The book is an affirmation of education and an espousal of cooperative democracy as a way of life for the new Africa. It contains as well a report on social studies of African life. It also expounds on the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of African life and its prospects for the future. Amidst the current debates concerning multiculturalism and political correctness, this publication moves the discussion beyond the vagueness of ethnicity to the reality of African empowerment.
From the Publisher: Edited and translated by Mercer Cook. Laymen and scholars alike will welcome the publication of this one-volume translation of the major sections of C.A. Diop's two books, Nations negres et culture and Anteriorite des civilizations negres, which have profoundly influenced thinking about Africa around the world. It was largely because of these works that, at the World Festival of the Arts held in Dakar in 1966, Dr. Diop shared with the late W.E.B. DuBois an award as the writer who had exerted the greatest influence on Negro thought in the 20th century.
The African Renaissance and the Afro-Arab Spring addresses the often unspoken connection between the powerful call for a political-cultural renaissance that emerged with the end of South African apartheid and the popular revolts of 2011 that dramatically remade the landscape in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia. Looking between southern and northern Africa, the transcontinental line from Cape to Cairo that for so long supported colonialism, its chapters explore the deep roots of these two decisive events and demonstrate how they are linked by shared opposition to legacies of political, economic, and cultural subjugation. As they work from African, Islamic, and Western perspectives, the book’s contributors shed important light on a continent’s difficult history and undertake a critical conversation about whether and how the desire for radical change holds the possibility of a new beginning for Africa, a beginning that may well reshape the contours of global affairs.
Thomas C. Oden surveys the decisive role of African Christians and theologians in shaping the doctrines and practices of the church of the first five centuries, and makes an impassioned plea for the rediscovery of that heritage. Christians throughout the world will benefit from this reclaiming of an important heritage.
Invisible Agents shows how personal and deeply felt spiritual beliefs can inspire social movements and influence historical change. Conventional historiography concentrates on the secular, materialist, or moral sources of political agency. Instead, David M. Gordon argues, when people perceive spirits as exerting power in the visible world, these beliefs form the basis for individual and collective actions. Focusing on the history of the south-central African country of Zambia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, his analysis invites reflection on political and religious realms of action in other parts of the world, and complicates the post-Enlightenment divide of sacred and profane. The book combines theoretical insights with attention to local detail and remarkable historical sweep, from oral narratives communicated across slave-trading routes during the nineteenth century, through the violent conflicts inspired by Christian and nationalist prophets during colonial times, and ending with the spirits of Pentecostal rebirth during the neoliberal order of the late twentieth century. To gain access to the details of historical change and personal spiritual beliefs across this long historical period, Gordon employs all the tools of the African historian. His own interviews and extensive fieldwork experience in Zambia provide texture and understanding to the narrative. He also critically interprets a diverse range of other sources, including oral traditions, fieldnotes of anthropologists, missionary writings and correspondence, unpublished state records, vernacular publications, and Zambian newspapers. Invisible Agents will challenge scholars and students alike to think in new ways about the political imagination and the invisible sources of human action and historical change.
The purpose of this book is to uncover the true history of sub-Saharan Africans, Africans in Diaspora, including African-Americans in context to world history and that of civilization from its inception. This context refutes the white supremacists claim that blacks have no history of achievements or accomplishments to human advancement prior to slavery and related emancipation. It demonstrates that blacks are the first human species, founders of civilization and its advancements. There is one civilization and that is African civilization. Western civilization is a replica of that singular civilization founded in Antiquity. Black African civilization's rebirth in Europe spawned the Renaissance, Age of Reason, Enlightenment, and Modernity. African civilization is the root, origin and master blueprint of all religions. During Antiquity all gods and goddesses were made in the image of sub-Saharan Africans, Africans in Diaspora, including African-Americans. All Saviors of Mankind, including Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Abraham, etc., were made in the image of Africans in Diaspora. The book highlights how Western ethnocentrism, xenophobia, distortions of religion, and racism that intensified during African slavery and colonization remade these images to appear as Aryan or Nordic as possible. All credit for the development of civilization and achievements were seized by these Western conquerors who reigned within the last 400 years. The 10,000 years or more of black African hegemony was purposely purged from recorded history. The purpose of this purge is to brainwash the more than 80 percent of the world's population that is colored to accept substandard wages and conditions to facilitate the accumulation of wealth and privilege by those who claim to be white. The book highlights the evidence that the first people and civilizations of Europe, Asia, Far East, Pacific Islands and Americas were direct descendants of the sub-Saharan Africans, Africans in Diaspora, including African-Americans. These blacks established all leaps forward from primitive society to the early civilizations that would spawn modernity. In addition, the book highlights evidence that the African hegemony maintained cultural and commercial ties globally from Antiquity to prior to Columbus and European invasions. Through Masonic secrecy the African civilization and its Mystery System survived the Inquisition, the rise of European nationalism and xenophobia to find its way to the North American colonies. As such, colonist founded the future superpower, the United States of America (USA), on principles and values accrued from Africa's Mystery System drawn from the Dogon-Egyptian civilization. The strength of this new nation depends on leaders that appear to fulfill the Pharaohic Karma of Antiquity and build a modern African global hegemony learning from the actual achievements and avoid mistakes of the past.
This book offers a comprehensive study of the history of African business. By analyzing the specificities of African business culture, as well as the dynamically changing African policy context, the author sheds new light on the development of African enterprises, markets and institutions. The book covers a wide range of historical studies, starting with the earliest exchange networks, the new market opportunities resulting from European penetration, the dualism of state-owned companies and private enterprises during the twentieth century, the role of foreign direct investments and multinational companies during the 1990s, and the globalization of African business.
“A call to arms in the class struggle for racial equity”—the hugely influential work of political theory and history, now powerfully introduced by Angela Davis (Los Angeles Review of Books). This legendary classic on European colonialism in Africa stands alongside C.L.R. James’ Black Jacobins, Eric Williams’ Capitalism & Slavery, and W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction. In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.
When Nigeria hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, it celebrated a global vision of black nationhood and citizenship animated by the exuberance of its recent oil boom. Andrew Apter's The Pan-African Nation tells the full story of this cultural extravaganza, from Nigeria's spectacular rebirth as a rapidly developing petro-state to its dramatic demise when the boom went bust. According to Apter, FESTAC expanded the horizons of blackness in Nigeria to mirror the global circuits of its economy. By showcasing masks, dances, images, and souvenirs from its many diverse ethnic groups, Nigeria forged a new national culture. In the grandeur of this oil-fed confidence, the nation subsumed all black and African cultures within its empire of cultural signs and erased its colonial legacies from collective memory. As the oil economy collapsed, however, cultural signs became unstable, contributing to rampant violence and dissimulation. The Pan-African Nation unpacks FESTAC as a historically situated mirror of production in Nigeria. More broadly, it points towards a critique of the political economy of the sign in postcolonial Africa.
