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Equipoise: 2020 Anthology of the Nair...
Brief Summary
Ten new stories from Kenya. Herein are to be found vampires and gods; sex toys and exhibitionists; divorces and soon-to-be divorcees; heart attacks and heartbreaks; grief unending, bad decisions and unexpected salvation; the unemployed, troubled expatriates, hustlers and conmen; adventures in Nairobi, Dar es Salam, Mt. Elgon and everywhere in between; friends who are not just friends, unruly relatives and beloved but complicated parents.
Featured authors are:
- Miriam Amoit
- Rumona Apiyo
- Nyasili Atetwe
- Clarie Gor
- Alvin Kathembe
- Duncan Mwangi
- Aggrey Oriwo
- Gladwell Pamba
- Natalie Sifuma
- Kiprono Tonui
Decolonization and Independence in Ke...
Brief Summary
The main purpose of the book is to show that decolonisation does not only mean the transfer of alien power to sovereign nationhood; it must also entail the liberation of the worlds of spirit and culture, as well as economics and politics.
The book also raises a more fundamental question, that is: How much independence is available to any state, national economy or culture in today's world? It asks how far are Africa's miseries linked to the colonial past and to the process of decolonization?
In particular the book raises the basic question of how far Kenya is avoidably neo-colonial? And what does neo-colonial dependence mean? The book answers these questions by discussing the dynamic between the politics of decolonization, the social history of class formation and the economics of dependence. The book ends with a provocative epilogue discussing the transformation of the post-colonial state from a single-party to a multi-party system.
African Civilizations: An Archaeologi...
Brief Summary
This new revised edition of African Civilizations re-examines the physical evidence for developing social complexity in Africa over the last six thousand years. Unlike the two previous editions, it is not confined to tropical Africa but considers the whole continent.
Graham Connah focuses upon the archaeological research of two key aspects of complexity, urbanism and state formation, in ten main areas of Africa: Egypt, North Africa, Nubia, Ethiopia, the West African savanna, the West African forest, the East African coast and islands, the Zimbabwe Plateau, parts of Central Africa and South Africa. The book's main concern is to review the available evidence in its varied environmental settings, and to consider possible explanations of the developments that gave rise to it.
Extensively illustrated, including new maps and plans, and offering an extended list of references, this is essential reading for students of archaeology, anthropology, African history, black studies and social geography.
The Oxford Handbook of Modern African...
Brief Summary
The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History represents an invaluable tool for historians and others in the field of African studies. This collection of essays, produced by some of the finest scholars currently working in the field, provides the latest insights into, and interpretations of,
the history of Africa - a continent with a rich and complex past.
An understanding of this past is essential to gain perspective on Africa's current challenges, and this accessible and comprehensive volume will allow readers to explore various aspects - political, economic, social, and cultural - of
the continent's history over the last two hundred years.
Since African history first emerged as a serious academic endeavour in the 1950s and 1960s, it has undergone numerous shifts in terms of emphasis and approach, changes brought about by political and economic exigencies and by ideological debates. This multi-faceted Handbook is essential reading for
anyone with an interest in those debates, and in Africa and its peoples. While the focus is determinedly historical, anthropology, geography, literary criticism, political science and sociology are all employed in this ground-breaking study of Africa's past.
A History of Modern Africa: 1800 to t...
Brief Summary
A History of Modern Africa recounts the full breadth of Africa's political, economic, and social history over the past two centuries.
- Adopts a long-term approach to current issues, stressing the importance of nineteenth-century and deeper indigenous dynamics in explaining Africa's later twentieth-century challenges
- Places a greater focus on African agency, especially during the colonial encounter
- Includes more in-depth coverage of non-Anglophone Africa
- Offers expanded coverage of the post-colonial era to take account of recent developments, including the conflict in Darfur and the political unrest of 2011 in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya
Ogadinma Or, Everything Will Be All R...
