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A Short History of Slavery
Brief Summary
As we approach the bicentenary of the abolition of the Atlantic trade, Walvin has selected the historical texts that recreate the mindset that made such a savage institution possible - morally acceptable even.
Setting these historical documents against Walvin's own incisive historical narrative, the two layers of this extraordinary, definitive account of the Atlantic slave trade enable us to understand the rise and fall of one of the most shameful chapters in British history, the repercussions of which the modern world is still living with.
ISBN:9780141027982
Author:James Walvin
Walking in Kenyatta Struggles By Dunc...
The legacy of notable leadership in Africa, be it in politics, government, academia, business or the corporate sector cannot be said to be adequately chronicled and published. Yet, the moment the story of a man or woman of great achievement, and whose contribution has changed the destiny of others is published — particularly when the one in focus has been presented as a person of flesh and blood — the inspiration that could result can eventually transform people, generations or even entire nations.
In acknowledgement of the foregoing, Kenya Leadership Institute (KLI) has initiated a Biography Programme with a mission to publish memoirs of outstanding men and women whose contributions to the makings of modern day Kenya beg systematic documentation. KLI hopes that publications that will result from this initiative will inspire Kenyans to aim higher in their various pursuits and rethink their individual roles in nation building.
The programme also aims at prompting useful discourse on issues of national interest.
The Africans by David Lamb
Brief Summary
During the four years he spent in black Africa as the bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, David Lamb traveled through almost every country south of the Sahara, logging more than 300,000 miles. He talked to presidents and guerrilla leaders, university professors and witch doctors.
He bounced from wars to coups oceans apart, catching midnight flights to little-known countries where supposedly decent people were doing unspeakable things to one another. In the tradition of John Gunther's Inside Africa,
The Africans is an extraordinary combination of analysis and adventure. Part travelogue, part contemporary history, it is a portrait of a continent that sometimes seems hell-bent on destroying itself, and of people who are as courageous as they are long-suffering.
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ISBN:9780394753089
Author:David Lamb
One Long Night
Brief Summary
One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps
A powerful exploration of the evolution of a harrowing phenomenon that forever changed the landscape of conflict in the twentieth century: the concentration and work camps
Concentration camps--the preemptive communal detention of innocent civilians--first took foothold in Cuba in the late 1800s when Spain's Captain General Valeriano Weyler drove a half million Cuban refugees into makeshift camps, ultimately killing over 100,000 of them through starvation and disease. Although Teddy Roosevelt and President McKinley condemned such tactical atrocities, the U.S. would establish concentration camps of its own in the Philippines just two years later, leading to the deaths of 11,000 people.
These colonial experiments paved the way for the worldwide internment of foreigners during World War I, followed by the extreme horrors of Nazi Germany and the Gulag. Yet greater consciousness and condemnation proved ineffective during the post-war years, as China and Korea soon adopted camps of their own, and the British continued their use overseas. Even Guantanamo Bay, established in 1898 partially in response to the savage abuses of the first camps, echoes their philosophy today in the detention of prisoners who have not been charged.
Far from being an exclusively World War II tool for perpetrating genocide, camps have existed for more than 100 years, recurring with appalling frequency. Shocking, powerful, and necessary, One Long Night seeks to answer the question of how these atrocities continued through the years after worldwide exposure, condemnation, and the solemn promise of "never again."
ISBN:9780316303590
Author:Andrea Pitzer
Sudans Nuba Mountains People Under Siege
Brief Summary
Sudan's Nuba Mountains People under Siege: Essays by Humanitarians in the Battle Zone
This collection of first-person accounts chronicles the experiences of 13 humanitarian aid workers who travelled to Sudan to provide food, medical care and spiritual support to the besieged people of the Nuba Mountains.
A diverse group of men and women of various ages, professions and religious beliefs, the essayists describe in detail the tragedies of the Civil War in South Sudan, their own close calls with death, and why they are committed to helping a group of people - Nuba civilians - little known by the rest of the world.
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ISBN:9781476667225
Author:Samuel Totten
A People Called the Agikuyu: Yesterda...
