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Swift dispatch
Ten Cities: Clubbing in Nairobi, Cair...
A nocturnal journey through local histories of clubbing in Africa and Europe
The image of the DJ dragging his record case through international “non-places” and deejaying in clubs around the globe is a contemporary cliché. But these club scenes have rich, geographically differentiated local histories and cultures. This book expands the focus beyond the North Atlantic clubbing axis of Detroit–Chicago–Manchester–Berlin.
It looks at ten club capitals in Africa and Europe, reporting on different scenes in Bristol, Johannesburg, Cairo, Kyiv, Lagos, Lisbon, Launda, Nairobi and Naples. The local music stories, the scenes, the subcultures and their global networks are reconstructed in 21 essays and photo sequences.
The tale they tell is one of clubs as laboratories of otherness, in which people can experiment with new ways of being and assert their claim to the city. Ten Cities is a nocturnal, sound-driven journey through ten social and urban stories from 1960 through to the present.
Swahili State and Society by Ali Mazrui
Zoo By Charles Chanchori
Chronicles from the Land of the Happi...
In an imaginary Nigeria, a cunning entrepreneur is selling body parts stolen from Dr. Menka's hospital for use in ritualistic practices. Dr. Menka shares the grisly news with his oldest college friend, bon viveur, star engineer, and Yoruba royal, Duyole Pitan-Payne--the life of every party-- who is about to assume a prestigious post at the United Nations in New York. It now seems that someone is determined that he not make it there.
Neither Dr. Menka nor Duyole knows why, or how close the enemy is, how powerful.
Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is at once a literary hoot, a crafty whodunit, and a scathing indictment of Nigeria's political elite.
It is a stirring call to arms against the abuse of power from one of that country's fiercest political activists, who just happens to be a global literary giant.
The House of Rust by Khadija Abdalla ...
The House of Rust is an enchanting novel about a Hadrami girl in Mombasa. When her fisherman father goes missing, Aisha takes to the sea on a magical boat made of a skeleton to rescue him. She is guided by a talking scholar’s cat (and soon crows, goats, and other animals all have their say, too).
On this journey Aisha meets three terrifying sea monsters. After she survives a final confrontation with Baba wa Papa, the father of all sharks, she rescues her own father, and hopes that life will return to normal. But at home, things only grow stranger.
Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s debut is a magical realist coming-of-age tale told through the lens of the Swahili and diasporic Hadrami culture in Mombasa, Kenya. Richly descriptive and written with an imaginative hand and sharp eye for unusual detail, The House of Rust is a memorable novel by a thrilling new voice.
Tom Mboya: Life, death and the disint...
Tears of the Crocodile: From Rio to R...
'A lucid, stinging critique' Environmental Politics a critical, radical perspective ... bringing reality home to the reader' international Energy and development
Contents: Road to Rio * Climate & Energy * Biodiversity & Biotechnology * Forests * Trade Versus Aid * Agriculture & Land * Water * Waste * Women & Other 'Groups' * Debt is Bad For Your Health
Killing for Conservation: Wildlife Po...
Is African wildlife threatened by the economic practices of Africans? Should trade in ivory and rhino horn be banned altogether? The issue of wildlife conservation in Africa has captured the public imagination in the industrialized world, where the prevailing view is that wildlife must be saved and preserved at all costs in the interests of global environmental good.
However, casting wildlife conservation as a politically neutral issue masks the complex economic, political, and social realities of African communities. In Killing for Conservation, Rosaleen Duffy presents the search for a solution to the human versus wildlife conflict in Zimbabwe as a case study of wider issues in the realm of global environmental politics.
What are the economic consequences of a strict preservationist policy for local economies versus a more balanced approach to sustainable utilization? Should the international community deprive developing countries of the right to use their natural resources for the economic benefit of their populations?
How can community development and wildlife preservation be welded together to serve the needs of both? Duffy’s keen analysis underlines the essentially political nature of conservation amid international rhetoric that presents it as an apolitical matter of saving animals.
National Policy and a Regional Respon...
