QUICK DELIVERY
Swift dispatch
Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Emp...
Brief Summary
To those who travel there today, the West Indies are unspoiled paradise islands. Yet that image conceals a turbulent and shocking history. For some 200 years after 1650, the West Indies were the strategic center of the western world, witnessing one of the greatest power struggles of the age as Europeans made and lost immense fortunes growing and trading in sugar-a commodity so lucrative it became known as "white gold." As Matthew Parker vividly chronicles in his sweeping history, the sugar revolution made the English, in particular, a nation of voracious consumers-so much so that the wealth of her island colonies became the foundation and focus of England's commercial and imperial greatness, underpinning the British economy and ultimately fueling the Industrial Revolution.
Yet with the incredible wealth came untold misery: the horror endured by slaves, on whose backs the sugar empire was brutally built; the rampant disease that claimed the lives of one-third of all whites within three years of arrival in the Caribbean; the cruelty, corruption, and decadence of the plantation culture.
While sugar came to dictate imperial policy, for those on the ground the British West Indian empire presented a disturbing moral universe. Parker brilliantly interweaves the human stories of those since lost to history whose fortunes and fame rose and fell with sugar.
Their industry drove the development of the North American mainland states, and with it a slave culture, as the plantation model was exported to the warm, southern states. Broad in scope, rich in detail, The Sugar Barons freshly links the histories of Europe, the West Indies, and North America and reveals the full impact of the sugar revolution, the resonance of which is still felt today.
Visual Voices: The Works of Contempor...
Books, African Interest, Business, Dictionaries & References, Entrepreneurs, History, Home & Living, International Bestsellers
Brief Summary
Visual Voices: The Works Of Contemporary Artists In Kenya.
This book showcases the work of contemporary visual and other artists in a large aesthetically pleasing and well-designed book.
The presentation of the works does justice to selected great art in Kenya today. Susan Wakhungu-Githuku worked with a panel of Art connoisseurs and individuals knowledgeable on the Art scene to select and profile over 50 artists that amply demonstrate the range of Kenya’s artistic talent and flair.
Nairobi The City That Calls Your Name...
Books, African Interest, Business, Dictionaries & References, Entrepreneurs, History, Home & Living, International Bestsellers
THE CITY THAT CALLS YOUR NAME
There is something about Nairobi, the large and fast expanding East African city of cities that gets under the skin of even the most skeptical. What is it about this incongruous metropolis of diverse cultures, tribes, people, of new and old buildings, the clean and the shoddy, the unending traffic amidst the green parks of Uhuru Highway that beckons and lingers within? A city once known as the place of cool waters that now often bakes in the sun, a city that grew out of a Railway outpost, a city that unashamedly holds the largest slum in Africa and yet boasts an ever expanding modern skyline! The double volume of Photographic Slices and Personal Musings, compiled by mother and daughter Susan Wakhungu-Githuku & Natalie Githuku, is a first-of-a-kind and beautifully pays homage to this fascinating ‘city that calls your name’.
Nairobi is packaged in two volumes (Vol 1: Photographic Slices and Vol. 2: Personal Musings).
Makers Of Kenya’s History: Fiel...
Brief Summary
Dedan Kimathi is a story of the man who is now almost universally accepted as the true symbol of Kenya's liberation struggle. A warrior and military strategist to boot, Dedan Kimathi rose through the ranks to become the overall leader of the Mau Mau freedom fighters.
Since his death at the heart of the struggle, he has acquired, in the minds of many, legendary and mythical qualities.
Selfhood Divinity of the Clitoris by ...
What you need to know:
In his 802-page book: Selfhood; Divinity of the Clitoris, the retired minister of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA) gives a rather revolutionary strategy to clean the Kenyan society of the vice in a country where one in three girls is at risk of the cut.
In his justification of the brazen title, Rev Njoya says he chose to use the word clitoris in its outright term to bring the message home to every man and woman on the effects of FGM.
Retired Rev. Timothy Njoya has taken a radical approach on ending Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Kenya.
