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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
Ethiopia The Unknown Land
Brief Summary
Ethiopia, the Unknown Land: A Cultural and Historical Guide.
A result of a lifetime’s study of the mysterious country, this book is the first truly comprehensive work on the monuments and art of Ethiopia, as well as a literary companion to its land and history.
Stuart Munro-Hay provides a valuable guide to the country’s architecture, geography, peoples, art, and history which covers all the major sites of the land from ancient times to the present.
ISBN:9781860647444
Author:Stuart Christopher Munro-Hay
African Diaspora Slavery Modernity an...
Brief Summary
The African diaspora is arguably the most important event in modern African history. From the fifteenth century to the present, millions of Africans have been dispersed -- many of them forcibly, others driven by economic need or political persecution -- to other continents, creating large communities with African origins living outside their native lands. The majority of these communities are in North America.
This historic displacement has meant that Africans are irrevocably connected to economic and political developments in the West and globally. Among the known legacies of the diaspora are slavery, colonialism, racism, poverty, and underdevelopment, yet the ways in which these same factors worked to spur the scattering of Africans are not fully understood -- by those who were part of this migration or by scholars, historians, and policymakers. In this definitive study of the diaspora in North America, Toyin Falola offers a causal history of the western dispersion of Africans and its effects on the modern world.
Reengaging old and familiar debates and framing new ones that enrich the discourse surrounding Africa, Falola isolates the thread, running nearly six centuries, that connects the history of slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, and current migrations. A boon to scholars and policymakers and accessible to the general reader, the book explores diverse narratives of migration and shows that the cultures that migrated from Africa to the Americas have the capacity to unite and create a new pan-Africanist movement within the globalized world.
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ISBN:9781580464536
Author:Toyin Falola
Revolution In Zanzibar An Americans C...
Brief Summary
The Cold War exploded in Zanzibar in 1964 when African rebels slaughtered one of every ten Arabs. Led by a strange, messianic Ugandan, Cuban-trained factions headed the rebels, making Zanzibar (in the eyes of Washington) a potentially cancerous base for the communist subversion of mainland Africa. Exotic Zanzibar - fabled island of spices, former slave-trading entrepôt, and stepping-off point for 19th century expeditions into the vast interior of the Dark Continent - had succumbed to the terror of 20th century revolution and Cold War intrigue.In the vivid, eyewitness tradition of The Bang Bang Club and The Skull beneath the Skin, Donald Petterson weaves an engrossing tale of human drama played out against a background of violence and horror.
As the only American in Zanzibar throughout the revolution, Petterson reports with the inside authority of a highly placed diplomatic observer, illuminating how the current troubles in Zanzibar are rooted in the Cold War and the revolution of 1964.
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ISBN:9780813342689
Author:Don Petterson
The Penguin Atlas of African History
Brief Summary
This invaluable reference work provides an account of the development of African society from 175 million years ago, through the first appearance of humans to the complex polity of the twentieth century.
Colin McEvedy tracks the development of modern man, the differentiation and spread of languages, the first crossings of the Sahara, the exploration of the Niger, and the search for the 'fountains of the Nile'. Gold and ivory lure traders from far away; Christendom and Islam compete for African attention.
Names from the distant past become nation-states with aspirations appropriate to the modern world. With sixty maps and a clear, concise text, this synthesis is especially useful to African studies and history teachers, but is also a fascinating guide for the general reader.
ISBN:9780140513219
Author:Colin McEvedy
Making Sense of the Central African R...
Brief Summary
Despite its position at the center of a tumultuous region that has drawn substantial international attention and intervention over the decades, the Central African Republic is often overlooked when discussions turn to questions of postcolonial development, democracy, and change in Africa.
This book seeks to remedy that oversight, bringing together the foremost experts on the Central African Republic to offer the first in-depth analysis of the nation’s recent history of rebellion and instability.
