| 2018 | Diggins, Jennifer | Coastal Sierra Leone: Materiality and the Unseen in Maritime West Africa (Cambridge University Press 2018) |
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| 2017 | Hodžić, Sadia | The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs (University of California Press 2017) |
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| 2016 | Covington-Ward, Yolanda | Gesture and Power: Religion, Nationalism, and Everyday Performance in Congo (Duke University Press 2016) |
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| 2015 | Adunbi, Omolade | Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria (Indiana University Press 2015) | |
| 2014 | Janson, Marloes | Islam, Youth and Modernity in the Gambia: The Tablighi Jama’at (Cambridge University Press 2014) |
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| Grabska, Katarzyna | Gender, Home and Identity: Nuer Repatriation to Southern Sudan (Boydell & Brewer Ltd 2014) |
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| 2013 | Neveu Kringelbach, Hélène | Dance Circles: Movement, Morality and Self-Fashioning in Urban Senegal (Berghahn Books 2013) | |
| McGovern, Mike | Unmasking the State: Making Guinea Modern (University of Chicago Press 2013) | ||
| 2012 | Newell, Sasha | The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption, and Citizenship in Côte d’Ivoire (University of Chicago Press 2012) | |
| 2011 | Fullwiley, Duana | The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa (Princeton University Press 2011) |
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| 2010 | Hunter, Mark | Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender and Rights in South Africa (Indiana University Press 2010) | |
| Geissler, Paul Wenzel & Prince, Ruth Jane | The Land is Dying: Contingency, Creativity and Conflict in Western Kenya (Berghahn Books 2010) | ||
| 2009 | Marchand, Trevor H.J. | The Masons of Djenné (Indiana University Press 2009) | |
| Sarró, Ramon | The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast: Iconoclasm Done and Undone (Edinburgh University Press 2009) | ||
| 2008 | Holsey, Bayo | Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana (University of Chicago Press 2008) | |
| 2007 | Pratten, David | The Man-Leopard Murders: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria (Edinburgh University Press 2007) | |
| 2006 | Englund, Harri | Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor (University of California Press 2006) | |
| 2005 | Apter, Andrew | The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (University of Chicago Press 2005) | |
| West, Harry G. | Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique (University of Chicago Press 2005) | ||
| 2004 | Willet, Frank | The Art of Ife (University of Glasgow 2004) | |
| 2003 | Little, Peter D. | Somalia: Economy Without State (James Currey 2003) | |
| Reed, Daniel P. | Dan Ge Performance: Masks and Music in Contemporary Cote d'Ivoire (Indiana UP 2003) | ||
| 2002 | Bledsoe, Caroline H. | Contingent Lives: Fertility, Time and Ageing in West Africa (University of Chicago Press 2002) | |
| 2001 | Royer, Patrick & Saul, Mahir | West African Challenge to Empire: Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War (Ohio UP/James Currey 2001) | |
| 2000 | Peel, J.D.Y. | Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yorua (Indiana UP 2000) | |
| 1999 | Piot, Charles | Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (University of Chicago Press 1999) | |
| Donham, Don | Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (University of California Press/James Currey 1999) | ||
| 1998 | Silla, Eric | People are not the Same: Leprosy and Identity in Twentieth-Century Mali | |
| 1997 | Whyte, Susan R. | The Pragmatics of Uncertainty in Eastern Uganda (CUP 1996) | |
| 1996 | Fairhead, James & Leach, Melissa | Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savannah Mosaic (CUP 1996) | |
| Hutchinson, Sharon | Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War and the State (Berkeley & London: University of California Press 1996) | ||
| 1995 | Malkki, L. | Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology among the Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (University of Chicago Press 1995) | |
| 1994 | Fadiman, J.A. | When we Began there were Witchmen (Univ. of California Press 1993) Johnson, D.H. Nuer Prophets (Clarendon Press 1994) | |
| 1993 | Steiner, C. | African Art in Transit (CUP 1993) | |
| 1992 | Launay, R. | Beyond the Stream (Univ. of California Press 1992) | |
| 1991 | Barber, K., | I Could Speak about Tomorrow: Oriki Women and the past in a Yoruba Town Werbner, R., Tears of the Dead: the Social Biography of an African Family | |
| 1990 | no award made | ||
| 1989 | Jackson M. | Paths Towards a Clearing: Radical Impiricism and Ethnographic Enquiry (Indiana UP 1989) | |
| 1988 | Schloss, M.R. | The Hatchetts Blood James, W., The Listening Ebony | |
| 1987 | Callaway, H. | Gender, Culture and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria (St Anthony's/MacMillan) | |
| 1986 | Barnes, Sandra A. | Patrons and Power | |
| 1985 | Buckley, A. | Yoruba Medicine | |
| 1984 | no award made | ||
| 1983 | Peel, J.D.Y. | Ileshas and Nigerians (CUP 1983) | |
| 1982 | Goody, E. | Parenthood and Social Reproduction (CUP 1982) | |
| 1981 | no award made | ||
| 1980 | no award made | ||
| 1979 | no award made | ||
| 1978 | Shaw, T., | Nigeria: Its Archaeology and Early History | |
| 1977 | Hill, P. | Population, Prosperity and Poverty: Rural Kano 1900-1970 | |
| 1976 | no award made | ||
| 1975 | Ottenberg, S. | Masked Rituals of Afikpo | |
| 1974 | Lloyd, P.C. | ||
| 1973 | no award made | ||
| 1972 | Henderson, R.N. | The King in Every Man (Yale UP 1972) | |
| 1971 | Goody, J.R. | Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa (OUP 1971) | |
| 1970 | Shaw, T. | Igbo Ukwa (Faber 1970) | |
| 1969 | Cohen, A. | Custom and Politics in Urban Africa (Routledge & KP 1969) | |
| 1968 | Ottenberg, S. | Double Descent in an African Society (U. Washington Press) | |
| 1967 | Lloyd, P.C., | Africa in Social Change (Penguin 1967) | |
| 1966 | Babola, S.A. | The Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala (Clarendon 1966) | |
| 1965 | Harris, R. | The Political Organization of the Mbembe (HMSO 1965) | |
| 1964 | no award made | ||
| 1963 | Fagg, W.B. | Nigerian Images | |
| 1962 | Lloyd, P.C. | Yoruba Land Tenures | |