Africa first captivated "New York Times "journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to the selfishness and shortsightedness of the rich, the suffering and dignity of the poor and the uses and abuses of power. And in this powerfully written, profoundly felt book, he gives us an unstinting account of the disastrous consequences of the fateful, centuries-old encounter between Africa and the West. French delineates the betrayal and greed... View More...
A penetrating overview of South Africa and its varied and complex history that will appeal to the many visitors to the country and anyone fascinated by its present and past. A Traveller's History of South Africa is intended as a comprehensive single-volume survey of one of today's most popular and exciting destinations. Lifting the lid on this most multicultural of societies--and its chequered past--the book begins by tracing the evolution of South Africa from prehistoric times, taking into account the most recent archaeological and anthropological findings. It then charts the penetration of t... View More...
Many outstanding men-James Bruce, Richard Francis Burton, David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, and others-won lasting fame from their African journeys. Africa Explored collects their amazing tales of treks into the unknown. These tales of Europeans in Africa before the wave of colonialism mix exotic sights and startling customs with sympathetic meetings of Africa's people and scenes of sublime beauty. Africa Explored relates Mungo Park's being robbed and left for dead in the West African desert, then saved by repeated acts of kindness; Burton and Speke's search for the legendary Mountains ... View More...
Christina Lamb's The Africa House is the bestselling account of an English gentleman and his African dream. In the last decades of the British Empire, Stewart Gore-Brown build himself a feudal paradise in Northern Rhodesia; a sprawling country estate modelled on the finest homes of England, complete with uniformed servants, daily muster parades and rose gardens. He wanted to share it with the love of his life, the beautiful unconventional Ethel Locke King, one of the first women to drive and fly. She, however, was nearly twenty years his senior, married and his aunt. Lorna, the only other woma... View More...
Readers assume the role of archaeologists, uncovering secrets of ancient civilizations. Stunning photographs and illustrations, plus detailed cutaways, maps and diagrams. View More...
Readers assume the role of archaeologists, uncovering secrets of ancient civilizations. Stunning photographs and illustrations, plus detailed cutaways, maps and diagrams. View More...
For more than a decade a vicious civil war has torn the fabric of society in the West African country of Sierra Leone, forcing thousands to flee their homes for refugee camps and others to seek peace and asylum abroad. Sierra Leoneans have established new communities around the world, in London, Paris, New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Yet despite the great geographic range of this diaspora and the diverse ethnic backgrounds among Sierra Leoneans settled in the same communities abroad, these Africans have come to understand and express their shared identity through religious rituals, ... View More...
In 1997, Pedro Rosa Mendes traveled across Africa--6,000 miles from the west to the east coast, from Angola to Mozambique--on trains with no windows, no doors, no seats, on wrecks of trucks and buses, on boats and motorcycles. In war-torn Angola, a country where land mines outnumber people, Mendes found long lines of villagers waiting for shock treatment to neutralize the phantom pain in amputated limbs, an apothecary's tent purveying boiled mucumbi bark to combat scurvy lesions in the mouth, and trains crowded with people eating salted fish and drinking beer, swapping tales of local sorcerers... View More...
What became of the castaways was stranger than fiction...and more than decent Englishmen could bear. In the summer of 1783 the grandees of the East India Company were horrified to learn that one of their finest ships, the 741-ton Grosvenor, had been lost on the wild and unexplored coast of southeast Africa. Astonishingly, most of those on board reached the shore safely91 members of the crew and 34 wealthy, high-born passengers, including women and children. They were hundreds of miles from the nearest European outpostand they were not alone. "They surveyed one another with mutual incomprehens... View More...
In analyzing the obstacles to democratization in post- independence Africa, Mahmood Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of colonialism's legacy--a bifurcated power that mediated racial domination through tribally organized local authorities, reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in subjects. Many writers have understood colonial rule as either direct (French) or indirect (British), with a third variant--apartheid--as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism. While direct rule denied rights t... View More...
Portuguese officials forced nearly a million African peasants to grow cotton in colonial Mozambique under a regime of coercion, brutality, and terror. The colonial state sought to control almost every aspect of peasant life: growers were told not only what they should produce, but where they should live, how they should organize their labor, and with whom they should trade. A privileged few managed to prosper under the cotton regime, but the great majority were impoverished, as cotton cultivation earned them next to nothing and exposed them to hardship and famine. Despite their efforts at cont... View More...