Gathering contributions from nearly every scholar and international policy maker who has written on the Central African Republic in recent years, the book presents a close look at the two major coups of the past twenty years, the successes and failures of attempts at international intervention, the ongoing series of UN and regional peacekeeping efforts, and the potential for peaceful, democratic change in the nation’s future.
ISBN:9781783603794
Author:Tatiana Carayannis and Louisa Lombard
Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood M...
Brief Summary
Mary Dudziak's Exporting American Dreams tells the little-known story of Thurgood Marshall's work with Kenyan leaders as they fought with the British for independence in the early 1960s. Not long after he led the legal team in Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall aided Kenya's constitutional negotiations, as adversaries battled over rights and land--not with weapons, but with legal arguments.
Set in the context of Marshall's civil rights work in the United States, this transnational history sheds light on legal reform and social change in the midst of violent upheavals in Africa and America. While the struggle for rights on both continents played out on a global stage, it was a deeply personal journey for Marshall.
Even as his belief in the equalizing power of law was challenged during his career as a Supreme Court justice, and in Kenya the new government sacrificed the rights he cherished, Kenya's founding moment remained for him a time and place when all things had seemed possible.
ISBN:9780691152448
Author:Mary L. Dudziak
London Cape Town Joburg
Brief Summary
1994. The world is about to change. The first truly democratic election in South Africa’s history is about to unite Nelson Mandela’s rainbow nation at the ballot box. And, across the world, those in exile, those who could not return home, those who would not return home, wait. Watch and wait . . .
London. Martin O’Malley isn’t one of those watching and waiting. He is too busy trying to figure out if Germaine Spencer really is the girl for him and why his best friend is intent on ruining every relationship he gets involved in. And then . . . And then Germaine is pregnant and suddenly the world really has changed for Martin O’Malley.
South Africa. A land of opportunity. A place where a young black man with an MSc from the London School of Economics could have it all, would have it all. But what does Martin O’Malley, London born and bred with an Irish surname, really know about his mother’s country? His motherland. A land he has never seen.
ISBN:B00LQ7796O
Author:Zukiswa Wanner
When Victims Become Killers Coloniali...
Brief Summary
When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda.
"When we captured Kigali, we thought we would face criminals in the state; instead, we faced a criminal population." So a political commissar in the Rwanda Patriotic Front reflected after the 1994 massacre of as many as one million Tutsis in Rwanda. Underlying his statement is the realization that, though ordered by a minority of state functionaries, the slaughter was performed by hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, including even judges, human rights activists, and doctors, nurses, priests, friends, and spouses of the victims. Indeed, it is its very popularity that makes the Rwandan genocide so unthinkable. This book makes it thinkable.
Rejecting easy explanations of the genocide as a mysterious evil force that was bizarrely unleashed, one of Africa's best-known intellectuals situates the tragedy in its proper context. He coaxes to the surface the historical, geographical, and political forces that made it possible for so many Hutu to turn so brutally on their neighbors. He finds answers in the nature of political identities generated during colonialism, in the failures of the nationalist revolution to transcend these identities, and in regional demographic and political currents that reach well beyond Rwanda. In so doing, Mahmood Mamdani usefully broadens understandings of citizenship and political identity in postcolonial Africa.
There have been few attempts to explain the Rwandan horror, and none has succeeded so well as this one. Mamdani's analysis provides a solid foundation for future studies of the massacre. Even more important, his answers point a way out of crisis: a direction for reforming political identity in central Africa and preventing future tragedies.
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ISBN:9780691102801
Author:Mahmood Mamdani
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forge...
Brief Summary
Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness tells the story of the author's mother, Nicola Fuller.
Nicola Fuller and her husband were a glamorous and optimistic couple and East Africa lay before them with the promise of all its perfect light, even as the British Empire in which they both believed waned. They had everything, including two golden children - a girl and a boy. However, life became increasingly difficult and they moved to Rhodesia to work as farm managers.
The previous farm manager had committed suicide. His ghost appeared at the foot of their bed and seemed to be trying to warn them of something. Shortly after this, one of their golden children died. Africa was no longer the playground of Nicola's childhood. They returned to England where the author was born before they returned to Rhodesia and to the civil war.
