Showing titles in Africa

The Rwandan Genocide served as one of the moments which the world chose to look away. This audiobook looks at what the world turned its eyes away from.

Tough, spirited, and fiercely independent Abigail is brought as a teenager to London from Nigeria by relatives who attempt to force her into prostitution. She flees, struggling to find herself in the shadow of a strong but dead mother. In spare yet haunting and lyrical prose reminiscent of Marguerite Duras, Abani brings to life a young woman who lives with a strength and inner light that will enlighten and uplift the listener.

The gripping story of 200 freed Mississippi slaves who sailed to Liberia to build a new colony - where the colonists' repression of the native tribes would beget a tragic cycle of violence. When a wealthy Mississippi cotton planter named Isaac Ross died in 1836, his will decreed that his plantation, Prospect Hill, should be liquidated and the proceeds from the sale be used to pay for his slaves' passage to the newly established colony of Liberia in western Africa.

La historia que se esconde detrás de una de las mejores novelas de aventuras de todos los tiempos. En 1875, Henry Rider Haggard escribe Las minas del rey Salomón, probablemente una de las mejores novelas de aventuras de todos los tiempos. Muchos intuyen pero pocos conocen el correlato histórico que se oculta detrás de esta novela: la lucha entre colonos ingleses y holandeses contra las tribus africanas por el control de los recursos naturales y de los territorios.

6th April, 1994: In the skies above Rwanda the president's plane is shot down in flames. The mass slaughter that follows is one of the bloodiest chapters in history. Twenty years on, BBC Newsnight producer David Belton, one of the first journalists into Rwanda, tells of the horrors he experienced. He revisits a country still marked with blood, in search of those who survived and the legacy of those who did not.

Using the writings of Cosmas and a wealth of other historical and archaeological evidence from the period, eminent historian G. W. Bowersock carefully reconstructs this fascinating but overlooked chapter in pre-Islamic Arabian history. The flashpoint of the war, Bowersock tells us, occurred when Yusuf, the Jewish king of Himyar, massacred hundreds of Christians living in Najran. The Christian ruler of Ethiopia, Kaleb, urged on by the Byzantine emperor Justin, led a force of 120,000 men across the Red Sea to defeat Yusuf.

This eye-opening personal history tells the story of an American college professor's 20-year engagement with a thriving Africa rarely encountered by Western visitors, including an extraordinary connection to poets across the continent. At once adventurous, spiritual, political, dreamlike, and humorous, Joining Africa is a unique documentary of a journey through the continent, including an intense five-year encounter with economically struggling but culturally fertile Eritrea. The Africa presented here is neither a postcolonial study nor an exotic tourist destination.

In 1994, 16-year-old Eric Irivuzumugabe climbed a cypress tree and remained there for 15 days without food or water. He wasn't trying to win a bet with his friends--he was attempting to save his life. Eric is a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide that claimed the lives of 800,000 people in just 100 days. In the midst of indescribable loss, and without a job, a home, or an education, Eric was determined to start a new life for himself and his two surviving brothers.

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 1849 Heinrich Barth joined a small British expedition into unexplored regions of Islamic North and Central Africa. One by one his companions died, but he carried on alone, eventually reaching the fabled city of gold, Timbuktu. His five-and-a-half-year, 10,000-mile adventure ranks among the greatest journeys in the annals of exploration, and his discoveries are considered indispensable by modern scholars of Africa.

Captain David Grief, South Pacific tycoon, owns plantations and trading stations from New Guinea to Samoa, pearling fisheries in the Paumotus, and rubber acreages in the Louisiades. His own vessels recruit contract labor, and he operates three steamers on ocean runs. He came to the South Seas at the age of 20 and, blessed with a blond skin impervious to tropical rays, became browner through two decades as a true "son of the sun". At 40 years of age, he looks no more than 30.

In the second volume of his three-part history, a monumental trilogy that began with Parting the Waters, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Taylor Branch portrays the Civil Rights Movement at its zenith, recounting the climactic struggles as they commanded the national stage. Beginning with the Nation of Islam and conflict over racial separatism, Pillar of Fire takes the listener to Mississippi and Alabama: Birmingham, the murder of Medgar Evers, the "March on Washington," the Civil Rights Act, and more.

In 2006, the Wall Street pioneer and philanthropist Ray Chambers flicked through some holiday snapshots taken by a friend and remarked on the placid beauty of a group of sleeping Malawian children. "They're not sleeping," his friend told him. "They're in malarial comas. A few days later, they were all dead." This moment sparked Chambers' determination to coordinate an unprecedented, worldwide effort to eradicate a disease that has haunted humanity since before the advent of medicine.

America began, we are often told, with the Founding Fathers, the men who waged a revolution and created a unique place called the United States. We may acknowledge the early Jamestown and Puritan colonists and mourn the dispossession of Native Americans, but we rarely grapple with the complexity of the nation’s pre-revolutionary past. In this pathbreaking revision, Daniel Richter shows that the United States has a much deeper history than is apparent - that far from beginning with a clean slate, it is a nation with multiple pasts.

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.

In 1856 Paul Du Chaillu marched into the equatorial wilderness of West Africa determined to bag an animal that, according to legend, was nothing short of a monster. When he emerged three years later, the summation of his efforts only hinted at what he'd experienced in one of the most dangerous regions on earth. Armed with an astonishing collection of zoological specimens, Du Chaillu leapt from the physical challenges of the jungle straight into the center of the biggest issues of the time.

In early November 1834, an aristocratic young couple from Savannah and South Carolina sailed from New York and began a seventeen-year odyssey in West Africa. Leighton and Jane Wilson sailed along what was for them an exotic coastline, visited cities and villages, and sometimes ventured up great rivers and followed ancient paths.

In Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, Catherine Higgs traces the early-twentieth-century journey of the Englishman Joseph Burtt to the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe - the chocolate islands - through Angola and Mozambique, and finally to British Southern Africa. Burtt had been hired by the chocolate firm Cadbury Brothers Limited to determine if the cocoa it was buying from the islands had been harvested by slave laborers forcibly recruited from Angola, an allegation that became one of the grand scandals of the early colonial era.

La crisi libica raccontata in cinque articoli di Repubblica: Libia, i video delle torture e quei profughi martiri, di Francesco Merlo; Asilo negato ai migranti, in tre mesi oltre 12mila clandestini in più, di Alessandra Ziniti; Libia, la posta in gioco per le milizie e il dramma migranti, di Vincenzo Nigro; Accordo tra i signori della guerra in Libia: è il momento della tregua, di Vincenzo Nigro; Nella Tripoli-fantasma tra bunker e checkpoint la tregua è solo illusione, di Vincenzo Nigro.

La guerra di Tripoli in sei articoli di Repubblica: Libia, nel bunker di Tripoli, di Vincenzo Nigro; La guerra di Tripoli, di Vincenzo Nigro; Tripoli, guerra alle porte, di Vincenzo Nigro; Italia-Libia la trattativa, di Gianluca Di Feo; Gli emissari di Haftar sono andati a Parigi, di Gianluca Di Feo e Anais Ginori; Libia, Conte cerca una sponda per fermare il conflitto, di Tommaso Ciriaco e Carmelo Lopapa.