Download or read book The Face of Africa Today written by James N. M. B. Rugiireheh-Runaku and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Face of Africa written by Stan Chu Ilo and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a call on Africans and non-Africans to once more believe in the possibility of a better future for Africa. In these pages, Stan Chu Ilo writes of his experience and the experiences of many young Africans like himself who are disturbed by the present condition of Africa. He writes about the challenges facing most Africans who are growing up in the African continent without any hope of quality education, without any guarantee of adequate food, water, housing, and clothing; without any hope of getting a job, and without any prospect of living in peace with their neighbors. He writes of the sad situation of millions of young Africans who are dying of malaria and HIV/AIDS, and the African women whose fate and fortune have been shackled by a male-dominated society. He questions the bases of the existence of the failed states of Africa, who are caught up in a cycle of violence and disorder and who are not asking the right questions about the future of their nations. He argues that corruption, excessive authoritarianism, a stubborn hold on power, and lack of openness to consensus-building among some African leaders insult the cultural value of Africans with regard to a sense of community, love and solidarity. He also writes of the pain of globalization, the debt burden, immigration and trade restrictions on Africans and African countries, exploitation of ordinary Africans by fellow Africans and Western governments and business conglomerates. He wonders why many Western nations should turn their backs on Africa, when they all share some responsibility in bringing Africa to her knees. However, even though many Africans have become exhausted in the battle for national survival and fora living space to pursue their ordered ends, this book proposes that Africans should not claim perpetual victimhood, rather they should stand up once more and work for a better tomorrow, which is possible, and within their reach. Ilo insists that the imposing mountains of economic and social ruin; the rising moans and groans of numberless Africans, should not weaken the inner energy and ardent hopes of millions of Africans struggling against the untested assumption, that the cracking social, political, and economic foundations of present day Africa, are incapable of supporting the structures of a new Africa. The face of Africa today is ugly, but behind the ugly face is the beauty that has been distorted by historical and cultural factors. The present condition of Africa is only the sign of the urgent need for the peoples of Africa to brace up for the long and hard journey to reclaim their future. Ilo outlines how non-Africans who are interested in the African condition can be involved with the peoples of Africa. A proper understanding of the African continent and her peoples, her history and cultural evolution is a necessary first step for those who wish to be engaged with the Africans. His total picture approach model as the key to interpreting the African condition and in comprehensively addressing the challenges facing Africa, offers a helpful and original tool in understanding Africa. It helps to overcome the stereotypes, prejudices and paternalism which non-Africans apply in their reading of African history and their relation with the African reality. With masterly skills, a keen sense of history, a balanced perspective and objectivity, Ilo identifies the constraints to growth andinnovation in Africa in terms of the low stocks in the human-capital and cultural development. He introduces a new concept in the interpretation of the African condition: homelessness in terms of cultural and existential crises that confront Africans today. His conclusion is that cultural and human development is the irreducible decimal in any proposal for the transformation of the continent; that grassroots village-based action should be preferred over bogus and unworkable national approaches to African development.
Download or read book Faces of Africa written by Carol Beckwith and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a selection of full-color photographs from across Africa, covering topics including sense of place, the joy of being, inner journeys, patterns of beauty, rhythm from within, and capacity to endure.
Download or read book Face of the Gods written by Robert Farris Thompson and published by Prestel Publishing. This book was released on 1993 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thompson examines the altar traditions in cultures from the Atlantic coast region of Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and the United States.
Download or read book Of Africa written by Wole Soyinka and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A member of the unique generation of African writers and intellectuals who came of age in the last days of colonialism, Wole Soyinka has witnessed the promise of independence and lived through postcolonial failure. He deeply comprehends the pressing problems of Africa, and, an irrepressible essayist and a staunch critic of the oppressive boot, he unhesitatingly speaks out.In this magnificent new work, Soyinka offers a wide-ranging inquiry into Africa's culture, religion, history, imagination, and identity. He seeks to understand how the continent's history is entwined with the histories of others, while exploring Africa's truest assets: "its humanity, the quality and valuation of its own existence, and modes of managing its environment—both physical and intangible (which includes the spiritual)."Fully grasping the extent of Africa's most challenging issues, Soyinka nevertheless refuses defeatism. With eloquence he analyzes problems ranging from the meaning of the past to the threat of theocracy. He asks hard questions about racial attitudes, inter-ethnic and religious violence, the viability of nations whose boundaries were laid out by outsiders, African identity on the continent and among displaced Africans, and more. Soyinka's exploration of Africa relocates the continent in the reader's imagination and maps a course toward an African future of peace and affirmation.
