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On 20th January 1886, the first installment of what is probably the first West African novel in English was published in a Ghanaian newspaper, the Western Echo, by a male author using the pseudonym ‘A. Native’. Preceded by a proud editorial which welcomed the arrival of this ‘work of “local effort”’ by ‘a native gentleman’, Marita: or the Folly of Love was serialised in 40 episodes, ending two years later in January 1888. It describes the disastrous consequences for African men of uniting according to the colonial Marriage Ordinance of 1884: this ordinance enshrined the Christian, Victorian ideal of marriage as a monogamous and lifelong union, and is shown in the story to transform peaceful, well-behaved women into shrews and termagants who are bent upon seizing domestic power from their husbands. The story proved to be so popular and relevant that it survived the closure of the Western Echo in December 1887 and found a new host in the Gold Coast Echo, before disappearing from the press, unfinished, in February 1888.
On 20th January 1886, the first installment of what is probably the first West African novel in English was published in a Ghanaian newspaper, the Western Echo, by a male author using the pseudonym 'A. Native'. Preceded by a proud editorial which welcomed the arrival of this 'work of "local effort"' by 'a native gentleman', Marita: or the Folly of Love was serialised in 40 episodes, ending two years later in January 1888. It describes the disastrous consequences for African men of uniting according to the colonial Marriage Ordinance of 1884: this ordinance enshrined the Christian, Victorian ideal of marriage as a monogamous and lifelong union, and is shown in the story to transform peaceful, well-behaved women into shrews and termagants who are bent upon seizing domestic power from their husbands. The story proved to be so popular and relevant that it survived the closure of the Western Echo in December 1887 and found a new host in the Gold Coast Echo, before disappearing from the press, unfinished, in February 1888.
Includes articles, annotated filmography, interviews, creative writing, and book reviews.
In the African context, there exists the 'myth' that orality means tradition. Written and oral verbal art are often regarded as dichotomies, one excluding the other. While orature is confused with 'tradition', literature is ascribed to modernity. Furthermore, local languages are ignored and literature is equated with writing in foreign languages. The contributions in this volume take issue with such preconceptions and explore the multiple ways in which literary and oral forms interrelate and subvert each other, giving birth to new forms of artistic expression. They emphasize the local agency of the African poet and writer, which resists the global commodification of literature through the international bestseller lists of the cultural industry. The first section traces the movement from oral to written texts, which in many cases coincides with a switch from African to European languages. But as the essays in the section on "New Literary Languages" make clear, in other cases a true philological work is accomplished in the African language to create a new written and literary medium. Through the mixing of languages in the cities, such as the Sheng spoken in Kenya or the bilinguality of a writer such as Cheik Aliou Ndao (Senegal), new idioms for literary expressions evolve. The use of new media, technology or music stimulate the emergence of new genres, such as Taarab in East Africa, radio poetry in Yoruba and Hausa, or Rap in the Senegal, as is shown in the section on "Forms of New Orality." It is a great achievement of this second volume of Versions and Subversions in African Literatures that it assembles contributions by scholars from the anglophone and the francophone world and that it covers literary production in a broad spectrum of languages: English, French, Hausa, Sheng, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Wolof and Yoruba. Some of the authors and cultural practitioners treated in detail are: Mobolaij Adenubi, Birago Diop, Boubacar Boris Diop, David Maillu, Thomas Mofolo, Cheik Aliou Ndao, Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, Hubert Ogunde, Shaaban Robert, Wole Soyinka, Ibrahim YaroYahaya, and Sénouvo Agbota Zinsou.
In this collection of ethnic group histories, written by authors from the Mara Region of Tanzania, local people tell their stories as a way to inspire development that builds on the strengths of the past. It combines histories from the small, but closely related, ethnic groups of Ikizu, Sizaki, Ikoma, Ngoreme, Nata, Ishenyi and Tatoga in South Mara, east of Lake Victoria and west of Serengeti National Park. Many of the authors compiled their stories by meeting with groups of elders. They were concerned to preserve history for the next generation who had not taken the time to learn the stories orally. The stories were written in Swahili and translated into English with annotations and an introduction so that readers not familiar with this region might also share in the experience. It also includes transcriptions of oral interviews with some of the same stories to get a sense of the ongoing conversions about the past. This collection makes local history told in a local idiom accessible to students of African history interested in social memory and the creation of ethnicity.
