Download or read book Breaking Kola An Inside View of African Customs written by Catherine Onyemelukwe and published by Peace Corps Writers. This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Catherine arrived in Nigeria as an idealistic Peace Corps volunteer, she had no idea of the wealth of customs and traditions she would come to love. With her marriage to a Nigerian electrical engineer, senior manager in the country's power industry, she became part of his family, clan, and village. She learned to speak the Igbo language and not only adapted to, but adopted, some of the customs of his people. In this intimate portrayal of family members, she reveals the secrets of the ties that bind her to his community. Through the striking accounts of her husbands' parents in their youth and with nods to customs from other tribes and countries, she paints an unforgettable picture of African life in times past. She evokes the atmosphere of the village market, the religious rituals, and the ceremonies that accompany life's major events. The author also reveals the challenges between the Christianity adopted by her husband's family and the traditions they sometimes abandon and sometimes preserve.The reader is brought into an African village with its richness of music, dance, ritual, and mystery. Throughout the book, the importance of family is stressed. She demonstrates the importance of showing respect for elders, honoring the ancestors, and caring for children communally. She contrasts this sense of community to the individualism experienced by people in the West. With her vivid descriptions of Igbo names and religious beliefs, she adds to the readers' understanding of an African society. How she found her own community is revealed in the last chapters of this intriguing book. She has taken her message of the importance of family and community to many venues. Four sermons she has presented are included in the appendix. Suggested discussion questions for book groups are also provided.
Download or read book Freshwater written by Akwaeke Emezi and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for a Debut Novel Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize A New York Times Notable Book The astonishing debut novel from the acclaimed bestselling author of The Death of Vivek Oji, You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, and Pet, Freshwater tells the story of Ada, an unusual child who is a source of deep concern to her southern Nigerian family. Young Ada is troubled, prone to violent fits. Born “with one foot on the other side,” she begins to develop separate selves within her as she grows into adulthood. And when she travels to America for college, a traumatic event on campus crystallizes the selves into something powerful and potentially dangerous, making Ada fade into the background of her own mind as these alters—now protective, now hedonistic—move into control. Written with stylistic brilliance and based in the author’s realities, Freshwater dazzles with ferocious energy and serpentine grace.
Download or read book Things Fall Apart written by Chinua Achebe and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1994-09-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.
Download or read book Akata Witch written by Nnedi Okorafor and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nnedi Okorafor writes glorious futures and fabulous fantasies. Her characters take your heart and squeeze it; her worlds open your mind to new things." -- Neil Gaiman, author of The Graveyard Book and American Gods Affectionately dubbed "the Nigerian Harry Potter," Akata Witch weaves together a heart-pounding tale of magic, mystery, and finding one's place in the world. Perfect for fans of Children of Blood and Bone! Sunny Nwazue lives in Nigeria, but she was born in New York City. Her features are West African, but she's albino. She's a terrific athlete, but can't go out into the sun to play soccer. There seems to be no place where she fits in. And then she discovers something amazing—she is a "free agent" with latent magical power. And she has a lot of catching up to do. Soon she's part of a quartet of magic students, studying the visible and invisible, learning to change reality. But as she’s finding her footing, Sunny and her friends are asked by the magical authorities to help track down a career criminal who knows magic, too. Will their training be enough to help them combat a threat whose powers greatly outnumber theirs? World Fantasy Award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor blends magic and adventure to create a lush world. Her writing has been called “stunning” by The New York Times and her fans include Neil Gaiman, Rick Riordan, John Green, Ursula K. Le Guin, and many more! Raves for Nnedi Okorafor's writing: "There’s more imagination on a page of Nnedi Okorafor’s work than in whole volumes of ordinary fantasy epics." —Ursula K. Le Guin, award-winning author of A Wizard of Earthsea “The most imaginative, gripping, enchanting fantasy novels I have ever read!” —Laurie Halse Anderson, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Speak "I always loved science fiction, but I didn’t feel I was part of it—until I read first Octavia Butler, and now Nnedi Okorafor." —Whoopi Goldberg "Highly original stuff, episode after amazing episode, full of color, life, and death. Nnedi Okorafor's work is wonderful!" —Diana Wynne Jones, award-winning author of The Chronicles of Chrestomanci "Jam-packed with mythological wonders." —Rick Riordan, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series "Okorafor's imagination is stunning." —The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Notes on Grief written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the globally acclaimed, best-selling novelist and author of We Should All Be Feminists, a timely and deeply personal account of the loss of her father: “With raw eloquence, Notes on Grief … captures the bewildering messiness of loss in a society that requires serenity, when you’d rather just scream. Grief is impolite ... Adichie’s words put welcome, authentic voice to this most universal of emotions, which is also one of the most universally avoided” (The Washington Post). Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure. Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page—and never without touches of rich, honest humor—Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he’d stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book—a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment—a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever—and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon.
Download or read book No Longer at Ease written by Chinua Achebe and published by Heinemann. This book was released on 1987 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Obi Okenkwo, a Nigerian country boy, is determined to make it in the city. Educated in England, he has new, refined tastes which eventually conflict with his good resolutions and lead to his downfall.
