Table of Contents

Introduction: Truth from Below
An Overview
The Slave Traders
The Imported Commodities
Cowries
Transformations: Enslavement and the Middle Passage in African American Memory
An Overview
The Entrepreneur and the Zombie
Colonial Vampires: The Theft of Life and Resources
Changing Bodies, Changing Worlds
Symbolic Money
Dangerous Women in an Age of AIDS
Village Intellectuals and the Challenge of Poverty
Mami Wata: Icon of Ambiguity
Symbolic Appropriations of Modernity
Converging Worlds, Polarized Worlds: the Realm Beneath the Sea Revised
Eating the State: Ridicule and the Crisis of the Quotidian
Conclusion

About the Author

ELIZABETH ISICHEI is Professor of Religious Studies, Otago University, Dunedin, New Zealand and author of over a dozen books on African history and political thought.

Reviews

The book is an important contribution to our understanding of Africa. It may become one of those 'must read' books for all Africanists.
*H-AFRICA*

Elizabeth Isichei's Voices of the Poor is an eloquent and ambitious effort to reconstruct the popular consciousness of ordinary Africans through the myths, rumors, and memories that circulate in African societies. Voices of the Poor is ambitious in its aims and sweeping in its scope. It is eloquently written and copiously documented . . . Isichei's fine book points the way to further integration between anthopology and history, providing a rich example of the means by which scholars can investigate popular consciousness by taking seriously the world of symbolic meaning.
*INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES, Volume 36 Number 2 [2003]*