Download or read book Death and the Invisible Powers written by Simon Bockie and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[Bockie's] description of Kongo culture is vivid, beautifullyclear, and absolutely authentic, as only a native could make it.... I don't know ofanything of its kind that is both as good, ethnographically, and asreadable." -- Wyatt MacGaffey "Simon Bockie haswritten an engaging, often personal account of the views and behaviors surroundingdeath in his own society, the Kongo of Lower Zaire, northern Angola, and theCongo." -- Cahiers d'Etudes africaines ..". excellentbook of Kongo religious life and thought... " --Religion "It is a book that is remarkably well written, bothfor its readability and for its explanatory value.... the book is a superb startingplace for understanding Kongo religion, and will work as an introduction to Africanreligion in general as well." -- International Journal of African HistoricalStudies ..". an excellent introduction for anyone seeking tounderstand Kongo traditional culture and thought." --Oshun Rich in anecdote and case histories, Death and the InvisiblePowers is a personal account of the spiritual life of the Kongo people. It describesthe ancient traditions that nourish a culture whose name symbolizes the heart ofCentral Africa.

Download or read book Our Mothers Our Powers Our Texts written by Teresa N. Washington and published by Oya's Tornado. This book was released on 2015-12-23 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Blazes a new trail in Africana literary criticism by providing an insight into the soul and spirit of Africana womanhood.” --Anthonia Kalu, The Ohio State University, author of Women, Literature, and Development in Africa This is the revised and expanded edition of Teresa N. Washington's groundbreaking book Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Aje in Africana Literature. In Yoruba language and culture, Aje signifies both a phenomenal spiritual power and the human beings who exercise that power. Aje is the birthright of Africana women who are revered as the Gods of Society. While Africana men can have Aje, its owners and controllers are Africana women. Because it is an African female power, and due to its invisibility, ubiquity, and profundity, Aje is often maligned as witchcraft. However, as Teresa N. Washington reveals in Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts, Aje is central to the Yoruba ethos, worldview, and cosmology. Not only is it essential to human creation and artistic creativity, but as a force of justice and retribution, Aje is vital to social harmony and balance. Washington analyzes forms, figures, and forces of Aje in the Yoruba world, in the Caribbean Islands, in Latin America, and in African America. Washington's research reveals that with the exile and enslavement of millions of Africans, Aje became a global force and an essential ally in organizing insurrections, soothing shattered souls, and reminding the dispossessed of their inherent divinity. From her in-depth exploration of Aje in Pan-African history and orature, Washington guides readers through rich analyses of the symbolic, methodological, and spiritual manifestations of Aje that are central to important works by Africana writers but are rarely elucidated by Western criticism. Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts includes innovative readings of works by many Africana writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Wole Soyinka, Jamaica Kincaid, and Ntozake Shange. This revised and expanded edition of Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts will appeal to scholars of Africana literature, African religion and philosophy, gender studies, and comparative literature. Devotees of Africana spiritual systems will find this book to be indispensable.

Download or read book Pentecostalism and Witchcraft written by Knut Rio and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-29 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book presents fresh ethnographic work from the regions of Africa and Melanesia—where the popularity of charismatic Christianity can be linked to a revival and transformation of witchcraft. The volume demonstrates how the Holy Spirit has become an adversary to the reconfirmed presence of witches, demons, and sorcerers as manifestations of evil. We learn how this is articulated in spiritual warfare, in crusades, and in healing or witch-killing raids. The contributors highlight what happens to phenomena that people address as locally specific witchcraft or sorcery when re-molded within the universalist Pentecostal demonology, vocabulary, and confrontational methodology.

Download or read book Harmful Traditional Practices written by Gerry Campbell and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-29 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about harmful traditional practices: damaging and often violent acts which include female genital mutilation, forced marriage, honour killings and abuse, breast ironing, witchcraft and faith-based abuse. Often targeting women and young girls, these practices are often justified on spurious religious or traditional grounds but are all forms of abuse. Roberts, Campbell and Sarkaria have backgrounds in psychology, policing and law and have spent many years working at the forefront of attempts to end these practices. Harmful Traditional Practices is therefore a uniquely pragmatic book which aims to inform readers about these acts while identifying the best approaches towards ending and prosecuting against them.

