Download or read book The City in the African Novel written by Lola Akande and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lola Akande's The City in the African Novel: A Thematic Rendering of Urban Spaces undertakes a critical analysis of sixteen African novels that she believes are representative of city trends. Beginning with an introduction that discusses why and how the city is an important phenomenon in literature, the problematic relationship between the city and the African novel, she goes on to examine how the African city emerges from villagisation into urbanity. Her careful and definitive analyses of the general and peculiar traits of African cities; the real impact of urban life on city dwellers; how earlier and recent novelists portray the city; how literature influences the way people conduct themselves in the city while the behaviour of people in the city also influences what comes out as literature are done against the background of the symbolisation of the African city as emblematic of the inchoate African modernities where citizens' lives are wracked with fruitless struggle. She then focuses on the contributions of female writers to the study of the city by critically assessing the extent to which city life has influenced female writers differently from their male counterparts.
Download or read book The African City written by Bill Freund and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-05 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is comprehensive both in terms of time coverage, from before the Pharaohs to the present moment and in that it tries to consider cities from the entire continent, not just Sub-Saharan Africa. Apart from factual information and rich description material culled from many sources, it looks at many issues from why urban life emerged in the first place to how present-day African cities cope in difficult times. Instead of seeing towns and cities as somehow extraneous to the real Africa, it views them as an inherent part of developing Africa, indigenous, colonial, and post-colonial and emphasizes the extent to which the future of African society and African culture will likely be played out mostly in cities. The book is written to appeal to students of history but equally to geographers, planners, sociologists and development specialists interested in urban problems.
Download or read book For the City Yet to Come written by Abdou Maliqalim Simone and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004-10-07 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVA study of how colonial and postcolonial legacies manifest in African cities and African urban planning./div
Download or read book Migrants and Strangers in an African City written by Bruce Whitehouse and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-14 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In cities throughout Africa, local inhabitants live alongside large populations of "strangers." Bruce Whitehouse explores the condition of strangerhood for residents who have come from the West African Sahel to settle in Brazzaville, Congo. Whitehouse considers how these migrants live simultaneously inside and outside of Congolese society as merchants, as Muslims in a predominantly non-Muslim society, and as parents seeking to instill in their children the customs of their communities of origin. Migrants and Strangers in an African City challenges Pan-Africanist ideas of transnationalism and diaspora in today's globalized world.
Download or read book Zoo City written by Lauren Beukes and published by Mulholland Books. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new edition of Lauren Beukes's Arthur C Clarke Award-winning novel set in a world where murderers and other criminals acquire magical animals that are mystically bonded to them. Zinzi has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit, and a talent for finding lost things. When a little old lady turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheck, Zinzi's forced to take on her least favorite kind of job -- missing persons. Being hired by reclusive music producer Odi Huron to find a teenybop pop star should be her ticket out of Zoo City, the festering slum where the criminal underclass and their animal companions live in the shadow of hell's undertow. Instead, it catapults Zinzi deeper into the maw of a city twisted by crime and magic, where she'll be forced to confront the dark secrets of former lives -- including her own.
Download or read book Living for the City written by Miles Larmer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-12 with total page 671 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living for the City is a social history of the Central African Copperbelt, considered as a single region encompassing the neighbouring mining regions of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Haut Katanga and Zambian Copperbelt mine towns have been understood as the vanguard of urban 'modernity' in Africa. Observers found in these towns new African communities that were experiencing what they wrongly understood as a transition from rural 'traditional' society – stable, superstitious and agricultural – to an urban existence characterised by industrial work discipline, the money economy and conspicuous consumption, Christianity, and nuclear families headed by male breadwinners supported by domesticated housewives. Miles Larmer challenges this representation of Copperbelt society, presenting an original analysis which integrates the region's social history with the production of knowledge about it, shaped by both changing political and intellectual contexts and by Copperbelt communities themselves. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Download or read book Living for the City written by Donna Jean Murch and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this nuanced and groundbreaking history, Donna Murch argues that the Black Panther Party (BPP) started with a study group. Drawing on oral history and untapped archival sources, she explains how a relatively small city with a recent history of African
Download or read book African Cities Through Local Eyes written by Giuseppe Faldi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-16 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides readers with a wide overview of place-based planning and design experiments addressing such powerful transformations in the African built environment. This continent is currently undergoing fast paced urban, institutional and environmental changes, which have stimulated an increasing interest for alternative architectural solutions, urban designs and comprehensive planning experiments. The international and balanced array of the collected contributions explore emerging research concepts for understanding urban and peri-urban processes in Africa, discuss bottom-up planning and design practices, and present inspirational and innovative co-design methods and participatory tools for steering such change through public spaces, sustainable services and infrastructures. The book is intended for students, researchers, decision-makers and practitioners engaged in planning and design for the built environment in Africa and the Global South at large.
Download or read book African Cities written by Professor Garth Myers and published by Zed Books. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking book, Garth Myers uses African urban concepts and experiences to speak back to theoretical and practical concerns. He argues for a re-visioning - a seeing again, and a revising - of how cities in Africa are discussed and written about in both urban studies and African studies. Cities in Africa are still either ignored - banished to a different, other, lesser category of not-quite cities - or held up as examples of all that can go wrong with urbanism in much of the mainstream and even critical urban literature. Myers instead encourages African studies and urban studies scholars across the world to engage with the vibrancy and complexity of African cities with fresh eyes. Touching on a diverse range of cities across Africa - from Zanzibar to Nairobi, Cape Town to Mogadishu, Kinshasa to Dakar - the book uses the author's own research and a close reading of works by other scholars, writers and artists to help illuminate what is happening in and across the region's cities.
