QUICK DELIVERY
Swift dispatch
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.
African Wildlife and Livelihoods: The...
Brief Summary
Recent conservation policies in Africa have followed three main principles:
1) that conservation should be community-based;
2) that things conserved should be managed to achieve both development and conservation goals;
3) that markets should play a role in shaping the incentives for conservation.
The editors and contributors of this volume examine the success or otherwise of these practices in a number of different contexts across the continent.
Swahili for the Broken hearted by Pet...
Brief Summary
Question: What do you do when you're dumped by the Girl Next Door?
Answer: Throw yourself into another madcap adventure and travel from Cape Town to Cairo...
A week after breaking up with the GND (his travelling companion through Central America) Peter Moore heads off to Africa to lose himself for a while. In the grand tradition of 19th-century scoundrelas, explorers and romantics, Africa strikes him as the ideal place to find solitude and anonymity in the face of a personal crisis.
What follows is Peter's journey from one end of the Dark Continent to the other.
Travelling the fabled Cape Town to Cairo route by any means of transport he can blag (or if he must, pay) his way onto, it's an epic trek that sees our intrepid Antipodean experience everything from the southernmost city in Africa to the Pyramids, vast game parks and thundering falls, cosmopolitan cities and tiny villages as he journeys through the very heart of Africa. And travelling on his own, it's inevitable that Peter falls in with a motley cast of characters and has a myriad misadventures: including coming face to face with a wild Hyena with very bad breath, crossing the treacherous Sani Pass, the highest in Africa, narrowly escaping a riot by hiding in a coffin shop, saving oil-covered Penguins in South Africa, acting as an extra in a WW2 epic, not to mention dodging 20,000 single woman trying to catch the eye of the king of Swaziland during the annual Reed Dance. And then there was the time when he was kicked out of Robert Mugabe's birthday bash at gunpoint.
God’s Bits of Wood by Ousmane S...
Brief Summary
In 1947 the workers on the Dakar-Niger Railway came out on strike. Throughout this novel, written from the workers' perspective, the community social tensions emerge, and increase as the strike lengthens
Ousmane Sembène envinces the color, passion, and tragedy of those formative years in the history of West Africa.
Petals of Blood by Ngugi Wa Thiongio
The Mau Mau rebellion, as it is often called, which began in Kenya in the early 1950s, was a nationalist, anticolonial armed resistance against the British colonial state.
The guerrilla movement called itself the Kenya Land Freedom Army; the British dubbed the movement “mau mau,” a meaningless name, to obscure the aims otherwise so clear in the resistance army’s name.
Ngugi Wa Thiongío’s Petals of Blood examines, among other things, the betrayal by the postcolonial regime of the ideals of this anticolonial struggle that helped Kenya achieve its independence.
The novel revolves around three men and a woman. The four friends reveal different aspects of their history to each other piecemeal, just as their families had guardedly explained the past to them. The lingering effects of the Mau Mau revolt have affected all their lives and by the end of the novel, each character is wrapped up in his or her own exclusive epiphany about life in Kenya.
Abdullah, the trader, thinks he failed the movement because he did not avenge the death of a friend who was a revolutionary and who was betrayed. Munira, the schoolteacher and eventual wide-eyed prophet, is paralyzed by the shadow of his successful father, who condemned the Mau Mau but aided the crony corruption of independent Kenya. Wanja, the beauty from a broken home, learns that it was two generations of revolutionary fervor that distorted the home she grew up in. And Karega, Thiongío’s union-pushing hero, scrutinizes the history of Mau Mau as if it were a sacred text. Somewhere in that history, they all believe, is the key to wisdom and justice.
Place by DRR, Clifton Gachagua and Fr...
Ritual by Carey Baraka, Wairimu Murii...
Brief Summary
Ritual is the second issue of drr and was published in August 2020. It's the largest issue of the journal so far and features works from more than 40 writers and artists from Africa and the African diaspora exploring a range of work around the theme of Ritual. Carey Baraka and Wairimu Muriithi are the series editors of Ritual.
Deception by Amal Mohamed
Black Poachers White Hunters A Social...
Brief Summary
For centuries, Kenya's game-laden plains and forests were the rewarding hunting grounds of her native African population.
Black Poachers, White Hunters traces the history of hunting there in the colonial era, describing the British attempt to impose the practices and values of nineteenth-century European aristocratic hunts. This both created and enforced an image of African inferiority and subordination.
Ultimately conservationists came to claim sovereignty over African wildlife, completing the transformation of indigenous hunters into criminal poachers and seeking to eliminate them altogether from the "sportsman's paradise" of Kenya.ABOUT THE AUTHOR---Edward I. Steinhart is an associate professor of history at Texas Tech University, Lubbock.
Mau Mau From Below by Greet Kershaw a...
Brief Summary
John Lonsdale says in his introduction:
"This is the oral evidence of the Kikuyu villagers with whom Greet Kershaw lived as an aid worker during the Mau Mau 'Emergency' in the 1950s, and which is now totally irrecoverable in any form save in her own field notes.
"Professor Kershaw has uncovered long local histories of social tension which could have been revealed by no other means than patient enquiry, of both her neighbour's memory and government archives...
"Nobody, whether Kikuyu participant, Kenyan or European scholar, has provided such startlingly authoritative ethnographic insights into the values, fears and expectations of Kikuyu society and thus of the motivation of Kikuyu action...
"Her data suggests, as other scholars have also accepted, that there never was a single such movement and that none of its members, even those who supposed themselves to be its leaders, ever saw it whole, not because they did not have a political aim, but because that agenda was contested within different political circles over which they had no control and of which they may scarcely have had any knowledge.
And why is this finding important? It is because others, including almost all the movement's enemies, did see Mau Mau whole in order to try to comprehend it, a first step towards defeating it."