The Partnership for Higher Education in Africa commissioned case studies of higher education provision in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa, as part of its effort to stimulate enlightened, equitable, and knowledge-based national development, and to provide guides to understanding.
A radical reform of South African higher education started after the first democratic elections of 1994: higher education was confronted with social, political and economic demands, of a kind not encountered during the apartheid era.
In association with Partnership for Higher Education in Africa
Custodians of the Land: Ecology and C...
Farming and pastoral societies inhabit ever-changing environments. This relationship between environment and rural culture, politics and economy in Tanzania is the subject of this volume which will be valuable in reopening debates on Tanzanian history.
In his conclusion, Isaria N. Kimambo, a founding father of Tanzanian history, reflects on the efforts of successive historians to strike a balance between external causes of change and local initiative in their interpretations of Tanzanian history.
He shows that nationalist and Marxist historians of Tanzanian history, understandably preoccupied through the first quarter-century of the country's post-colonial history with the impact of imperialism and capitalism on East Africa, tended to overlook the initiatives taken by rural societies to transform themselves.
Yet there is good reason for historians to think about the causes of change and innovation in the rural communities of Tanzania, because farming and pastoral people have constantly changed as they adjusted to shifting environmental conditions.
The Midnight Sun by J.B. Omukangala
Making the World Safe for Dictatorshi...
Authoritarian states try to present a positive image of themselves abroad. They invest in foreign-facing media, retain public relations firms, and showcase their successes to elite and popular foreign audiences. But there is also a darker side to these efforts. Authoritarian states try to obscure or censor bad news about their governments and often discredit their critics abroad.
In extreme cases, authoritarian states intimidate, physically attack, or even murder their opponents overseas. This book is about how authoritarian states manage their image abroad using both “promotional” tactics of persuasion and “obstructive” tactics of repression. They adopt these practices to enhance their internal and external regime security or, put differently, to make their world safe for dictatorship.
To substantiate these arguments, the book uses a diverse array of data, including fieldwork and author interviews, cross-national data on extraterritorial repression, examination of public relations filings with the United States government, analysis of authoritarian propaganda, media frequency analysis, and speeches and statements by authoritarian leaders.
It builds a new data set—the Authoritarian Actions Abroad Database—that uses publicly available information to categorize nearly 1,200 instances in which authoritarian states repressed their critical exiles abroad, ranging from vague threats to confirmed assassinations.
It also selects three cases for closer examination to understand in more detail how authoritarian states manage their image abroad using combinations of promotional and obstructive tactics: China, Rwanda, and North Korea. The result is a new way of thinking about the international dimensions of authoritarian politics.
From Home Guard to Mau Mau by Elisha ...
This is a fictional account of a young Kenyan man who is the trusted home guard and bodyguard of a white farmer. The fight to free Kenya of the colonialists rule is on, and the Mau Mau are the spearhead.
The young man secretly joins the Mau Mau, but his loyalties are in conflict and each part of his life now involves betrayal of an other. The life story is one of survival, betrayal, anguish and vengeance.
Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta
Kara Davis is a girl caught in the middle — of her Canadian nationality and her desire to be a “true” Jamaican, of her mother and grandmother’s rages and life lessons, of having to avoid being thought of as too “faas” or too “quiet” or too “bold” or too “soft.” Set in “Little Jamaica,” Toronto’s Eglinton West neighbourhood, Kara moves from girlhood to the threshold of adulthood, from elementary school to high school graduation, in these twelve interconnected stories.
We see her on a visit to Jamaica, startled by the sight of a severed pig’s head in her great aunt’s freezer; in junior high, the victim of a devastating prank by her closest friends; and as a teenager in and out of her grandmother’s house, trying to cope with the ongoing battles between her unyielding grandparents.
A rich and unforgettable portrait of growing up between worlds, Frying Plantain shows how, in one charged moment, friendship and love can turn to enmity and hate, well-meaning protection can become control, and teasing play can turn to something much darker. In her brilliantly incisive debut, Zalika Reid-Benta artfully depicts the tensions between mothers and daughters, second-generation Canadians and first-generation cultural expectations, and Black identity and predominately white society.
