Showing titles in Africa

A reportage from the turbulent, chaotic birth of the free Angola; the author calls it his “first real book”. Ryszard Kapuściński arrives to a country divided by two armies. For some time he's the only foreign correspondent there. Among the unbelievable chaos, he meets more and more people whose fates become the illustration of the cruelty of war. This book is a unique combination of war reportage with literary artistry - so characteristic of Ryszard Kapuściński.

Unfair Game features the shocking results of a new inquiry Lord Ashcroft has carried out into South Africa’s lion business. He shows how tourists are unwittingly being used to support the abuse of lions he details how lions are being tranquilised and then hunted in enclosed spaces he urges the British government to ban imports of captive-bred lion trophies and he demonstrates why Asia’s insatiable appetite for lion bones has become a multi-million-dollar business linked to criminality and corruption which now underpins South Africa's captive lion industry.

When Ugandan President Idi Amin expelled the country's entire Asian population in 1972, more than 28,000 people from Britain's former colony arrived on airstrips around the country and began building new lives - but their incredible stories remained largely hidden. Fifty years later, first and second-generation testimony uncovers an under-explored period of history, touching on colonialism, immigration, identity and modern multiculturalism through the lens of individual experience.

Beginning in prehistoric times, West Africa has always been an incredible region. Early nomadic tribes settled into some of the earliest communities on Earth and learned how to work with metal. Various West African tribes then became adept at working with metal and were some of the most skilled artisans in the world. As civilizations developed in West Africa, nomadic tribes turned into urban societies that built kingdoms. Eventually, some of the greatest leaders in the world created mighty West African empires.

If you reckon corruption in South Africa began with Zuma or even with apartheid, it’s time to catch a wake-up call. Rogues’ Gallery tells the story of some of the biggest skelms to grace our (un)fair shores, showing that dodgy dealings have been a national pastime for as long as South African history has been written down.

Underneath the desert sands, a forgotten culture awaits your discovery...Its pyramids jut like wind-ravaged arrowheads from the ground, dominating the skyline of the desert plane. Sun-scorched air whistles through the carved stones of its ancient monuments, whispering of grandeur long gone, now nearly swallowed by unmerciful desert sands. Its secrets whisper. And its riddles beckon. But now the mysteries of ancient Nubia are now laid bare, waiting for you to discover them! The kingdoms of ancient Nubia rivaled the world’s greatest empires for thousands of years.

The last ruler of the House of Solomon, Haile Selassie, was not only the final Emperor of Ethiopia but also the link to a bygone past. In the days of Haile Selassie, absolute rule was given as an unquestioned divine right. Even though Selassie in many ways was a moderate progressive, he was still an autocratic ruler.

African folktales come in many different types. Some are myths explaining the origins of things, while others are tales of heroes with supernatural abilities. Animal stories are many and varied, and they usually involve some kind of trickster who uses his wiles to get out of sticky situations and sometimes into them. There are also cautionary tales explaining why it is important to behave well and treat others with respect, while other stories have a style and shape similar to that of a fairy tale.

In A Man Apart Richard Steyn once again brings to life a South African icon. Louis Botha was the first Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, a union he did much to create in the decade after the devastation of the Anglo-Boer War. During the war Botha was a brilliant young Boer general who through his battlefield strategy won significant victories over the British in the early stages of the war.

In the summer of 1627, Barbary corsairs raided Iceland, killing dozens of people and abducting close to 400 to sell into slavery in Algiers. Among those taken was the Lutheran minister Reverend Olafur Egilsson. Reverend Olafur wrote The Travels to chronicle his experiences both as a captive and as a traveler across Europe (he journeyed alone from Algiers to Copenhagen in an attempt to raise funds to ransom the Icelandic captives who remained behind).

The transatlantic slave trade was founded by the Portuguese in the 15th century for the specific purpose of supplying the New World colonies with African slave labor. It was soon joined by all the major trading powers of Europe, and it reached its peak in the 18th century with the founding and development of plantation economies that ran from the South American mainland through the Caribbean and into the southern states of the United States. The East African Slave Trade, on the other hand, was more complex, far older, and significantly more widespread.

After Tripoli declared war on the United States in 1801, Barbary pirates captured 300 U.S. sailors and marines. President Jefferson sent navy squadrons to the Mediterranean, but he also authorized a secret mission to overthrow the government of Tripoli. He chose an unlikely diplomat, William Eaton, to lead the mission, but before Eaton departed, Jefferson grew wary of the affair and withdrew his support.

In 1940 a group of artists, sculptors, film makers, theatre designers and set painters came together to form the Camouflage Unit. Led by Major Geoffrey Barkas and including among their number the internationally renowned stage magician Jasper Maskelyne, the unit's projects became a crucial battlefield weapon.

The Mediterranean has always been a leading stage for world history, and it is also visited each year by tens of millions of tourists. Jeremy Black provides an account in which the experience of travel is foremost: travel for tourism, trade, war, migration, culture, or, as so often, a variety of reasons. Throughout the audiobook the emphasis is on the sea, on coastal regions and on port cities visited by cruise liners, but it also looks beyond, notably to the other waters that flow into the Mediterranean.

Frank Sayi grew up in the 1970s in Mawabeni, a native reserve in colonial Rhodesia, a country under white minority rule, governed by Ian Smith's illegal regime. Reserves were places of repression and containment. There seemed to Frank to be no difference between government soldiers, police officers, and guerillas fighting for freedom. They were all violent men who terrorised the civilian population. Schools were closed, food supply chains and clothing were contaminated with poison, refugees fled the armies.

From what we know of history, Egypt, along with Sumer, were the foundations of civilization. The Fertile Crescent, which stretched from the Nile Valley to the twin rivers in Mesopotamia, gave us our earliest glimpse of organized man. But organized how? For one, both locations gave us writing -- hieroglyphics in Egypt and cuneiform in Sumer. There is still some debate about who was first.

First published in 1907, The Defense of Duffer's Drift is a classic essay on small unit tactics based on author Ernest Dunlop Swinton's experiences in the Boer War in South Africa.

At the end of a steep gravel road in one of the remotest corners of Lusikisiki in the old Transkei lies the village of Ithanga. Home to a few hundred villagers, the majority of them unemployed, it is inconceivably poor. In the broader world, most would consider it entirely inconsequential. It is to here that award-winning author Jonny Steinberg travels to explore the lives of a community caught up in a battle to survive the ravages of HIV/AIDS.

This story deals with the first great and documented humanitarian tragedy in African history. The East African slave trade, the lesser known of the two branches of the African slave trade, flourished in virtual anonymity as the attention of the world was focused on the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and the destruction of slavery in the Western hemisphere. Doctor David Livingstone, the great Victorian missionary explorer, devoted his life to witnessing and publicizing this grotesque African trade.

A hundred years ago, a girl was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar. Before she was 10 years old, Yetemegnu was married to a man two decades her senior, an ambitious poet-priest. Over the next century her world changed beyond recognition. She witnessed Fascist invasion and occupation, Allied bombardment and exile from her city, the ascent and fall of Emperor Haile Selassie, revolution and civil war. She endured all these things alongside parenthood, widowhood and the death of children.