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This book examines the twin critical processes of state-building and nation-building in Africa and the confluence of major domestic and global issues that shape them. The book covers topics such as the expansive role of non-governmental organizations, the growing influence of charismatic Pentecostalism, ethnic conflicts in East Africa, the failure of the African Union’s peacekeeping efforts in Sudan’s Darfur region, and Africa's expanding relations with the European Union. It combines discussion of these frontier issues shaping contemporary African society with analysis from leading policy experts.
The ANC, in its rush for political control, chose power over the people instead of power of the people. History will judge them harshly. Historically, societies tend to wait until it is too late before rich people understand that their wealth can only be secured in a more just society. Only a dramatic, imaginatively crafted intervention -- a massive redistribution programme managed by the private sector, far-reaching policy changes in schooling, housing and health, and better, disciplined governance -- will deliver the genuine liberation South Africas still-poor millions expected from the 1994 settlement. Without it, without the real promise of a free, meritocratic society, South Africa will flounder and fail as corruption, crime, social decay, hopelessness and anger engulf society. This is the compelling thesis of Hlumelo Bikos hard-hitting, thoughtful analysis of South Africas past, present and future, a sobering assessment of where we stand today, and where we need to go. At once unnervingly candid and inspiring, The Great African Society demolishes the complacent optimism that underpins much soft thinking about South Africas future and places at the service of public debate practical, achievable objectives for business, government and civil society. South Africas challenge, the book argues, is to act now to avoid the mounting threat of revolt and decline that would devalue every political and economic achievement of the past decade-and-a-half and leave Nelson Mandelas feted rainbow nation staring decrepitude in the face. Biko, the son of two great South Africans, Steve Biko and Mamphela Ramphele, is generous in acknowledging achievements to date, but unsparing in judging the flaws and failures of the ANC-led government, of business, unions and civil society. He offers a comprehensive survey of the profound and continuing devastation visited on the country by its unjust history, and plain, rational proposals for repairing the damage. No debate from here on about the South African future can be taken seriously without weighing Bikos insights and his warnings. This book is vividly moral in its intentions, but sober and unsentimental in examining political and economic imperatives. It is guaranteed to make the reader sit up and take stock afresh.
Intended for those interested in the African continent and the diversity of human history, this work looks at Africa's past and reflects on the changing ways it has been imagined and represented. It illustrates key themes in modern thinking about Africa's history with a range of historical examples.
Only a dramatic, imaginatively crafted intervention - a massive redistribution programme managed by the private sector, far-reaching policy changes in schooling, housing and health, and better, disciplined governance - will deliver the genuine liberation South Africa's still-poor millions expected from the 1994 settlement. Without it, without the real promise of a free, meritocratic society, South Africa will flounder and fail as corruption, crime, social decay, hopelessness and anger engulf society. This is the compelling thesis of Hlumelo Biko's hard-hitting, thoughtful analysis of South Africa's past, present and future, a sobering assessment of where we stand today, and where we need to go. At once unnervingly candid and inspiring, The Great African Society demolishes the complacent optimism that underpins much soft thinking about South Africa's future and places at the service of public debate practical, achievable objectives for business, government and civil society. South Africa's challenge, the book argues, is to act now to avoid the mounting threat of revolt and decline that would devalue every political and economic achievement of the past decade-and-a-half and leave Nelson Mandela's feted rainbow nation staring decrepitude in the face. No debate from here on about the South African future can be taken seriously without weighing Biko's insights and his warnings. The Great African Society is vividly moral in its intentions, but sober and unsentimental in examining political and economic imperatives. It is guaranteed to make the reader sit up and take stock afresh.
The transatlantic slave trade forced millions of Africans into bondage. Until the early nineteenth century, African slaves came to the Americas in greater numbers than Europeans. In the Shadow of Slavery provides a startling new assessment of the Atlantic slave trade and upends conventional wisdom by shifting attention from the crops slaves were forced to produce to the foods they planted for their own nourishment. Many familiar foods—millet, sorghum, coffee, okra, watermelon, and the "Asian" long bean, for example—are native to Africa, while commercial products such as Coca Cola, Worcestershire Sauce, and Palmolive Soap rely on African plants that were brought to the Americas on slave ships as provisions, medicines, cordage, and bedding. In this exciting, original, and groundbreaking book, Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff draw on archaeological records, oral histories, and the accounts of slave ship captains to show how slaves' food plots—"botanical gardens of the dispossessed"—became the incubators of African survival in the Americas and Africanized the foodways of plantation societies.
In recent years, scholarly interest in love has flourished. Historians have addressed the rise of romantic love and marriage in Europe and the United States, while anthropologists have explored the ways globalization has reshaped local ideas about those same topics. Yet, love in Africa has been peculiarly ignored, resulting in a serious lack of understanding about this vital element of social life—a glaring omission given the intense focus on sexuality in Africa in the wake of HIV/AIDS. Love in Africa seeks both to understand this failure to consider love and to begin to correct it. In a substantive introduction and eight essays that examine a variety of countries and range in time from the 1930s to the present, the contributors collectively argue for the importance of paying attention to the many different cultural and historical strands that constitute love in Africa. Covering such diverse topics as the reception of Bollywood movies in 1950s Zanzibar, the effects of a Mexican telenovela on young people’s ideas about courtship in Niger, the models of romance promoted by South African and Kenyan magazines, and the complex relationship between love and money in Madagascar and South Africa, Love in Africa is a vivid and compelling look at love’s role in African society.
"Examines continuity and change in African politics and society from the precolonial era to the present, with particular focus on the post-Cold War era". -- Jacket.
Examining a series of processes (Islamization, Arabization, Africanization) and case studies from North, West and East Africa, this book gives snapshots of Muslim societies in Africa over the last millennium. In contrast to traditions which suggest that Islam did not take root in Africa, author David Robinson shows the complex struggles of Muslims in the Muslim state of Morocco and in the Hausaland region of Nigeria. He portrays the ways in which Islam was practiced in the 'pagan' societies of Ashanti (Ghana) and Buganda (Uganda) and in the ostensibly Christian state of Ethiopia - beginning with the first emigration of Muslims from Mecca in 615 CE, well before the foundational hijra to Medina in 622. He concludes with chapters on the Mahdi and Khalifa of the Sudan and the Murid Sufi movement that originated in Senegal, and reflections in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001.
Explores empires of medieval west Africa.
This book focuses on African childhood and youth within the context of development and socialization where children are expected to be moulded in the image of adults. In many African societies children are generally held as passive bearers of the demands of adults, regardless of the fact that they are often exposed to a multitude of challenges that originate from the capriciousness of those adults. However, buoyed by international conventions and national legislations that offer them greater protection, and the ubiquitous internet that exposes them to childhood and youth experiences elsewhere, many of them are increasingly becoming assertive in homes, schools, and communities as well as re-invigorating their survival and self-preservation instincts. It is in this regard that this book, through the various chapters, engages with their competencies, skills and creativity to respond to experiential challenges as independent migrants or ones under coercion working in city streets and markets or cocoa farms or juggling work and schooling in pursuit of some education. Confronted with their parents' and siblings' health predicaments and the inadequacies of state and familial care, or urgent negotiation of their sexualities, they demonstrate incredible resilience. Similarly, their perceptiveness is demonstrated in a unique appreciation of politics and its actors and a capacity to assume responsibilities beyond their chronological age. Thus while highlighting some of the challenges confronting African children, the book provides gripping evidence of how they resiliently negotiate those challenges.