The last part of the book sees the Fullers in their old age on a banana and fish farm in the Zambezi Valley. They had built their ramshackle dining room under the Tree of Forgetfulness. In local custom, this tree is the meeting place for villagers determined to resolve disputes. It is in the spirit of this Forgetfulness that Nicola finally forgot - but did not forgive - all her enemies including her daughter and the Apostle, a squatter who has taken up in her bananas with his seven wives and forty-nine children. Funny, tragic, terrifying, exotic and utterly unself-conscious, this is a story of survival and madness, love and war, passion and compassion.
ISBN:9781849832960
Author:Alexandra Fuller
The Book of Night Women
Brief Summary
The Book of Night Women is a sweeping, startling novel, a true tour de force of both voice and storytelling. It is the story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they and she will come to both revere and fear.
The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age and reveals the extent of her power, they see her as the key to their plans. But when she begins to understand her own feelings and desires and identity, Lilith starts to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman in Jamaica, and risks becoming the conspiracy's weak link.
Lilith's story overflows with high drama and heartbreak, and life on the plantation is rife with dangerous secrets, unspoken jealousies, inhuman violence, and very human emotion between slave and master, between slave and overseer, and among the slaves themselves. Lilith finds herself at the heart of it all. And all of it told in one of the boldest literary voices to grace the page recently--and the secret of that voice is one of the book's most intriguing mysteries.
ISBN:9781594488573
Author:Marlon James
The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Brief Summary
A sequel to Nervous Conditions, this is a powerful and engaging story about one young woman's quest to redefine the personal and political forces that threaten to engulf her.
As its title suggests, this is also a book about denial and unfulfilled expectations and about the theft of the self that remains one of colonialism's most pernicious legacies.
The novel disrupts any comfortable sense of closure to the dilemmas of colonial modernity explored in Nervous Conditions and as such is a fitting sequel.
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ISBN:9780954702373
Author:Tsitsi Dangarembga
Ancestor Stones by Aminatta Forna
A powerful, sensuously written novel that, through the lives of women, beautifully captures Africa’s past and present, and the legacy that her daughters take with them wherever they live.
From the author of The Devil That Danced on the Water - a timeless portrait of the lives of a family of independent, spirited African women over the last century of dramatic cultural change.
Aminatta Forna’s The Devil That Danced on the Water was rapturously acclaimed, a moving and gorgeously written memoir that garnered international attention. Now she has seamlessly turned her hand to fiction and delivers a novel that is lush and beautiful, a touching and intimate portrait of several generations of African women.
In Ancestor Stones, a young woman from West Africa, who has lived in England for many years and is married to a British man, returns to visit her family after years of civil war. Her four aunts have decided to leave her the family coffee plantation, as she is the last person in the family with the means to revive its fortunes. And on this trip home she is given an unprecedented look into the lives of the women in her family as her Aunts Mary, Hawa, Asana, and Serah— women who were mysterious and a bit intimidating to her younger self—begin to tell her their stories.
They are timeless tales of rivalrous co-wives, patriarchal society, and old religions challenged by Islamic and Christian incursions; they are modern stories of European-owned mining companies, the repressive influence of mission schools, corrupt elections, and the postcolonial African elite. Through their voices a family history interwoven with the history of a country emerges—one of a society both ancient and modern, of a family of strong women refusing to live as second-class citizens.
In her debut foray into fiction, Forna has created a powerful, sensuously written novel that, through the lives of women, beautifully captures Africa’s past and present, and the legacy that her daughters take with them wherever they live. It is a wonderful achievement that recalls The God of Small Things and The Joy Luck Club, and establishes Forna as a gifted novelist.
Burma Boy
Brief Summary
A few months ago fourteen-year-old Ali Banana was apprenticed to a whip-wielding blacksmith in his rural hometown. Now its winter 1944, the war is entering its most crucial stage and Ali is a private in Thunder Brigade. His unit has been given orders to go behind enemy lines and wreak havoc. But the Burmese jungle is a mud-riven, treacherous place, riddled with Japanese snipers, insanity and disease.