Download or read book Meditations on African Literature written by Dubem Okafor and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2001-02-28 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While African literature is presently enjoying much attention from the scholarly community, its heritage and identity are becoming less clearly defined. While Africa has a rich oral tradition, African writers find themselves writing in the languages of their colonial oppressors. So too, many of the best African writers now live outside Africa, particularly in North America. Much of the criticism of African literature is written by American professors, African writers sometimes teach their literature at American universities, and American publishers issue African literary works. At the same time, the political climate of many African countries has been detrimental to literacy and writing. This book explores many of the issues currently facing African literature. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor, to provide the volume with a broad coverage of numerous topics related to the present state of African literature. The opening chapters examine issues of language and postcoloniality in African literary works. Later chapters discuss such concerns as the formation of an African literary canon, representations of history and ideology in African writing, the role of women in African literature, and African ritual theater. Through its various chapters, the volume makes clear that African writers continue to engage pressing social and political issues, and that they are intellectuals rather than entertainers.
Download or read book Afropolitan Horizons written by Ulf Hannerz and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-02-11 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction. Nigerian Connections -- Palm Wine, Amos Tutuola, and a Literary Gatekeeper -- Bahia-Lagos-Ouidah: Mariana's Story -- Igbo Life, Past and Present: Three Views -- Inland, Upriver with the Empire: Borrioboola-Gha -- The City, according to Ekwensi . . . and Onuzo -- Points of Cultural Geography: Ibadan . . . Enugu, Onitsha, Nsukka -- Been-To: Dreams, Disappointments, Departures, and Returns -- Dateline Lagos: Reporting on Nigeria to the World -- Death in Lagos -- Tai Solarin: On Colonial Power, Schools, Work Ethic, Religion, and the Press -- Wole Soyinka, Leo Frobenius, and the Ori Olokun -- A Voice from the Purdah: Baba of Karo -- Bauchi: The Academic and the Imam -- Railtown Writers -- Nigeria at War -- America Observed: With Nigerian Eyes -- Transatlantic Shuttle -- Sojourners from Black Britain -- Oyotunji Village, South Carolina: Reverse Afropolitanism.
Download or read book Half of a Yellow Sun written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-10-29 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With her award-winning debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was heralded by the Washington Post Book World as the “21st century daughter” of Chinua Achebe. Now, in her masterly, haunting new novel, she recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria during the 1960s. With the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Adichie weaves together the lives of five characters caught up in the extraordinary tumult of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Ugwu is houseboy to Odenigbo, a university professor who sends him to school, and in whose living room Ugwu hears voices full of revolutionary zeal. Odenigbo’s beautiful mistress, Olanna, a sociology teacher, is running away from her parents’ world of wealth and excess; Kainene, her urbane twin, is taking over their father’s business; and Kainene’s English lover, Richard, forms a bridge between their two worlds. As we follow these intertwined lives through a military coup, the Biafran secession and the subsequent war, Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise, and intimately, the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place. Epic, ambitious and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a more powerful, dramatic and intensely emotional picture of modern Africa than any we have had before.
Download or read book Europeans and Africans written by Michał Tymowski and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-09-07 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Europeans and Africans Michał Tymowski analyses the cultural and organizational aspects of contacts of both sides on the West African coast in the 15th and early 16th centuries, and the creation of the image of ‘other’ – African for Europeans, and European for Africans.
Download or read book Nigerian Unity written by Gerald McLoughlin and published by Army War College Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nigeria¿s future as a unified state is in jeopardy. Those who make or execute U.S. policy will find it difficult to advance U.S. interests in Africa without an understanding of the pressures that tear and bind Nigeria. Despite this, the centrifugal forces that tear at the country and the centripetal forces that have kept it whole are not well understood and rarely examined. After establishing Nigeria¿s importance to the United State as a cohesive and functioning state, this monograph examines the historic, religious, cultural, political, physical, demographic, and economic factors that will determine Nigeria¿s fate. It identifies the specific fault lines along which Nigeria may divide. It concludes with practical policy recommendations for the United States to support Nigerians in their efforts to maintain a functioning and integrated state, and, by so doing, advance U.S. interests.
Download or read book Caravans of Kola written by Paul E. Lovejoy and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Travels in West Africa written by Mary H. Kingsley and published by . This book was released on 1897 with total page 842 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a dutiful Victorian daughter, the author was thirty before being freed (by her parents' deaths) to do as she chose. She went to West Africa in 1893 and again in 1895, to investigate the beliefs and customs of the inland tribes and also to collect zoological specimens. She was appalled by the 'thin veneer of rubbishy white culture' imposed by British officials and was not afraid to say so.
Download or read book Love Under the Kola Nut Tree written by Esther Lamnyam and published by . This book was released on 2009-02-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a romantic, spiritual, captivating and meditative story, a self-help book is dramatically brought to life.
Download or read book Africans written by John Iliffe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-13 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An updated and comprehensive single-volume history covering all periods from human origins to contemporary African situations.
Download or read book The African Film Industry written by UNESCO and published by UNESCO Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The production and distribution of film and audiovisual works is one of the most dynamic growth sectors in the world. Thanks to digital technologies, production has been growing rapidly in Africa in recent years. For the first time, a complete mapping of the film and audiovisual industry in 54 States of the African continent is available, including quantitative and qualitative data and an analysis of their strengths and weaknesses at the continental and regional levels.The report proposes strategic recommendations for the development of the film and audiovisual sectors in Africa and invites policymakers, professional organizations, firms, filmmakers and artists to implement them in a concerted manner.
Download or read book Mark of Voodoo written by Sharon Caulder and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caulder writes of the links between her heritage, her spirituality and the practices of Voodoo and Shamanism. color photos.
