Research in International Studies, Africa Series - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

The Sacred Door and Other Stories

Sat, 01 Dec 2007

The Sacred Door and Other Stories
Cameroon Folktales of the Beba

By Makuchi

The Sacred Door and Other Stories: Cameroon Folktales of the Beba offers readers a selection of folktales infused with riddles, proverbs, songs, myths, and legends, using various narrative techniques that capture the vibrancy of Beba oral traditions. Makuchi retells the stories that she heard at home when she was growing up in her native Cameroon.

The collection of thirty-four folktales of the Beba showcases a wide variety of stories that capture the richness and complexities of an agrarian society’s oral literature and traditions. Revenge, greed, and deception are among the themes that frame the story lines in both new and familiar ways. In the title story, a poor man finds himself elevated to king. The condition for his continued success is that he not open the sacred door. This tale of temptation, similar to the story of Pandora’s box, concludes with the question, “What would you have done?”

Makuchi relates the stories her mother told her so that readers can make connections between African and North American oral narrative traditions. These tales reinforce the commonalities of our human experiences without discounting our differences.

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Swahili beyond the Boundaries

Thu, 15 Mar 2007

Swahili beyond the Boundaries
Literature, Language, and Identity

By Alamin Mazrui

Africa is a marriage of cultures: African and Asian, Islamic and Euro-Christian. Nowhere is this fusion more evident than in the formation of Swahili, Eastern Africa’s lingua franca, and its cultures. Swahili beyond the Boundaries: Literature, Language, and Identity addresses the moving frontiers of Swahili literature under the impetus of new waves of globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These momentous changes have generated much theoretical debate on several literary fronts, as Swahili literature continues to undergo transformation in the mill of human creativity.

Swahili literature is a hybrid that is being reconfigured by a conjuncture of global and local forces. As the interweaving of elements of the colonizer and the colonized, this hybrid formation provides a representation of cultural difference that is said to constitute a “third space,” blurring existing boundaries and calling into question established identitarian categorizations. This cultural dialectic is clearly evident in the Swahili literary experience as it has evolved in the crucible of the politics of African cultural production.

However, Swahili beyond the Boundaries demonstrates that, from the point of view of Swahili literature, while hybridity evokes endless openness on questions of home and identity, it can simultaneously put closure on specific forms of subjectivity. In the process of this contestation, a new synthesis may be emerging that is poised to subject Swahili literature to new kinds of challenges in the politics of identity, compounded by the dynamics and counterdynamics of post–Cold War globalization.

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Empire in Africa

Wed, 15 Feb 2006

Empire in Africa
Angola and Its Neighbors

By David Birmingham

The dark years of European fascism left their indelible mark on Africa. As late as the 1970s, Angola was still ruled by white autocrats, whose dictatorship was eventually overthrown by black nationalists who had never experienced either the rule of law or participatory democracy.

Empire in Africa takes the long view of history and asks whether the colonizing ventures of the Portuguese can bear comparison with those of the Mediterranean Ottomans or those experienced by Angola's neighbors in the Belgian Congo, French Equatorial Africa, or the Dutch colonies at the Cape of Good Hope and in the Transvaal.

David Birmingham takes the reader through Angola's troubled past, which included endemic warfare for the first twenty-five years of independence, and examines the fact that in the absence of a viable neocolonial referee such as Britain or France, the warring parties turned to Cold War superpowers for a supply of guns. For a decade Angola replaced Vietnam as a field in which an international war by proxy was conducted.

Empire in Africa explains how this African nation went from colony to independence, how in the 1990s the Cold War legacy turned to civil war, and how peace finally dawned in 2002.

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Not White Enough, Not Black Enough

Thu, 17 Nov 2005

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough
Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community

By Mohamed Adhikari

The concept of Colouredness—being neither white nor black—has been pivotal to the brand of racial thinking particular to South African society. The nature of Coloured identity and its heritage of oppression has always been a matter of intense political and ideological contestation.

Between Black and White: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community is the first systematic study of Coloured identity, its history, and its relevance to South African national life. Mohamed Adhikari engages with the debates and controversies thrown up by the identity’s troubled existence and challenges much of the conventional wisdom associated with it. A combination of wide-ranging thematic analyses and detailed case studies illustrates how Colouredness functioned as a social identity from the time of its emergence in the late nineteenth century through its adaptation to the postapartheid environment.

Adhikari demonstrates how the interplay of marginality, racial hierarchy, assimilationist aspirations, negative racial stereotyping, class divisions, and ideological conflicts helped mold people’s sense of Colouredness over the past century. Knowledge of this history, and of the social and political dynamic that informed the articulation of a separate Coloured identity, is vital to an understanding of present-day complexities in South Africa.

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Negotiating Power and Privilege

Mon, 01 Nov 2004

Negotiating Power and Privilege
Career Igbo Women in Contemporary Nigeria

By Philomina E. Okeke

Even with a university education, the Igbo women of southeastern Nigeria face obstacles that prevent them from reaching their professional and personal potentials. Negotiating Power and Privilege is a study of their life choices and the embedded patriarchy and other obstacles in postcolonial Africa barring them from fulfillment.

Philomina E. Okeke recorded life-history interviews and discussions during the 1990s with educated women of differing ages and professions. Her interviews expose both familiar and surprising aspects of the women's experience—their victories and compromise—within their families, marriages, and workplaces. Okeke explores the many factors that have shaped women's access to sponsorship and promotion in their quest to join men as partners in nation building.

