UWA Handbook 2025

Unit Overview

Description

This unit introduces students to the rich history of Africa. While the continent's vast and diverse history cannot be reviewed comprehensively in a single semester, it focuses on a number of key themes and important historical problems in lectures and tutorials. It begins with a discussion of Eurocentrism and the concepts of 'agency' and 'structure', and examines African slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. It explores conflict over land and resources in nineteenth-century southern Africa before turning its attention to the colonial era. The unit concentrates on the variety of African responses to European colonialism: violent resistance to European conquest in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; accommodation with colonial rulers once European rule was secured and the Mau Mau uprising in late colonial Kenya; the controversial politics of female circumcision in Kenya; Idi Amin's dictatorship in Uganda and the emergence of the Black Consciousness Movement in apartheid South Africa; and the terrible genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and the continuing humanitarian catastrophe in the Congo. The unit also focuses on the themes of agency and structure in the unfolding of African history, and in lectures and workshops students pay special attention to the important roles played by African historical actors, as well as the way in which material circumstances limited their freedom of action.

Credit

6 points

Offering
(see Timetable)

Availability	Location	Mode
Semester 1	UWA (Perth)	Face to face
Semester 1	Albany	Face to face

Details for undergraduate courses

• Level 3 option in the History major sequence
• Level 3 elective

Outcomes

Students are able to (1) describe and assess the basic methodological issues characteristic of the discipline of History; (2) identify and evaluate the methodological problems posed by historical accounts of Africa that emphasise African agency and/or structural conditions as the primary motor of historical change in the continent; (3) demonstrate a detailed understanding of important themes in the history of Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; (4) analyse a range of primary sources, especially those that represent Africans from a Eurocentric perspective; (5) relate their independent interpretations to complex historiographical debates about the history of Africa; and (6) present advanced arguments in both written and oral assessments using the conventions of the historical discipline.

Assessment

Indicative assessments in this unit are as follows: (1) workshop participation; (2) test; and (3) written assignments. Further information is available in the unit outline.

Student may be offered supplementary assessment in this unit if they meet the eligibility criteria.

Unit Coordinator(s)

Dr Jeremy Martens

Unit rules

Prerequisites

a Level 2 History unit
or EURO2201 European Civilisation
or GEND2902 Men and Masculinities in History

Incompatibility

HIST2247 Introduction to African History

Contact hours

3 hours per week