"Understanding Contemporary Africa" is a multidisciplinary book that can be used as a core text in "Introduction to Africa" courses and also as a supplemental reader in various discipline-oriented courses. The authors concentrate on the crucial issues facing Africa in the 1990s: there is a thorough treatment not only of politics, economics, and history, but also of women and development, the family, population and urbanization, the environment, religion, and literature. Each topic is covered in depth and on the basis of the latest available scholarship. Showing how Africa"s past has shaped its present and examining the major forces now shaping the Africa of the next century, "Understanding Contemporary Africa" focuses on the themes most vital to an awareness of the African experience in all of its diversity and complexity.