Download or read book Faces of Jesus in Africa written by Robert J. Schreiter and published by Orbis Books. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Zuma Years written by Richard Calland and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2013-08-16 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The face of power in South Africa is rapidly changing – for better and for worse. The years since Thabo Mbeki was swept aside by Jacob Zuma’s ‘coalition of the wounded’ have been especially tumultuous, with the rise and fall of populist politicians such as Julius Malema, the terrible events at Marikana, and the embarrassing Guptagate scandal. What lies behind these developments? How does the Zuma presidency exercise its power? Who makes our foreign policy? What goes on in cabinet meetings? What is the state of play in the Alliance – is the SACP really more powerful than before? And, as the landscape shifts, what are the opposition’s prospects? In The Zuma Years, Richard Calland attempts to answer these questions, and more, by holding up a mirror to the new establishment; by exploring how people such as Malema, Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng and DA parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko have risen so fast; by examining key drivers of transformation in South Africa, such as the professions and the universities; and by training a spotlight on the toxic mix of money and politics. The Zuma Years is a fly-on-the-wall, insider’s approach to the people who control the power that affects us all. It takes you along the corridors of government and corporate power, mixing solid research with vivid anecdote and interviews with key players. The result is an accessible yet authoritative account of who runs South Africa, and how, today.
Download or read book Heart of Whiteness written by June Goodwin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1995 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When South Africa's present transitional government comes to an end, apartheid will be dead. But just as the demise of slavery did not solve America's race problems, so the abolition of apartheid will only begin South Africa's healing process. Heart of Whiteness examines the cataclysmic changes taking place among Afrikaners--the "white tribe" of South Africa.
Download or read book The Church and Development in Africa written by Stan Chu Ilo and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2011-09-09 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Stan Ilo offers an integral theology of development and creatively lays the groundwork for Christian humanitarian and social ministry in Africa. Ilo proposes a vulnerable missional praxis through a social analysis informed by the gospel, which promises to enrich the ways Catholic and Christian charities worldwide carry out their humanitarian work and engage in aid and development initiatives in developing countries of Africa and among the poor in different parts of the world. Ilo offers a comprehensive and systematic presentation of Catholic social ethics in relation to human rights, ecology, globalization, international cooperation, development and aid, human and cultural development, business ethics, social justice, and the challenges of poverty eradication.
Download or read book Africa Must Be Modern written by Olúfémi Táíwò and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a forthright and uncompromising manner, Olúfémi Táíwò explores Africa's hostility toward modernity and how that hostility has impeded economic development and social and political transformation. What has to change for Africa to be able to respond to the challenges of modernity and globalization? Táíwò insists that Africa can renew itself only by fully engaging with democracy and capitalism and by mining its untapped intellectual resources. While many may not agree with Táíwò's positions, they will be unable to ignore what he says. This is a bold exhortation for Africa to come into the 21st century.
Download or read book The Bright Continent written by Dayo Olopade and published by HMH. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “For anyone who wants to understand how the African economy really works, The Bright Continent is a good place to start” (Reuters). Dayo Olopade knew from personal experience that Western news reports on conflict, disease, and poverty obscure the true story of modern Africa. And so she crossed sub-Saharan Africa to document how ordinary people deal with their daily challenges. She found what cable news ignores: a continent of ambitious reformers and young social entrepreneurs driven by kanju—creativity born of African difficulty. It’s a trait found in pioneers like Kenneth Nnebue, who turned cheap VHS tapes into the multimillion-dollar film industry Nollywood. Or Ushahidi, a technology collective that crowdsources citizen activism and disaster relief. A shining counterpoint to conventional wisdom, The Bright Continent rewrites Africa’s challenges as opportunities to innovate, and celebrates a history of doing more with less as a powerful model for the rest of the world. “[An] upbeat study of development in Africa . . . The book is written more in wonder at African ingenuity than in anger at foreign incomprehension.” —The New Yorker “A hopeful narrative about a continent on the rise.” —The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book The Changing Face of Christianity written by Lamin Sanneh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-03-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past century, Christianity's place and role in the world have changed dramatically. In 1900, 80 percent of the world's Christians lived in Europe and North America. Today, more than 60 percent of the world's Christians live outside of that region. This change calls for a reexamination of the way the story of Christianity is told, the methodological tools for its analysis, and its modes of expression. Perhaps most significant is the role of Africa as the new Christian heartland. The questions and answers about Christianity and its contemporary mission now being developed in the African churches will have enormous influence in the years to come. This volume offers nine new essays addressing this sea-change and its importance for the future of Christianity. Some contributions consider the development of "non-Western" forms of Christianity, others look at the impact of these new Christianities in the West. The authors cover a wide range of topics, from the integration of witchcraft and Christianity in Nigeria and the peacemaking role of churches in Mozambique to the American Baptist reception of Asian Christianity. The Changing Face of Christianity shows the striking cultural differences between the new world Christianity and its western counterpart. But with so many new immigrants in Europe and North America, the faith's fault lines are not purely geographical. The new Christianity now thrives in American and European settings, and northerners need to know this faith better. At stake is their ability to be good neighbors-and perhaps to be good Christian citizens of the world.
