Historical Dictionary of Kenya

Historical Dictionary of Kenya
Author: Michael Mwenda Kithinji
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 617
Release: 2024-06-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1538157462

Kenya has a rich and complex history. Due to the vast discoveries of prehistoric archaeological remains, Kenya is one of the few places in the world with the largest and most complete record of human’s cultural development. Furthermore, the country’s strategic location astride the Indian Ocean and the East African littoral attracted numerous foreigners such as the Arabs, Persians, Portuguese, Americans, British, Chinese, French, and Germans. Additionally, immigrants from throughout Africa and beyond have settled in Kenya to escape conflict or political persecution, while others wanted an opportunity to begin a new life. As a result of being a gateway to the world, the country traditionally has been one of the most important business, cultural, diplomatic, and political centers in Africa. Still, Kenya, like many other countries throughout the world, has been plagued by an increasing array of complex economic, political, and social challenges. Historical Dictionary of Kenya, Fourth Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities as well as aspects of the country’s politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Kenya.

Dictionary of African Biography

Dictionary of African Biography
Author: Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong
Publisher:
Total Pages: 3382
Release: 2012-02-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0195382072

From the Pharaohs to Fanon, Dictionary of African Biography provides a comprehensive overview of the lives of the men and women who shaped Africa's history. Unprecedented in scale, DAB covers the whole continent from Tunisia to South Africa, from Sierra Leone to Somalia. It also encompasses the full scope of history from Queen Hatsheput of Egypt (1490-1468 BC) and Hannibal, the military commander and strategist of Carthage (243-183 BC), to Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana (1909-1972), Miriam Makeba and Nelson Mandela of South Africa (1918 -).

From Mukogodo to Maasai

From Mukogodo to Maasai
Author: Lee Cronk
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2018-04-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429979975

This book focuses on the strategic manipulation of ethnic identity by the Mukogodo of Kenya. It is about how Mukogodo people changed their way of life to a radically different one, that is their change as Maasai people, giving them a new way of living, a new language, and a new set of beliefs.

Laibon

Laibon
Author: Elliot M. Fratkin
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2011-10-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0759120676

Elliot Fratkin shares the story of his early anthropological fieldwork in Kenya in the 1970s. Using his fieldnotes and letters home to bring to life the voices of those he met, Fratkin invites the reader to experience his cross-cultural friendships with the enigmatic laibon (a diviner and healer of the Samburu and Maasai peoples) Lonyoki, his family, and the people of the nomadic community of Lukumai. Fratkin participated in the daily lives of the Ariaal livestock herders and accompanied the laibon as he performed divination and healing rituals throughout Marsabit and Samburu Districts. After Fratkin reunited Lonyoki with his son and wife, Lonyoki adopted Fratkin into his family, and Fratkin continues his close friendship with Lonyoki's son Lembalen today. Black-and-white photographs, a guide to the characters, words, and places, and a list of suggested readings supplement the engaging narrative. Laibon is more than a memoir; it delves into nitty-gritty details of fieldwork, speaks to larger questions about ethnographic research, and provides unparalleled insight into the world of the laibon.

Number – Constructions and Semantics

Number – Constructions and Semantics
Author: Anne Storch
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2014-03-19
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027270635

This book is the outcome of several decades of research experience, with contributions by leading scholars based on long-term field research. It combines approaches from descriptive linguistics, anthropological linguistics, socio-historical studies, areal linguistics, and social anthropology. The key concern of this ground-breaking volume is to investigate the linguistic means of expressing number and countable amounts, which differ greatly in the world’s languages. It provides insights into common number-marking devices and their not-so-common usages, but also into phenomena such as the absence of plurals, or transnumeral forms. The different contributions to the volume show that number is of considerable semantic complexity in many languages worldwide, expressing all kinds of extendedness, multiplicity, salience, size, and so on. This raises a number of challenging questions regarding what exactly is described under the slightly monolithic label of ‘number’ in most descriptive approaches to the languages of the world.

Dictionary Catalog

Dictionary Catalog
Author: Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature and History
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1010
Release: 1962
Genre: African Americans
ISBN:

The Maasai of Matapato

The Maasai of Matapato
Author: Paul Spencer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2004-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134371675

This study pioneered the relation of the dynamics of the Maasai age organization to tensions within the family. Together, these provide the twin strands of a man's career, opposed ritually and reflecting a fundamental ambivalence in Maasai thought. This analysis is illustrated with case material from the Matapato: a typical Maasai group.

Maasai Language & Culture

Maasai Language & Culture
Author: Frans Mol
Publisher:
Total Pages: 440
Release: 1996
Genre: Maasai language
ISBN:

"The Maasai, basically a cattle-keeping people, live in East Africa on both sides of the Kenya-Tanzania border. . . . [Their] language and culture [are] under great stress and pressure from present-day ideas of modern life. . . . Maasai children learn their language from their mothers, but most of these children when they go to school will never learn to read or write in their mother tongue. None of them will ever know the basics of the grammar of their own language. This book tries to preserve as much as possible of Maa, the language, and Olmaa, the culture. It may best be described as a depository of linguistic and cultural data of the Maasai." -- Introduction, p. iii.

An International Bibliography of African Lexicons

An International Bibliography of African Lexicons
Author: Melvin K. Hendrix
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 1982
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780810814783

Contains 3,500 entries, representing almost 700 African languages and over 200 dialects, spanning over 400 years of African lexicographical writing and research.