NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Set in a close-knit Newark neighborhood during a terrifying polio outbreak in 1944, a “book [that] has the elegance of a fable and the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama” (The New Yorker)—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral. Bucky Cantor is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director during the summer of 1944. A javelin thrower and weightlifter, he is disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As the devastating disease begins to ravage Bucky’s playground, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain. Moving between the streets of Newark and a pristine summer camp high in the Poconos, Nemesis tenderly and startlingly depicts Cantor’s passage into personal disaster, the condition of childhood, and the painful effect that the wartime polio epidemic has on a closely-knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.
My thesis is basically intended for theological and philosophical students and at the same-time their lecturers in biblical theology, systematic theology and philosophy of religion. There is no doubt in my mind that these disciplines must surgically forcefully put through the hermeneutical operation of radicalism and liberation black theology and black studies. Because liberation black theology and black studies are both pertinent and existential to black people not only in the diaspora but principally within the demography of Africa. Why? Because Africa is the social, economic, political, scientific, spiritual, theological and psychological incubation chamber with the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism and semantic cultural Christianization of Africans. The besom merchants, traders, planters, slavers, missionaries, philosophers, historians, theologians and scientists, with savagery and brutality imposed on African slaves mendaciously that enslavement was good for Africans. It is therefore apposite for liberation black theology and black studies particularly in praxis to critique and challenge the systems and endogenous forces that violated and emasculated Africans empowerment and humanity. The slaves were brutally transformed physically and psychologically. The slaves potentialities endowed with the imprint of the African traditional belief in a supreme being and prime mover of the cosmos was transgressed with falsehood that their belief in a supreme being was primitive and paganistic. For Africans the supreme being is within their inner consciousness. The enslavement of Africans was without morality and justice. The creation of a symbiosis of liberation theology, liberation black theology and hermeneutical application and praxis is sempiternal significance to the black experience and the Jesus of the black experience that gives timba to the dis-empowered blacks of the streets of Accra and the continent of Africa that were consciously made into the apocalyptic and eschatological symbol of poverty, dis-possessed, impuissant politically and economically in a world that is dominated with nuclear weapons and technological hegemony. In the midst of such imbalance and the perversion of justice and equality regardless of ethnicity, black people must make the conscious, spiritual and psychological connection with the Jesus of the stigmata of the imprisoned African slaves on the Middle Passage and the diabolical plantations. There is no another way according to the sociological, theological, psychological impacting force of the various violations of Africans dignity, liberty, freedom, equality and humanity of black people in all dimensions of struggles to become veridical human beings in the full image of God. That is to say, theologically and sociologically the derivatives of shalom culminating in the absolute restoration of black humanity. With the force of chimerical-ism twinned with the black mans epistemological dreams without empiricism and existentialism. It is at this juncture that all the mythological aspirations are reduced to the level of stultification because Christianity with the painting of a white plastic Jesus cannot be connected with the black experience. When on Good Friday black people sing with effusive passion Jesus keep me near the Cross the Kebuka and Maafa on the plantation sufferings, brutalization and de-humanization rings with
This study examines a political-military tradition in sub-Saharan Africa which has survived colonialism as well as the Cold War. Five modern African insurgencies are evaluated: Madagascar 1947, Kenya (Mau Mau) 1952-63, Cameroon (UPC) 1955-70, Congo/Zaire (Kwilu) 1964-8 and Mozambique (RENAMO) 1977-92. These case-studies demonstrate a persistent link between traditional African religion and contemporary nationalist movements whose political as well as military significance has frequently been underestimated and often misunderstood.
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Man makes history, in a fashion, and history also makes man. As with other men, the historical experience of the African over the centuries has had a profound effect on his self-image as well as on his perception of the external world. Perhaps more than other men, the African in pre-colonial times developed a strong historical tradition, and his perception of himself and his world came to depend very much on his view of the past. European colonialism, brief as it was, produced a traumatic effect largely because it tried to impose on the African a gross distortion of his historical tradition.
Southern Africa surveys the contemporary history of the whole region encompassing economic, social, political, security, foreign policy, health, environmental and gender issues in one short succinct volume. Positioning the collapse of Portugal’s African Empire in the context of the region’s history since 1945, Farley asserts that this collapse set in motion a train of events that eventually led to the transition of power from minority to majority rule in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa. He examines the experiences of these countries as well as the former High Commission territories of Swaziland, Botswana and Lesotho to analyse the kind of states that evolved and shows how Southern Africa’s present problems are the inevitable result of a long history of white rule. The book assesses the challenges faced by Southern Africa’s political leaders up to the present day and discusses how these problems might be successfully addressed in the future. With maps, a chronology and glossary, this is a valuable resource for all those interested in African history, politics and culture.
The hardcover edition of volume 8 was published in 1994. This paperback edition is the eighth and final volume to be published in the UNESCO General History of Africa. Volume 8 examines the period from 1935 to the present, and details the role of African states in the Second World War and the rise of postwar Africa. This is one of the most important books in the entire series, and as such, it is an unabridged paperback.
This collection is concerned with the problems and pleasures of writing literary biography in the context of South African writing. Stephen Gray's introduction outlines the choice faced by the researcher: between writing revisionist history (à la Strachey) and the personal bias the portraitist must take into account when conducting the retrieval especially of lost and enigmatic figures (à la Symons). Concentrating on the unattached irregulars of the arts in South Africa - often the arts of their times - Gray stresses the value of the free-lance figure in the formation of an evolving colonial and post-colonial literature. Subjects included are: Charles Maclean, alias John Ross, who recorded his experiences of the Zulu King Shaka in Natal's first captivity narrative; Douglas Blackburn, rated as the successor of Swift for his satires of the Anglo-Boer War conflict; Beatrice Hastings, polymath journalist whose lovers included Katherine Mansfield and Amedeo Modigliani; Stephen Black, founder of indigenous South African drama in English; Edward Wolfe, the Bloomsbury painter who began as a child-actor in the mining town of Johannesburg; Bessie Head, who became the Botswana-based wise-woman of African literature before her untimely death in 1986, yet never knew her own origins; Etienne Leroux, the Free State rancher who, in Afrikaans, wrote much-banned postmodernist novels; Mary Renault whose bestselling novels set in Ancient Greece peculiarly represented the shutdown of democracy in apartheid South Africa; Sipho Sepamla, stalwart of the Soweto Poetry school which came to prominence after the 1976 Soweto uprising; and Richard Rive, novelist, cultural commentator and liberation icon, murdered in his prime. The portrait gallery of the figures who have shaped and defined the role of literature in South Africa is both revealing and provocative, showing the route taken by some lesser-known talents in their struggle to establish the rights of authors in an often indifferent or repressive state.
Violence in southern Africa has occurred in a variety of modes including ethnic confrontation, liberation struggles and cross-border aggression and crime. This volume examines the degree to which violence however defined has influenced political change across the region. The contributions include analyses of the ramifications of violent disorder in Angola and Mozambique, the impact on the political economy of both states and the prospects for lasting peace following the end of civil war.
