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Oil on Water by Helon Habila
Brief Summary
In the oil-rich and environmentally devastated Nigerian Delta, the wife of a British oil executive has been kidnapped. Two journalists-a young upstart, Rufus, and a once-great, now disillusioned veteran, Zaq-are sent to find her.
In a story rich with atmosphere and taut with suspense, Oil on Water explores the conflict between idealism and cynical disillusionment in a journey full of danger and unintended consequences.
As Rufus and Zaq navigate polluted rivers flanked by exploded and dormant oil wells, in search of "the white woman," they must contend with the brutality of both government soldiers and militants. Assailed by irresolvable versions of the "truth" about the woman's disappearance, dependent on the kindness of strangers of unknowable loyalties, their journalistic objectivity will prove unsustainable, but other values might yet salvage their human dignity.
ISBN:9780393339642
Author:Helon Habila
Poisoned Wells The Dirty Politics of ...
Brief Summary
Each week the oil and gas fields of sub-Saharan Africa produce over a billion dollars’ worth of oil, yet this rising tide of money is not promoting stability or development but instead is causing violence, poverty and stagnation.
'Poisoned Wells' exposes the root causes of this paradox of poverty from plenty.
ISBN:9781403971944
Author:Nicholas Shaxson
The Snow Angel by Lauren St John
Brief Summary
Lauren St John's stunning Christmas classic is about forgotten children, the power of nature to heal us and a girl who will climb mountains in search for a place to call home.
Growing up in vibrant, crowded Nairobi, Makena has only one dream: to climb Mount Kenya like her hero, her mountain guide father. But when her beautiful world is shattered, she finds that in the city's dark places there are a thousand ways to fall, each more deadly than any crevasse.
In a world of strangers, does she dare trust Snow, whose ballet dreams are haunted by a past she's still running from? And is the sparkling fox friend or foe?
After a fresh start in the Scottish Highlands turns bad, Makena flees to the mountains. But will they betray her or be the making of her?
ISBN:9781786695895
Author:Lauren St John
Taxing Africa Coercion Reform and Dev...
Brief Summary
It has long been debated whether Africa’s lack of growth is best explained by the continent’s exploitation by the global system, or by internal failures of domestic political leadership, and taxation is no different. Some point to a global economic system that undermines Africa’s tax collection through tax havens and evasion by multinational firms and wealthy individuals.
Meanwhile, others highlight domestic barriers to effective taxation that are rooted in corruption and the unwillingness or inability of political leaders to take necessary action. Written by leading international experts, Taxing Africa moves beyond this polarizing debate, arguing that substantial cultural and political change must come from within African countries themselves.
From tackling the collusion of elites with international corporations to enhancing local democratic governance, the book examines the potential for reform, and how it may become a springboard for broader development gains.
ISBN:9781783604531
Author:Mick Moore, Wilson Prichard and Odd-Helge Fjeldstad
Spies in the Congo by Susan Williams
Brief Summary
Spies in the Congo: America's Atomic Mission in World War II
A thrilling account of the extraordinary efforts of Allied intelligence in gaining control of Belgian Congo's uranium mines and keeping them from Hitler and Stalin.
This book is the true story of American spies in Africa in the Second World War, which until now has never been researched or told. It is set against the background of one of the most tightly guarded secrets of the war -- America's struggle to secure enough high quality uranium to build atomic bombs. These efforts were focused on the Shinkolobwe Mine in the Belgian Congo, which was described within the Manhattan Project as the 'most important deposit of uranium yet discovered in the world'.
Uranium from this mine was used to build the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. Given the very real possibility that Germany was also working on an atomic bomb, it was an urgent priority for the US to prevent uranium from the Congo being diverted to the enemy. This task was given to the newly-created Office of Strategic Services in Washington, which sent some of their best Secret Intelligence agents under cover to the Belgian Congo to track the ore and to hunt for Nazi collaborators. Their assignment was made even tougher by the complex colonial reality and by tensions with British officials.
Spies in the Congo tells the story of the men -- and one woman -- who were sent on this dangerous wartime mission
ISBN:9781849046381
Author:Susan Williams
God Dies by the Nile by Nawal El Saadawi
Brief Summary
Nawal El Saadawi is the 2007 recipient of the African Literature Association's Fonlon-Nichols Award!
