Search results for ""african lives""

In 1857, at the height of the colonial period, as Britain was advancing its control over southern Africa and absorbing the formerly independent African chiefdoms, the Anglican Bishop of Cape Town, Robert Gray, set up Zonnebloem College on an old wine farm on the outskirts of the city. Working in partnership with the British Governor, Sir George Grey, his plan was to enrol the sons and daughters of leading African chiefs and equip them with an English, Christian education, and then send them home to further the cause of Christianity and `civilisation’ among their own people. This elite educational project, which was at the same time cultural and political in nature, soon gathered steam. Among the first entrants were Gonya and Emma Sandile, heir and eldest daughter of the Rharhabe chief Sandile; Nathaniel Umhala, son of the Ndlambe chief Mhala; and George Tlali, son of the great Basotho leader, Moshoeshoe I. Over the years a succession of sons from chiefly dynasties, sometimes spanning several generations, would come to Zonnebloem: the Moshoeshoes of Basutoland, the Pilanes of Bechuanaland, the Lewanikas of Barotseland, and the Lobengulas of Matabeleland. They and many others who followed in their steps would, after their education at Zonnebloem, take up careers as catechists, teachers, political secretaries, lawyers, newspaper editors and priests and serve their communities with distinction. Their stories – their trials and their achievements – are recounted here, often in their own words, drawing on a unique collection of school essays and letters to their various mentors that must form one of the earliest bodies of writing by Africans in southern Africa. This remarkable book, based on years of research and written with great sympathy, tells the little-known early history of the genesis of an African intelligentsia during the colonial period.

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This beautifully designed book brings together Kok Nam’s photos as well as tributes to Machel and quotations from his own speeches, reminding us of the power of his oratory and the depth of his commitment to a free, democratic and just Mozambique. As Machel said: “Our goal is not to be the African country which is less corrupt than the others, but to eliminate corruption by the roots.” The 29th September 2018 is the 85th anniversary of the birth of Machel. This book is an appropriate and timely tribute to the man and a reminder of the values he espoused in leading the struggle for true liberation in his own country – values which are just as applicable in South Africa today. As Albie Sachs says in his introductory essay: “The humane revolutionary spirit of Samora, evidenced in this beautifully composed book, speaks to us in Southern Africa with undiminished appeal. And Kok Nam’s pictures, intimate yet non-intrusive, accompany the words in eloquent symbiosis.” “Samora had an extraordinary capacity to communicate: with his tone of voice, with his hands, with his eyes, and even with the movements of his body. Kok Nam captured exceptionally well in photographs one of the moments in which his body, the expression on his face and particularly his eyes show a calm Samora but with a restless spirit, shades of colour shining in his gaze, which speaks volumes of the perspicacity of an always restless mind. This photo is more than an image. It leads us to catch and to understand much of the `I’ of Samora.” – Graça Machel

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Landmark study of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, one of the most important documents in modern African history, that positions it within the African Lives Matter struggle to assert an African identity rather than as simply a human rights document. Describes its underlying African origins and how the principles of the OAU influenced its path and content.

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This is the first book devoted to the archaeology of African life on both sides of the Atlantic; it highlights the importance of archaeology in completing the historical records of the Atlantic world's Africans. Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora presents a diverse, richly textured picture of Africans' experiences during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and offers the most comprehensive explanation of how African lives became entangled with the creation of the modern world. Through interdisciplinary approaches to material culture, the dynamics of a comparative transatlantic archaeology is developed.

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This is the first book devoted to the archaeology of African life on both sides of the Atlantic; it highlights the importance of archaeology in completing the historical records of the Atlantic world's Africans. Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora presents a diverse, richly textured picture of Africans' experiences during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and offers the most comprehensive explanation of how African lives became entangled with the creation of the modern world. Through interdisciplinary approaches to material culture, the dynamics of a comparative transatlantic archaeology is developed.

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Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has unsettled generations of readers with its haunting portrait of colonialism and the brutal exploitation of African lives. Peter Kuper’s graphic adaptation reimagines this masterpiece for a new generation. Illustrated to evoke early twentieth-century woodcuts, Kuper’s Heart of Darkness confronts Conrad’s famously ambiguous, labyrinthine sentences and invents in stark black and white panels a visual language that excavates the hidden corners of Conrad’s 1899 masterpiece. Capturing the ominous atmosphere and hellish conditions of the Belgian Congo, Kuper transforms this lurid tale of madness, greed and evil into something shockingly modern. Long-time admirers of the novel will see Conrad’s opus with new eyes while new readers will discover a brilliant introduction to a classic work.

