The Mind of the African Strongman

The Mind of the African Strongman

Author: Herman J. Cohen

Publisher: Vellum

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 9780986435317

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This book offers a colorful and penetrating look at African cultural norms and imperatives at the core of African political and economic performance over the past half-century. The author served in five US embassies in Africa and as Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, this provided him with unique opportunities to engage in private conversations with African heads of state. Despite billions of dollars of international development assistance poured into Africa since 1955, and despite huge earnings from commodity sales, Africa has lagged far behind most other emerging nations in economic growth and poverty reduction. Through these conversations, Cohen provides an opportunity to the African leaders he knew to tell us personally why the initial enthusiasm that accompanied independence went so badly awry. A new third generation of African leadership is now coming to the fore. The key question is, can they and the international donor community learn from and overcome the negative legacies of their predecessors? ¿Hank Cohen¿s experience in Africa and access to a wide array of historic African leaders are unparalleled. This unique book provides important lessons from the continent¿s past and insights for its future.¿ ¿KENNETH L. BROWN, formerly U.S. ambassador to Cote d¿Ivoire, Ghana, and Republic of Congo and president, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training ¿That individuals often do make a difference is the thesis of The Mind of the African Strong Man. Based upon his unrivaled experience as an American diplomat in Africa, Hank Cohen's collection of conversations with Africa¿s Big Men is invaluable to anyone interested in that continent and its tumultuous modern history.¿¬¬ ¿EDWARD MARKS, Minister-Counselor (ret.), U.S. Foreign Service ¿Secretary Cohen is a master storyteller who has made it easier for Africans to form a broad historical perspective through his revealing tales about their rulers.¿ ¿AHMADU ABUBAKER, Nigerian Lawyer active in sub-Saharan Africa development issues.


The Mind of the African Strongman

The Mind of the African Strongman

Author: Herman J. Cohen

Publisher: Vellum

Published: 2015-05

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 9780986435300

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This book offers a colorful and penetrating look at African cultural norms and imperatives at the core of African political and economic performance over the past half-century. The author served in five US embassies in Africa and as Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, this provided him with unique opportunities to engage in private conversations with African heads of state. Despite billions of dollars of international development assistance poured into Africa since 1955, and despite huge earnings from commodity sales, Africa has lagged far behind most other emerging nations in economic growth and poverty reduction. Through these conversations, Cohen provides an opportunity to the African leaders he knew to tell us personally why the initial enthusiasm that accompanied independence went so badly awry. A new third generation of African leadership is now coming to the fore. The key question is, can they and the international donor community learn from and overcome the negative legacies of their predecessors? "Hank Cohen's experience in Africa and access to a wide array of historic African leaders are unparalleled. This unique book provides important lessons from the continent's past and insights for its future." -KENNETH L. BROWN, formerly U.S. ambassador to Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Republic of Congo and president, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training "That individuals often do make a difference is the thesis of The Mind of the African Strong Man. Based upon his unrivaled experience as an American diplomat in Africa, Hank Cohen's collection of conversations with Africa's Big Men is invaluable to anyone interested in that continent and its tumultuous modern history."-- -EDWARD MARKS, Minister-Counselor (ret.), U.S. Foreign Service "Secretary Cohen is a master storyteller who has made it easier for Africans to form a broad historical perspective through his revealing tales about their rulers." -AHMADU ABUBAKER, Nigerian Lawyer active in sub-Saharan Africa development issues."


Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

Author: Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2020-11-10

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 1324001550

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What modern authoritarian leaders have in common (and how they can be stopped). Ruth Ben-Ghiat is the expert on the "strongman" playbook employed by authoritarian demagogues from Mussolini to Putin—enabling her to predict with uncanny accuracy the recent experience in America and Europe. In Strongmen, she lays bare the blueprint these leaders have followed over the past 100 years, and empowers us to recognize, resist, and prevent their disastrous rule in the future. For ours is the age of authoritarian rulers: self-proclaimed saviors of the nation who evade accountability while robbing their people of truth, treasure, and the protections of democracy. They promise law and order, then legitimize lawbreaking by financial, sexual, and other predators. They use masculinity as a symbol of strength and a political weapon. Taking what you want, and getting away with it, becomes proof of male authority. They use propaganda, corruption, and violence to stay in power. Vladimir Putin and Mobutu Sese Seko’s kleptocracies, Augusto Pinochet’s torture sites, Benito Mussolini and Muammar Gaddafi’s systems of sexual exploitation, and Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump’s relentless misinformation: all show how authoritarian rule, far from ensuring stability, is marked by destructive chaos. No other type of leader is so transparent about prioritizing self-interest over the public good. As one country after another has discovered, the strongman is at his worst when true guidance is most needed by his country. Recounting the acts of solidarity and dignity that have undone strongmen over the past 100 years, Ben-Ghiat makes vividly clear that only by seeing the strongman for what he is—and by valuing one another as he is unable to do—can we stop him, now and in the future.