Brief Summary
The Agikuyu are a people living in the eastern African country of Kenya. The earliest ancestors of the Agikuyu—as of all other modern human beings of the species Homo sapiens living today—according to archaeological, ethnological, and genetic studies coordinated by Professor Sarah Tishkoff, lived in an area around the coastal border of today’s Namibia and Angola about 200,000 years ago.
The Great Migration out of Africa 70-50 thousand years ago left the ancestors of Africa’s Black population occupying the valley of the River Nile and the then lushly green areas of the present Sahara Desert. By 6000 BC, there were farming communities of Negroid peoples living in the Rivers Niger-Benue Basin.
From around 2500 BC, a great migration of the Bantu peoples would start from the Basin of the Rivers Niger and Benue. In the next 4,000 years, the Bantu peoples, of whom the Agikuyu are a prominent group, would occupy and tame virtually the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.
By around AD 1000, a Bantu community speaking a Thagicu dialect had obtained a foothold at the foothills of Nyambene Hills in Igembe-Tigania in northern Meru country. This community set out around AD 1000 to look for new living space due west and south.
During this migration, the ancestors of the Tharaka were the first to hive off from the original community of Thagicu migrants. On arrival at Ntugi forest/Kijege hill, they veered eastwards towards the lower plains of Thagana River. Next, the ancestors of the Cuka hived off at the confluence of Mutonga and Ruguti rivers, occupying the ridges on the eastern slopes of Mount Kenya. At Mwene Ndega’s grove across the Thuci River, the ancestors of the Embu made settlement.
ISBN:9789966111982
Author:Paul Ngige Njoroge
Wildflower The Extraordinary Life
Brief Summary
Wildflower: The Extraordinary Life and Mysterious Murder of Joan Root
A compelling story of African adventure, romance and intrigue, perfect for readers of bestselling true crime such as WHITE MISCHIEF and MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL.
WILDFLOWER is the gripping life story of the naturalist, filmmaker and lifelong conservationist Joan Root. From her passion for animals and her hard-fought crusade to save Kenya's beautiful Lake Naivasha, to her storybook love affair, Root's life was one of a remarkable modern-day heroine.
After 20 years of spectacular, unparalleled wildlife filmmaking together, Joan and Alan Root divorced and a fascinating woman found her own voice. Renowned journalist Mark Seal has written a breathtaking portrait of a strong woman discovering herself and fighting for her beliefs before her mysterious and brutal murder in Kenya.
With a cast as wild, wondrous and unpredictable as Africa itself, WILDFLOWER is a real-life adventure tale set in the world's disappearing wilderness. Rife with personal revelation, intrigue, corruption and murder, readers will remember Joan Root's extraordinary journey long after they turn the last page of this compelling book.
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ISBN:9780753828809
Author:Mark Seal
This House is Not for Sale
Brief Summary
The award-winning author of Voice of America paints a vivid, fully imagined portrait of an extraordinary African family and the house that holds them together.
A powerful tale of family and community, This House Is Not for Sale brings to life an African neighborhood and one remarkable house, seen through the eyes of a young member of the household. The house lies in a town seemingly lost in time, full of colorful, larger-than-life characters; at the narrative’s heart are Grandpa, the family patriarch whose occasional cruelty is balanced by his willingness to open his doors to those in need, and the house itself, which becomes a character in its own right and takes on the scale of legend.
From the decades-long rivalry between owners of two competing convenience stores to the man who convinces his neighbors to give up their earthly possessions to prepare for the end of the world, Osondu’s story captures a place beyond the reach of the outside world, full of superstitions and myths that sustain its people.
Osondu’s prose has the lightness and magic of fable, but his themes—poverty, disease, the arrival of civilization in an isolated community—are timeless and profound. At once full of joyful energy and quiet heartbreak, This House Is Not for Sale is an utterly original novel from a master storyteller.
ISBN:9780061990885
Author:E.C. Osondu
The Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah
Brief Summary
This unique book about the late Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, President of Ghana from 1960 to 1966, grew out of a symposium organized by the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, which he founded. All of the contributors are Ghanaian scholars of various academic disciplines.