Brief Summary
Ogadinma Or, Everything Will be All Right tells the story of the naïve and trusting teenager Ogadinma as she battles against Nigeria's societal expectations in the 1980s. After a rape and unwanted pregnancy leave her exiled from her family in Kano, thwarting her plans to go to university, she is sent to her aunt's in Lagos and pressured into a marriage with an older man.
When their whirlwind romance descends into abuse and indignity, Ogadinma is forced to channel her independence and resourcefulness to escape a fate that appears all but inevitable. Ogadinma, the UK debut by Ukamaka Olisakwe, introduces a heroine for whom it is impossible not to root, and announces the author as a gifted chronicler of the patriarchal experience.
‘An intimate and dazzling exploration of the life and times of a young Nigerian woman whose move to the capital city of Lagos leads to a series of encounters, which are by turns disorienting, revelatory and tragic.’ Christopher Merrill, author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood
‘Written in vivid, engaging prose, this is the story of one woman’s journey to independence.’ Chinelo Okparanta, author of Under the Udala Trees and Happiness, Like Water: Stories
Baranzan’s People: An Ethnohistory of...
Brief Summary
Based on in-depth fieldwork, research, and personal interviews, this comprehensive ethnographic study of the Bajju people of southern Kaduna State in Nigeria covers their origins, history, culture, religious beliefs, and practices. Bajju precolonial political-religious organization, economy, legal system, social organization, and values are described. Also included are chapters on the Hausa-Fulani, the colonial context, the Christian era, and cultural change.
Ethnologists, missiologists, development personnel, and the Bajju themselves will find this a rich resource.
For me as a Bajju scholar, this study is as important as E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s classic study, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937). For that reason, all Bajju sons and daughters must read this important work (from the foreword by Dr. Samuel Waje Kunhiyop).
Baranzan’s People: An Ethnohistory of the Bajju of the Middle Belt of Nigeria is a companion volume to Bajju Christian Conversion in the Middle Belt of Nigeria, published by SIL International® 2019.
African Friends and Money Matters: Ob...
Brief Summary
African Friends and Money Matters grew out of frustrations that Westerners experience when they travel and work in Africa. Africans have just as many frustrations relating to Westerners in their midst. Each manages money, time, and relationships in very different ways, often creating friction and misunderstanding. This book deals with everyday life in Africa, showing the underlying logic of African economic systems and behavior.
Two new chapters in this second edition emphasize personal relationships, making the book even more relevant to the thoughtful reader. Maranz introduces these principles, as well as the very different goals of African and Western economic systems, plus ninety specific observations of money-related African behaviors. Personal anecdotes bring this book to life. The result is that the reader can make sense of customs that at first seem incomprehensible. This popular book has captured the interest of Westerners living in or visiting Sub-Saharan Africa: business, diplomatic, and NGO personnel; religious workers, journalists, and tourists.
The readership includes professors and students of African Studies. African readers will also be interested for what it reveals about Western culture and ways Westerners often react to Africa. David E. Maranz (Ph.D., International Development) has worked with SIL International in several African countries since 1975 in community development, administration, and anthropology consulting. His earlier book, Peace is Everything (SIL International), examines the worldview and religious context of the Senegambia region.
Acclimated to Africa: Cultural Compet...
Brief Summary
Misunderstood: one thing foreigners never want to be! But Africans and Westerners, interpreting the world through different cultural lenses, misunderstand each other with alarming regularity. This is sometimes funny, sometimes scandalous, but always damages credibility.
This book is designed to promote cultural competence among Westerners working in Africa and among Africans living in the West. Cultural competence--knowing what one needs to know to act in a manner acceptable in a society--is the first step to credibility and the surest antidote to being misunderstood.
DiGennaro creatively introduces dialog between two fictitious characters: Juma as the African voice, and Wesley as the Western voice. They articulate their culture's perspectives on seven themes, themes which were identified by Westerners in Africa and by their African co-workers, as the most chronic points of cross-cultural stress: organization, finances, friendship, spirituality, communication and conflict, leadership, and work.