Download or read book Africa since 1940 written by Frederick Cooper and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-10-10 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frederick Cooper's book on the history of decolonization and independence in Africa is part of the textbook series New Approaches to African History. This text will help students understand the historical process out of which Africa's position in the world has emerged. Bridging the divide between colonial and post-colonial history, it allows readers to see just what political independence did and did not signify and how men and women, peasants and workers, religious leaders and local leaders sought to refashion the way they lived, worked, and interacted with each other.
Download or read book The Angry Gods of Africa written by Yao Foli Modey and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this epochal historical novel, Professor Modey takes another look at both the European slave trade to Africa and plantation slavery in the New World, both are old subjects. He dramatizes an imaginary journey of apology and shows how a delegation from fundamentalist groups from the former Old South traveled to Africa to show genuine remorse, make atonement and ask for reconciliation from the chiefs. He points out how the Europeans and Americans, who had the lions share of the trade and made tons of wealth from it, must go past the sugar coated words of apology---make atonement for the profane past and ask for final reconciliation. He points out in the book that regardless of what people think, Africans did not invite the Europeans to their shores to buy their blood brothers and sisters. The Oburonis just showed up in Africa, but claimed that they just stumbled upon the continent. They imposed the slave trade on the African people using their guns and cannons to force the chiefs to exchange prisoners of war for guns, broadcloth and rum. So he said Africans are the victims and should not be going around doing all the apologizing and performing atonement rituals. The opposition to the slave trade from the African chiefs and kings is well-dramatized in the historical novel. He discusses the physical and demographic effects of the mfecane in detail. He demonstrated that the most lasting impacts are the psychological scars---inferiority complex in Africans everywhere and institutionalized racism across the globe. Hence the struggles to overcome the forces---betrayal, disunity, distrust and, unlike the recent economic success of Asian nations, the African leaders inability to experience similar success in the modern global economy effectively, he blames on the Americans and Europeans because of the stigma. He discusses efforts to apologize for the slave trade---the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Southern Baptists, the USA Congress and Senate, several American states such as Virginia, North Carolina and New Jersey. But Professor Modey points out that, instead of sweet sugar-coated words of apologies, the African leaders need atonement---help for Africa to heal from the lingering effects of the notorious slave trade. But he wants the Europeans and Americans to put Africa back where it once was before their ancestors came and decimated the continent with the wicked trade and destroyed the continent at iconoclastic proportions. Though the setting of the book is the Panfest festival at Cape Coast, Ghana, highlighting the dungeons, the Palaver Hall, the Portuguese chapels, the cannons, the lighthouse and the Shrine of Music, the author uses Memphis, Tennessee to demonstrate the lingering impact of plantation slavery on the Africans in the Diaspora. The author dramatizes how time is running out for atonement and present scenarios of remarkable disastrous consequences if the descendants of the former slave trades and plantation slave owners refuse to atone for the profane past. In spite of his drama of disasters and turmoil emanating from the restless souls of the dearly departed, the book, however, ends on a note of optimism about the future---Africa shall rise and the world would eventual emerge from the ashes of the greatest calamity in global history.
Download or read book You re Not a Country Africa written by Pius Adesanmi and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2012-09-28 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-ranging collection of essays, Pius Adesanmi explores what Africa means to him as an African and as a citizen of the world. Examining the personal and the political, tradition and modernity, custom and culture, Adesanmi grapples with the complexity and contradictions of this vast continent, zooming in most closely on Nigeria, the country of his birth. The inspiration for the title of the collection, You're Not a Country, Africa, comes from a line of poetry: 'You are not a country Africa, you are a concept, fashioned in our minds, each to each'. The Africa fashioned in our minds - with our fears and our dreams - is the Africa that the reader will encounter in these essays. Through narratives and political and cultural reflections, Pius Adesanmi approaches the meaning of Africa from the perspective that you never actually define Africa: rather, it defines you in various contexts and for various people.
Download or read book Born in Blackness Africa Africans and the Making of the Modern World 1471 to the Second World War written by Howard W. French and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity, Born in Blackness vitally reframes our understanding of world history. Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity? In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa. Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history. While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories—siloed and piecemeal—were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic “rise of the West” theories that have endured to this day. “Capacious and compelling” (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton—and of the greatest “commodity” of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the “New World,” whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.
Download or read book Against Decolonisation written by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò and published by Hurst Publishers. This book was released on 2022-06-30 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’; it suffocates African thought and denies African agency. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. He finds ‘decolonisation’ of culture intellectually unsound and wholly unrealistic, conflating modernity with coloniality, and groundlessly advocating an open-ended undoing of global society’s foundations. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers. This powerful, much-needed intervention questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Táíwò’s is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.
