by LaRay Denzer, PAS Editor of newsletter and working papers
The Names of the Python: Belonging in East Africa, 900 to 1930
The Names of the Python: Belonging in East Africa, 900 to 1930 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2021).
David L. Schoenbrun
David L. Schoenbrun’s new book demonstrates that historical the fluid nature of knowledge networks and systems of belonging in social and political development in ancient eastern Africa. He uses a wide variety of sources, including historical linguistics and vernacular texts, to recount how people created communities, tracing the origins of nationhood in the Ganda state over a millennia. He argues that the earliest clans emerged from shared investments, knowledges, and practices rather than political identity or language. This study supplements and redirects current debates about ethnicity in excolonial Africa and beyond.
Schoenbrun has also authored A Green Place, a Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century and The Historical Reconstruction of Great Lakes Bantu Cultural Vocabulary: Etymologies and Distributions.