Strongmen

Strongmen

Author: Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Publisher: Profile Books

Published: 2020-11-05

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1782834788

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'A gripping and illuminating picture of how strongmen have deployed violence, seduction, and corruption' Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die 'A timely analysis of how a certain kind of charisma delivers political disaster' Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny Ours is the age of the strongman. Countries from Russia to India, Turkey to America are ruled by men who combine populist appeal with authoritarian policy. They have reshaped their countries around them, creating cults of personality which earn the loyalty of millions. And they do so by drawing on a playbook of behaviour established by figures such as Benito Mussolini, Muammar Gaddafi and Adolf Hitler. So why - despite the evidence of history - do strongmen still hold such appeal for us? Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat draws on analysis of everything from gender to corruption and propaganda to explain who these political figures are - and how they manipulate our own history, fears and desires in search of power at any cost. Strongmen is a fierce and perceptive history, and a vital step in understanding how to combat the forces which seek to derail democracy and seize our rights.


Queering Black Atlantic Religions

Queering Black Atlantic Religions

Author: Roberto Strongman

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2019-03-14

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1478003456

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In Queering Black Atlantic Religions Roberto Strongman examines Haitian Vodou, Cuban Lucumí/Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé to demonstrate how religious rituals of trance possession allow humans to understand themselves as embodiments of the divine. In these rituals, the commingling of humans and the divine produces gender identities that are independent of biological sex. As opposed to the Cartesian view of the spirit as locked within the body, the body in Afro-diasporic religions is an open receptacle. Showing how trance possession is a primary aspect of almost all Afro-diasporic cultural production, Strongman articulates transcorporeality as a black, trans-Atlantic understanding of the human psyche, soul, and gender as multiple, removable, and external to the body.


The Mind of Black Africa

The Mind of Black Africa

Author: Dickson Mungazi

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 1996-02-28

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 031339055X

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The violent colonization of Africa by European nations toward the end of the 19th century—a colonization justified by theories about the African Mind promulgated in the Age of Reason—had a profound impact upon the mind of Black Africa. After World War II, the mind of Black Africa rebelled; this rebellion led to a struggle for the self. After Africans achieved political independence, the new African leaders betrayed their own people. Africans now have the responsibility of restoring and reaffirming their true inheritance—the mind of Black Africa.


Secrets & Lies

Secrets & Lies

Author: Marléne Burger

Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa

Published: 2012-10-30

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 1770222480

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This is a tale of military machination and scientific subterfuge, of combatants who disappeared without trace, and bizarre experiments carried out behind locked doors. In waging ‘total war’ during the 1970s and 1980s, South African securocrats demanded a ‘total strategy’, including secret and unconventional means to fight the perceived ‘total onslaught’ against the apartheid regime. Against that background, a group of scientists under military guidance crossed the threshold of an arcane realm, familiar to ordinary citizens only through the imaginations of fiction writers – a world marked by covert operations and germ warfare, high-stakes deals in the international arms bazaar, smoke and mirrors, plausible deniability. A world where intrigue and double-crossing are routine, where secret missions and sinister sub-plots are the milestones for life in the fast lane. Set against the backdrop of the international Cold War and South Africa’s bloody passage to democracy, the events related in this book were uncovered during ten years of investigation and made public by the trial of Wouter Basson, the first criminal prosecution in the world of the head of an official chemical and biological warfare programme. As the authors take you from combat zone to courtroom, read how one of the apartheid era’s best-kept secrets became the subject of one of the ‘new’ South Africa’s costliest legal exercises – and how the former military officer at the heart of both walked away a free man. Ten years have passed since Wouter Basson was acquitted of the criminal charges brought against him and Secrets and Lies was originally published. This eBook edition comes with a brand new foreword by author Chandre Gould.


