Living with Africa

Living with Africa
Author: Jan Vansina
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 1994
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780299143244

In 1952, a young Belgian scholar of European medieval history traveled to the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) to live in a remote Kuba village. Armed with a smattering of training in African cultures and language, Jan Vansina was sent to do fieldwork for a Belgian cultural agency. As it turned out, he would help found the field of African history, with a handful of other European and African scholars. "I'm not an ethnologist, I'm a historian!" Vansina was to repeat again and again to those who assumed that people without written texts have no history. His discovery that he could analyze Kuba oral tradition using the same methods he had learned for interpreting medieval dirges was a historiographical breakthrough, and his first book, Oral Tradition as History, is considered the seminal work that gave the study of precolonial African history both the scholarly justification and the self-confidence it had been lacking. Living with Africa is a compelling memoir of Vansina's life and career on three continents, interwoven with the story of African history as a scholarly specialty. In the background of his narrative are the collapse of colonialism in Africa and the emergence of newly independent nations; in the foreground are the first conferences on African history, the founding of journals and departments, and the efforts of Africans to establish a history curriculum for the schools in their new nations.

A Living Man from Africa

A Living Man from Africa
Author: Roger S. Levine
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 477
Release: 2010-12-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0300168594

Born into a Xhosa royal family around 1792 in South Africa, Jan Tzatzoe was destined to live in an era of profound change—one that witnessed the arrival and entrenchment of European colonialism. As a missionary, chief, and cultural intermediary on the eastern Cape frontier and in Cape Town and a traveler in Great Britain, Tzatzoe helped foster the merging of African and European worlds into a new South African reality. Yet, by the 1860s, despite his determined resistance, he was an oppressed subject of harsh British colonial rule. In this innovative, richly researched, and splendidly written biography, Roger S. Levine reclaims Tzatzoe's lost story and analyzes his contributions to, and experiences with, the turbulent colonial world to argue for the crucial role of Africans as agents of cultural and intellectual change.

Living in . . . South Africa

Living in . . . South Africa
Author: Chloe Perkins
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 36
Release: 2016-10-04
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1481470949

Discover what it’s like to grow up in South Africa with this fascinating, nonfiction Level 2 Ready-to-Read, part of a series all about kids just like you in countries around the world! Dumela! My name is David, and I’m a kid just like you living in South Africa. South Africa is a country filled with stunning cities, amazing animals, and many different cultures—that’s why they call South Africa the rainbow nation! Have you ever wondered what South Africa is like? Come along with me to find out! Each book in our Living in… series is narrated by a kid growing up in their home country and is filled with fresh, modern illustrations as well as loads of history, geography, and cultural goodies that fit perfectly into Common Core standards. Join kids from all over the world on a globe-trotting adventure with the Living in… series—sure to be a hit with children, parents, educators, and librarians alike!

How to Write About Africa

How to Write About Africa
Author: Binyavanga Wainaina
Publisher: One World
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2023-06-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0812989678

From one of Africa’s most influential and eloquent essayists, a posthumous collection that highlights his biting satire and subversive wisdom on topics from travel to cultural identity to sexuality “A fierce literary talent . . . [Wainaina] shines a light on his continent without cliché.”—The Guardian “Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. . . . Africa is to be pitied, worshipped, or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.” Binyavanga Wainaina was a pioneering voice in African literature, an award-winning memoirist and essayist remembered as one of the greatest chroniclers of contemporary African life. This groundbreaking collection brings together, for the first time, Wainaina’s pioneering writing on the African continent, including many of his most critically acclaimed pieces, such as the viral satirical sensation “How to Write About Africa.” Working fearlessly across a range of topics—from politics to international aid, cultural heritage, and redefined sexuality—he describes the modern world with sensual, emotional, and psychological detail, giving us a full-color view of his home country and continent. These works present the portrait of a giant in African literature who left a tremendous legacy.

Being Colonized

Being Colonized
Author: Jan Vansina
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2010-03-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299236439

What was it like to be colonized by foreigners? Highlighting a region in central Congo, in the center of sub-Saharan Africa, Being Colonized places Africans at the heart of the story. In a richly textured history that will appeal to general readers and students as well as to scholars, the distinguished historian Jan Vansina offers not just accounts of colonial administrators, missionaries, and traders, but the varied voices of a colonized people. Vansina uncovers the history revealed in local news, customs, gossip, and even dreams, as related by African villagers through archival documents, material culture, and oral interviews. Vansina’s case study of the colonial experience is the realm of Kuba, a kingdom in Congo about the size of New Jersey—and two-thirds the size of its colonial master, Belgium. The experience of its inhabitants is the story of colonialism, from its earliest manifestations to its tumultuous end. What happened in Kuba happened to varying degrees throughout Africa and other colonized regions: racism, economic exploitation, indirect rule, Christian conversion, modernization, disease and healing, and transformations in gender relations. The Kuba, like others, took their own active part in history, responding to the changes and calamities that colonization set in motion. Vansina follows the region’s inhabitants from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, when a new elite emerged on the eve of Congo’s dramatic passage to independence.

