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Animals of the Masai Mara
Brief summary
One of the greatest attractions of a trip to Kenya is the chance to see animals such as lions, cheetah, leopards, zebra, and giraffe up close and in their natural habitats.
Animals of the Masai Mara is a lavish photographic guide that explores the charismatic wildlife most likely to be encountered by a safari visitor to the Masai Mara National Reserve in southwest Kenya.
More than 140 stunning photographs showcase 65 mammals and 17 reptile species, including 6 snakes. Designed to be informative and locally accurate, rather than purely identification-based, this easy-to-use book pays particular attention to wildlife behavior and is written from the firsthand experiences of the authors and the knowledge of local safari guides.
Numerous "Top Tips" throughout show readers how and where to locate specific species. The only field guide to focus solely on the wildlife of the Masai Mara National Reserve, Animals of the Masai Mara will be indispensable to visitors to this famous park and all nature enthusiasts with an interest in this area of the world.
• The only photographic guide specific to the animals of the Masai Mara National Reserve
• More than 140 remarkable photographs covering 65 mammals and 17 reptile species, including 6 snakes
• Accessible text explores animal behavior and other interesting facts
• A brief and informative introduction to the habitats of the Masai Mara
ISBN:9780691156019
Author:Adam Scott Kennedy and Vicki Kennedy
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
Brief summary
William Kamkwamba was born in Malawi, a country where magic ruled and modern science was mystery. It was also a land withered by drought and hunger.
But William had read about windmills, and he dreamed of building one that would bring to his small village a set of luxuries that only 2 percent of Malawians could enjoy: electricity and running water.
His neighbors called him misala—crazy—but William refused to let go of his dreams. With a small pile of once-forgotten science textbooks; some scrap metal, tractor parts, and bicycle halves; and an armory of curiosity and determination, he embarked on a daring plan to forge an unlikely contraption and small miracle that would change the lives around him.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is a remarkable true story about human inventiveness and its power to overcome crippling adversity. It will inspire anyone who doubts the power of one individual's ability to change his community and better the lives of those around him.
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ISBN:9780061730337
Author:William Kamkwamba & Bryan Mealer
Africas Greatest Entrepreneurs by Mok...
Africa's Greatest Entrepreneurs comprises of a series of profiles on some of the most successful and dynamic businesspeople currently operating in Africa.
Each chapter is dedicated to a single entrepreneur and will focus on the personality as well as the story of how they achieved their success in their particular environment or field.
The narrative will focus on the personal success stories of these self-starters in the context of the economic and political climate of their respective markets.
Issues discussed include: how they started in business; their defining moments; the challenges they faced and how they overcame them; their frustrations and achievements; what kept them going; what they learned in the process; things they would have done differently; their relationship with the political power structures; their opinions on leadership, on Africa's future; their heroes and villains, and finally, the legacy they leave behind.
The book is inspiring and will provide a better understanding of who the real powerbrokers in Africa are. It will give an unprecedented insight into unique and successful African entrepreneurs as well as first-hand experiences of the realities of how to get things done on the continent.
Africa's Greatest Entrepreneurs will feature an eclectic mix of the most well-known and notable entrepreneurs in Africa. Some of the names included in the book are: Kagiso Mmusi (Botswana), Victor Fotso (Cameroon), Jean Kacou Diagou (Cote d'Ivoire), Gerald Mangoua (Cote d'Ivoire), Kofi Amoabeng(Ghana), Kwabena Adjai (Ghana), Chris Kirubi (Kenya), Daniel David (Mozambique), Wale Tinubu (Nigeria), Aliko Dangote (Nigeria), Aliou Sow (Senegal), Mzi Khumalo (South Africa), Keith Kunene (SA), Ndaba Ntsele (SA), Herman Mashaba (SA), Richard Maponya (SA), Mo Ibrahim (Sudan), Reginald Mengi (Tanzania), Ali Mufuruki (Tanzania) and Wavamunno (Uganda).
The Peculiar Kenyan by Sunny Bindra
Brief summary
Sunny Bindra, Kenya’s renowned author and business advisor, has been regaling Kenyans since 2003 in his famous Sunday Nation column, "A Sunny Day.”
His bold and contrarian writing has created much discussion and debate across the country and beyond. Storymoja presents a collection of selected articles, all written with a light touch and with a twist of his trademark edgy humour.
These pieces skewer all that is "peculiar” about Kenyans: our leaders, our business, our social habits. And as we laugh at ourselves, we gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be Kenyan.
