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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”
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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.
Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politi...
Brief Summary
In Saviors and Survivors, Mahmood Mamdani explains how the conflict in Darfur began as a civil war (1987—89) between nomadic and peasant tribes over fertile land in the south, triggered by a severe drought that had expanded the Sahara Desert by more than sixty miles in forty years; how British colonial officials had artificially tribalized Darfur, dividing its population into “native” and “settler” tribes and creating homelands for the former at the expense of the latter; how the war intensified in the 1990s when the Sudanese government tried unsuccessfully to address the problem by creating homelands for tribes without any. The involvement of opposition parties gave rise in 2003 to two rebel movements, leading to a brutal insurgency and a horrific counterinsurgency–but not to genocide, as the West has declared.
Mamdani also explains how the Cold War exacerbated the twenty-year civil war in neighboring Chad, creating a confrontation between Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi (with Soviet support) and the Reagan administration (allied with France and Israel) that spilled over into Darfur and militarized the fighting. By 2003, the war involved national, regional, and global forces, including the powerful Western lobby, who now saw it as part of the War on Terror and called for a military invasion dressed up as “humanitarian intervention.”
Incisive and authoritative, Saviors and Survivors will radically alter our understanding of the crisis in Darfur.
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.
The Concise Untold History of the Uni...
Brief Summary
A companion to Oliver Stone’s ten-part documentary series of the same name, this guide offers a people’s history of the American Empire: “a critical overview of US foreign policy…indispensable” (former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev); “brilliant, a masterpiece!” (Daniel Ellsberg); “Oliver Stone’s new book is as riveting, eye-opening, and thought-provoking as any history book you will ever read. It achieves what history, at its best, ought to do: presents a mountain of previously unknown facts that makes you question and re-examine many of your long-held assumptions about the most influential events” (Glenn Greenwald).
In November 2012, Showtime debuted a ten-part documentary series based on Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the United States. The book and documentary looked back at human events that, at the time, went underreported, but also crucially shaped America’s unique and complex history over the twentieth century.
From the atomic bombing of Japan to the Cold War and fall of Communism, this concise version of the larger book is adapted for the general reader. Complete with poignant photos, arresting illustrations, and little-known documents, The Concise Untold History of the United States covers the rise of the American empire and national security state from the late nineteenth century through the Obama administration, putting it all together to show how deeply rooted the seemingly aberrant policies of the Bush-Cheney administration are in the nation’s past and why it has proven so difficult for Obama to change course.
In this concise and indispensible guide, Kuznick and Stone (who Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills has called America’s own “Dostoevsky behind a camera”) challenge prevailing orthodoxies to reveal the dark truth about the rise and fall of American imperialism
Why We’re Polarized Book by Ezr...
Brief Summary
Discover how American politics became a toxic system, why we participate in it, and what it means for our future--from journalist, political commentator, and cofounder of Vox, Ezra Klein.
After Election Day 2016, both supporters and opponents of the soon-to-be president hailed his victory as a historically unprecedented event. Most Americans could agree that no candidate like Donald Trump had ever been elected President before. But political journalist Ezra Klein makes the case that the 2016 election wasn't surprising at all. In fact, Trump's electoral victory followed the exact same template as previous elections, by capturing a nearly identical percentage of voter demographics as previous Republican candidates.
Over the past 50 years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. Those merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.
In this groundbreaking book, Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and each other. And he traces the feedback loops between our polarized political identities and our polarized political institutions that are driving our political system towards crisis.
Neither a polemic nor a lament, Klein offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump's rise to the Democratic Party's leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. A revelatory book that will change how you look at politics, and perhaps at yourself.
America’s Deadliest Export: Dem...
Brief Summary
For over sixty-five years, the United States war machine has been on automatic pilot. Since World War II we have been conditioned to believe that America's motives in 'exporting' democracy are honorable, even noble.
In this startling and provocative book, William Blum, a leading dissident chronicler of US foreign policy and the author of controversial bestseller Rogue State, argues that nothing could be further from the truth.
Moreover, unless this fallacy is unlearned, and until people understand fully the worldwide suffering American policy has caused, we will never be able to stop the monster.
Equality in Kenya’s 2010 Consti...
Brief Summary
"This book asks whether there is a coherent conception of equality in Kenya's 2010 Constitution and explores how competing and interrelated ideas of equality in it should be conceptualized, interpreted and applied. Making a significant contribution to the ongoing global conversations on the various understandings of equality, the book illuminates the many ways in which diverse equality guarantees clash, or are interrelated.
It also sets out principled approaches on how they can be coherently interpreted to address the myriad inequalities in Kenya. Taking a comparative approach, the book considers how other jurisdictions including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, India and Botswana have approached the conceptualization, interpretation and application of various equality concepts.
The book focuses on important issues such as: - transformative constitutionalism in relation to the interpretation of Kenya's 2010 Constitution; - expanding the list of enumerated grounds for non-discrimination; - affirmative action; - accommodating religious and cultural diversity versus gender equality; - the interrelation between socio-economic rights and status-based equality"--
Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Poli...
There is no better guide than Paul Krugman to basic economics, the ideas that animate much of our public policy. Likewise, there is no stronger foe of zombie economics, the misunderstandings that just won’t die.
In Arguing with Zombies, Krugman tackles many of these misunderstandings, taking stock of where the United States has come from and where it’s headed in a series of concise, digestible chapters. Drawn mainly from his popular New York Times column, they cover a wide range of issues, organized thematically and framed in the context of a wider debate. Explaining the complexities of health care, housing bubbles, tax reform, Social Security, and so much more with unrivaled clarity and precision, Arguing with Zombies is Krugman at the height of his powers.
Arguing with Zombies puts Krugman at the front of the debate in the 2020 election year and is an indispensable guide to two decades’ worth of political and economic discourse in the United States and around the globe. With quick, vivid sketches, Krugman turns his readers into intelligent consumers of the daily news and hands them the keys to unlock the concepts behind the greatest economic policy issues of our time. In doing so, he delivers an instant classic that can serve as a reference point for this and future generations.