"People have become corrupt everywhere. You can search in vain for justice or true morality. They no longer exist."
Kafr El Teen is a beautiful, sleepy village on the banks of the Nile. Yet at its heart it is tyrannical and corrupt. The Mayor, Sheikh Hamzawi of the mosque, and the Chief of the Village Guard are obsessed by wealth and use and abuse the women of the village, taking them as slaves, marrying them and beating them. Resistance, it seems, is futile.
Zakeya, an ordinary villager, works in the fields by the Nile and watches the world, squatting in the dusty entrance to her house, quietly accepting her fate. It is only when her nieces fall prey to the Mayor that Zakeya becomes enraged by the injustice of her society and possessed by demons. Where is the loving and peaceful God in whom Zakeya believes? Nawal El Saadawi's classic attempt to square religion with a society in which women are respected as equals is as relevant today as ever.
ISBN:9781842778777
Author:Nawal El Saadawi
Female Circumcision The Interplay of ...
Brief Summary
A Kenyan woman theologian--"an insider"--examines arguments for and against the controversial practice of female circumcision.
Based on her interviews with fifty Kenyan women representing Christianity, Islam, African Initiated Churches, and traditional religion, Wangila emphasizes the importance of understanding the gender relationships and cultural beliefs behind the practice and the important role played by religion.
ISBN:9781570757105
Author:Mary Nyangweso Wangila
Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
Brief Summary
In a narrative as mysterious as memory itself – at once both shadowed and luminous – Warlight is a vivid, thrilling novel of violence and love, intrigue and desire. It is 1945, and London is still reeling from the Blitz and years of war. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, are apparently abandoned by their parents, left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth.
They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women with a shared history, all of whom seem determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel.
But are they really what and who they claim to be? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all he didn’t know or understand in that time, and it is this journey – through reality, recollection, and imagination – that is told in this magnificent novel.
ISBN:9781787330726
Author:Michael Ondaatje
When The Walking Defeats You One Mans...
Brief Summary
Deep in the Congo’s Garamba National Park in the dead of night, Joseph Kony – the notorious warlord wanted by the International Criminal Court – made a shocking admission. Loosened by home-made wine, exposing a vulnerability he could never show the world, Kony looked George Omona in the eye, ‘You need to know that if I had a choice I would not be doing this … I wish I could be a man of books, like you.’
Three years earlier George was expelled from one of Uganda’s best schools, just weeks before he was due to graduate with exemplary grades, destroying his dreams of becoming a teacher. In desperation, his uncle found him a role in Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). George’s education and fluent command of English allowed him to rapidly rise through the ranks, eventually becoming one of Kony’s bodyguards, before he finally made his escape.
George’s story – based on many hours of interviews with acknowledged LRA expert Ledio Cakaj – provides a vivid, personal and fascinating insight into the inner workings of the LRA, and the mind of Kony, its self-appointed prophet.
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Ivory Power and Poaching in Africa by...
Brief Summary
Half of Tanzania's elephants have been killed for their ivory since 2007. A similar alarming story can be told of the herds in northern Mozambique and across swathes of central Africa, with forest elephants losing almost two-thirds of their numbers to the tusk trade.
The huge rise in poaching and ivory smuggling in the new millennium has destroyed the hope that the 1989 ivory trade ban had capped poaching and would lead to a long-term fall in demand. But why the new upsurge? The answer is not simple. Since ancient times, large-scale killing of elephants for their tusks has been driven by demand outside Africa's elephant ranges - from the Egyptian pharaohs through Imperial Rome and industrializing Europe and North America to the new wealthy business class of China.
And, who poaches and why do they do it? In recent years lurid press reports have blamed mass poaching on rebel movements and armed militias, especially Somalia's Al Shabaab, tying two together two evils - poaching and terrorism. But does this account stand up to scrutiny? This new and ground-breaking examination of the history and politics of ivory in Africa forensically examines why poaching happens in Africa and why it is corruption, crime and politics, rather than insurgency that we should worry about.
ISBN:9781849046763
Author:Keith Somerville
The Art of Recycling in Kenya by Anne...
Brief Summary
Amidst dumps and slums, street children and artisans search for how to survive, to reclaim and promote their own existence. This publication offers photographs taken in the markets and villages of Kenya, where initiative promoting self-sustenance have developed on the development of experience in exploiting poor and recyclable materials.