Imported schnapps gin has a remarkable history in West Africa. Gin was imported in great quantities between 1880 and World War I, when its consumption showed access to the modern, international world. Subsequently schnapps was transformed into a good that signified traditional, local culture. Today, imported schnapps has high status because of its importance for African ritual and as symbol of the status of chiefs and elders, but actual consumption is limited. This book explores this unexpected trajectory of commoditisation to investigate how imported goods acquire specific local meanings. This analysis of consumption and marketing of gin contributes to our understanding of patterns of consumption, rejection and appropriation within processes of identity formation, elite formation, and the redefinition of community in colonial and postcolonial West Africa.
Interracial sex mattered to the British colonial state in West Africa. In Crossing the Color Line, Carina E. Ray goes beyond this fact to reveal how Ghanaians shaped and defined these powerfully charged relations. The interplay between African and European perspectives and practices, argues Ray, transformed these relationships into key sites for consolidating colonial rule and for contesting its hierarchies of power. With rigorous methodology and innovative analyses, Ray brings Ghana and Britain into a single analytic frame to show how intimate relations between black men and white women in the metropole became deeply entangled with those between black women and white men in the colony in ways that were profoundly consequential. Based on rich archival evidence and original interviews, the book moves across different registers, shifting from the micropolitics of individual disciplinary cases brought against colonial officers who “kept” local women to transatlantic networks of family, empire, and anticolonial resistance. In this way, Ray cuts to the heart of how interracial sex became a source of colonial anxiety and nationalist agitation during the first half of the twentieth century.
The Pen-Pictures is a well-known source for the history of the Gold Coast, modern Ghana, cited and quoted by both professional historians and interested lay-people. This annotated edition is the first reprint of the book and offers a lively and both historically and literarily interesting text about an important phase in Ghanaian history. The added introduction and annotation offer a context hitherto unavailable to the scholar and general reader.
The essays collected in African Print Cultures claim African newspapers as subjects of historical and literary study. Newspapers were not only vehicles for anticolonial nationalism. They were also incubators of literary experimentation and networks by which new solidarities came into being. By focusing on the creative work that African editors and contributors did, this volume brings an infrastructure of African public culture into view. The first of four thematic sections, “African Newspaper Networks,” considers the work that newspaper editors did to relate events within their locality to happenings in far-off places. This work of correlation and juxtaposition made it possible for distant people to see themselves as fellow travellers. “Experiments with Genre” explores how newspapers nurtured the development of new literary genres, such as poetry, realist fiction, photoplays, and travel writing in African languages and in English. “Newspapers and Their Publics” looks at the ways in which African newspapers fostered the creation of new kinds of communities and served as networks for public interaction, political and otherwise. The final section, “Afterlives, ” is about the longue durée of history that newspapers helped to structure, and how, throughout the twentieth century, print allowed contributors to view their writing as material meant for posterity.
By featuring the life histories of eight senior men, Making Men in Ghana explores the changing meaning of becoming a man in modern Africa. Stephan F. Miescher concentrates on the ideals and expectations that formed around men who were prominent in their communities when Ghana became an independent nation. Miescher shows how they negotiated complex social and economic transformations and how they dealt with their mounting obligations and responsibilities as leaders in their kinship groups, churches, and schools. Not only were notions about men and masculinity shaped by community standards, but they were strongly influenced by imported standards that came from missionaries and other colonial officials. As he recounts the life histories of these men, Miescher reveals that the passage to manhood--and a position of power, seniority, authority, and leadership--was not always welcome or easy. As an important foil for studies on women and femininity, this groundbreaking book not only explores masculinity and ideals of male behavior, but offers a fresh perspective on African men in a century of change.