The Lion and the Jewel by Wole Soyinka
This is one of the best-known plays by Africa's major dramatist, Wole Soyinka. It is set in the Yoruba village of Ilunjinle.
The main characters are Sidi (the Jewel), 'a true village belle' and Baroka (the Lion), the crafty and powerful Bale of the village, Lakunle, the young teacher, influenced by western ways, and Sadiku, the eldest of Baroka's wives.
How the Lion hunts the Jewel is the theme of this ribald comedy.
Minutes of Glory: And Other Stories b...
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong ’o, although renowned for his novels, memoirs, and plays, honed his craft as a short story writer. From “The Fig Tree” written in 1960, his first year as an undergraduate at Makere University College in Uganda, to the playful “The Ghost of Michael Jackson,” written while a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine, these collected stories reveal a master of the short form.
Covering the period of British colonial rule and resistance in Kenya to the bittersweet experience of independence—and including two stories that have never before been published in the United States—Ngũgĩ’s characters include women fighting for their space in a patriarchal society, big men in their Bentleys and Mercedes who have inherited power from the British; and rebels who still embody the fighting spirit of the downtrodden. One of Ngũgĩ’s most beloved stories, “Minutes of Glory,” tells of Beatrice, a sad, but ambitious waitress who fantasizes about being feted and lauded over by the middle class clientele in the city’s beer halls. Her dream leads her on a witty and heartbreaking adventure.
Published for the first time in America, Minutes of Glory and Other Stories celebrates the storytelling might of one of Africa’s best-loved writers.
The trouble with Nigeria by Chinua Ac...
The eminent African novelist and critic, here addresses Nigeria's problems, aiming to challenge the resignation of Nigerians and inspire them to reject old habits which inhibit Nigeria from becoming a modern and attractive country.
In this famous book now reprinted, he professes that the only trouble with Nigeria is the failure of leadership, because with good leaders Nigeria could resolve its inherent problems such as tribalism; lack of patriotism; social injustice and the cult of mediocrity; indiscipline; and corruption.
The Talking Of Trees by Alexander Nde...
This stage play script covers the life, death and legacy of Prof. Wangari Maathai in unsurpassed technicolour. Steeped in research and injected with a heavy dose of imagination (and a double dose of humour), THE TALKING OF TREES will make you laugh, cry, and cheer.
A biographical note on the Nobel Prize's official website, www.nobelprize.org, captures the essence of Prof. Maathai:
"Wangari Maathai was the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She was also the first female scholar from East and Central Africa to take a doctorate (in biology), and the first female professor ever in her home country of Kenya... Maathai played an active part in the struggle for democracy in Kenya, and belonged to the opposition to Daniel arap Moi's regime. In 1977 she started a grass-roots movement aimed at countering the deforestation that was threatening the means of subsistence of the agricultural population. The campaign encouraged women to plant trees in their local environments and to think ecologically. The so-called Green Belt Movement spread to other African countries, and contributed to the planting of over thirty million trees..."
An American in Africa: 50 Years explo...
Unbury Our Dead with Song by Mũkoma w...
In the heart of Nairobi, four musicians – The Diva, The Taliban Man, The Corporal and 70-year-old bartender Miriam – gather for a once in a lifetime competition, to see who can perform the best Tizita. In the audience is tabloid journalist John Thandi Manfredi, who is enthralled by their renditions of the Ethiopian blues.
Desperate to learn more, he follows the musicians back to Ethiopia, hoping to uncover the secret to this haunting music. Manfredi's search takes him from the idyllic Ethiopian countryside to vibrant juke joints and raucous parties in Addis Ababa, set to a soundtrack of stirring Tizita performances.
From the humble domesticity behind the Diva's glamorous façade, to the troubling question of the Corporal's military service past, Manfredi discovers that the many layers to this musical genre are reflected in the lives and secrets of its performers.
A love letter to beauty, music and the imagination, Unbury Our Dead with Song captures how it feels have an encounter with the sublime.