The discovery of "poor art”, from children’s toys to the works of craftsmen and artist, is a powerful form of expression and can somewhat and somewhat magical art. Shoes made from discarded rubber, a knife grinder made from a bicycle wheel, an organ made from water pipes, a lamp made from plastic bottle bottoms and a clock made from old flip-flops are a few of the ingenious recycled Kenyan products covered in this fascinating volume.
ISBN:9788881586974
Author:Annelise Della Rosa
Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron
Brief Summary
Running the Rift follows Jean Patrick Nkuba, a gifted Rwandan boy, from the day he knows that running will be his life to the moment he must run to save his life, a ten-year span in which his country is undone by the Hutu-Tutsi tensions. Born a Tutsi, he is thrust into a world where it's impossible to stay apolitical - where the man who used to sell you gifts for your family now spews hatred, where the girl who flirted with you in the lunchroom refuses to look at you, where your Hutu coach is secretly training the very soldiers who will hunt down your family.
Yet in an environment increasingly restrictive for the Tutsi, he holds fast to his dream of becoming Rwanda's first Olympic medal contender in track, a feat he believes might deliver him and his people from this violence. When the killing begins, Jean Patrick is forced to flee, leaving behind the woman, the family, and the country he loves. Finding them again is the race of his life.
This is the third Bellwether Prize winner published by Algonquin. The Bellwether Prize is awarded biennially by Barbara Kingsolver for an unpublished novel that addresses issues of social justice and was previously awarded to The Girl Who Fell from the Sky and Mudbound.
ISBN:9781616201944
Author:Naomi Benaron
A Swamp Full of Dollars Pipelines and...
Brief Summary
A Swamp Full of Dollars: Pipelines and Paramilitaries at Nigeria's Oil Frontier
The largest U.S. trading partner in sub-Saharan Africa, petroleum-rich Nigeria exports half its daily oil production to the United States. Like many African nations with natural resources coveted by the world's superpowers, the country has been shaped by foreign investment and intervention, conflicts among hundreds of ethnic and religious groups, and greed.
Polio has boomed along with petroleum, small villages face off with giant oil companies, and scooter drivers run their own ministates. The oil-rich Niger Delta region at the heart of it all is a trouble spot as hot as the local pepper soup.
Blending vivid reportage, history, and investigative journalism, in A Swamp Full of Dollars journalist Michael Peel tells the story of this extraordinary country, which grows ever more wild and lawless by the day as its refined petroleum pumps through our cities. Through a host of colorful characters--from the Area Boy gangsters of Lagos to a corrupt state governor who stashed money in his London penthouse, from the militants in their swamp forest hideouts to oil company executives--Peel makes the connection between Western energy consumption and the breakdown of the Nigerian state, where the corruption of the haves is matched only by the determination and ingenuity of the have-nots.
What has happened to Nigeria is a stark warning to the United States and other economic powers as they grow increasingly frantic in their search for new oil sources: unbridled plunder eventually rebounds on those who have done the taking.
A Swamp Full of Dollars--shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award--shows that if the Arab world is the precarious eastern battle line in an intensifying world war for crude, then Nigeria has become the tumultuous western front.
ISBN:9781569762868
Author:Michael Peel
Sudan Looks East China India and the ...
Brief Summary
By successfully turning to China, Malaysia and India from the mid-1990s, amidst civil war and political isolation, Khartoum's 'Look East' policy transformed Sudan's economy and foreign relations. Sudan, in turn, has been a key theatre of Chinese, Indian and Malaysian overseas energy investment. What began as economic engagements born of pragmatic necessity later became politicized within Sudan and without, resulting in global attention.
Despite its importance, widespread sustained interest and continuing political controversy, there is no single volume publication examining the rise and nature of Chinese, Malaysian and Indian interests in Sudan, their economic and political consequences, and role in Sudan's foreign relations.
Addressing this gap, this book provides a groundbreaking analysis of Sudan's 'Look East' policy. It offers the first substantive treatment of a subject of fundamental significance within Sudan that, additionally, has become a globally prominent dimension of its changing international politics.
ISBN:9781847010377
Author:Luke A. Patey and Daniel Large
Women and the Informal Economy in Urb...