Barbarism to Decadence

Barbarism to Decadence

Author: Abudu Rasheed Oki

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2021-08-06

Total Pages: 808

ISBN-13: 166321915X

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Since independence in 1960, Nigeria’s successor leaderships and the private sector manifestly failed to dispense good governance and corporate social responsibility. Both sectors, tacitly aided by foreign institutions and corporations have perverted the ends of government and justice. Ergo, in Barbarism to Decadence, Abudu Rasheed “Richard” Oki offers an encompassing but cursory evaluation of each successor corrupting maladministration, participatory industry roles, and systemic debaucheries, along with the vast derivative adverse impacts on the citizenry. Through research, eyewitness accounts, personal experience, etc., the book presents an assessment of the devastating decades of adventitious effects of otherworldly corruption on the nation, and a look at the overall septic effects of the vice on the rest of other black African nations. Ab initio, it delves in on characteristic fractious leaderships; past immiserating military decades; compromised judiciary/law enforcement; fraudulent elections; decrepit power supply and infrastructure; human health and educational fetidness, duplicitous and complicit local and international media; natural resource curse and colossal environmental pollution; modern-day religious chicanery and radicalized Islamic terrorism; elites’ otherworldly and authoritative brigandage; and ever-present suffocating misfeasance and malfeasance in the private sector. There are also the overall, undermining roles from overseas nations, institutions, and corporations; and, sui generis, China’s hegemonic role. These are part of vast interrelated factors that hermetically immure and immolate her lumpen masses in the bonds of anomie. That correlative societal demise is portrayed in marasmus and spectral looks, along with mass spiritual and mental atrophies. Yet her affluent minority and foreign expropriation of its raw wealth and assets remain at exhilarating boil. The grim hard facts and figures indicate that Nigeria absolutely needs to be set on the right path for the long-term needs of her marred population. Meanwhile, the masses intrinsically remain restive with brutish thoughts, here and there. To wit, the crystallization of that armed mass revolutionary mettle should never be discounted in her future. So, the book provides crosscurrents, and propounds on ways to sustainably adjust her venal course mainstream. Pithily, it seeks to provide a clarion call to jettison present, and block future, serially rogue leaderships for the summum bonum.


From Hope to Horror

From Hope to Horror

Author: Joyce E. Leader

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2020-03-01

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 1640122451

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As deputy to the U.S. ambassador in Rwanda, Joyce E. Leader witnessed the tumultuous prelude to genocide—a period of political wrangling, human rights abuses, and many levels of ominous, ever-escalating violence. From Hope to Horror offers her insider’s account of the nation’s efforts to move toward democracy and peace and analyzes the challenges of conducting diplomacy in settings prone to—or engaged in—armed conflict. Leader traces the three-way struggle for control among Rwanda’s ethnic and regional factions. Each sought to shape democratization and peacemaking to its own advantage. The United States, hoping to encourage a peaceful transition, midwifed negotiations toward an accord. The result: a revolutionary blueprint for political and military power-sharing among Rwanda’s competing factions that met categorical rejection by the “losers” and a downward spiral into mass atrocities. Drawing on the Rwandan experience, Leader proposes ways diplomacy can more effectively avert the escalation of violence by identifying the unintended consequences of policies and emphasizing conflict prevention over crisis response. Compelling and expert, From Hope to Horror fills in the forgotten history of the diplomats who tried but failed to prevent a human rights catastrophe.


Thomas Sankara

Thomas Sankara

Author: Brian J. Peterson

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2021-03-02

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 0253053773

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Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa offers the first complete biography in English of the dynamic revolutionary leader from Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara. Coming to power in 1983, Sankara set his sights on combating social injustice, poverty, and corruption in his country, fighting for women's rights, direct forms of democracy, economic sovereignty, and environmental justice. Drawing on government archival sources and over a hundred interviews with Sankara's family members, friends, and closest revolutionary colleagues, Brian J. Peterson details Sankara's political career and rise to power, as well as his assassination at age 37 in 1987, in a plot led by his close friend Blaise Compaoré. Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa offers a unique, critical appraisal of Sankara and explores why he generated such enthusiasm and hope in Burkina Faso and beyond, why he was such a polarizing figure, how his rivals seized power from him, and why T-shirts sporting his image still appear on the streets today.