The Mind of the African Strongman

The Mind of the African Strongman
Author: Herman J. Cohen
Publisher: Vellum
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2015
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780986435317

This book offers a colorful and penetrating look at African cultural norms and imperatives at the core of African political and economic performance over the past half-century. The author served in five US embassies in Africa and as Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, this provided him with unique opportunities to engage in private conversations with African heads of state. Despite billions of dollars of international development assistance poured into Africa since 1955, and despite huge earnings from commodity sales, Africa has lagged far behind most other emerging nations in economic growth and poverty reduction. Through these conversations, Cohen provides an opportunity to the African leaders he knew to tell us personally why the initial enthusiasm that accompanied independence went so badly awry. A new third generation of African leadership is now coming to the fore. The key question is, can they and the international donor community learn from and overcome the negative legacies of their predecessors? ¿Hank Cohen¿s experience in Africa and access to a wide array of historic African leaders are unparalleled. This unique book provides important lessons from the continent¿s past and insights for its future.¿ ¿KENNETH L. BROWN, formerly U.S. ambassador to Cote d¿Ivoire, Ghana, and Republic of Congo and president, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training ¿That individuals often do make a difference is the thesis of The Mind of the African Strong Man. Based upon his unrivaled experience as an American diplomat in Africa, Hank Cohen's collection of conversations with Africa¿s Big Men is invaluable to anyone interested in that continent and its tumultuous modern history.¿¬¬ ¿EDWARD MARKS, Minister-Counselor (ret.), U.S. Foreign Service ¿Secretary Cohen is a master storyteller who has made it easier for Africans to form a broad historical perspective through his revealing tales about their rulers.¿ ¿AHMADU ABUBAKER, Nigerian Lawyer active in sub-Saharan Africa development issues.

The Mind of the African Strongman

The Mind of the African Strongman
Author: Herman J. Cohen
Publisher: Vellum
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2015-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780986435300

This book offers a colorful and penetrating look at African cultural norms and imperatives at the core of African political and economic performance over the past half-century. The author served in five US embassies in Africa and as Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, this provided him with unique opportunities to engage in private conversations with African heads of state. Despite billions of dollars of international development assistance poured into Africa since 1955, and despite huge earnings from commodity sales, Africa has lagged far behind most other emerging nations in economic growth and poverty reduction. Through these conversations, Cohen provides an opportunity to the African leaders he knew to tell us personally why the initial enthusiasm that accompanied independence went so badly awry. A new third generation of African leadership is now coming to the fore. The key question is, can they and the international donor community learn from and overcome the negative legacies of their predecessors? "Hank Cohen's experience in Africa and access to a wide array of historic African leaders are unparalleled. This unique book provides important lessons from the continent's past and insights for its future." -KENNETH L. BROWN, formerly U.S. ambassador to Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Republic of Congo and president, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training "That individuals often do make a difference is the thesis of The Mind of the African Strong Man. Based upon his unrivaled experience as an American diplomat in Africa, Hank Cohen's collection of conversations with Africa's Big Men is invaluable to anyone interested in that continent and its tumultuous modern history."-- -EDWARD MARKS, Minister-Counselor (ret.), U.S. Foreign Service "Secretary Cohen is a master storyteller who has made it easier for Africans to form a broad historical perspective through his revealing tales about their rulers." -AHMADU ABUBAKER, Nigerian Lawyer active in sub-Saharan Africa development issues."

Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present
Author: Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2020-11-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1324001550

What modern authoritarian leaders have in common (and how they can be stopped). Ruth Ben-Ghiat is the expert on the "strongman" playbook employed by authoritarian demagogues from Mussolini to Putin—enabling her to predict with uncanny accuracy the recent experience in America and Europe. In Strongmen, she lays bare the blueprint these leaders have followed over the past 100 years, and empowers us to recognize, resist, and prevent their disastrous rule in the future. For ours is the age of authoritarian rulers: self-proclaimed saviors of the nation who evade accountability while robbing their people of truth, treasure, and the protections of democracy. They promise law and order, then legitimize lawbreaking by financial, sexual, and other predators. They use masculinity as a symbol of strength and a political weapon. Taking what you want, and getting away with it, becomes proof of male authority. They use propaganda, corruption, and violence to stay in power. Vladimir Putin and Mobutu Sese Seko’s kleptocracies, Augusto Pinochet’s torture sites, Benito Mussolini and Muammar Gaddafi’s systems of sexual exploitation, and Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump’s relentless misinformation: all show how authoritarian rule, far from ensuring stability, is marked by destructive chaos. No other type of leader is so transparent about prioritizing self-interest over the public good. As one country after another has discovered, the strongman is at his worst when true guidance is most needed by his country. Recounting the acts of solidarity and dignity that have undone strongmen over the past 100 years, Ben-Ghiat makes vividly clear that only by seeing the strongman for what he is—and by valuing one another as he is unable to do—can we stop him, now and in the future.

Strongmen

Strongmen
Author: Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Publisher: Profile Books
Total Pages:
Release: 2020-11-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1782834788

'A gripping and illuminating picture of how strongmen have deployed violence, seduction, and corruption' Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die 'A timely analysis of how a certain kind of charisma delivers political disaster' Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny Ours is the age of the strongman. Countries from Russia to India, Turkey to America are ruled by men who combine populist appeal with authoritarian policy. They have reshaped their countries around them, creating cults of personality which earn the loyalty of millions. And they do so by drawing on a playbook of behaviour established by figures such as Benito Mussolini, Muammar Gaddafi and Adolf Hitler. So why - despite the evidence of history - do strongmen still hold such appeal for us? Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat draws on analysis of everything from gender to corruption and propaganda to explain who these political figures are - and how they manipulate our own history, fears and desires in search of power at any cost. Strongmen is a fierce and perceptive history, and a vital step in understanding how to combat the forces which seek to derail democracy and seize our rights.