Brief Summary
Women and the Informal Economy in Urban Africa: From the Margins to the Centre
In this highly original work, Mary Njeri Kinyanjui explores the trajectory of women's movement from the margins of urbanization into the centers of business activities in Nairobi, Kenya and its accompanying implications for urban planning.
While women in much of Africa have struggled to gain urban citizenship, and continue to be weighed down by poor education, low incomes and confinement to domestic responsibilities, a new form of urban dynamism partly informed by the informal economy is now enabling them to manage poverty, create jobs and link women to the circuits of capital and labour.
Relying on social ties, reciprocity, sharing and collaboration, women's informal 'solidarity entrepreneurialism' is taking them away from the margins of business activity and catapulting them into the centre.
Bringing together key issues of gender, economic informality and urban planning in Africa, Kinyanjui demonstrates that women have become a critical factor in the making of a postcolonial city.
ISBN:9781780326306
Author:Mary Njeri Kinyanjui
This Will Be My Undoing Living at the...
Brief Summary
This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America
From one of the fiercest critics writing today, Morgan Jerkins’ highly-anticipated collection of linked essays interweaves her incisive commentary on pop culture, feminism, black history, misogyny, and racism with her own experiences to confront the very real challenges of being a black woman today—perfect for fans of Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists.
Morgan Jerkins is only in her twenties, but she has already established herself as an insightful, brutally honest writer who isn’t afraid of tackling tough, controversial subjects. In This Will Be My Undoing, she takes on perhaps one of the most provocative contemporary topics: What does it mean to "be”—to live as, to exist as—a black woman today? This is a book about black women, but its necessary reading for all Americans.
Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality.
In This Will Be My Undoing, Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large
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The First Century After Beatrice
Brief Summary
A French entomologist, attending a symposium in Cairo, finds a curious kind of bean being on a market stall. It is claimed the beans, derived from the scarab beetle, have magic powers; specifically the power to guarantee the birth of a male infant - and when the entomologist does some research in to the matter, discovering the incidence of female birth has become increasingly rare, he is left in no doubt that the world has entered into a critical phase of its history.
As this beloved daughter Beatrice approaches maturity, the entomologist and his partner question the validity of gender bias, and attempt to redress the growing imbalance before it reaches irreversible proportions.
But in the poverty and famine of the South, where male children can mean the difference between survival and starvation, the popularity of the scarab beans is already taking devastating effect.
ISBN:9780349105994
Author:Amin Maalouf
The Age of Magic
Brief Summary
This novel takes us on a journey, a magical, and a literal one. A tightly knit group of filmmakers travel from Paris together to make a documentary. Unknown to themselves they carry a lot of unwanted baggage - fear, anger, jealousy, love.
When they arrive in an idyllic Swiss village ringed by mountains and reflected in a lake, they discover a haunted world that will compel them to confront the demons they have been trying to escape.
A mind-blowingly beautiful book, full of unexpected, poetic and metaphysical revelations.
ISBN:9781784081478
Author:Ben Okri
Africas Third Liberation The New Sear...
Brief Summary
Between 2000 and 2010, six of the ten fastest-growing economies worldwide were African. In this favorable environment, how do we make sure jobs and poverty reduction follow? Now is the time for African countries to consider how economic growth and political liberalization should reinforce each other.
Africa has experienced two liberations: the first from colonial and racist regimes and the second from the autocrats who often followed foreign rule. At the end of the 1970s, just three African countries regularly held multiparty elections; more than 40 do today. Africa’s political evolution points to a third liberation, one from political economies characterized by graft, crony capitalism, rent-seeking, elitism and social inequality.
This liberation will open up the economic space in which business can compete, a necessary condition for expanding employment. The debate is about how Africa can realize its economic potential and avoid the disappointments of the first 50 years of independence. Using examples from Central and South America, South-East and South Asia, and the Middle East, the authors examine what means are best to match political liberalization with growth.
ISBN:9780143528883
Author:Greg Mills and Jeffrey Herbst
Out of Eden
Brief Summary
Book Summary of Out Of Eden: The Peopling Of The World In 1988, "Newsweek" headlined the discovery that everyone alive on the earth can trace their maternal DNA back to one woman who lived in Africa 150,000 years ago.
It was thought that humans populated the world through a series of migratory waves from their African homeland.
This book reveals the revolutionary theory about our origins.
ISBN:9781841198941
Author:Stephen Oppenheimer