Africa as a Living Laboratory

Africa as a Living Laboratory
Author: Helen Tilley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 520
Release: 2011-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226803481

Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research methods. Africa as a Living Laboratory is a far-reaching study of the thorny relationship between imperialism and the role of scientific expertise—environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological—in the colonization of British Africa. A key source for Helen Tilley’s analysis is the African Research Survey, a project undertaken in the 1930s to explore how modern science was being applied to African problems. This project both embraced and recommended an interdisciplinary approach to research on Africa that, Tilley argues, underscored the heterogeneity of African environments and the interrelations among the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was unquestionably to transform and modernize Africa, their efforts, Tilley contends, were often unexpectedly subverted by scientific concerns with the local and vernacular. Meticulously researched and gracefully argued, Africa as a Living Laboratory transforms our understanding of imperial history, colonial development, and the role science played in both.

Stuck in Africa

Stuck in Africa
Author: Rashad McCrorey
Publisher:
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2021-08-08
Genre:
ISBN:

In the midst of a global pandemic, a Black American businessman in Africa face unexpected events. In March of 2020, Rashad McCrorey a native New Yorker, set off for a business trip to the West African country of Ghana. However; with a brand new pandemic quickly shutting down life as we knew it, McCrorey made the decision not to return home to United States and instead, self-quarantine in Ghana. A year and a half later, what started out as a temporary fix has turned into his "new normal."As seen on: CNN Forbes Magazine ABC World News TheGrio New York Daily News New York Post Black Enterprise Blavity Travel Noire & more Did You Know? Stuck in Africa takes place in the Central Region of Ghana specifically the towns of Elmina & Cape Coast; home of the infamous slave dungeons and doors of no returns. All locations mentioned in "Stuck in Africa" are real life locations; meaning as of August 2021 you can actually visit them. (Make sure to let them know you read Stuck in Africa). Stuck in Africa was originally written as a script for a movie to be filmed in Ghana. However, after some unfortunate circumstances, McCrorey re-wrote the script into the screenplay that you are about to purchase. All characters used in the are names of people McCrorey knows in real life. Though the characters are names of people McCrorey knows, the characters are not the actual people named except for McCrorey himself.

Out Of Africa

Out Of Africa
Author: Isak Dinesen
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2014-06-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1443432954

In Out of Africa, author Isak Dinesen takes a wistful and nostalgic look back on her years living in Africa on a Kenyan coffee plantation. Recalling the lives of friends and neighbours—both African and European—Dinesen provides a first-hand perspective of colonial Africa. Through her obvious love of both the landscape and her time in Africa, Dinesen’s meditative writing style deeply reflects the themes of loss as her plantation fails and she returns to Europe. HarperTorch brings great works of non-fiction and the dramatic arts to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperTorch collection to build your digital library.

Voices of the San

Voices of the San
Author: Willemien Le Roux
Publisher: Kwela Books
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2004
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Over the years many books have been written about the San of southern Africa, who are widely known as the Bushmen and frequently viewed as one entity. This is the first international publication in which the San of today step forward to tell their own story in their own words. Covering eight language groups in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, young San interviewers went out into their communities and collected the thoughts and feelings, knowledge and understanding, dreams and fears, of their elders and their peers. The interviews they transcribed present the spirit of their communities and highlight the traditional differences and similarities between the groups, the shared history of suffering, and their desire and enthusiasm for life and most of all, freedom. Voices of the San provides a glimpse into the hundreds of broad, open-ended discussions held amongst the San themselves. It begins with the story of this book and is then divided into four chapters covering the themes they themselves identified as reflecting their current existence. All of this is richly and beautifully illustrated with over 300 photographs, contemporary artworks and drawings. The photographs are both historic and modern; including images from the Bleek and Lloyd Collection (late 19th century), the Duggan-Cronin Collection dating from the early 20th century and the Denver Expedition of 1925, as well as internationally known photographers such as Jens Bjerre (circa 1955), JÃ1⁄4rgen Schadeberg (1959) and Paul Weinberg (1985- ), and the San organizations within the region.

Funerals in Africa

Funerals in Africa
Author: Michael Jindra
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2011-09-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857452061

Across Africa, funerals and events remembering the dead have become larger and even more numerous over the years. Whereas in the West death is normally a private and family affair, in Africa funerals are often the central life cycle event, unparalleled in cost and importance, for which families harness vast amounts of resources to host lavish events for multitudes of people with ramifications well beyond the event. Though officials may try to regulate them, the popularity of these events often makes such efforts fruitless, and the elites themselves spend tremendously on funerals. This volume brings together scholars who have conducted research on funerary events across sub-Saharan Africa. The contributions offer an in-depth understanding of the broad changes and underlying causes in African societies over the years, such as changes in religious beliefs, social structure, urbanization, and technological changes and health.