Access your Project MUSE content using one of the login options below Close(X)
Browse Results For:
Four Nineteenth-Century Diaries
In the 1860s, as America waged civil war, several thousand African Americans sought greater freedom by emigrating to the fledgling nation of Liberia. While some argued that the new black republic represented disposal rather than emancipation, a few intrepid men set out to explore their African home. African-American Exploration in West Africa collects the travel diaries of James L. Sims, George L. Seymour, and Benjamin J. K. Anderson, who explored the territory that is now Liberia and Guinea between 1858 and 1874. These remarkable diaries reveal the wealth and beauty of Africa in striking descriptions of its geography, people, flora, and fauna. The dangers of the journeys surface, too -- Seymour was attacked and later died of his wounds, and his companion, Levin Ash, was captured and sold into slavery again. Challenging the notion that there were no black explorers in Africa, these diaries provide unique perspectives on 19th-century Liberian life and life in the interior of the continent before it was radically changed by European colonialism.
A Centenary of Wildlife Filming in Kenya
Jean Hartley, born in Kenya, is acknowledged as being the first to legitimise ìfixingî for wildlife film crews. Over the last 25 years, she has worked on over a thousand films, the vast majority being about wildlife and nature. She features five of the great film makers who all started their careers in Kenya in the1950s, legends whom she is proud to call personal friends. Watching all of their films, and many more, she became fascinated by the history of film making in Kenya and determined to find out when it all started. In this insightful book, she traces the roots of wildlife film back a hundred years, drawing on accounts of the original film makers and the professional hunters who guided those early safaris. She tracks the changes from those grainy, speeded up, silent films through to the technologically perfect High Definition and 3D films that are being made today.
How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania
The TAZARA (Tanzania Zambia Railway Authority), or Freedom Railway, from Dar es Salaam on the Tanzanian coast to the Copperbelt region of Zambia, was instrumental in fostering one of the most sweeping development transitions in postcolonial Africa. Built during the height of the Cold War, the railway was intended to redirect the mineral wealth of the interior away from routes through South Africa and Rhodesia. Rebuffed by Western aid agencies, newly independent Tanzania and Zambia accepted help from China to construct what would become one of Africa's most vital transportation corridors. The book follows the railroad from design and construction to its daily use as a vital means for moving villagers and goods. It tells a story of how transnational interests contributed to environmental change, population movements, and the rise of local and regional enterprise.
Old World and New
The second edition of this landmark work is enhanced by new chapters on Ogun worship in the New World. From reviews of the first edition:
"... an ethnographically rich contribution to the historical understanding of West African culture, as well as an exploration of the continued vitality of that culture in the changing environments of the Americas." -- African Studies Review
"... leav[es] the reader with a sense of the vitality, dynamism, and complexity of Ogun and the cultural contexts in which he thrives.... magnificent contribution to the literature on Ogun, Yoruba culture, African religions, and the African diaspora." -- International Journal of Historical Studies
The Bastardization of Cameroon
Africa?s Political Wastelands explores and confirms the fact that because of irresponsible, corrupt, selfish, and unpatriotic kleptocrats parading as leaders, the ultimate breakdown of order has become the norm in African nations, especially those south of the Sahara. The result is the virtual annihilation of once thriving and proud nations along with the citizenry who are transformed into wretches, vagrants, and in the extreme, refugees. Doh uses Cameroon as an exemplary microcosm to make this point while still holding imperialist ambitions largely responsible for the status quo in Africa. Ultimately, in the hope of jumpstarting the process, he makes pertinent suggestions on turning the tide on the continent.
The late Julius Kambarage Nyerere was nicknamed ìMusaî (Moses) during the later, post-independence years for leading his people from slavery and guiding them toward a free land of prosperity ñ the Promised Land. The Tanzanian odyssey chronicled in this book, which first appeared ten years ago as Tanzanians to the Promised Land, has been updated with new research. The author- also an engineer and a journalist- offers an enlightened and unbiased discussion of the journey and both sides of the contributions - successes and failures - made by former presidents and their systems of administration: the late Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere, Alhajj Ali H. Mwinyi, and Mr. Benjamin W. Mkapa. Tanzaniansí hopes and expectations of the incumbent president, H.E. Mr. Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete, are also discussed. It is not intended as a political campaign of any kind, for any party or any individual. As a brief, yet comprehensive guide to the understanding of our nationís political and economic history, it puts forward suggestions concerning important areas of the country's economic development. Nyerere unfortunately didnít live to see his people arrive at the hoped-for destination, and I. J. Werremaís original inspiration to write, at forty years of independence, is sustained because after fifty years The Promised Land is Still Too Far.
A History of Zimbabwe Project
1978: In Rhodesia, the Internal Settlement led to the creation of a coalition government. Smith had, however, neither capitulated nor abandoned his belief in white superiority, and thousands of people fled across the countryís borders.In England, a group of missionaries, supported by the Catholic Institute for International Relations, formed a steering group that was to become the Zimbabwe Project. Originally an educational fund to support exiled young Zimbabweans, it shifted focus toward humanitarian assistance to refugees in the region.1981: The Zimbabwe Project Trust, a child of the war, came home, and its director, Judith Todd, started mapping the route that it would follow for the next thirty years.ZimPro ñ as it came to be known ñ began its work with ex-combatants, assisting with their education, skills training and co-operative development, and producing a news bulletin. In terms of funding, courage, and creative programming, it became a giant in the countryís development landscape, but it has had to negotiate many political, financial and philosophical minefields on the way. Against The Odds offers a rare insight into workings of an NGO on the frontline. With a cast of larger-than-life characters, it also offers a drama of Zimbabweís first thirty years and provides insights and lessons which will benefit everyone concerned with development, and provide historians with another important lens through which to view the past.
For more than half a century before World War II, black South Africans and “American Negroes”—a group that included African Americans and black West Indians—established close institutional and personal relationships that laid the necessary groundwork for the successful South African and American antiapartheid movements. Though African Americans suffered under Jim Crow racial discrimination, oppressed Africans saw African Americans as free people who had risen from slavery to success and were role models and potential liberators. Many African Americans, regarded initially by the South African government as “honorary whites” exempt from segregation, also saw their activities in South Africa as a divinely ordained mission to establish “Africa for Africans,” liberated from European empires. The Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, the largest black-led movement with two million members and supporters in forty-three countries at its height in the early 1920s, was the most anticipated source of liberation. Though these liberation prophecies went unfulfilled, black South Africans continued to view African Americans as inspirational models and as critical partners in the global antiapartheid struggle. The Americans Are Coming! is a rare case study that places African history and American history in a global context and centers Africa in African Diaspora studies.
In 1998 David Kruiper, the leader of the ‡Khomani San who today live in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa, lamented, “We have been made into nothing.” His comment applies equally to the fate of all the hunter- gatherer societies of the Cape Colony who were destroyed by the impact of European colonialism. Until relatively recently, the extermination of the Cape San peoples has been treated as little more than a footnote to South African narratives of colonial conquest. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Dutch-speaking pastoralists who infiltrated the Cape interior dispossessed its aboriginal inhabitants. In response to indigenous resistance, colonists formed mounted militia units known as commandos with the express purpose of destroying San bands. This ensured the virtual extinction of the Cape San peoples. In Anatomy of a South African Genocide, Mohamed Adhikari examines the history of the San and persuasively presents the annihilation of Cape San society as genocide.