Easy to read and broad in approach, this book is ideal for North Americans and Europeans who desire to expand their appreciation and comprehension of Africans' social reality.
Debbi DiGennaro (M.A. in Social Work, The Ohio State University) moved to East Africa in 2008. She leaned heavily on her training in social sciences to facilitate her understanding of work and relationship patterns in Africa. Based in Nairobi with her family, DiGennaro currently leads the regional team of a faith-based NGO.
Impact of Traditional African Sacrifi...
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Co...
Brief Summary
In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this prophetic work, which has been unavailable for more than ten years, he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America's future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education. With a universal message of hope that continues to resonate, King demanded an end to global suffering, asserting that humankind-for the first time-has the resources and technology to eradicate poverty.
Nairobi in the Making: Landscapes of ...
Brief Summary
What does it mean to make a life in an African city today? How do ordinary Africans, surrounded by collapsing urban infrastructures and amid fantastical promises of hypermodern, globalized futures, try to ensure a place for themselves in the city's future? Exploring the relationship between the remains of empire and the global city, and themes of urban belonging and exclusion, housing and security, Constance Smith examines the making and remaking of one of Africa's most fragmented, vibrant cities.
Nairobi is on the cusp of radical urban change. As in other capital cities across Africa, the Kenyan government has launched "Vision 2030", an urban megaproject that envisions the capital as a "world class metropolis", a spectacular new node in a network of global cities. Yet as a city born of British colonialism, Nairobians also live amongst the dilapidated vestiges of imperial urban planning; spaces designed to regulate urban subjects. Based on extensive ethnographic research in a dilapidated, colonial-era public housing project built as a model urban neighborhood but which is now slated for demolition, Smith explores how projects of self-making and city-making are entwined.
She traces how it is through residents' everyday lives - in the mundane, incremental work of home maintenance, in the accumulation of stories about the past, in ordinary people's aspirations for the future - that urban landscapes are formed, imaginatively, materially and unpredictably, across time. Nairobi emerges as a place of pathways and plans, obstructions and aspirations, residues and endurances, that inflect the way that ordinary people produce the city, generating practices of history making, ideas about urban belonging and attempts to refashion "Vision 2030" into a future more meaningful and inclusive to ordinary city dwellers.
I Accuse the Press: An Insider’...
The Agikuyu: 1890 – 1965 by Mai...
Brief Summary
Author Maina wa Kinyatti, who has written extensively on the history of the Mau Mau, breaks fresh ground in this treatise, first delivered in The Gikuyu language. The Agikuyu people with their cousins--Embu, Miiru, Mbeere and Akamba--are the inhabitants of central Kenya, which was the epicenter of the decade-long Mau Mau war of liberation.
In this book, Kinyatti deftly navigates through the early phases of Kenya's history from the invasion and occupation of the country by the British imperialists and the Africans' spirited response to repression, which would find expression in formulations such as the Kenya African Union (KAU). Kinyatti pays close attention to KAU's towering figures like Jomo Kenyatta, the country's future founding president.
He explains how his complicated role in the national struggle--anti-imperialism on one hand, and Mau Mau ambivalence on the other--would lead to his mistaken Author Maina wa Kinyatti, who has written extensively on the history of the Mau Mau, breaks fresh ground in this treatise, first delivered in The Gikuyu language.
The Agikuyu people with their cousins--Embu, Miiru, Mbeere and Akamba--are the inhabitants of central Kenya, which was the epicenter of the decade-long Mau Mau war of liberation. In this book, Kinyatti deftly navigates through the early phases of Kenya's history from the invasion and occupation of the country by the British imperialists and the Africans' spirited response to repression, which would find expression in formulations such as the Kenya African Union (KAU).