Tall, striking, and adventurous to a fault, young British relief worker Emma McCune came to Sudan determined to make a difference in a country decimated by the longest-running civil war in Africa. She became a near legend in the bullet-scarred, famine-ridden country, but her eventual marriage to a rebel warlord made international headlines--and spelled disastrous consequences for her ideals. Enriched by Deborah Scroggins's firsthand experience as an award-winning journalist in Sudan, this unforgettable account of Emma McCune's tragically short life also provides an up-close look at the volatil... View More...
Tall, striking, and adventurous to a fault, young British relief worker Emma McCune came to Sudan determined to make a difference in a country decimated by the longest-running civil war in Africa. She became a near legend in the bullet-scarred, famine-ridden country, but her eventual marriage to a rebel warlord made international headlines--and spelled disastrous consequences for her ideals. Enriched by Deborah Scroggins's firsthand experience as an award-winning journalist in Sudan, this unforgettable account of Emma McCune's tragically short life also provides an up-close look at the volatil... View More...
Emma McCune's passion for Africa, her unstinting commitment to the children of the Sudan, and her youthful beauty and glamour set her apart from other relief workers from the moment she arrived in southern Sudan. But no one was prepared for her decision to marry a local warlord -- a man who seemed to embody everything she was working against -- and to throw herself into his violent quest to take over southern Sudan's rebel movement.With precision and insight, Deborah Scroggins -- who met McCune in the Sudan -- harts the process by which McCune's romantic delusions led to her descent into the h... View More...
" A] timely, well-researched and written analysis of popular and private life that is too often underestimated or overlooked yet which constitutes the majority of human existence in a region too often viewed from the narrow constraints of the state and its unrepresentative elites." --John Entelis"The broadening of Islamic studies (or regional studies on Islam) to include study of ordinary people, their daily lives, and popular cultures has been long overdue. An] extremely interesting and innovative study which, in its own way, successfully challenges the pervasive misperception of the Middle ... View More...
A documented account by a military officer of the US operations in Somalia and Haiti. Colonel Lawrence Casper experienced Operation Continue Hope and Operation Uphold Democracy. He provides a discussion of what did and did not work, and what went on behind the scenes at operational level. View More...
In the spring of 2001, photographer Basil Pao accompanied actor (and former Monty Python member) Michael Palin and a BBC film crew into the heart of the world's largest desert--the Sahara. The result of that journey is these remarkable pictures of landscapes and people, taken on a route that covered nine countries and an astonishing variety of cultures. Even when in some of the most hostile conditions known to man, Pao succeeds in capturing the awe-inspiring beauty of the region. Here is Tangier, known for its incredible light; scenic old towns, such as Chefchouen in the Jabala Mountains, bare... View More...
This second volume of Introduction to the History of African Civilization examines Africa's history in the controversial twentieth century. It focuses on the methods of domination that were employed by colonial powers, and the new methods of domination, which were invented and employed by Western nations in the post-colonial period. While the book covers the partition of Africa, the nature and impact of colonial rule and the post- colonial situation in Africa, it is not simply a history text, for it investigates matters usually avoided in historical studies of twentieth century Africa, includi... View More...
In 1895 three African chiefs, dressed in the finest British clothing available, began a tour of the British Isles. That tour foiled Cecil Rhodes' grand plan for Africa and culminated in the Chamberlain Settlement, the document that indirectly led to the independence of present-day Botswana. "King Khama, Emperor Joe, and the Great White Queen" is the story of this bizarre journey, one of the most neglected events in British Victorian history, here revealed for the first time in its full detail and cultural complexity. The chiefs initially went to England to persuade Queen Victoria not to give t... View More...
"Here is a rich new biographical perspective on the brilliant storyteller whose sophisticated romantic fiction . . . made her an international success and perpetual candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. . . . These letters] contain the raw material that was later transformed into her classic memoir "Out of Africa" (1937). They also reveal her as a highly intelligent and sensitive analyst of a strange new world." Bruce Allen, "Christian Science Monitor" ""Letters from Africa" is literary gold, 24 karat." Alden Whitman, "Boston Globe"" View More...