This book is divided into three major section: policy and performance, economic policy and economic development; origin and performance of the state-owned enterprises; agricultural policy, industrialization, foreign trade and neocolonialism.
ISBN:9780865433953
Author:Kwame Arhin
The Idealist Jeffrey Sachs and the Qu...
Brief Summary
A powerful portrayal of Jeffrey Sachs's ambitious quest to end global poverty
"The poor you will always have with you," to cite the Gospel of Matthew 26:11. Jeffrey Sachs—celebrated economist, special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, and author of the influential bestseller The End of Poverty—disagrees. In his view, poverty is a problem that can be solved. With single-minded determination he has attempted to put into practice his theories about ending extreme poverty, to prove that the world's most destitute people can be lifted onto "the ladder of development."
In 2006, Sachs launched the Millennium Villages Project, a daring five-year experiment designed to test his theories in Africa. The first Millennium village was in Sauri, a remote cluster of farming communities in western Kenya. The initial results were encouraging. With his first taste of success, and backed by one hundred twenty million dollars from George Soros and other likeminded donors, Sachs rolled out a dozen model villages in ten sub-Saharan countries. Once his approach was validated it would be scaled up across the entire continent. At least that was the idea.
For the past six years, Nina Munk has reported deeply on the Millennium Villages Project, accompanying Sachs on his official trips to Africa and listening in on conversations with heads-of-state, humanitarian organizations, rival economists, and development experts. She has immersed herself in the lives of people in two Millennium villages: Ruhiira, in southwest Uganda, and Dertu, in the arid borderland between Kenya and Somalia. Accepting the hospitality of camel herders and small-hold farmers, and witnessing their struggle to survive, Munk came to understand the real-life issues that challenge Sachs's formula for ending global poverty.
The Idealist is the profound and moving story of what happens when the abstract theories of a brilliant, driven man meet the reality of human life.
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ISBN:9780771062506
Author:Nina Munk
The Bright Continent
Brief Summary
The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa
The path to progress in Africa lies in the surprising and innovative solutions Africans are finding for themselves
Africa is a continent on the move. It’s often hard to notice, though—the Western focus on governance and foreign aid obscures the individual dynamism and informal social adaptation driving the past decade of African development. Dayo Olopade set out across sub-Saharan Africa to find out how ordinary people are dealing with the challenges they face every day. She discovered an unexpected Africa: resilient, joyful, and innovative, a continent of DIY change makers and impassioned community leaders.
Everywhere Olopade went, she witnessed the specific creativity born from African difficulty—a trait she began calling kanju. It’s embodied by bootstrapping innovators like Kenneth Nnebue, who turned his low-budget, straight-to-VHS movies into a multimillion-dollar film industry known as Nollywood. Or Soyapi Mumba, who helped transform cast-off American computers into touchscreen databases that allow hospitals across Malawi to process patients in seconds. Or Ushahidi, the Kenyan technology collective that crowd sources citizen activism and disaster relief.
The Bright Continent calls for a necessary shift in our thinking about Africa. Olopade shows us that the increasingly globalized challenges Africa faces can and must be addressed with the tools Africans are already using to solve these problems themselves. Africa’s ability to do more with less—to transform bad government and bad aid into an opportunity to innovate—is a clear ray of hope amidst the dire headlines and a powerful model for the rest of the world.
ISBN:9780547678313
Author:Dayo Olopade
Creating Africas Struggles Over Nature
Brief Summary
Creating Africa’s: Struggles Over Nature, Conservation and Land
In Africa, conflicts between protected areas for fauna and flora and space for their surrounding human populations continue despite years spent trying to find an accommodation between the needs of both parties.
Creating Africas investigates the roots of the current conservation boom, demonstrates that it is part of a struggle over various definitions of existing realities, and examines the global effects of this struggle. The book discusses the first UNESCO World Heritage Site in South Africa, the Isimangaliso (St Lucia) Wetland Park. Here, conservation interests are pitted against those of industrial forestry, commercial farming, and local communities struggling to have their lands returned to them. They all seek to define and create their own realities, but do so with very different resources at their disposal. In his expert analysis, Nustad treats these realities not as different representations but rather as multiple, often competing, viewpoints that involve a wide range of actors, both human and non-human.
