Being an avid reader her whole life, she read a lot to her young Children and also told them stories she invented herself. One of these was the "Little piggy Straight tail" story that the children loved and wanted to hear again and again. Over the years she often thought of publishing the story but life had more pressing demands. Raising her family, frequent moves, work, and learning to paint took precedence. So it took many years until the time was just right and this little story was printed. Illustrating the book brought lots of fun and laughter and hopefully little children everywhere will enjoy the story as much as her children did.
Gerard Philippson is Professor of Bantu Languages at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales and is a member of the Dyamique de Langage research team of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Lyon II University. He has mainly worked on comparative Bantu tonology. Other areas of interest include Afro-Asiatic, general phonology, linguistic classification and its correlation with population genetics.
Robert Harms explores nature and culture in the story of the Nunu, who live in and around the swampy floodplains of the Zaire River. Increasing population impinged upon the limits of available resources in the late eighteenth century, eventually resulting in civil war in the 1960s.
A discussion of political and religious crisis in Africa, this book covers such topics as democratic transition, good governance, civil society and the African renaissance. Elias K. Bongmba proposes humanistic interventions centred on the recovery of interpersonal relations and seeks to understand the ongoing struggles in Africa.
Protected areas have often been defined as the backbones of biodiversity conservation. Protected areas have often been defined as the backbones of biodiversity conservation. However, legitimate demands formulated by countries for their economic development, growing human populations, forest fragmentations, and needs of local communities for sustainable livelihoods are also pressing demands on protected areas, stringently pressuring conservation community to identify means to reconcile long term biodiversity conservation and communities’ livelihoods. Hence, integrating conservation activities within the global framework of economic development of countries with high biodiversity had become part of conservation paradigms. Integrated development as a route to conservation, strict protected areas, community managed areas, etc. have been tried but resulted in debatable outcomes in many ways. The lukewarm nature of these results brought ‘landscape approach’ at the front of biodiversity conservation in Central Africa. Since the late 1990s the landscape approach uses large areas with different functional attributes and shifts foundational biodiversity conservation paradigms. Changes are brought to the role traditionally attributed to local communities, aligning sustainable development with conservation and stretching conservation beyond the confines of traditional protected areas. These three shifts need a holistic approach to respond to different conservation questions. There are only a few instances where the landscape experience has been scientifically documented and lessons learnt drawn into a corpus of knowledge to guide future conservation initiatives across Central Africa. To subjugate one biodiversity conservation landscape as one case study emerged as a matter of urgency to present the potential knowledge acquired throughout the landscape experiment, including leadership and management, processes tried, results (at least partially) achieved, and why such and such other process or management arrangement were been chosen among many other alternatives, etc. The challenges of the implementation of the conservation landscape approach needed also to be documented. This book responds to the majority of these questions; drawing its content from the firsthand field knowledge, it discusses these shifts and documents what has been tried, how successful (unsuccessful) it was, and what lessons learnt from these trials. Theoretical questions such as threat index, and ecological services, etc. are also discussed and gaps in knowledge are identified.
The United States of America: My Country of Destiny is a facts-fit-fiction story of a hardworking, well-educated young Southern Cameroonian during the period of African-to-African colonial rule and occupancy by the Republic of Cameroon. Bila was born and raised in the City of Komo, Northern Zone in the Southern Cameroons a.k.a. the Federal Republic of Ambazonia. He seemed to be rejected by the culture. He studied hard and earned a master's degree in geology, but because the country was poorly ruled under French Cameroon, his university diploma became worthless. He did what he saw for a job, and because of his kind of job, he was mistaken for a madman. This was when mentally challenged people were considered dirt. They needed to be taken off the streets of Douala as a neo-French emperor was visiting. At the time, Bila felt that his life was done. He got a US visa to travel to the United States of America, where he worked hard to become a naturalized US citizen. When he had the opportunity to make a better life for himself and others, he did just that.
"...several towns of the dead almost forgotten that force the predestined researchers to meet supernatural beings, an alternate African-like/African-inspired setting full of fabled treasures, unusual colorful fruit whose healing properties are so respected they would easily convince desperate people to take them, and many more tales of strange, perilous creatures who inhabit interesting and characteristic worlds full of strange plants and trees, where experience, readiness and personal skills make the difference between life and death."
