Showing titles in Africa

Who are the Hausa people—and where did they really come from? For centuries, the origins of one of Africa’s largest and most influential civilizations have been explained through myth, assumption, and externally shaped narratives. From the legendary story of Bayajidda to claims of Middle Eastern ancestry, the true history of the Hausa has often been obscured rather than clarified. In The Origins Of The Hausa People, History, Myth, Migration and the Making of Northern Nigeria, Frederick Amakom takes readers on a bold and deeply researched journey into the past—separating fact from ...

In the dark heart of Africa’s deepest rainforest, a ruthless predator waits. And he kills without mercy. When insurance investigator Jason Green is dispatched to a remote research station in the shadow of Ngandu Mountain, it sounds routine. Inspect a few breakdowns, file a report, and fly home.

Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution. 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, 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 repercussions of European colonialism in Africa remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.

More than 2,000 years ago one of the greatest military leaders in history almost destroyed Rome. Hannibal, a daring African general from the city of Carthage, led an army of warriors and battle elephants over the snowy Alps to invade the very heart of Rome's growing empire. But what kind of person would dare to face the most relentless imperial power of the ancient world? How could Hannibal, consistently outnumbered and always deep in enemy territory, win battle after battle until he held the very fate of Rome within his grasp?

The autobiography of global human rights icon Nelson Mandela is "riveting . . . both a brilliant description of a diabolical system and a testament to the power of the spirit to transcend it" (Washington Post). Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an...

Twenty years after Ouma Gretchen’s death, her favourite grandson Craig Venter is clearing old papers on his smallholding outside Okahandja when he stumbles on the few belongings of hers that were never thrown out: two letters, a faded hand-drawn map, a rusted knife blade, and, hidden in a snuff box, a rough diamond. Widowed himself and newly vulnerable to the claims of memory, Craig follows the trail south to Mariental and Maltahöhe, into old farm country where stories have survived in fragments. What he slowly reconstructs is darker and more extraordinary than family legend ever allowed...

Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe's dehumanizing engagement with the "dark" continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe's yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies in the heart of West Africa.

Beginning the trilogy that continues with The Day of Battle, An Army at Dawn opens on the eve of Operation TORCH, the daring amphibious invasion of Morocco and Algeria. After three days of hard fighting against the French, American and British troops push deeper into North Africa. But the...

Already a major international bestseller, Zeinab Badawi’s sweeping and much-needed survey of African history traces the continent’s extraordinary legacy from prehistory to the present from the African perspective. “Equal parts gripping and galvanizing. . . . Researched across more than 30...

Are the tribes of Israel really "lost" or were they hidden on purpose as prophesied in Psalms 83? The Bible indicates that there would be a multi national conspiracy to hide Israel and wipe out the memory of who they really are. If this is true, then history as we know it has been hijacked, and it is only through searching that we will find the truth.

In the late 1890s, Edmund Dene Morel, a young British shipping company agent, noticed something strange about the cargoes of his company’s ships as they arrived from and departed for the Congo, Leopold II’s vast new African colony. Incoming ships were crammed with valuable ivory and rubber...

This comparison of the political and social systems of Europe and black Africa from antiquity to the formation of modern states demonstrates the black contribution to the development of Western civilization.

Hatshepsut: The Pharaoh Who Disappeared Someone tried to erase her from history. They failed. For over twenty years, Hatshepsut ruled Egypt as pharaoh — not as a regent, not as a queen consort, but as the full divine king. She launched ambitious building projects, sent trading expeditions to distant lands, and presided over one of the most prosperous periods in Egyptian history. Then she vanished. After her death, someone systematically destroyed her statues, chiseled her name from temple walls, and erased her image from monuments across Egypt. For three thousand years, the campaign ...

Masquerades are among Africa’s most powerful—and most misunderstood—institutions. Often reduced to colorful costumes, festivals, or “traditional dances,” African masquerades have in fact functioned for centuries as embodied authority: enforcing law, preserving moral order, educating society, healing spiritual imbalance, and mediating between the living and the dead. In Masquerades of Black Africa, this groundbreaking work restores masquerades to their rightful place as serious African philosophical, political, and spiritual institutions. Drawing on African cosmology, history, and ...

For six hundred years, the city of Carthage dominated the western Mediterranean. Founded in the ninth century BCE as a small colonial outpost, by the third, it had grown into the area's largest, richest empire. When, inevitably, it clashed with Rome for supremacy over the region, the conflict spanned over one century, three wars, and forty-three years of active fighting. After Carthage fell, the city was razed, and the tale of its defeat became a mere foundation stone in Rome's legend.

So often, Africa has been depicted simplistically as a uniform land of famines and safaris, poverty and strife, stripped of all nuance. In this bold and insightful book, Dipo Faloyin offers a much-needed corrective, weaving a vibrant tapestry of stories that bring to life Africa's rich diversity, communities, and histories. Starting with an immersive description of the lively and complex urban life of Lagos, Faloyin unearths surprising truths about many African countries' colonial heritage and tells the story of the continent's struggles with democracy through seven dictatorships.

An epic history of a doomed civilization and a lost empire. The devastating struggle to the death between the Carthaginians and the Romans was one of the defining dramas of the ancient world. In an epic series of land and sea battles, both sides came close to victory before the Carthaginians finally succumbed and their capital city, history, and culture were almost utterly erased.

Africana Philosophy from Ancient Egypt to the Nineteenth Century is the first volume in the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps series to bring listeners the story of Africana philosophy. This diverse topic is defined as philosophy emerging from and distinctively related to Africa or the African diaspora. The story starts at the beginning by asking what it would mean to engage philosophically with evidence left by prehistoric peoples of Africa, and proceeds to discuss the philosophical traditions of ancient Egypt, late ancient and early modern Ethopia, and Islamic philosophy in West Africa.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The harrowing story of one of the great feats of exploration of all time and its complicated legacy—from the New York Times bestselling author of The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: THE WASHINGTON POST GOODREADS "A lean...

The Shinkolobwe Mine in the Belgian Congo was described by a 1943 Manhattan Project intelligence report as the "most important deposit of uranium yet discovered in the world". So long as the United States remained in control of this mine and its supply, it had a world monopoly on the primary material needed to build an atomic bomb. The uranium from this mine was used to build the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.