Nustad posits that in order to avoid being accused of neo-colonial land grabbing, the conservation lobby will need to find a new way of imagining nature and protection that includes people.
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ISBN:9781849042581
Author:Knut Nustad
Agricultural Development and Food Sec...
Brief Summary
Agricultural Development and Food Security in Africa: The Impact of Chinese, Indian and Brazilian Investments (Africa Now)
The subject of food security and land issues in Africa has become one of increased importance and contention over recent years. In particular, the focus has shifted to the role new global South donors - especially India, China and Brazil - are playing in shaping African agriculture through their increased involvement and investment in the continent.
Approaching the topic through the framework of South-South co-operation, this highly original volume presents a critical analysis of the ways in which Chinese, Indian and Brazilian engagements in African agriculture are structured and implemented. Do these investments have the potential to create new opportunities to improve local living standards, transfer new technology and knowhow to African producers, and reverse the persistent productivity decline in African agriculture? Or will they simply aggravate the problem of food insecurity by accelerating the process of land alienation and displacement of local people from their land?
Topical and comprehensive, Agricultural Development and Food Security in Africa offers fresh insight into a set of relationships that will shape both Africa and the world over the coming decades.
ISBN:9781780323718
Author:Fantu Cheru and Renu Modi
African Voices of the Global Past
Brief Summary
African Voices of the Global Past: 1500 to the Present
Global historical events are too often recounted exclusively through European and American voices. African Voices of the Global Past explores six major historical developments of global significance? The Atlantic slave trade, industrialization, colonialism, the World Wars, decolonization, and the development of modern feminism? From an African perspective. Voices emerge throughout the text in the form of primary sources that explore the personal accounts of individuals.
These enable students to look beyond the indistinct figures of Africans in European and American accounts to see the people directly involved and affected by the major global changes they experienced.
Featuring contributed chapters from renowned scholars, many from the continent of Africa or the African diaspora, African Voices of the Global Past offers a unique view of global history from a traditionally overlooked perspective. This book is a perfect supplement for world history and African history instructors seeking to relate a compelling narrative of major world events.
ISBN:9780813347875
Author:Trevor R. Getz
The Black Man’s Burden
Brief Summary
The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-state
Basil Davidson on the nation-state in Africa and its huge disappointments, its relationship to the colonial years and the parallels with events in Eastern Europe. North America: Times/Random House.
ISBN:9780852557006
Author:Basil Davidson
China Safari On the Trail of Beijing&...
Brief Summary
China has now taken Great Britain’s place as Africa’s third largest business partner. Where others only see chaos, the Chinese see opportunities. With no colonial past and no political preconditions, China is bringing investment and needed infrastructure to a continent that has been largely ignored by Western companies or nations.
Traveling from Beijing to Khartoum, Algiers to Brazzaville, the authors tell the story of China’s economic ventures in Africa. What they find is tantamount to a geopolitical earthquake: The possibility that China will help Africa direct its own fate and finally bring light to the so-called "dark continent,” making it a force to be reckoned with internationally.
ISBN:9781568584263
Author:Michel Beuret and Serge Michel
Blue Dahlia Black Gold: A Journey Int...
Brief Summary
An absorbing, surprising and insightful on-the-ground exploration of one of Africa's most vibrant, excessive, important and quickly-changing countries: Angola.
Since the end of its crippling 27-year civil war over a decade ago, Angola has changed almost beyond recognition. An oil-fuelled bonanza has brought about massive foreign investment and a fabulously wealthy new elite, making its capital, Luanda, the second most expensive city in the world. Today, fortunes are being made and lost overnight, and rich Angolans are eagerly buying up the assets of its former coloniser, Portugal.
Fascinated by this complex nation, perched at the forefront of a resurgent Africa, writer Daniel Metcalfe travelled to Angola to explore the country for himself. Ebullient and proud, and often unwilling to dwell on its past, Angola has a large army, a hunger for wealth and a need to prove itself on the continent.
