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Kisumu 1901- 2001: From An Inland por...
Brief Summary
Kisumu 1901- 2001: From An Inland port to First Millennium City is the first book in the series, History of Kenyan cities and Towns. The series looks at the people and events that have shaped the cities' and towns' development and the broader impact they have had on Kenya's history.
The book follows City's historical journeys from 1901 ( when it was known as Port Florence ) to its centennial celebrations graced by President Moi (Kenya), Mkapa ( Tanzania ) and Museveni (Uganda) in 2001 that paved way for its being recognized by the United Nations First Millennium City in 2006.
The text is enriched with a large collection of photographs capturing the evolution of the City during its first 100 years.
Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder...
Brief Summary
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was virtually unknown until 1919, when he took the lead in thwarting the victorious Allies' plan to partition the Turkish core of the Ottoman Empire.
He divided the Allies, defeated the last Sultan, and secured the territory of the Turkish national state, becoming the first president of the new republic in 1923, fast creating his own legend.
Andrew Mango's revealing portrait of Atatürk throws light on matters of great importance today-resurgent nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and the reality of democracy.
Stealing from the Saracens: How Islam...
Brief Summary
Against a backdrop of Islamophobia, Europeans are increasingly airbrushing from history their cultural debt to the Muslim world. But this legacy lives on in some of Europe's most recognizable buildings, from Notre-Dame Cathedral to the Houses of Parliament.
This beautifully illustrated book reveals the Arab and Islamic roots of Europe's architectural heritage. Diana Darke traces ideas and styles from vibrant Middle Eastern centers like Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo, via Muslim Spain, Venice and Sicily into Europe. She describes how medieval crusaders,
pilgrims and merchants encountered Arab Muslim culture on their way to the Holy Land; and explores more recent artistic interaction between Ottoman and Western cultures, including Sir Christopher Wren's inspirations in the "Saracen" style of Gothic architecture.
Recovering this long yet overlooked history of architectural "borrowing," Stealing from the Saracens is a rich tale of cultural exchange, shedding new light on Europe's greatest landmarks.
Vision Or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the...
Brief Summary
Something extraordinary is happening in Saudi Arabia. A traditional, tribal society once known for its lack of tolerance is rapidly implementing significant economic and social reforms. An army of foreign consultants is rewriting the social contract, King Salman has cracked down hard on corruption, and his dynamic though inexperienced son, the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, is promoting a more tolerant Islam. But is all this a new vision for Saudi Arabia or merely a mirage likely to dissolve into Iranian-style revolution?
David Rundell - one of America's foremost experts on Saudi Arabia - explains how the country has been stable for so long, why it is less so today, and what is most likely to happen in the future. The book is based on the author's close contacts and intimate knowledge of the country where he spent 15 years living and working as a diplomat. Vision or Mirage demystifies one of the most powerful, but least understood, states in the Middle East and is essential reading for anyone interested in the power dynamics and politics of the Arab World.
The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave ...
Brief Summary
The island nation of Iceland is known for many things—majestic landscapes, volcanic eruptions, distinctive seafood—but racial diversity is not one of them. So the little-known story of Hans Jonathan, a free black man who lived and raised a family in early nineteenth-century Iceland, is improbable and compelling, the stuff of novels.
In The Man Who Stole Himself, Gisli Palsson lays out the story of Hans Jonathan (also known as Hans Jónatan) in stunning detail. Born into slavery in St. Croix in 1784, Hans was taken as a slave to Denmark, where he eventually enlisted in the navy and fought on behalf of the country in the 1801 Battle of Copenhagen.
After the war, he declared himself a free man, believing that he was due freedom not only because of his patriotic service, but because while slavery remained legal in the colonies, it was outlawed in Denmark itself. He thus became the subject of one of the most notorious slavery cases in European history, which he lost. Then Hans ran away—never to be heard from in Denmark again, his fate unknown for more than two hundred years. It’s now known that Hans fled to Iceland, where he became a merchant and peasant farmer, married, and raised two children. Today, he has become something of an Icelandic icon, claimed as a proud and daring ancestor both there and among his descendants in America.
The Man Who Stole Himself brilliantly intertwines Hans Jonathan’s adventurous travels with a portrait of the Danish slave trade, legal arguments over slavery, and the state of nineteenth-century race relations in the Northern Atlantic world. Throughout the book, Palsson traces themes of imperial dreams, colonialism, human rights, and globalization, which all come together in the life of a single, remarkable man. Hans literally led a life like no other. His is the story of a man who had the temerity—the courage—to steal himself.
