Write a roughly 1,000 word essay on the start of colonial rule in Africa
The Basics:
Write a roughly 1,000 word essay on the start of colonial rule in Africa. The essay is due on Monday, September 19. You must submit your essay via e-mail. You must also upload your essay to SafeAssign. You do not need to submit a hard copy.
Failing to submit your essay through both SafeAssign and e-mail will result in a 3-point deduction from your essay grade.
The Assignment:
The inauguration of colonial rule in Africa was a complex process, involving a wide array of political and social changes. Your assignment is to draw upon the readings from Emily Lynn Osborn, Holly Hanson, Brian Peterson, and John Iliffe and GCK Gwassa to write an essay that touches upon the changes wrought by the start of colonialism.
Here are some questions to help guide you:
1) How was gender linked to political power before and after colonial takeover, as seen in the accounts of Osborn and Hanson? In what ways were women politically relevant? How did “private” life (i.e. family life) and “public life” (i.e. state politics) affect each other? How did these relationships change when Europeans took power?
Note: if you don’t need an A grade, you can write this paper using only Hanson’s article.
2) What are some of the ways that Samori Toure is remembered by residents of present-day Mali, as recorded by Peterson and Osborn? What legacy was left behind by his wars against the French? Note: this essay requires a careful reading of both Osborn and Peterson, since it’s easy to oversimplify their accounts.
Note: if you don’t need an A grade, you can write this paper using only Peterson’s article.
3) Both Osborn’s book (especially the fifth chapter) and the accounts of the Maji Maji uprising recorded by Iliffe and Gwassa discuss how practices similar to slavery continued after colonial rule had started, even though European colonial rulers claimed to be abolishing slavery. In what different ways were people still subjected to coercion even after colonial rule had officially ended slavery? Conversely, in what ways did practices of coercion change after the start of colonial rule?
Note: If you don’t need an A grade, you can write this paper using either Osborn or Iliffe and Gwassa.
4) The fifth chapter of Osborn’s book, Peterson’s article, and the chapter by Iliffe and Gwassa all discuss different examples of warfare and conflict during the era of colonial takeover: the first two discuss the wars of Samori Toure against the French, and the last talks about the Maji Maji uprising in Tanzania. Write a paper that compares and contrasts these different conflicts. Some questions you might want to consider (although this is not an exhaustive list): who participated in these wars? What caused them? How they were fought? How have they been remembered?
Note that these questions are to help you, not to restrain you. If you want to use the readings to discuss a different topic, or a different theme, you are free to do so. It is probably a good idea to check with me first, to make sure that the topic you intend to pursue is suitable for the purposes of the assignment, but you can go beyond these questions if you wish. Just make sure that you are using the readings to write your essay, whatever topic you end up pursuing.
I should alert you that, of the various sources you can use, Osborn’s book is probably the most difficult; aside from the fact that it’s the longest, she writes as an academic, so it can get somewhat dense. Then too, reading only the fifth and sixth chapters of a book can be hard (although the e-book is available via the UM Library website, so if you want to skim other sections, it’s an option). However, part of what makes Osborn challenging is the wealth of historical detail, which you don’t need to stress about for the purposes of this paper. Focusing on her arguments and her analysis – rather than on, say, the specific history of Kankan – should make it considerably easier to use her work.
Osborn’s book also uses some specific vocabulary terms that would be helpful to know: sofa refers to the army of Samori Toure; tirailleurs are African soldiers in the French army; the French Soudan is present-day Mali.
How to Write a Response Paper:
This is a relatively short essay: the suggested range is around 1,000 words. This is a guideline, rather than a strict rule. If you want to write a shorter essay, and you think that you can still make an effective argument, go ahead. If you want to write a longer essay, and are not just writing words for the sake of typing, feel free.
The essay is relatively short because I do not want you to churn out filler. Filler is bad. It’s boring for you to write. It’s boring for me to read. It’s not fun for anyone. Prioritize quality, not quantity, because writing empty words is not going to raise your grade. You should have around 1,000 good words in you, but if you don’t, adding useless words on top is not going to help you.
One way to avoid writing filler is to organize your essay around an argument. A lot of filler comes when students say more than they need to about the reading. You do not need to summarize the reading; that is not the point of the essay, because I have also done the reading, and I already know about it. To receive an A grade, your essay should do more than simply demonstrate that you’ve done the reading; it should show that you’ve done the reading with enough care and analytical skill to make an argument about it. If you organize your essay around a central argument (also known as a thesis) then it will make it easier for you to analyze the reading, and not simply summarize it. All of your body paragraphs should support, in some way, your main argument (your thesis); in turn, your body paragraphs should use the reading in order to support the arguments.
It’s important to try to find a balance between your argument and your evidence. A general orientation to follow is that when you use the reading in your essay, you need to do so in ways that support you own analysis, rather than replace it. Put differently, you need to make your own argument, to show that you have analyzed the reading; you also need to use evidence to support your argument, to show that you are not just making stuff up. Within that overall framework, you want to have the argument driving the evidence, rather than just throwing lots of things from the
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