Historical Dictionary of The Gambia

Historical Dictionary of The Gambia

Author: Arnold Hughes

Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Published: 2008-09-11

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 0810862603

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The fourth edition of the Historical Dictionary of The Gambia_through its chronology, introductory essay, appendixes, map, bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on important persons, places, events, institutions, and significant political, economic, social, and cultural aspects_provides an important reference on this burgeoning African country.


Historical Dictionary of The Gambia

Historical Dictionary of The Gambia

Author: David Perfect

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-05-27

Total Pages: 615

ISBN-13: 1442265264

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When The Gambia achieved its independence from Great Britain on 18 February 1965, as mainland Africa’s smallest state, its future seemed uncertain. It retained this status for nearly 30 years, An attempted coup d’état in July 1981 was put down, but, ironically, when other African states were returning to democratic government, Gambian democracy finally succumbed to a military coup on 22 July 1994. While civilian rule was restored in 1996, full democracy was not and a number of subsequent presidential and parliamentary elections have been far from free and fair, while The Gambia’s human rights record has been very poor since 1994. This fifth edition of Historical Dictionary of The Gambia contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about The Gambia.


Culture and Customs of Gambia

Culture and Customs of Gambia

Author: Abdoulaye S. Saine Ph.D.

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2012-04-13

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13:

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Ideal for high school and undergraduate students, this addition to the Culture and Customs of Africa series examines the contemporary cultures and traditions of modern Gambia, from religious customs to literature to cuisine and much more. This title in the Culture and Customs of Africa series examines the traditions and customs of contemporary Gambia, a geographically tiny nation in the vast landscape of Africa that is home to a large number of various ethnic groups, each with its own distinctive way of life. It is a country that has been largely unknown in Western culture, with the exception of Alex Haley's book Roots and subsequent TV series, which highlights Gambia's historic significance in the slave trade. This book illuminates Gambian religion and worldview; literature and media; arts and architecture/housing; gender roles, marriage, and family; social customs, traditional dress, cuisine, and lifestyle; and music and dance. The author has successfully encapsulated both long-ago history and contemporary Gambia to provide students with a complete look at life in Gambia today. Information on past traditions and historic events is discussed in the context of how they pertain to life today and their influence on the constant evolution of Gambian life and culture.


Mande Music

Mande Music

Author: Eric Charry

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2000-10

Total Pages: 540

ISBN-13: 9780226101620

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With Mande Music, Eric Charry offers the most comprehensive source available on one of Africa's richest and most sophisticated music cultures. Using resources as disparate as early Arabic travel accounts, oral histories, and archival research as well as his own extensive studies in Mali, Guinea, Senegal, and the Gambia, Charry traces this music culture from its origins in the thirteenth-century Mali empire to the recording studios of Paris and New York. He focuses on the four major spheres of Mande music—hunter's music, music of the jelis or griots, jembe and other drumming, and guitar-based modern music—exploring how each evolved, the types of instruments used, the major artists, and how each sphere relates to the others. With its maps, illustrations, and musical transcriptions as well as an exhaustive bibliography, discography, and videography, this book is essential reading for those seeking an in-depth look at one of the most exciting, innovative, and deep-rooted phenomena on the world music scene. A compact disc is available separately.


Defining Creole

Defining Creole

Author: John H. McWhorter

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2005-02-03

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 0195347234

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A conventional wisdom among creolists is that creole is a sociohistorical term only: that creole languages share a particular history entailing adults rapidly acquiring a language usually under conditions of subordination, but that structurally they are indistinguishable from other languages. The articles by John H. McWhorter collected in this volume demonstrate that this is in fact untrue. Creole languages, while complex and nuanced as all human languages are, are delineable from older languages as the result of their having come into existence only a few centuries ago. Then adults learn a language under untutored conditions, they abbreviate its structure, focusing upon features vital to communication and shaving away most of the features useless to communication that bedevil those acquiring the language non-natively. When they utilize their rendition of the language consistently enough to create a brand-new one, this new creation naturally evinces evidence of its youth: specifically, a much lower degree of the random accretions typical in older languages, which only develop over vast periods of time. The articles constitute a case for this thesis based on both broad, cross-creole ranges of data and focused expositions referring to single creole languages. The book presents a general case for a theory of language contact and creolization in which not only transfer from source languages but also structural reduction plays a central role, based on facts whose marginality of address in creole studies has arisen from issues sociopolitical as well as scientific. For several decades the very definition of the term creole has been elusive even among creole specialists. This book attempts to forge a path beyond the inter- and intra-disciplinary misunderstandings and stalemates that have resulted from this, and to demonstrate the place that creoles might occupy in other linguistic subfields, including typology, language contact, and syntactic theory.


Dictionary of Portuguese Loanwords in the Languages of Sub-Saharan Africa

Dictionary of Portuguese Loanwords in the Languages of Sub-Saharan Africa

Author: Sergio Baldi

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-10-16

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 9004680780

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The main purpose of this dictionary is twofold. On the one hand, it provides the scholar of African studies with a tool to identify the possible Portuguese origin of terms present in African languages and, on the other, it offers those who are interested in Portuguese culture an overview of the presence of its lexicon in African languages. No doubt the Portuguese were among the first Europeans to explore the world outside of Europe, and as such they were also the first to introduce that world to European concepts and words.This book is the result of a long and detailed work on texts in African languages, as also shown by the rich bibliography in the dictionary.


Islam, Youth and Modernity in the Gambia

Islam, Youth and Modernity in the Gambia

Author: Marloes Janson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1107040574

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This monograph explores the expansion of the Tablighi Jama'at, a transnational Islamic missionary movement that originated in India in the mid-nineteenth century, and its impact in the Gambia (West Africa) in the past decade. The Jama'at offers Gambian youth, and women in particular, new opportunities to express their religious identity in a way that is in line with a modern lifestyle. The book investigates how Gambian youth have incorporated the South Asian Tablighi ideology into their daily lives and adapted it to their local context.