ISBN:9789966001139
Author:Sunny Bindra
Slave My True Story
Brief summary
Mende Nazer lost her childhood at age twelve, when she was sold into slavery. It all began one horrific night in 1993, when Arab raiders swept through her Nuba village, murdering the adults and rounding up thirty-one children, including Mende.
Mende was sold to a wealthy Arab family who lived in Sudan's capital city, Khartoum. So began her dark years of enslavement. Her Arab owners called her "Yebit," or "black slave." She called them "master." She was subjected to appalling physical, sexual, and mental abuse. She slept in a shed and ate the family leftovers like a dog. She had no rights, no freedom, and no life of her own.
Normally, Mende's story never would have come to light. But seven years after she was seized and sold into slavery, she was sent to work for another master—a diplomat working in the United Kingdom. In London, she managed to make contact with other Sudanese, who took pity on her. In September 2000, she made a dramatic break for freedom.
Slave is a story almost beyond belief. It depicts the strength and dignity of the Nuba tribe. It recounts the savage way in which the Nuba and their ancient culture are being destroyed by a secret modern-day trade in slaves. Most of all, it is a remarkable testimony to one young woman's unbreakable spirit and tremendous courage.
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ISBN:9781844081165
Author:Mende Nazer & Damien Lewis
A Gift of Love
Brief summary
A Gift of Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings
The classic collection of sixteen sermons preached and compiled by Dr. King
As Dr. King prepared for the Birmingham campaign in early 1963, he drafted the final sermons for Strength to Love, a volume of his best-known homilies. King had begun working on the sermons during a fortnight in jail in July 1962.
Having been arrested for holding a prayer vigil outside Albany City Hall, King and Ralph Abernathy shared a jail cell for fifteen days that was, according to King, ‘‘dirty, filthy, and ill-equipped’’ and "the worse I have ever seen.” While behind bars, he spent uninterrupted time preparing the drafts for classic sermons such as "Loving Your Enemies,” "Love in Action,” and "Shattered Dreams,” and continued to work on the volume after his release.
A Gift of Love includes these classic sermons, along with two new preachings. Collectively they present King’s fusion of Christian teachings and social consciousness, and promote his prescient vision of love as a social and political force for change.
ISBN:9780141985183
Author:Martin Luther King Jr.
Empires in the Sun
Brief summary
Empires in the Sun: The Struggle for the Mastery of Africa.
In this compelling history of the men and ideas that radically changed the course of world history, Lawrence James investigates and analyses how, within a hundred years, Europeans persuaded and coerced Africa into becoming a subordinate part of the modern world.
His narrative is laced with the experiences of participants and onlookers and introduces the men and women who, for better or worse, stamped their wills on Africa. The continent was a magnet for the high-minded, the philanthropic, the unscrupulous and the insane.
Visionary pro-consuls rubbed shoulders with missionaries, explorers, soldiers, adventurers, engineers, big-game hunters, entrepreneurs and physicians. Between 1830 and 1945, Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, Italy and the United States exported their languages, laws, culture, religions, scientific and technical knowledge and economic systems to Africa.
The colonial powers imposed administrations designed to bring stability and peace to a continent that seemed to lack both. The justification for occupation was emancipation from slavery - and the common assumption that late nineteenth-century Europe was the summit of civilisation.
By 1945 a transformed continent was preparing to take charge of its own affairs, a process of decolonisation that took a mere twenty or so years. There remained areas where European influence was limited (Liberia, Abyssinia) - through inertia and a desire for a quiet time, Africa's new masters left much undisturbed. This magnificent history also pauses to ask: what did not happen and why?
ISBN:9781474604383
Author:Lawrence James
Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okpa...
Inspired by Nigeria’s folktales and its war, Under the Udala Trees is a deeply searching, powerful debut about the dangers of living and loving openly.
Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does; born before independence, she is eleven when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child and they, star-crossed, fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities.
They are also both girls. When their love is discovered, Ijeoma learns that she will have to hide this part of herself. But there is a cost to living inside a lie.
As Edwidge Danticat has made personal the legacy of Haiti’s political coming of age, Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees uses one woman’s lifetime to examine the ways in which Nigerians continue to struggle toward selfhood.
Even as their nation contends with and recovers from the effects of war and division, Nigerian lives are also wrecked and lost from taboo and prejudice. This story offers a glimmer of hope — a future where a woman might just be able to shape her life around truth and love.
A Long Walk Home
Brief summary
A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival
This is the story of how, over a period of one hundred and ninety-two days, I was torn away from the life I knew and loved, and dragged down to the depths of despair; of how I endured enforced isolation and near-starvation at the hands of Somali pirates; and of how I made a choice to survive by any and all means that I could muster.
