Enfn, Charles Tshimanga a raison d’insister sur les spécifcités et les révélations du discours du rap français: les paroles n’expriment pas seulement la contestation subversive trop rapidement qualifée de racisme anti-blanc. Elles permettent à une catégorie sociale bien délimitée et discriminée, celle des jeunes de banlieue, de transcender par la dérision leurs diférences de race, d’ethnie, de religion, voire même de classe pour exprimer leur engagement dans le débat politique français.

Accompagné de références précises en fn de chaque article et d’une solide bibliographie générale, d’un glossaire très utile des termes dits «de banlieue» et d’un index fourni, ce livre, dont le ton est mesuré même si les analyses ne manquent pas d’audace, constitue un bilan sérieusement documenté de nos dernières années postcoloniales, dont on ne peut que souhaiter qu’une version française soit bientôt publiée. En attendant, ce livre constitue un outil de travail redoutable pour tous nos collègues anglophones intéressés à l’histoire de France, aussi bien nationale que coloniale.

© Coquery-Vidrovitch C., 2013

A. B. Davidson

HISTORY IN AFRICA: PROBLEMS OF STUDY

This introductory article sums up the work that has already been done by Russian scholars and draws the outline of the new tasks that they now have to fulfil in order to understand the way history is studied and taught in Africa.

S. V. Mazov

HISTORICAL ISSUES IN THE WORKS BY J. E. CASELY HAYFORD

J. E. Casely Hayford is best known as a Gold Coast politician and journalist. His merits as a writer relates primarily to popularizing the ideas of Wilmot Blyden, the father of cultural nationalism in West Africa. Revealing Casely Hayford views on the African past and the role of Africans in the World History, the author argues that he deserves the right to be a distinctive thinker with his own vision of fundamental problems of the world.

N. G. Scherbakov

A HARD TREK: FROM THE HISTORY OF NEGROES TO THE HISTORY OF AFRICAN PEOPLES

Four centuries of trans-atlantic slave trade and more than one hundred years of the migration of Africans to the former metropolitan and other western countries formed a unique community – a large diaspora of the peoples of African origin. Among those who influenced the historical studies of African peoples most of all is the personality of William Edward B. Du Bois (1868–1963).We try to clarify in which way and when his understanding of Black History transferred from the history of Negroes to the history of African Peoples. The 15 years after the Manchester Pan-African congress show the best promise as Dr. Du Bois attached much importance and influenced greatly the development of African studies in the USSR. Through better understanding of newly independent states of Africa more and more historians realized the new character of Black History which became separated and from the late 50-s and on was developing as the history of Africans and Negroes, i.e. African-Americans.

A. V. Voevodsky

THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA AS SEEN BY AFRICAN INTELLECTUALS (1870s-1930s): SPECIFIC FEATURES OF THE FORMATION OF IDEAS ABOUT HISTORY

Historical views are the most important factor in the development of the ethnic self-consciousness. They have an impact not only on the methods of representation of the past, but also on the perception of the modern world. African intellectuals played an important role in the formation of the collective historical memory of Africans and in the understanding of their own past. Literature (historical prose) had a big influence on this process. African intellectuals saw their main mission in the restoring the historical justice and showing that African people of Southern Africa have not been deprived of greatness, that they were the creators of their history. However their writings were full of fiction and biased assessments in the interpretation of historical events. The first African historians became the authors of new historical myths, many of which are alive to the present time.

S. V. Mazov

«AFRICAN HERCULES» AND «COLONIAL HYDRA». COLONIAL PROBLEM IN THE KWAME NKRUMAH'S WORKS

The article covers Kwame Nkrumah's views on colonialism and its impact on Africa. His works are often read as though they were all written at the same time, and an abstract and dogmatic system called «Nkrumaism» is extracted from them. The author traced the evolution of Nkrumah's assessments of colonialism caused by the changes in his status and political career.