But as Metcalfe also discovers, it has some of the most grinding poverty in Africa as few Angolans have reaped the rewards of the peace. Nonetheless, amid Angola's brash reality, Metcalfe finds there is a place for a traveller who isn't there to make a quick buck. Crossing the country as ordinary Angolans do, talking to tribal elders, oil workers, mine clearers, street children, he encounters a place of extremes, where cynicism and excess go hand-in-hand with great hospitality and ingenuity. Metcalfe also reveals a colourful history of pirates and slave traders, capuchin monks, syncretic Christian cults and elaborate spirit masks. This is an Angola that symbolises nothing less than a broader turning point between the continents, the repositioning of the rich developed world versus Africa. It is a land that, until now, few outsiders have managed to unlock.
ISBN:9780099525172
Author:Daniel Metcalfe
Africas Past Our Future
Brief Summary
Africa's Past, Our Future engages the history of the African continent through the perspective of global issues such as political instability, economic development, and climate change.
Since the past may offer alternative models for thinking about our collective future, this book promotes an appreciation for African social, economic, and political systems that have endured over the long-term and that offer different ways of thinking about a sustainable future.
Introducing readers to the wide variety of sources from which African history is constructed, the book’s ten chapters cover human evolution, the domestication of plants and animals, climate change, social organization, the slave trade and colonization, development, and contemporary economics and politics.
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ISBN:9780253016553
Author:Kathleen R. Smythe
Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia
Brief Summary
Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia: A Guide to the Remote Churches of an Ancient Land
Ethiopia is a land of hidden treasures, and among the greatest are its remote churches, whose richly decorated interiors amaze and astound with their vibrant colours and extraordinary illustration. Yet steeped in ancient legend, and often situated in remote locations, a true appreciation and understanding of these unique churches and their spectacular murals has been restricted to a select few.
Now, in Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia, Maria-Jose Friedlander provides a unique guide to the churches, their architecture and decoration. Ranging from the rock-hewn churches of the Tigray region to the spectacular timber-built cave church of Yemrehane Krestos, Maria-Jose Friedlander provides detailed descriptions of the wonderful murals and of the stories behind them.
Many of the wall paintings contain inscriptions in Ge'ez - the ancient language of Ethiopia - and full translations of these scripts are given. Detailed plans show the exact location of the paintings within the churches and the superb colour photographs by Bob Friedlander show the many aspects of the churches and their decoration in rich detail.
ISBN:9781780768168
Author:von Marie-jose Friedlander and Bob Friedlander
Indians in Kenya The Politics of Dias...
Brief Summary
Working as merchants, skilled tradesmen, clerks, lawyers, and journalists, Indians formed the economic and administrative middle class in colonial Kenya. In general, they were wealthier than Africans, but were denied the political and economic privileges that Europeans enjoyed. Moreover, despite their relative prosperity, Indians were precariously positioned in Kenya. Africans usually viewed them as outsiders, and Europeans largely considered them subservient. Indians demanded recognition on their own terms.
Indians in Kenya chronicles the competing, often contradictory, strategies by which the South Asian diaspora sought a political voice in Kenya from the beginning of colonial rule in the late 1890s to independence in the 1960s.
Indians’ intellectual, economic, and political connections with South Asia shaped their understanding of their lives in Kenya. Sana Aiyar investigates how the many strands of Indians’ diasporic identity influenced Kenya’s political leadership, from claiming partnership with Europeans in their mission to colonize and "civilize” East Africa to successful collaborations with Africans to battle for racial equality, including during the Mau Mau Rebellion.
She also explores how the hierarchical structures of colonial governance, the material inequalities between Indians and Africans, and the radicalized political discourses that flourished in both colonial and postcolonial Kenya limited the success of alliances across racial and class lines. Aiyar demonstrates that only by examining the ties that bound Indians to worlds on both sides of the Indian Ocean can we understand how Kenya came to terms with its South Asian minority.
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ISBN:9780674289888
Author:Sana Aiyar