Download or read book D R Congo the Darkness of the Heart written by Loso Kiteti Boya and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2010-05-19 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Book Synopsis: This book recounts from the perspective of a Congolese native the five-hundred-year journey of the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It analyzes dispassionately the facts of the turbulent history of the country and its continuing impact on the life of the modern-day Congolese. In the book, we set out to begin the search for the Congolese answers to the DR Congos historical paradox of a very rich country living a very poor life in a neighborhood in which it is the biggest and yet the weakest country. We travel back five hundred years to rediscover the ancient kingdom of Congo and look closely at its people, institutions, value and belief systems, customs and practices and try to establish the linkages between the present cultural values, belief system, and practices of the modern-day Congolese with those of their past. Through the revisiting of the past, we try to identify the ways and means of a more effective strategy for social, political, and economic renaissance in the DR Congo. Although a diary, the book is not a chronological presentation of the Congos history. The reader can expect to travel back and forth on the meandering road of the Congolese journey. The DR Congo is a land of ecological gigantism and an environmental Garden of Eden. It has the second largest freshwater river in the world, the Congo River, a powerful source of clean energy, and the second largest tropical rain forest in the world; the largest number of big lakes in Africa, including Lake Tanganyika; one of the largest assortment of minerals and precious metals and gems in the world, including uranium; and a large landmass of 906,000 square miles stretching over two time zones with a population of less than seventy million, translating into one the lowest population densities in the world. Such an array of diverse and rich natural resources and the extraordinary economic power potential of DR Congo have always attracted envy and invasions from foreign countries, multinational companies, and individuals over the centuries, the latest being the attack of the combined armies of Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi in August 1998. The history of the DR Congo is also the history of the darkness of the human heart, extreme cruelty and violence, greed and selfishness by the early European explorers, the slave traders, the Zanzibari Arab slave merchants of the last centuries, and the neocolonialists and cold warriors of the twentieth century. It is the history of treason of the Congo by the Congolese, the betrayal of the public trust of the people, and of the pursuit of power at all costs and bad management of the economy by the Congolese leaders and the politicians, from the medieval kings of the kingdom of the Congo to the present-day ruling class. The book follows the less publicized but crucial journeys of the numerous Congolese slaves to the Americas, documenting their early settlements in the United States, the Caribbean Islands, and Brazil and reconnecting their present-day descendants in the Americas to their Congolese roots and ancestry.

Download or read book Memorializing the Unsung written by Elochukwu Uzukwu, C.S.Sp. and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2024-06-05 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the time the Capuchins arrived in the seventeenth century, Kongo had been Catholic for nearly two hundred years. The European mission could not be conversion, then, but reinforcement; the Capuchins sought to establish the sacraments and a line to Rome in a lay-led church already suffused with an enduring, creative, and complex theological culture. In Memorializing the Unsung, Elochukwu Uzukwu uses the framework of this “ancient” Kongo Catholicism to explore European dependence on enslaved Kongo Catholics and the unconscionable Capuchin and Spiritan participation in the slave trade at large—a practice denounced by the lone voices of Capuchin Epifanio de Moirans and Spiritan Alexandre Monnet. Reconstructing the church that missionaries and Kongo Catholics built together on the foundations of local religion, Memorializing the Unsung contrasts the dignity denied the Kongo Catholics with the freedom they nonetheless performed. Uzukwu is particularly deft in tracing the agency of Kongo elites and laypeople from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth, carefully evaluating their deliberate engagements with southern Europeans, the role of the maestri (translator-catechists) in guiding the faithful, and the ultimate development of a unique theological vocabulary endorsed by the Kikongo catechism. Without the support and creativity of these unsung lay Catholics across west-central and eastern Africa, Uzukwu shows, the European missions in the region would have failed. Even while enslaved, the Kongo Slaves of the Church and the eastern African Slaves of the Mission served as mediators, co-creators, and reinventors of their world.