Queering Black Atlantic Religions

Queering Black Atlantic Religions
Author: Roberto Strongman
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2019-03-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1478003456

In Queering Black Atlantic Religions Roberto Strongman examines Haitian Vodou, Cuban Lucumí/Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé to demonstrate how religious rituals of trance possession allow humans to understand themselves as embodiments of the divine. In these rituals, the commingling of humans and the divine produces gender identities that are independent of biological sex. As opposed to the Cartesian view of the spirit as locked within the body, the body in Afro-diasporic religions is an open receptacle. Showing how trance possession is a primary aspect of almost all Afro-diasporic cultural production, Strongman articulates transcorporeality as a black, trans-Atlantic understanding of the human psyche, soul, and gender as multiple, removable, and external to the body.

A Good Man in Africa

A Good Man in Africa
Author: William Boyd
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2011-07-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307787796

In the small African republic of Kinjanja, British diplomat Morgan Leafy bumbles heavily through his job. His love of women, his fondness for drink, and his loathing for the country prove formidable obstacles on his road to any kind of success. But when he becomes an operative in Operation Kingpin and is charged with monitoring the front runner in Kinjanja’s national elections, Morgan senses an opportunity to achieve real professional recognition and, more importantly, reassignment. After he finds himself being blackmailed, diagnosed with a venereal disease, attempting bribery, and confounded with a dead body, Morgan realizes that very little is going according to plan.

US Policy Toward Africa

US Policy Toward Africa
Author: Herman J. Cohen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Africa
ISBN: 9781626378698

Herman Cohen draws on both the documentary record and his years of on-the-ground experience to provide a uniquely comprehensive survey and interpretation of nearly eight decades of US policy toward Africa. Tracing how this policy has evolved across successive administrations since 1942 (beginning with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's third term in office), Cohen illuminates the debates that have taken place at the highest levels of government; shows how policy toward Africa has been affected over the years by US relations with Europe, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and most recently China; and points to the increasing reliance of Western economic interests on Africa's natural resources. His deeply informed narrative reveals the roles not only of circumstance and ideology, but also of personalities, in the formulation and implementation of US foreign policy.

Mandela's Kinsmen

Mandela's Kinsmen
Author: Timothy Gibbs
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 184701089X

Mandela's Kinsmen is the first study of the fraught relationships between the ANC leadership and their relatives who ruled apartheid's foremost "tribal" Bantustan, the Transkei. In the early 20th century, the chieftaincies had often been well-springs of political leadership. In the Transkei, political leaders, such as Mandela, used regionally rooted clan, schooling and professional connections to vault to leadership; they crafted expansive nationalisms woven from these "kin" identities. But from 1963 the apartheid government turned South Africa's chieftaincies into self-governing, tribal Bantustans in order to shatter African nationalism. While historians often suggest that apartheid changed everything - African elites being eclipsed by an era of mass township and trade union protest, and the chieftaincies co-opted by the apartheid government - there is another side to this story. Drawing on newly discovered accounts and archives, Gibbs reassesses the Bantustans and the changing politics of chieftaincy, showing how local dissent within Transkei connected to wider political movements and ideologies. Emphasizing the importance of elite politics, he describes how the ANC-in-exile attempted to re-enter South Africa through the Bantustans drawing on kin networks. This failed in KwaZulu, but Transkei provided vital support after a coup in 1987, and the alliances forged were important during the apartheid endgame. Finally, in counterpoint to Africanist debates that focus on how South African insurgencies narrowed nationalist thought and practice, he maintains ANC leaders calmed South Africa's conflicts of the early 1990s by espousing an inclusive nationalism that incorporated local identities, and that "Mandela's kinsmen" still play a key role in state politics today. Timothy Gibbs is a Lecturer in African History, University College London. Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland & Botswana): Jacana

Prelude to Genocide

Prelude to Genocide
Author: David Rawson
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2018-10-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0821446509

As the initial US observer, David Rawson participated in the 1993 Rwandan peace talks at Arusha, Tanzania. Later, he served as US ambassador to Rwanda during the last months of the doomed effort to make them hold. Despite the intervention of concerned states in establishing a peace process and the presence of an international mission, UNAMIR, the promise of the Arusha Peace Accords could not be realized. Instead, the downing of Rwandan president Habyarimana’s plane in April 1994 rekindled the civil war and opened the door to genocide. In Prelude to Genocide, Rawson draws on declassified documents and his own experiences to seek out what went wrong. How did the course of political negotiations in Arusha and party wrangling in Kigali, Rwanda, bring to naught a concentrated international effort to establish peace? And what lessons are there for other international humanitarian interventions? The result is a commanding blend of diplomatic history and analysis that is a milestone read on the Rwandan crisis and on what happens when conflict resolution and diplomacy fall short. Published in partnership with the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series.

Strong as Sandow

Strong as Sandow
Author: Don Tate
Publisher: Charlesbridge Publishing
Total Pages: 47
Release: 2017-08-22
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1607348861

Little Friedrich Müller was a puny weakling who longed to be athletic and strong like the ancient Roman gladiators. He exercised and exercised. But he to no avail. As a young man, he found himself under the tutelage of a professional body builder. Friedrich worked and worked. He changed his name to Eugen Sandow and he got bigger and stronger. Everyone wanted to become “as strong as Sandow.” Inspired by his own experiences body-building, Don Tate tells the story of how Eugen Sandow changed the way people think about strength and exercise and made it a part of everyday life. Backmatter includes more information about Sandow, suggestions for exercise, an author’s note, and a bibliography.