Download or read book The Rise of the African Novel written by Mukoma Wa Ngugi and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging questions of language, identity, and reception to restore South African and diaspora writing to the African literary tradition
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 African Town written by Charles Waters and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-01-04 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicling the story of the last Africans brought illegally to America in 1860, African Town is a powerful and stunning novel-in-verse. Cover may vary. In 1860, long after the United States outlawed the importation of enslaved laborers, 110 men, women and children from Benin and Nigeria were captured and brought to Mobile, Alabama aboard a ship called Clotilda. Their journey includes the savage Middle Passage and being hidden in the swamplands along the Alabama River before being secretly parceled out to various plantations, where they made desperate attempts to maintain both their culture and also fit into the place of captivity to which they'd been delivered. At the end of the Civil War, the survivors created a community for themselves they called African Town, which still exists to this day. Told in 14 distinct voices, including that of the ship that brought them to the American shores and the founder of African Town, this powerfully affecting historical novel-in-verse recreates a pivotal moment in US and world history, the impacts of which we still feel today.
Download or read book African Novels and the Question of Orality written by Eileen Julien and published by . This book was released on 1992-07-22 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This genre lends itself to sophisticated experimentation in political discourse. Sony Labou Tansi's La Vie et demie (1979) and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Devil on the Cross (1982) caricature the puerile representatives of political and economic power through grotesque physical appetites and bodily deformations.
Download or read book Africa s Cities written by Somik V. Lall and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities in Sub-Saharan Africa are experiencing rapid population growth. Yet their economic growth has not kept pace. Why? One factor might be low capital investment, due in part to Africa's relative poverty: Other regions have reached similar stages of urbanization at higher per capita GDP. This study, however, identifies a deeper reason: African cities are closed to the world. Compared with other developing cities, cities in Africa produce few goods and services for trade on regional and international markets To grow economically as they are growing in size, Africa's cities must open their doors to the world. They need to specialize in manufacturing, along with other regionally and globally tradable goods and services. And to attract global investment in tradables production, cities must develop scale economies, which are associated with successful urban economic development in other regions. Such scale economies can arise in Africa, and they will--if city and country leaders make concerted efforts to bring agglomeration effects to urban areas. Today, potential urban investors and entrepreneurs look at Africa and see crowded, disconnected, and costly cities. Such cities inspire low expectations for the scale of urban production and for returns on invested capital. How can these cities become economically dense--not merely crowded? How can they acquire efficient connections? And how can they draw firms and skilled workers with a more affordable, livable urban environment? From a policy standpoint, the answer must be to address the structural problems affecting African cities. Foremost among these problems are institutional and regulatory constraints that misallocate land and labor, fragment physical development, and limit productivity. As long as African cities lack functioning land markets and regulations and early, coordinated infrastructure investments, they will remain local cities: closed to regional and global markets, trapped into producing only locally traded goods and services, and limited in their economic growth.
Download or read book The Journey s End written by Mutia, Ba'bila and published by Spears Media Press. This book was released on 2016-06-13 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Akuma, a youthful African government secondary school teacher, leaves his hometown and goes to the capital city, he hardly knows that he will be paralyzed and will not be able to use his legs again. The Journey's End is a character-driven narrative that explores the lives of two men who meet in Yaoundé, the capital city: Lucas Wango, an elderly pensioner who comes to collect his back pay of seven years' pension money, and Akuma, a physically challenged man who helps him recover his pension arrears. Wango doesn't know that Akuma, aka Général, is a mobster and the boss of a city gang that commands and controls a better part of the metropolis. Running parallel to this central plot are two subplots that eventually converge at the end of the novel: Lucas Wango's meddling in and eventual frustration with national political life and Général's relationship with Martina, a woman with whom he falls in love in the city. Set in the rural African landscape of Yambe and Menamo - Akuma's home village which he left to come to the city, and the urban backdrop of the rapidly populated city of Yaoundé, The Journey's End epitomizes the predicament of Africa's expanding slum-cities, characterized by poverty, corruption, and survival-driven individuality. For whom does the journey end - remains an absorbing question that animates every single page in this extraordinary urban adventure.
Download or read book Slavery and the Birth of an African City written by Kristin Mann and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-26 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the slave trade entered its last, illegal phase in the 19th century, the town of Lagos on West Africa's Bight of Benin became one of the most important port cities north of the equator. Slavery and the Birth of an African City explores the reasons for Lagos's sudden rise to power. By linking the histories of international slave markets to those of the regional suppliers and slave traders, Kristin Mann shows how the African slave trade forever altered the destiny of the tiny kingdom of Lagos. This magisterial work uncovers the relationship between African slavery and the growth of one of Africa's most vibrant cities.
Download or read book Smart Economy in Smart African Cities written by Gora Mboup and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book highlights the use of information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructures in order to develop smart cities and produce smart economies in Africa. It discusses a robust set of concepts, including smart planning, smart infrastructure development, smart economic development, smart environmental sustainability, smart social development, resilience, and smart peace and security in several African cities. By drawing on the accumulated knowledge on various conditions that make cities smart, green, livable and healthy, it helps in the planning, design and management of African urbanization. In turn, it fosters the development of e-commerce, e-education, e-governance, etc. The rapid development of ICT infrastructures facilitates the creation of smart economies in digitally served cities and towns through smart urban planning, smart infrastructures, smart land tenure and smart urban policies. In the long term, this can reduce emissions of CO2, promote the creation of low carbon cities, reduce land degradation and promote biodiversity.