Download or read book The Kongolese Saint Anthony written by John Thornton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-05-13 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of the Christian religious movement led by Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita in the Kingdom of Kongo from 1704 until her death, by burning at the stake, in 1706. Beatriz, a young woman, claimed to be possessed by St Anthony, argued that Jesus was a Kongolese, and criticized Italian Capuchin missionaries in her country for not supporting black saints. The movement was largely a peace movement, with a following among the common people, attempting to stop the devastating cycle of civil wars between contenders for the Kongolese throne. Thornton supplies background information on the Kingdom, the development of Catholicism in Kongo since 1491, the nature and role of local warfare in the Atlantic slave trade, and contemporary everyday life, as well as sketching the lives of some local personalities.

Download or read book The Scent of the Father written by Valentin-Yves Mudimbe and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-11-09 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Valentin-Yves Mudimbe is a Congolese philosopher, novelist, poet, essayist, and academic, widely considered to be one of the most important African thinkers of his generation. The ideas and arguments he has developed in his writings since the 1970s, including The Invention of Africa, have been hugely influential across many disciplines and established his reputation as one of the essential postcolonial thinkers of our time. In The Scent of the Father, Mudimbe set himself the task of shedding light on the complex links that bind Africa to the West and determine the exercise of thought and knowledge practices, particularly in relation to the social sciences. For Africa to escape the West, says Mudimbe, it must become aware of what remains Western in the very concepts and forms of thought that allow it to think against the West, and be alert to the possibility that the recourse against the West might be just another ruse that the West uses for its own ends. Africa must elucidate the modalities of the integration of Africans into the myths of the West, while at the same time aiming at the readaptation of the African psyche in the wake of the violence it has suffered. This seminal work by a leading African thinker will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the legacies of colonialism and the debates on decolonization and decoloniality in the social and human sciences.

Download or read book The Devil s Children written by Jean La Fontaine and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A number of cases of serious child abuse have resulted from beliefs that children may be possessed by evil spirits and may then be given the power to bewitch others. Misfortune, failure, illness and even death may be blamed on them. The 'cure', nowadays called deliverance rather than exorcism, is to expel the spirits, sometimes by violent means. This book draws together contributions on aspects of possession and witchcraft from leading academics and expert practitioners in the field. It has been put together following conferences held by Inform, a charity that provides accurate information on new religions as a public service. There is no comparable information publicly available; this book is the first of its kind. Eileen Barker, founder of Inform, introduces the subject and Inform's Deputy Director goes on to detail the requests the charity has answered in recent years on the subject of children, possession and witchcraft. This book offers an invaluable resource for readers, whether academic or practitioner - particularly those in the fields of the safeguarding of children, and their education, health and general welfare.

Download or read book Kongo Political Culture written by Wyatt MacGaffey and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2000-03-22 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lutete devoted much of his attention to aspects of Kongo ritual and religious belief, including minkisi and the rituals for the installation of chiefs. The original text of what he had to say about chiefship is printed, with translation notes. The work of other informants is also used."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book changes et communications II written by Claude Lévi-Strauss and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 780 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To celebrate the 270th anniversary of the De Gruyter publishing house, the company is providing permanent open access to 270 selected treasures from the De Gruyter Book Archive. Titles will be made available to anyone, anywhere at any time that might be interested. The DGBA project seeks to digitize the entire backlist of titles published since 1749 to ensure that future generations have digital access to the high-quality primary sources that De Gruyter has published over the centuries.

Download or read book The Limits of State Power in Africa written by Georges/Sembe Bakaly and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2006-11 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book An Anthology of Kongo Religion written by John M. Janzen and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book KINDOKI written by Afefe Ogo and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2017-01-28 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Afefe Ogo says .".".. true magical energy is derived from the individual witch's creative process and their connection with those forces that they have developed relationships with." In Kindoki the Witch will learn to wield potent methods that indeed foster such a connection with the 'forces' that have helped Magicians, Sorcerers, Witches and Shaman apply their magical energies for thousands of years. Kindoki presents African methods to the Western occultist from a Left Hand Path perspective. For those who grew up reading obscure little booklets found in the corner botanical, to those who favor large ceremonial tombs, this text will bridge the gap by helping the true practitioner accomplish tasks in a simple but precise manner.