Beyond Capitalism and Socialism in Ke...
Kenyan capitalists, the State, and de...
Brief Summary
Himbara argues that the literature on Kenyan capitalism largely misses the mark because it either omits or misconceptualises as ""Asian capital"" the principal segment of the domestic bourgeoisie. He demonstrates the leading role that Kenya's Indian entrepreneurs have played in her development.
Scars Of A Nation: Survivor Of Kiamba...
Brief Summary
A true Story about victims of the 2007/08 Post election Violence in Kenya, their suffering and the search for their Justice at The International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. The lies, intrigues, machinations and skullduggery during the ICC process.
The author is a victim of the Kiambaa Church Massacre.
Quote from the book:
“Today, when you walk into the Kenya Assemblies of God Church in Kiambaa Eldoret, thirty-six graves are conspicuously visible. They stick out as a monument of that massacre - a powerful reminder of the consequences of prejudice, negative ethnicity, hate and the greed of a few individuals, who do not care that innocent citizens have to die from artificially generated conflicts, as long as this enables them to negotiate for political power, so as to satiate their individual greed, with ill-gotten wealth, and soothe their ego, with fame and prestige”
In Naivasha “the attackers came to the home of Mr. Bernard Ndege, a man from the Luo tribe, and locked his entire family inside their house then set it ablaze and killed nine of his children and two wives”
“having a President coming from your ethniccity is usually just a feel-good attitude only, and can be quite deceptive to think that one is privileged, because, it does not necessarily translate into tangible personal gains when ‘one of our own is the President’ Only a good governance system can guarantee equality for all”
N/B Buy the book to support and encourage Kenyan authors.
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.
Ethnicity and Empire in Kenya: Loyalt...
Brief Summary
This book is about the creation and development of ethnic identity among the Kamba. Comprising approximately one-eighth of Kenya's population, the British considered the Kamba East Africa's premier "martial race" by the mid-twentieth century: a people with an apparent aptitude for soldiering. The reputation, indeed, was one that Kamba leaders used to leverage financial rewards from the colonial state. However, beneath this simplistic exterior was a maelstrom of argument and debate.
Men and women, young and old, Christians and non-Christians, and the elite and poor fought over the virtues they considered worthy of honor in their communities, and which of their visions should constitute "Kamba" identity.
Based on extensive archival research and more than 150 interviews, Ethnicity and Empire is one of the first books to analyze the complex process of building and shaping "tribe" over more than two centuries. It reveals new ways to think about themes crucial to the history of colonialism: soldiering, "loyalty", martial race, and indeed the nature of empire itself.
Raw Power Supreme Courts and the Cons...
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.
Rays of Hope: Alternative Narratives ...
Man, the State and War: a theoretical...
Brief Summary
Man, the state, and war is the second of the Topical Studies in International Relations to be published. The series was planned to demonstrate some of the contributions which existing bodies of knowledge are capable of making to the understanding of modern international relations.
Even in a relatively new field of academic specialization, it is not necessary for the scholar to make an absolutely fresh start. Indeed, it is incumbent upon him not to fail to draw on existing storehouses of knowledge.
One of those storehouses least systematically inventoried for its usefulness for international relations is classical Western political thought....
Neither Settler nor Native: The Makin...
Brief Summary
Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, this book calls us to rethink political violence and reimagine political community beyond majorities and minorities.
In this genealogy of political modernity, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the nation-state and the colonial state created each other. In case after case around the globe―from the New World to South Africa, Israel to Germany to Sudan―the colonial state and the nation-state have been mutually constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority.
The model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created both a permanent native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallized as a settler nation. In Europe, this template would be used by the Nazis to address the Jewish Question, and after the fall of the Third Reich, by the Allies to redraw the boundaries of Eastern Europe’s nation-states, cleansing them of their minorities. After Nuremberg the template was used to preserve the idea of the Jews as a separate nation. By establishing Israel through the minoritization of Palestinian Arabs, Zionist settlers followed the North American example. The result has been another cycle of violence.
Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this historical process. Mamdani rejects the “criminal” solution attempted at Nuremberg, which held individual perpetrators responsible without questioning Nazism as a political project and thus the violence of the nation-state itself. Instead, political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice for perpetrators but a rethinking of the political community for all survivors―victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries―based on common residence and the commitment to build a common future without the permanent political identities of settler and native. Mamdani points to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an unfinished project, seeking a state without a nation.