Bibliographic Essay

Primary sources for historians of violence include lexical material via historical linguistics; see for example Jan Vansina's Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) and How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa before 1600 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004).

The best secondary resource for pre-colonial African military history is John K. Thornton, Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500-1800 (London: University College London Press, 1999). For accounts of military history focused on specific areas of pre-colonial western Africa, not mentioned in the footnotes, see J. F. Ade Ajayi and Robert S. Smith, Yoruba Warfare in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964); I. A. Akinjogbin, War and Peace in Yorubaland, 1793-1893 (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1998); Stanley B. Alpern, Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Toyin Falola and Dare Oguntomisin, The Military in Nineteenth Century Yoruba Politics (Ile- Ife, Nigeria: University of Ife Press, 1984); Robert S. Smith, Warfare and Diplomacy in Pre­Colonial West Africa (London: Methuen, 1976); and Joseph P.

For academic studies of pre-nineteenth-century African martial-arts and combat-sports- related violence see William J. Baker and J. A. Mangan, Sport in Africa: Essays in Social History (New York: Africana Publishing, 1987); T. J. Desch-Obi, Fighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Art Traditions in the Atlantic World (Colombia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008); Olivier P. Nguema Akwe, Sorcellerie et arts martiaux en Afrique: anthropologie des sports de combat (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2011); and Edward Powe, Combat Games of Northern Nigeria (Madison, WI: Dan Aiki Publications, 1994). For the slavery-era African diaspora see Manuel Barcia Paz, West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba: Soldier Slaves in the Atlantic World, 1807-1844 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Kenneth M. Bilby, True-Born Maroons (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005); C. Daniel Dawson, Dancing Between Two Worlds: Kongo-Angola Culture and the Americas (New York: Caribbean Cultural Center, 1991); Mavis Campell, The Maroons of Jamaica 1655-1796 (Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1988); Thomas H. Holloway, Policing Rio De Janeiro: Repression and Resistance in a 19th-Century City (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); and Richard Price, Alabi’s World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).