Download or read book Baby X written by Harry Keeble and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-03-11 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When super-tough cop Sergeant Harry Keeble announced he was joining Hackney's ailing Child Protection Team in 2000, his colleagues were astounded. Known as the 'Cardigan Squad', its officers were seen as glorified social workers dealing with domestics. The reality was very different. Within a few months he'd fought machete-wielding thugs, rescued kids who had pit bulls chained to their cots and confronted the horrors of African witchcraft, exposing a network of abuse in the process - all in his unrelenting war against child cruelty. Harry rescued dozens of kids - kids in crack houses, kids living in unimaginable filth and kids who had burned their houses down. Then there were the hostage situations, the lynch mobs, and the almost impossible process of interviewing paedophiles to get a confession. Without wading in sentimentality, Harry describes how his team - working alongside dedicated but chronically underfunded social workers - operated at the sharp end of child protection. This is a shocking and unforgettable story of how some of the UK's most disadvantaged children escaped their tormentors - and explains why some cases, similar to that of Baby P's, ended in tragedy.

Download or read book Ralph Ellison s Invisible Theology written by M. Cooper Harriss and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the religious dimensions of Ralph Ellison’s concept of race Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man provides an unforgettable metaphor for what it means to be disregarded in society. While the term “invisibility” has become shorthand for all forms of marginalization, Ellison was primarily concerned with racial identity. M. Cooper Harriss argues that religion, too, remains relatively invisible within discussions of race and seeks to correct this through a close study of Ralph Ellison’s work. Harriss examines the religious and theological dimensions of Ralph Ellison’s concept of race through his evocative metaphor for the experience of blackness in America, and with an eye to uncovering previously unrecognized religious dynamics in Ellison’s life and work. Blending religious studies and theology, race theory, and fresh readings of African-American culture, Harriss draws on Ellison to create the concept of an “invisible theology,” and uses this concept as a basis for discussing religion and racial identity in contemporary American life. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology is the first book to focus on Ellison as a religious figure, and on the religious dynamics of his work. Harriss brings to light Ellison’s close friendship with theologian and literary critic Nathan A. Scott, Jr., and places Ellison in context with such legendary religious figures as Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and Martin Luther King, Jr. He argues that historical legacies of invisible theology help us make sense of more recent issues like drone warfare and Clint Eastwood’s empty chair. Rich and innovative, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology will revolutionize the way we understand Ellison, the intellectual legacies of race, and the study of religion.

Download or read book What Do Science Technology and Innovation Mean from Africa written by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-06-16 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explorations of science, technology, and innovation in Africa not as the product of “technology transfer” from elsewhere but as the working of African knowledge. In the STI literature, Africa has often been regarded as a recipient of science, technology, and innovation rather than a maker of them. In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines show that STI in Africa is not merely the product of “technology transfer” from elsewhere but the working of African knowledge. Their contributions focus on African ways of looking, meaning-making, and creating. The chapter authors see Africans as intellectual agents whose perspectives constitute authoritative knowledge and whose strategic deployment of both endogenous and inbound things represents an African-centered notion of STI. “Things do not (always) mean the same from everywhere,” observes Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, the volume's editor. Western, colonialist definitions of STI are not universalizable. The contributors discuss topics that include the trivialization of indigenous knowledge under colonialism; the creative labor of chimurenga, the transformation of everyday surroundings into military infrastructure; the role of enslaved Africans in America as innovators and synthesizers; the African ethos of “fixing”; the constitutive appropriation that makes mobile technologies African; and an African innovation strategy that builds on domestic capacities. The contributions describe an Africa that is creative, technological, and scientific, showing that African STI is the latest iteration of a long process of accumulative, multicultural knowledge production. Contributors Geri Augusto, Shadreck Chirikure, Chux Daniels, Ron Eglash, Ellen Foster, Garrick E. Louis, D. A. Masolo, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Neda Nazemi, Toluwalogo Odumosu, Katrien Pype, Scott Remer