A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Wo...
Brief Summary
In A Moonless, Starless Sky Okeowo weaves together four narratives that form a powerful tapestry of modern Africa: a young couple, kidnap victims of Joseph Kony's LRA; a Mauritanian waging a lonely campaign against modern-day slavery; a women's basketball team flourishing amid war-torn Somalia; and a vigilante who takes up arms against the extremist group Boko Haram.
This debut book by one of America's most acclaimed young journalists illuminates the inner lives of ordinary people doing the extraordinary--lives that are too often hidden, underreported, or ignored by the rest of the world.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Brief Summary
At the dawn of the next world war, a plane crashes on an uncharted island, stranding a group of schoolboys. At first, with no adult supervision, their freedom is something to celebrate; this far from civilization the boys can do anything they want. Anything.
They attempt to forge their own society, failing, however, in the face of terror, sin and evil. And as order collapses, as strange howls echo in the night, as terror begins its reign, the hope of adventure seems as far from reality as the hope of being rescued.
Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse, Lord of the Flies is perhaps our most memorable novel about “the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart.”
Think You Can by Ivan Mawanda
Brief Summary
No one stops you to think even though it seems like it is the hardest work, that’s why very few engage in it. No dream is too big, no challenge is too great, and nothing we want for our future is beyond our reach. By thinking, I mean that you stop what you are doing, concentrate on the subject or problem that must be solved and force yourself to come up with a new idea or solution.
I am greatly irritated by some people who have a mantra: “Life is hard”. Often when I hear them say this, I am tempted to ask, “Compared to what?” As the cliche goes, life is what you make it. If you think it’s hard, it is hard. If you think it’s easy, it will be easy. It all begins and ends with your thinking. Everything is possible; your-dreams, your ideas, your inventions, your visions. Never let anyone tell you that you can’t. Think you can and it will be.
Beloved, this book Think you can emphasizes your progress beyond imagination, aggressive but dignified yet frank-filled in nature. This is a noble tool to build and encourage the voice of reason with every opportunity that avails itself so that you can have an excellent tale ending. Read keenly every chapter then you’ll humbly understand when or how to seek knowledge and integrate it with your choices.
This will make you assess life in a constructive way. Think you can or think you can’t; either way you’re right.
We are what we repeatedly do; excellence is therefore not an act but a habit. Never be bullied into silence, never allow yourself to be made a victim; never accept one’s definition of your life, define yourself. “You can’t stop people from talking about you; but you can stop giving them what to talk about”, and the worst thing to being blind is to have sight with no vision.
Make it your ambition to live a quiet life, to mind your own business and work with your own hands. Have a positive mindset,
Learn how to handle fear. It is never too late to start so don’t give up no matter how hard it gets, you have what it takes to be successful? Just go for it and make a difference.
My life experience sometime back when I communicated to some people that I wanted to write this book, not all but some asked me, “Ivan... Why are you so ambitious? Hmmm… and the challenge is you don’t listen, have you any idea how difficult it is?”
Guess why?
To cut the long story short, I silently ignored their critics and kept my cards for myself inclined to work harder since these friends were misleading me with a bad attitude or faulty thinking. I knew none of them was God to predict my ability. All learning begins with a simple phrase, “I don’t know” but some people believe they completed learning the moment they stepped out of school. How mistaken they are?
Without imagining that each person was given the brain to think, we must be good stewards with them and consciously think more every day…”Brain storming”. No matter how you run, you still have yourself to deal with; this could be circumstances or in the mindset. The single most important decision in your life other than regretting is to read this factual inspirational book, with God all things are possible...then happiness will be 100% your responsibility.
We Are All Birds of Uganda by Hafsa Z...
'You can't stop birds from flying, can you, Sameer? They go where they will...'
1960s UGANDA. Hasan struggles to keep his family business afloat following the sudden death of his wife. As he begins to put his shattered life back together piece by piece, a new regime seizes power, and a wave of rising prejudice threatens to sweep away everything he has built.
Present-day LONDON. Sameer, a young high-flying lawyer, senses an emptiness in what he thought was the life of his dreams. Called back to his family home by an unexpected tragedy, Sameer begins to find the missing pieces of himself not in his future plans, but in a heritage he never knew.
Moving between two continents over a troubled century, We Are All Birds of Uganda is an immensely resonant novel that explores racial tensions, generational divides and what it means to belong.
The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna
Sixteen-year-old Deka lives in fear and anticipation of the blood ceremony that will determine whether she will become a member of her village. Already different from everyone else because of her unnatural intuition, Deka prays for red blood so she can finally feel like she belongs.
But on the day of the ceremony, her blood runs gold, the color of impurity--and Deka knows she will face a consequence worse than death.
Then a mysterious woman comes to her with a choice: stay in the village and submit to her fate, or leave to fight for the emperor in an army of girls just like her. They are called alaki--near-immortals with rare gifts. And they are the only ones who can stop the empire's greatest threat.
Knowing the dangers that lie ahead yet yearning for acceptance, Deka decides to leave the only life she's ever known. But as she journeys to the capital to train for the biggest battle of her life, she will discover that the great walled city holds many surprises. Nothing and no one are quite what they seem to be--not even Deka herself.
Field Guides Birds of East Africa Ken...
Brief Summary
This spectacular new edition of the best-selling Helm field guide of all time covers all resident, migrant and vagrant species found in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. Over 1,300 species are illustrated with full details of all the plumages and major races likely to be encountered.
Concise text describes the identification, status, range, habits and voice, with fully updated range maps for each species.
This authoritative book will not only be an indispensable guide to the visiting birder, but also a vital tool for those engaged in work to conserve and study the avifauna of the region - East Africa shelters a remarkable diversity of birds, many seriously endangered with small and vulnerable ranges.