In September 2011 Judith Tebbutt and her husband David set out on an adventurous holiday to Kenya. A couple for thirty-three years, they had first met in Zambia: Africa had played a major part in their life together.
After a joyous week on safari in the Masai Mara, they flew on to a beach resort forty kilometres south of Somalia. And there, in the early hours of 11 September, tragedy struck them.
Judith was torn away from David by a band of armed pirates, dragged over sea and land to a village in the arid heart of lawless Somalia, and there held hostage in a squalid room, a ransom on her head. There, too, she learned the terrible truth that the responsibility of securing her release now rested with her son Ollie.
Powerful, moving and at times quite devastating, this is Judith Tebbutt's story in her own words.
ISBN:9780571303069
Author:Judith Tebbutt
Africa Solo
Brief summary
Africa Solo: My World Record Race from Cairo to Cape Town
Shortlisted for Adventure Travel Book of the Year
In the spring of 2015, Mark Beaumont set out from the bustling heart of Cairo on his latest world record attempt - solo, the length of Africa, intending to ride to Cape Town in under 50 days.
Seven years since he smashed the world record for cycling round the world, this would be his toughest trip yet. And he would set a new mark that would simply break the limits of endurance.
Despite illness, mechanical faults, attempted robbery and stone-throwing children, as well as dehydration in the deserts and unprecedented levels of exhaustion, Mark completed the journey in just 41 days, 10 hours and 22 minutes, after cycling 6,762 miles, spending 439 hours in the saddle (sometimes up to 16 hours a day) and climbing 190,355 feet through 8 countries. It was an astonishing journey, and one that will fascinate and grip the reader.
From the obvious dangers of Egypt, Sudan and Kenya, over the unpaved, muddy, mountainous roads of Ethiopia, through the beautiful grasslands of Tanzania and Zambia, to riding at night in Botswana in the company of elephants and giraffes, Mark brings Africa to life in all its complex glory, friendship and curiosity, while inspiring us all to question the bounds of what is possible.
ISBN:9781473526952
Author:Mark Beaumont
Shadows on the Grass
Brief summary
Isak Dinesen takes up the absorbing story of her life in Kenya begun in the unforgettable Out of Africa, which she published under the name of Karen Blixen.
With warmth and humanity these four stories illuminate her love both for the African people, their dignity and traditions, and for the beauty and wildness of the landscape.
The first three were written in the 1950s and the last, 'Echoes from the Hills', was written especially for this volume in the summer of 1960 when the author was in her seventies. In all they provide a moving final chapter to her African reminiscences.
ISBN:9780140180435
Author:Isak Dinesen & Karen Blixen
Africas Long Road Since Independence
Brief summary
Africa's Long Road since Independence: The Many Histories of a Continent.
'A superb book...genuinely innovative' Jack Spence OBE, King's College London
Over the last half century, sub-Saharan Africa has not had one history, but many. Histories that have intertwined, converged and diverged. They have involved a continuing process of decolonization and state-building, conflict, economic problems but also progress and the perpetual interplay of structure and agency.
This new view of those histories looks in particular at the relationship between territorial, economic, political and societal structures and human agency in the complex and sometimes confusing development of an independent Africa.
The story starts well before the granting of independence to Ghana in 1957, but the book also looks at Africa in the closing decades of the old millennium and opening ones of the new. This is a book, too, about the history of the peoples of Africa and their struggle for economic development against the global economic straitjacket into which they were strapped by colonial rule and decolonisation.
The importance of imposed or inherited structures, whether the global capitalist system, of which Africa is a subordinate part, or the artificial and often inappropriate state borders and political systems is discussed in the light of the exercise of agency by African peoples, political movements and leaders.
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ISBN:9780141984094
Author:Keith Somerville
The Garden Of Burning Sand
Brief summary
Lusaka, Zambia: Zoe Fleming is a young, idealistic American lawyer working with an NGO devoted to combatting the epidemic of child sexual assault in southern Africa. Zoe’s organization is called in to help when an adolescent girl is brutally assaulted.
The girl’s identity is a mystery. Where did she come from? Was the attack a random street crime or a premeditated act?
A betrayal in her past gives the girl’s plight a special resonance for Zoe, and she is determined to find the perpetrator. She slowly forms a working relationship, and then a surprising friendship, with Joseph Kabuta, a Zambian police officer.
Their search takes them from Lusaka’s roughest neighbourhoods to the wild waters of Victoria Falls, from the AIDS-stricken streets of Johannesburg to the matchless splendour of Cape Town.
