Showing titles in Africa

Alexandra Fuller tells the idiosyncratic story of her life growing up white in rural Rhodesia as it was becoming Zimbabwe. The daughter of hardworking, yet strikingly unconventional English-bred immigrants, Alexandra arrives in Africa at the tender age of two. She moves through life with a hardy resilience, even as a bloody war approaches. Narrator Lisette Lecat reads this remarkable memoir of a family clinging to a harsh landscape and the dying tenets of colonialism.

Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa’s most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to win a scholarship to an American university.

The Great Boer War (1899-1902) - more properly the Great Anglo-Boer War - was one of the last romantic wars, pitting a sturdy, stubborn pioneer people fighting to establish the independence of their tiny nation against the British Empire at its peak of power and self-confidence. It was fought in the barren vastness of the South African veldt, and it produced in almost equal measure extraordinary feats of personal heroism, unbelievable examples of folly and stupidity, and many incidents of humor and tragedy.

The dictator who grew so rich on his country's cocoa crop that he built a 35-storey-high basilica in the jungles of the Ivory Coast. The austere, incorruptible leader who has shut Eritrea off from the world in a permanent state of war and conscripted every adult into the armed forces. In Equatorial Guinea, the paranoid despot who thought Hitler was the saviour of Africa and waged a relentless campaign of terror against his own people.

Between 1987 and 1989, Alepho, Benjamin, and Benson, like tens of thousands of young boys, took flight from the massacres of Sudan's civil war. They became known as the Lost Boys. With little more than the clothes on their backs, sometimes not even that, they streamed out over Sudan in search of refuge. Their journey led them first to Ethiopia and then, driven back into Sudan, toward Kenya. They walked nearly one thousand miles, sustained only by the sheer will to live.

It is December 1878, and war looms on the horizon in South Africa. British high commissioner Sir Henry Bartle-Frere seeks to dismantle the powerful neighboring kingdom of the Zulus and uses an incursion along the disputed border as his justification for war. He issues an impossible ultimatum to the Zulu king, Cetshwayo, demanding he disband his armies and pay massive reparations. With a heavy heart, the king prepares his nation for war against their former allies.

From the author of the New York Times best-selling and award-winning Not on Our Watch, John Prendergast co-writes a compelling book with Fidel Bafilemba—with stunning photographs by Ryan Gosling—revealing the way in which the people and resources of the Democratic Republic of Congo have been used throughout the last five centuries to build, develop, advance, and safeguard the United States and Europe. The book highlights the devastating price Congo has paid for that support.

Carthage was a power that dominated the western Mediterranean for almost six centuries before its fall to Rome. The history of the realm and its Carthaginians was subsumed by their conquerors and, along the way, the story of the real Carthage was lost. An ancient North African kingdom, Carthage was the home of Hannibal and of Dido, of war elephants and enormous power and wealth, of great beauty and total destruction.

Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the West and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the repercussions of European colonialism in Africa remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.

The riveting memoirs of the outstanding moral and political leader of our time, Long Walk to Freedom brilliantly recreates the drama of the experiences that helped shape Nelson Mandela's destiny. From his beginning in the Transkei to his being taken to Robben Island, this is the remarkable story of how a man rose so far, only to be sentenced to life imprisonment. Emotive and compelling, this is the story of an epic life.

Cobalt Red is the searing first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt.

Commando is more than a historical document. With prose that captures both the brutality and the beauty of war, Reitz weaves a narrative that resonates with authenticity, transcending time. As relevant today as when it was first penned, Commando has become a South African classic and stands as a testament to the indomitable human spirit in the face of adversity.

This classic presents historical, archaeological, and anthropological evidence to support the theory that ancient Egypt was a black civilization.

Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe's dehumanizing engagement with the "dark" continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe's yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies in the heart of West Africa.

In White Malice, Susan Williams unearths the covert operations pursued by the CIA from Ghana to the Congo to the UN in an effort to frustrate and deny Africa’s new generation of nationalist leaders. This dramatically upends the conventional belief that the African nations failed to establish effective, democratic states on their own accord. As the old European powers moved out, the US moved in.

In 1898, the British were building a railway line between Mombasa in Kenya and Uganda. At the Tsavo River in Kenya where a bridge needed to be built, the project was suddenly interrupted by two man-eating lions that targeted the camps of the workers. Over a period of nine months, the lions killed scores of people. These lions were deliberately hunting people, preferring humans over any other prey, and they seemed to have supernatural abilities in evading all attempts to stop them. Colonel J.H. Patterson, the chief engineer in charge of the project, finally managed to eliminate them.

In 2012 retired South African general Johan Jooste was parachuted into the seemingly unwinnable war against rhino poaching in the Kruger National Park. With poaching spiralling out of control, Jooste was given the mandate to 'go military', to convert Kruger's ranger corps into a para-military force capable of taking the fight to poachers. Aged 60, white, and a veteran of 35 years of military service, Jooste's controversial appointment was immediately met with resentment and hostility by elements of South African National Parks, the police, and even the military he had served with.

Drusilla Dunjee Houston (1876-1941) was a teacher, journalist, and self-taught historian. Inspired by the works of WEB DuBois, Houston undertook a quest to discover African history from an African American perspective. In Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, Houston identifies the Kushite civilization of Sudan, with its capital city Meroe, to be the cradle of humanity.

In 1994, the Rwandan government orchestrated a campaign of extermination, in which everyone in the Hutu majority was called upon to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Close to a million people were slaughtered in a hundred days, and the rest of the world did nothing to stop it. A year later, Philip Gourevitch went to Rwanda to investigate the most unambiguous genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews.

In the summer of 1716, a Cornish cabin boy named Thomas Pellow and 52 of his comrades were captured at sea by the Barbary corsairs. Their captors, fanatical Islamic slave traders, had declared war on the whole of Christendom. Thousands of Europeans had been snatched from their homes and taken in chains to the great slave markets of Algiers, Tunis and Sale in Morocco to be sold to the highest bidder.