Ebook: A history of African popular culture

Popular culture in Africa is the product of everyday life: the unofficial, the non-canonical. And it is the dynamism of this culture that makes Africa what it is. In this book, Karin Barber offers a journey through the history of music, theatre, fiction, song, dance, poetry, and film from the seventeenth century to the present day. From satires created by those living in West African coastal towns in the era of the slave trade to the poetry and fiction of townships and mine compounds in South Africa, and from today’s East African streets, where Swahili hip-hop artists gather, to the juggernaut of the Nollywood film industry, this book weaves together a wealth of sites and scenes of cultural production. In doing so, it provides an ideal text for students and researchers seeking to learn more about the diversity, specificity, and vibrancy of popular cultural forms in African history.

Karin Barber is Fellow of the British Academy and Emeritus Professor of African Cultural Anthropology at the University of Birmingham. She was appointed CBE in 2012 for services to African studies. She is the author of a number of books and articles on African popular culture, including The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular Life in Theatre (2000) and Print Culture and the First Yoruba Novel (2012).