studies series ; 58
African studies series ; 58.
Contents The comparative history of the poor -- Christian Ethiopia -- The Islamic tradition -- Poverty and power -- Poverty and pastoralism -- Yoruba and Igbo -- Early European initiatives -- Poverty in South Africa, 1886-1948 -- Rural poverty in colonial Africa -- Urban poverty in tropical Africa -- The care of the poor in colonial Africa -- Leprosy -- The growth of poverty in independent Africa -- The transformation of poverty in southern Africa
Summary This history of the poor of Sub-Saharan Africa begins in the monasteries of thirteenth-century Ethiopia and ends in the South African resettlement sites of the 1980s. Its thesis, derived from histories of poverty in Europe, is that most very poor Africans have been individuals incapacitated for labour, bereft of support, and unable to fend for themselves in a land-rich economy. There has emerged the distinct poverty of those excluded from access to productive resources. Natural disaster brought widespread destitution, but as a cause of mass mortality it was almost eliminated in the colonial era, to return to those areas where drought has been compounded by administrative breakdown. Professor Iliffe investigates what it was like to be poor, how the poor sought to help themselves, how their counterparts in other continents live. The poor live as people, rather than merely parading as statistics. Famines have alerted the world to African poverty, but the problem itself is ancient. Its prevailing forms will not be understood until those of earlier periods are revealed and trends of change are identified. This is a book for all concerned with the future of Africa, as well as for students of poverty elsewhere
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 356-375) and index
Notes English
Print version record
Subject Poor -- Africa -- History
Poor
Africa
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 87014622
ISBN 0521344158
9780521344159
0521348773
9780521348775
0511584121
9780511584121