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David Livingstone has gone down in history as a fearless explorer and missionary, hacking his way through the forests of Africa to bring light to the people - and also to free them from slavery. But who was he, and what was he actually like? "He was an extraordinary character," according to biographer Stephen Tomkins, spectacularly bad at personal relationships, at least with white people, possessed of infinite self-belief, courage, and restlessness. He was an almost total failure as a missionary, and so became an explorer and campaigner against the slave trade, hoping to save African lives and souls that way instead. He helped, however unwittingly, to set the tone and the extent of British involvement in Africa. He was a flawed but indomitable idealist. Fascinating new evidence about Livingstone's life and his struggles have come to light in the letters and journals he left behind, now accessible to us for the first time through spectral imaging. These form a significant addition to the source material for this excellent biography, which provides an honest and balanced account of the real man behind the Victorian icon.

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The complex relationships between altruists, beneficiaries, and brokers in the global effort to fight AIDS in Africa In the wake of the AIDS pandemic, legions of organizations and compassionate individuals descended on Africa from faraway places to offer their help and save lives. A Fraught Embrace shows how the dreams of these altruists became entangled with complex institutional and human relationships. Ann Swidler and Susan Cotts Watkins vividly describe the often mismatched expectations and fantasies of those who seek to help, of the villagers who desperately seek help, and of the brokers on whom both Western altruists and impoverished villagers must rely. Based on years of fieldwork in the heavily AIDS-affected country of Malawi, this powerful book digs into the sprawling AIDS enterprise and unravels the paradoxes of AIDS policy and practice. All who want to do good--from idealistic volunteers to world-weary development professionals--depend on brokers as guides, fixers, and cultural translators. These irreplaceable but frequently unseen local middlemen are the human connection between altruists' dreams and the realities of global philanthropy. The mutual misunderstandings among donors, brokers, and villagers--each with their own desires and moral imaginations--create all the drama of a romance: longing, exhilaration, disappointment, heartache, and sometimes an enduring connection. Personal stories, public scandals, and intersecting, sometimes clashing fantasies bring the lofty intentions of AIDS altruism firmly down to earth. Swidler and Watkins ultimately argue that altruists could accomplish more good, not by seeking to transform African lives but by helping Africans achieve their own goals. A Fraught Embrace unveils the tangled relations of those involved in the collective struggle to contain an epidemic.

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Diamonds have long been bloody. A new history shows how Germany’s ruthless African empire brought diamond rings to retail display cases in America—at the cost of African lives.Since the late 1990s, activists have campaigned to remove “conflict diamonds” from jewelry shops and department stores. But if the problem of conflict diamonds—gems extracted from war zones—has only recently generated attention, it is not a new one. Nor are conflict diamonds an exception in an otherwise honest industry. The modern diamond business, Steven Press shows, owes its origins to imperial wars and has never escaped its legacy of exploitation.In Blood and Diamonds, Press traces the interaction of the mass-market diamond and German colonial domination in Africa. Starting in the 1880s, Germans hunted for diamonds in Southwest Africa. In the decades that followed, Germans waged brutal wars to control the territory, culminating in the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples and the unearthing of vast mineral riches. Press follows the trail of the diamonds from the sands of the Namib Desert to government ministries and corporate boardrooms in Berlin and London and on to the retail counters of New York and Chicago. As Africans working in terrifying conditions extracted unprecedented supplies of diamonds, European cartels maintained the illusion that the stones were scarce, propelling the nascent US market for diamond engagement rings. Convinced by advertisers that diamonds were both valuable and romantically significant, American purchasers unwittingly funded German imperial ambitions into the era of the world wars.Amid today’s global frenzy of mass consumption, Press’s history offers an unsettling reminder that cheap luxury often depends on an alliance between corporate power and state violence.

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Landmark study of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, one of the most important documents in modern African history, that positions it within the African Lives Matter struggle to assert an African identity rather than as simply a human rights document. Describes its underlying African origins and how the principles of the OAU influenced its path and content. The African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR), which was proposed in 1979, adopted in 1981 and came into effect in 1986, was the first non-Western declaration of human rights and the first official statement of an African human rights perspective. With Africa largely absent in 1948 when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted, it stands in stark historical reproach to the Western conception of universal human rights as a pivotal document in the decolonisation of the continent. This book, for the first time, presents a comprehensive account of the development of the ACHPR, which is key to a proper understanding of its fundamental nature. Through documenting its process of construction, it becomes possible to understand how Africans themselves understood the process and the issues involved and how the ACHPR became a political text asserted by African leaders and not a continuum of a so-called universal human rights tradition. The result is a radical repositioning of the underlying context of the ACHPR, one of the most important documents in modern African history, of how it came to be and how it should therefore be understood. Volume 1 outlines the dominant African political and cultural ideas of the time and their symbiotic relationship with the principles and politics upon which the OAU (now African Union) was founded and upon which it functioned. It thereby draws out the path the ACHPR process was obliged to follow and the influence of the existential desire to counter neo-colonialism in all its forms that helped bring it into being and shaped its content.

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