Showing titles in Africa

Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912) was a diplomat, educator, writer and politician. Born in the West Indies, he migrated to Liberia in 1851. Blyden’s writings on pan-Africanism were influential in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the two countries founded in the time of slavery for the resettlement of free blacks from the United Kingdom and the United States. Blyden believed that Zionism was a model for what he termed Ethiopianism, and that African-Americans could return to Africa and redeem it.

The Zulu are one of the most famous ethnic groups in Africa and possibly one of the most misunderstood. Of course that was due almost entirely to the fact that European colonial powers encountered the powerful group in the 19th century and found that they were more than willing to resist and fight them. At the height of its power in the southern part of Africa, the Zulu could rely on an army of 40,000 warriors, presenting a formidable obstacle to the designs of the British.

Matthew Hart embarks on a journey into the largely hidden and fascinating world that is the diamond trade. The geology of diamonds explains how hard it is to find them. They are accidents of nature, carbon crystals compressed underground for eons. Weaving science and history, Hart follows the diamond trail from the basement where Gabi Tolkowsky, the world's greatest cutter, faced the 599-carat Centenary diamond, to Africa's Diamond Coast, to the sales rooms of De Beers.

The Liberian Civil Wars examines the incredibly deadly conflicts in the West African region, and how they changed the nation. You will learn about the the wars and Liberia's transition like never before....

Loves and wars in the cauldron of Southern Africa in 1890-1902, where a young Englishman and his American companion become accidental soldiers. Can they survive the desperate fighting between settlers and African tribesmen, and between British and Boer armies? Which of four pioneering young women will choose to share their challenges? WINNER! Historical Fiction category; IndieReader 2013 Discovery Awards (announced at Book Expo America in New York on June 1, 2013 Excerpts from reviews on Amazon: ***** “A brilliant unputdownable read from start to finish.” ***** “I've read many books ...

Ivory's Ghosts is the first comprehensive, contemporary look at the world's most treasured organic material, ivory. Using a wide range of historical and firsthand reportage, John Frederick Walker tells the astonishing and sometimes savage story of ivory's enormous impact on both human history and that of its most important source: the majestic African elephant.

This book presents a story of one of the most glorified and celebrated Islamic heroes, that is Tariq Ibn Ziyad. He fought many brave battles to spread the vision of Islam around present-day Spain and Portugal. This book is designed as a part of the historical figures series. This book aims to impart the understanding of their lives and bravery in the minds of children. It seeks to help people reflect on their courage, abilities, strategies, and challenges they faced.

The indigenous Africans known as pygmies have interested outsiders for thousands of years. In the 2200s BC, the Egyptian pharaoh Pepi II referred to one as a "dancing dwarf of the god from the land of spirits", and the Ancient Greeks were also familiar with them. Today, of course, anthropologists know a lot more about the pygmies, a collective of indigenous groups in Africa who are still defined by the fact that they have an average height of less than five feet tall.

King Leopold II of Belgium emerges from the pages of history as a curious character. He was a member of a privileged clique of European monarchs, bereft of power but rich, indulgent, and indolent. Leopold certainly availed himself of all the pleasures of court life, but he was also shrewd, astonishingly competent, and avaricious to an almost unimaginable degree.

The story of Amy Biehl is well known in South Africa. The 26-year-old white American Fulbright scholar was brutally murdered on August 25, 1993, during the final, fiery days of apartheid by a mob of young black men in a township outside Cape Town. Her parents' forgiveness of two of her killers became a symbol of the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa. Justine van der Leun decided to introduce the story to an American audience. But as she delved into the case, the prevailing narrative started to unravel.

The author spent several years as an assistant district officer among the Yorubas in Nigeria, and was thus enabled to collect the folklore contained in this book from native sources. The reticence of the natives on religious subjects made it necessary to piece much together from incantations and chance remarks, but it is hoped that the notes will show that no great liberty has been taken with the beliefs of a tribe which inhabits a large area in West Africa.

From stories of resurrected mummies and thousand-year-old curses to powerful pharaohs and the coveted treasures of the Great Pyramids, ancient Egypt has had an unfaltering grip on the modern imagination. Now, in Egyptian Mythology, Geraldine Pinch offers a comprehensive introduction that untangles the mystery of Egyptian Myth.

Known in the Dominican Republic and Togo as Vodu, in Benin as Vodún, and in Haiti as Vodou, West African religion has, for hundreds of years, served as a repository of sacred knowledge while simultaneously evolving in response to human experience and globalization. Spirit Service: Vodún and Vodou in the African Atlantic World explores this dynamic religion, its mobility, and its place in the modern world.

The European history of South Africa began with the 1652 arrival of a small Dutch flotilla in Table Bay, which made landfall with a view to establishing a victualing station to service passing Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) ships...The Colonization of South Africa: The History and Legacy of the European Subjugation of South Africa looks at the controversial expeditions, fighting, and results...you will learn about the colonization of South Africa like never before.

This small book is mainly a personal record of my adventures and impressions during the first five months of the African War. It may also be found to give a tolerably coherent account of the operations conducted by Sir Redvers Buller for the Relief of Ladysmith. The correspondence of which it is mainly composed appeared in the columns of the Morning Post newspaper, and I propose, if I am not interrupted by the accidents of war, to continue the series of letters.

Madagascar provided the stunning backdrop for one of the strangest conflicts of the Second World War - when Britain went head to head against one of its closest allies. When British forces landed on the island in 1942, the enemy they faced wasn’t German, Japanese, or even Italian, this time the opposing forces were French.

International human rights activist Lisa Shannon spent many afternoons at the kitchen table having tea with her friend Francisca Thelin, who often spoke of her childhood in Congo. Thelin would conjure vivid images of lush flower gardens, fish the size of small children, and of children running barefoot through her family's coffee plantation, gorging themselves on fruit from the robust and plentiful mango trees.

In early November 1834, an aristocratic young couple from Savannah and South Carolina sailed from New York and began a seventeen-year odyssey in West Africa. Leighton and Jane Wilson sailed along what was for them an exotic coastline, visited cities and villages, and sometimes ventured up great rivers and followed ancient paths.

The Lord's Resistance Army appeared on the conflict landscape of Central Africa at the dawn of perhaps one of the bleakest period of post-independence African history: the 1980s and 1990s. This was the era of Afro-pessimism, during which the proliferation of war and crisis in Africa appeared simply overwhelming.

Shifting Sands is about that other Sahara, not the empty wasteland of the romantic imagination but the vast and highly differentiated space in which Saharan peoples and, increasingly, new arrivals from other parts of Africa live, work, and move. It takes us from the ancient Roman Empire through the bloody colonial era to the geopolitics of the present, questioning easy clichés and exposing fascinating truths along the way.