In his 802-page book: Selfhood; Divinity of the Clitoris, the retired minister of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA) gives a rather revolutionary strategy to clean the Kenyan society of the vice in a country where one in three girls is at risk of the cut.
In his justification of the brazen title, Rev Njoya says he chose to use the word clitoris in its outright term to bring the message home to every man and woman on the effects of FGM.
PIECE OF MEAT
“Clitoris is made in the image of God and it is divine,” he explains.
“To cut a woman and remove the clitoris is like taking a woman for a piece of meat.”
But why is it so important that a clitoris remains in its whole?
Rev. Njoya has a divinity answer to that.
“A woman’s clitoris has more than 20,000 nerve endings, while a penis is wired with only 2,000 nerve endings,” he states.
“The clitoris is wired to pull 60kg of pelvic bones apart and pull them back. Without the nerve endings, the muscles cannot pull apart…that is why 20 per cent of Kenyan women die during child birth because their pelvic bones have nothing to pull them apart when they are circumcised.”
We Need to Talk About Africa: The Har...
Brief Summary
If you boil a kettle twice today, you will have used five times more electricity than a person in Mali uses in a whole year. How can that be possible?
Decades after the colonial powers withdrew Africa is still struggling to catch up with the rest of the world. When the same colonists withdrew from Asia there followed several decades of sustained and unprecedented growth throughout the continent. So what went wrong in Africa? And are we helping to fix it, or simply making matters worse?
In this provocative analysis, Tom Young argues that so much has been misplaced: our guilt, our policies, and our aid. Human rights have become a cover for imposing our values on others, our shiniest infrastructure projects have fuelled corruption and our interference in domestic politics has further entrenched conflict. Only by radically changing how we think about Africa can we escape this vicious cycle.
General History of Africa Complete Se...
This set brings together all 8 volumes of the groundbreaking Unesco General History of Africa, which are all now available again as paperbacks.
The series demonstrates the importance of African history from earliest pre-history, through the establishment of its ancient civilizations to the placing of Africa in the context of world history.
The growth and development of African historiography, once written records became more common, document the triumph of Islam, the extension of trading relations, cultural exchanges and human contacts, as well as the impact and consequences of the slave trade.
The European scramble for colonial territory in the 1880s is examined with a focus on the responses of Africans themselves to the economic and social aspects of colonial systems up to 1935, including the growth of anti-colonial movements and the strengthening of African political nationalism.
The contributions document how the continent moved from international conflict under foreign domination to struggles for political sovereignty and economic independence. The last (unabridged) volume 8 examines the challenges of nation-building and the socio-cultural changes affecting the newly independent nations.
Crossing Rivers An African Historical...
Brief Summary
Crossing Rivers: A young Maasai girl’s world is turned upside down when she is traded to an old Gikuyu woman in exchange for food, by her starving parents. Compelled to become a Gikuyu she goes through adoption and initiation rituals.
She falls in love but soon after her marriage her world, once again, changes forever. Crossing Rivers is Book One in The Agikuyu Series" Brilliantly written and uncompromising in its perspective, Crossing Rivers by Skeeter Wilson delivers us into the hands of the peoples of pre-colonial eastern Africa allowing us to learn at their fires, listen to a voice most have never heard, and appreciate a way of life all too often misrepresented." T.L. O’Hara
Author: Skeeter Wilson
The Dead Are Arising The Life of Malc...
Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X—all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, classmates, street friends, cellmates, Nation of Islam figures, FBI moles and cops, and political leaders around the world. His goal was ambitious: to transform what would become over a hundred hours of interviews into an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate fact from fiction.
The result is this historic biography that conjures a never-before-seen world of its protagonist, a work whose title is inspired by a phrase Malcolm X used when he saw his Hartford followers stir with purpose, as if the dead were truly arising, to overcome the obstacles of racism. Setting Malcolm’s life not only within the Nation of Islam but against the larger backdrop of American history, the book traces the life of one of the twentieth century’s most politically relevant figures “from street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary.”
