Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> A proverb that is well known among the Lozi people who live in and around the upper Zambezi floodplain of western Zambia observes that when danger threatens a hippopotamus retreats strategically to the deep waters. The Hidden Hippopotamus reconstructs the history of the crucial twenty years 1876-96 during which the Lozi first encountered white expansion from the south. Without an understanding of this early experience the subsequent colonial and post- colonial eras cannot be successfully described. But Bulozi already possesses a sizeable literature of both historical and anthropological works. Dr Prins demonstrates that this corpus is funda- mentally flawed. In fact the book is a discreet manifesto as well as a monograph for its structure logic and substance defend the view that the history and anthropology of an African society must be studied together; if divorced as they have been in the past in Bulozi neither can be properly understood. This proposition has wide and urgent relevance elsewhere because much African history and anthropology is similar to these earlier works on Bulozi. Dr Prins argues that extensive contemporary field data and archival sources must be engaged in a process of reciprocal ‘control’ which will reveal the limits of explanation in both and in this way provide the reader with a benchmark to judge the interpret- ations offered.