African Affairs

African Affairs is a peer-reviewed academic journal published quarterly by Oxford University Press on behalf of the London-based Royal African Society. The journal covers any Africa-related topic: political, social, economic, environmental and historical. Each issue also includes a section of book reviews.

It is the No 1. ranked journal in African Studies and the No 1. ranked journal in Area Studies. The journal is also ranked within political science.

It was established as the Journal of the African Society in 1901, and was published as the Journal of the Royal African Society from 1936 until it obtained its current name in 1944.

History

The Royal African Society and its journal grew out of the travels of Mary Kingsley, an English writer and explorer who travelled to Africa several times in the 1890s and greatly influenced European study of Africa. In 1893, Kingsley travelled to Luanda, Angola, where she lived with the indigenous peoples to learn their customs. In 1895 she returned to study cannibal tribes, travelled up the Ogooué River collecting specimens of previously undiscovered fish, and became the first European to climb Mount Cameroon. Upon her return to England, Kingsley upset many people, particularly the Church of England: she criticized missionaries, and supported many traditional aspects of African life, most controversially the practice of polygamy. Kingsley wrote that a "black man is no more an undeveloped white man than a rabbit is an undeveloped hare".