Burma Boy is a horrific, vividly realized account of the madness, the sacrifice and the dark humor of the Second World War's most vicious battleground. It's also the moving story of a boy trying to live long enough to become a man.
ISBN:9780099488989
Author:Biyi Bandele
Boy Snow Bird
Brief Summary
BOY Novak turns twenty and decides to try for a brand-new life. Flax Hill, Massachusetts, isn’t exactly a welcoming town, but it does have the virtue of being the last stop on the bus route she took from New York. Flax Hill is also the hometown of Arturo Whitman –- craftsman, widower, and father of Snow.
SNOW is mild-mannered, radiant and deeply cherished –- exactly the sort of little girl Boy never was, and Boy is utterly beguiled by her. If Snow displays a certain inscrutability at times, that’s simply a characteristic she shares with her father, harmless until Boy gives birth to Snow’s sister, Bird.
When BIRD is born Boy is forced to re-evaluate the image Arturo’s family have presented to her, and Boy, Snow and Bird are broken apart. Sparkling with wit and vibrancy, Boy, Snow, Bird is a deeply moving novel about three women and the strange connection between them. It confirms Helen Oyeyemi’s place as one of the most original and dynamic literary voices of her generation.
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ISBN:9781594631399
Author:Helen Oyeyemi
In a Free State
Brief Summary
No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect case in point is this riveting novel, a masterful and stylishly rendered narrative of emigration, dislocation, and dread, accompanied by four supporting narratives.
In the beginning it is just a car trip through Africa. Two English people--Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys, and Linda, a supercilious compound wife -- are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda.
And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims. Alongside this Conradian tour de force are four incisive portraits of men seeking liberation far from home. By turns funny and terrifying, sorrowful and unsparing, In A Free State is Naipaul at his best.
ISBN:9781400030552
Author:V.S. Naipaul
Mistaking Africa
Brief Summary
Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind
For many Americans the mention of Africa immediately conjures up images of safaris, ferocious animals, strangely dressed "tribesmen,” and impenetrable jungles. Although the occasional newspaper headline mentions genocide, AIDS, malaria, or civil war in Africa, the collective American consciousness still carries strong mental images of Africa that are reflected in advertising, movies, amusement parks, cartoons, and many other corners of society.
Few think to question these perceptions or how they came to be so deeply lodged in American minds. Curtis Keim's Mistaking Africa looks at the historical evolution of this mind-set and examines the role that popular media plays in its creation. Keim addresses the most prevalent myths and preconceptions and demonstrates how these prevent a true understanding of the enormously diverse peoples and cultures of Africa.
Updated throughout, the third edition includes a new chapter, "Where Is the Real Africa," discussing the multifaceted nature of the question and the importance of not grasping onto stereotypes of Africa's mythical past. Keim also includes new examples and new images to expand the visual narrative of western views about Africa. Mistaking Africa is an important book for African studies courses and for anyone interested in unraveling American misperceptions about the continent.
ISBN:9780813348940
Author:Curtis A Keim
The Elephant Whisperer
Brief Summary
The Elephant Whisperer: Learning About Life, Loyalty and Freedom from a Remarkable Herd of Elephants.
When South African conservationist Lawrence Anthony was asked to accept a herd of 'rogue' elephants on his Thula Thula game reserve in Zululand, his common sense told him to refuse. But he was the herd's last chance of survival - dangerous and unpredictable, they would be killed if Anthony wouldn't take them in.
As Anthony risked his life to create a bond with the troubled elephants and persuade them to stay on his reserve, he came to realize what a special family they were, from the wise matriarch Nana, who guided the herd, to her warrior sister Frankie, always ready to see off any threat, and their children who fought so hard to survive.
With unforgettable characters and exotic wildlife, this is an enthralling book that will appeal to animal lovers and adventurous souls everywhere.
ISBN:9780283070877
Author:Lawrence Anthony and Graham Spence
