A Black Byzantium: The Kingdom Of Nupe In Nigeria
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
At the crossroads of African political complexity and anthropological inquiry stands A Black Byzantium, S. F. Nadel's landmark study of the Nupe Kingdom of northern Nigeria — a sophisticated, centralised state that astonished Western scholars with its elaborate court culture, stratified social order, and deeply entrenched systems of governance. Nadel, drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in the 1930s as Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University, Canberra, presents a meticulous portrait of the Nupe people: their political institutions, economic life, religious practices, and the intricate web of relationships binding ruler to subject in a society that bore striking parallels to the great Byzantine Empire of old. The work stands as a foundational text in Africanist anthropology and political sociology, illustrating with rare precision how a pre-colonial African kingdom achieved a level of institutional complexity that demands serious scholarly engagement. Nadel's prose is measured and authoritative, combining rigorous ethnographic method with a narrative clarity that renders even the most technical passages compelling. With a foreword by Lord Lugard, formerly Governor General of Nigeria, the volume carries the weight of both academic and colonial-era political authority — a tension that itself invites the modern reader to question whose voices shaped the story of Nupe, and whose remain yet to be heard.
Author: S. F. Nadel
Format: Hardback
Published: 1965, Oxford University Press (for the International African Institute)
Genre: Anthropology
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
At the crossroads of African political complexity and anthropological inquiry stands A Black Byzantium, S. F. Nadel's landmark study of the Nupe Kingdom of northern Nigeria — a sophisticated, centralised state that astonished Western scholars with its elaborate court culture, stratified social order, and deeply entrenched systems of governance. Nadel, drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in the 1930s as Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University, Canberra, presents a meticulous portrait of the Nupe people: their political institutions, economic life, religious practices, and the intricate web of relationships binding ruler to subject in a society that bore striking parallels to the great Byzantine Empire of old. The work stands as a foundational text in Africanist anthropology and political sociology, illustrating with rare precision how a pre-colonial African kingdom achieved a level of institutional complexity that demands serious scholarly engagement. Nadel's prose is measured and authoritative, combining rigorous ethnographic method with a narrative clarity that renders even the most technical passages compelling. With a foreword by Lord Lugard, formerly Governor General of Nigeria, the volume carries the weight of both academic and colonial-era political authority — a tension that itself invites the modern reader to question whose voices shaped the story of Nupe, and whose remain yet to be heard.