Kinyatti pays close attention to KAU's towering figures like Jomo Kenyatta, the country's future founding president. He explains how his complicated role in the national struggle--anti-imperialism on one hand, and Mau Mau ambivalence on the other--would lead to his mistaken
Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists - he a photographer, she a dancer - trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them.
Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics o...
Decolonising the Mind is a collection of essays about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity.
The book, which advocates for linguistic decolonization, is one of Ngũgĩ’s best-known and most-cited non-fiction publications, helping to cement him as a pre-eminent voice theorizing the “language debate” in post-colonial studies.
Ngũgĩ describes the book as “a summary of some of the issues in which I have been passionately involved for the last twenty years of my practice in fiction, theatre, criticism, and in teaching of literature…” Decolonising the Mind is split into four essays: “The Language of African Literature,” “The Language of African Theatre,” “The Language of African Fiction,” and “The Quest for Relevance.”
Olonana Ole Mbatian ( Makers of Kenya...
Brief Summary
Olonana ole Mbatian, popularly known as Lenana, was one of the most outstanding Masai and Kenyan leaders, African chief and Laibon (prophet/visionary), whose life spanned the second half of the nineteenth, and the first decade of the twentieth centuries.
He lived through and influenced a crucial period in Kenya's history: when the Masai were engaged in nation building, there was competition for leadership, land, people, livestock, wealth and power; and when European intrusions, which were becoming ever more intensive, were shaping Kenya's colonial culture and economy. This is a balanced and critical study of an individual's biography, and historical context.
It analyses for example to what extent Olonana's relationship with the colonialists influenced colonial policy on pastoralism; the devastating effects of colonial policy on pastoralism; and why the Masai shunned westernism, education and trade in favour of traditional pastoralism, and the position of Olonana on these issues. It considers popular perceptions of Olonana as a champion of Masai cultural heritage; and assesses his achievements and legacy. This is a concise biography of a key figure in Masai history, about whom little has been written, which serves well as a general introduction to the history and key figures of the period.
Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Politi...
A powerful investigation into a grisly political murder and the authoritarian regime behind it: Do Not Disturb upends the narrative that Rwanda sold the world after one of the deadliest genocides of the twentieth century.
We think we know the story of Africa’s Great Lakes region. Following the Rwandan genocide, an idealistic group of young rebels overthrew the brutal regime in Kigali, ushering in an era of peace and stability that made Rwanda the donor darling of the West, winning comparisons with Switzerland and Singapore. But the truth was considerably more sinister.
Vividly sourcing her story with direct testimony from key participants, Wrong uses the story of the murder of Patrick Karegeya, once Rwanda’s head of external intelligence and a quicksilver operator of supple charm, to paint the portrait of a modern African dictatorship created in the chilling likeness of Paul Kagame, the president who sanctioned his former friend’s assassination.
What We’re Told Not to Talk About (Bu...
Brief Summary
14 countries, 42 women, each with a story no one has heard before.
What do you do when you're living on the streets and on your period? What does it feel like to have a poo after you've given birth? How do we learn to love our bodies again after they've been abused? And, how do you know if you've ever really orgasmed? We all have questions about our bodies but often women's voices are silenced for being impolite or improper
What We're Told Not To Talk About (But We're Going To Anyway) is an important, taboo-breaking book that gives voice to the experiences of women from all walks of life, whose stories might not ordinarily be heard. Alongside Nimko's story of living with FGM, rebuilding her relationship with her own body and being a woman her own way, these are the true stories of real women who are sharing the experiences they've always been told should be secret and shameful.
The book is a call to arms for all women to reclaim the narrative around their bodies and to refuse to bow to the taboos which keep us silent. There is no such thing as oversharing.
'A beautiful book with such a wide range of uplifting but often heart-breaking stories. Made us cry and think in equal measure' - Pandora Sykes, co-host of The High Low
How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company.
Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean-up and financial reparations to the villagers are made—and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interest. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle would last for decades and come at a steep price.
Told through the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold onto its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.