In tracing Malcolm X’s life from his Nebraska birth in 1925 to his Harlem assassination in 1965, Payne provides searing vignettes culled from Malcolm’s Depression-era youth, describing the influence of his Garveyite parents: his father, Earl, a circuit-riding preacher who was run over by a street car in Lansing, Michigan, in 1929, and his mother, Louise, who continued to instill black pride in her children after Earl’s death. Filling each chapter with resonant drama, Payne follows Malcolm’s exploits as a petty criminal in Boston and Harlem in the 1930s and early 1940s to his religious awakening and conversion to the Nation of Islam in a Massachusetts penitentiary.
With a biographer’s unwavering determination, Payne corrects the historical record and delivers extraordinary revelations—from the unmasking of the mysterious NOI founder “Fard Muhammad,” who preceded Elijah Muhammad; to a hair-rising scene, conveyed in cinematic detail, of Malcolm and Minister Jeremiah X Shabazz’s 1961 clandestine meeting with the KKK; to a minute-by-minute account of Malcolm X’s murder at the Audubon Ballroom.
Introduced by Payne’s daughter and primary researcher, Tamara Payne, who, following her father’s death, heroically completed the biography, The Dead Are Arising is a penetrating and riveting work that affirms the centrality of Malcolm X to the African American freedom struggle.
The Economists Tale A Consultant Enco...
Brief Summary
What really happens when the World Bank imposes its policies on a country? This is an insider's view of one aid-made crisis. Peter Griffiths was at the interface between government and the Bank.
In this ruthlessly honest, day by day account of a mission he undertook in Sierra Leone, he uses his diary to tell the story of how the World Bank, obsessed with the free market, imposed a secret agreement on the government, banning all government food imports or subsidies. The collapsing economy meant that the private sector would not import. Famine loomed. No ministry, no state marketing organization, no aid organization could reverse the agreement. It had to be a top-level government decision, whether Sierra Leone could afford to annoy minor World Bank officials.
This is a rare and important portrait of the aid world which insiders will recognize, but of which the general public seldom get a glimpse.
Kenya A Country in the Making 1880-19...
Brief Summary
This stunning collection of 720 photographs, many of them drawn from family archives and scrapbooks and all carefully restored, is one of the most important visual records of Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ever to have been published.
The early photographers captured the beauty and dangerous allure of life on this spectacular frontier: the ceremonies and traditional attire of the native people, the fantastic machinery used in construction of the Uganda Railway, the gradual development of trade on the coast and in the country's interior, the hardships of the East African Campaign during World War I, and the pioneering spirit of early European settlers and farmers. Many of the most famous names and places connected with Africa appear in these pages, including Karen Blixen's farm and Ernest Hemingway and Theodore Roosevelt on safari.
This is a book to delight anyone who has ever traveled to East Africa or been intrigued by its history. 720 photographs
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics o...
Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum
Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.
Across the world today, from the Americas to Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege while populism and nationalism are on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum offers an unexpected explanation: that there is a deep and inherent appeal to authoritarianism, to strongmen, and, especially, to one-party rule--that is, to political systems that benefit true believers, or loyal soldiers, or simply the friends and distant cousins of the Leader, to the exclusion of everyone else.
People, she argues, are not just ideological; they are also practical, pragmatic, opportunistic. They worry about their families, their houses, their careers. Some political systems offer them possibilities, and others don't. In particular, the modern authoritarian parties that have arisen within democracies today offer the possibility of success to people who do not thrive in the meritocratic, democratic, or free-market competition that determines access to wealth and power.
Drawing on reporting in Spain, Switzerland, Poland, Hungary, and Brazil; using historical examples including Stalinist central Europe and Nazi Germany; and investigating related phenomena: the modern conspiracy theory, nostalgia for a golden past, political polarization, and meritocracy and its discontents, Anne Applebaum brilliantly illuminates the seduction of totalitarian thinking and the eternal appeal of the one-party state.