As the investigation builds to a climax, threatening to send shockwaves through Zambian society, Zoe is forced to radically reshape her assumptions about love, loyalty, and family and, especially, the meaning of justice.
ISBN:9781443419710
Author:Corban Addison
Of goats and poisoned oranges
It is generally accepted that there are only two possible outcomes to the flipping of a coin - heads or tails. In reality, there is also a small possibility of the coin landing on its edge.
In this book we explore the tumultuous marriage of a middle aged Kenyan power couple as it is told by different parties in their life.
On this riveting journey across the foothills of Mt. Kenya and the chaotic streets of Nairobi, the reader will learn that the truth is not a universal concept, but one that is dependent on the person telling the story.
ISBN:B00HBBWPI6
Author: Ciku Kimeria
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kings...
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959.
They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil.
What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.
Britains Gulag The Brutal End of Empi...
Britain fought in the Second World War to save the world from fascism. But just a few years after the defeat of Hitler came the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya - a mass armed rebellion by the Kikuyu people, demanding the return of their land and freedom.
The draconian response of Britain's colonial government was to detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population of one-and-a half-million - to hold them in camps or confine them in villages ringed with barbed wire - and to portray them as sub-human savages.
From 1952 until the end of the war in 1960 tens of thousands of detainees - and possibly a hundred thousand or more - died from the combined effects of exhaustion, disease, starvation and systemic physical brutality.
Until now these events have remained untold, largely because the British government in Kenya destroyed most of its files. For the last eight years Caroline Elkins has conducted exhaustive research to piece together the story, unearthing reams of documents and interviewing several hundred Kikuyu survivors.
Britain's Gulag reveals what happened inside Kenya's detention camps, as well as the efforts to conceal the truth.
Now, for the first time, we can understand the full savagery of the Mau Mau war and the ruthless determination with which Britain sought to control its empire.
Leaving Before the Rains Come
The sequel to Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.
In her twenties Alexandra Fuller embarked on a new journey, into a long, tempestuous marriage to Charlie Ross...,
The love of her life. In this frank, personal memoir, she charts their twenty years together, from the brutal beauty of the Zambezi to the mountains of Wyoming – the new adventures, the unexplored paths, the insurmountable obstacles… and the many signals that they missed along the way.
ISBN:2147483647
Author:Alexandra Fuller
In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz by Miche...
He was known as "the Leopard," and for the thirty-two years of his reign Mobutu Sese Seko, president of Zaire, showed all the cunning of his namesake, seducing Western powers, buying up the opposition, and dominating his people with a devastating combination of brutality and charm.
While the population was pauperized, he plundered the country's copper and diamond resources, downing pink champagne in his jungle palace like some modern-day reincarnation of Joseph Conrad's crazed station manager.
Michela Wrong, a correspondent who witnessed firsthand Mobutu's last days, traces the rise and fall of the idealistic young journalist who became the stereotype of an African despot.
Engrossing, highly readable, and as funny as it is tragic, her book assesses how Belgium's King Leopold, the CIA, and the World Bank all helped to bring about the disaster that is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
If, in this poignant account, the villains are the "Big Vegetables" (les Grosses légumes) — the fat cats who benefited from Mobutu's largesse — the heroes are the ordinary citizens trapped in a parody of a state. Living in the shadow of a disintegrating nuclear reactor, where banknotes are not worth the paper they are printed on, they have turned survival into an art form.
For all its valuable insights into Africa's colonial heritage and the damage done by Western intervention, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz is ultimately a celebration of the irrepressible human spirit.
Interventions by Kofi Annan with Nade...
Interventions: A Life in War and Peace is the story of Annan’s remarkable time at the center of the world stage.
After forty years of service at the United Nations, Annan shares here his unique experiences during the terrorist attacks of September 11; the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; the war between Israel, Hizbollah, and Lebanon; the brutal conflicts of Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia; and the geopolitical transformations following the end of the Cold War.
With eloquence and unprecedented candor, Interventions finally reveals Annan’s unique role and unparalleled perspective on decades of global politics.
A Good Man in Africa
In the small African republic of Kinjanja, British diplomat Morgan Leafy bumbles heavily through his job.
His love of women, his fondness for drink, and his loathing for the country prove formidable obstacles on his road to any kind of success.
But when he becomes an operative in Operation Kingpin and is charged with monitoring the front runner in Kinjanja’s national elections, Morgan senses an opportunity to achieve real professional recognition and, more importantly, reassignment.
After he finds himself being blackmailed, diagnosed with a venereal disease, attempting bribery, and confounded with a dead body, Morgan realizes that very little is going according to plan.
ISBN:2147483647
Author:William Boyd