Negotiating Power and Privilege captures the voices of African female professionals and vividly portrays the women's continuous negotiation as wives, mothers, single women, and workers. It shows the inherent limitations of contemporary policies in developing nations that often prescribe secondary and advanced education for women as a panacea for every social ill. It is also an original and important contribution to African studies, gender studies, development studies, education policy, and sociology. This engagingly written book will appeal to a wide audience, ranging from undergraduate students to scholars and professionals.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Negotiating+Power+and+Privilege.
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Portugal and Africa

Wed, 28 Jul 2004

Portugal and Africa

By David Birmingham

Portugal was the first European nation to assert itself aggressively in African affairs. David Birmingham's Portugal and Africa, a collection of uniquely accessible historical essays, surveys this colonial encounter from its earliest roots. The Portuguese established sugar plantations on Africa's offshore islands and built factories on the beaches in the fifteenth century, but Professor Birmingham explains that their focus shifted to regions where medieval African miners had discovered deep seams of gold ore. Later, when even richer mines and more fertile lands were captured from the native peoples of the Americas, Portuguese ships became the great "slave bridge" that spanned the Atlantic and ferried captive black workers to the colonies of the New World.

Portugal lost its major mining claims in Africa to the British, but it left a legacy of a new pattern of white settler colonization based on American-style plantations. The blending of European and African cultures and races led to the emergence of elite communities, from the Kongo princes of the seventeenth century to the creolized generals of today.

Portugal and Africa focuses extensively on Angola to cast new light on the final years of the colonial experience and its traumatic legacies. After 1950, Portuguese Angola became one of the most dynamic of Africa's colonies and the largest white colony outside of Algeria or South Africa. Angola's eventual collapse in a series of wars had devastating results. Birmingham brings the terror and devastation to life in a series of powerful chapters that are a model of disciplined scholarship and informed passion.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Portugal+and+Africa.
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The Children of Africa Confront AIDS

Tue, 28 Oct 2003

The Children of Africa Confront AIDS
From Vulnerability to Possibility

Edited by Arvind Singhal and W. Stephen Howard

AIDS is now the leading cause of death in Africa, where twenty-eight million people are HIV-positive, and where some twelve million children have lost one or both parents to AIDS. In Zimbabwe, 45 percent of children under the age of five are HIV-positive, and the epidemic has shortened life expectancy by twenty-two years. A fifteen-year-old in Botswana or South Africa has a one-in-two chance of dying of AIDS. AIDS deaths are so widespread in sub-Saharan Africa that small children now play a new game called “Funerals.”

The Children of Africa Confront AIDS depicts the reality of how African children deal with the AIDS epidemic, and how the discourse of their vulnerability affects acts of coping and courage. A project of the Institute for the African Child at Ohio University, The Children of Africa Confront AIDS cuts across disciplines and issues to focus on the world's most marginalized population group, the children of Africa.

Editors Arvind Singhal and Stephen Howard join conversations between humanitarian and political activists and academics, asking, “What shall we do?” Such discourse occurs in African contexts ranging from a social science classroom in Botswana to youth groups in Kenya and Ghana. The authors describe HIV/AIDS in its macro contexts of vulnerable children and the continent's democratization movements and also in its national contexts of civil conflict, rural poverty, youth organizations, and agencies working on the ground.

Singhal, Howard, and other contributors draw on compelling personal experience in descriptions of HIV/AIDS interventions for children in difficult circumstances and present thoughtful insights into data gathered from surveys and observations concerning this terrible epidemic.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Children+of+Africa+Confront+AIDS.
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Broken Lives and Other Stories

Fri, 01 Aug 2003

Broken Lives and Other Stories

By Anthonia C. Kalu

In her startling collection of short stories, Broken Lives and Other Stories, Anthonia C. Kalu creates a series of memorable characters who struggle to hold displaced but dynamic communities together in a country that is at war with itself.

Broken Lives and Other Stories presents a portrait of the ordinary women, children, and men whose lives have been battered by war in their homeland. Written in response to the Nigerian Civil War, known on the Igbo side as Ogu Biafra—the Biafran War—this collection focuses on the everyday conditions of the local people and how their personal situations became entangled in national crises. The stories capture a diversity of issues, from the implications of self-rule and the presence of soldiers among civilians, to masquerades, air raids, and rape.

Through her riveting narratives, Kalu draws the reader into the depths of some of Africa’s most troubling issues, such as the concern for safety during the frequent outbreaks of hostilities, which can range from civil unrest to armed combat. How do young people, women, and the elderly cope during those crises? Are the struggles for national political power greater than the everyday struggle for decent living by the person on the street?

While conveying the vitality and joy of Africa's women and youth, Broken Lives and Other Stories also examines the impact of the brain drain caused by wars and instability within the continent itself. Both the war against women and women’s constant war to survive in contemporary Africa are brought into sharp focus throughout these stories.

For readers interested in the last thirty-five years of unrest across Africa, this collection is essential reading.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Broken+Lives+and+Other+Stories.
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Voices from Madagascar/Voix de Madagascar

Tue, 01 Apr 2003

Voices from Madagascar/Voix de Madagascar
An Anthology of Contemporary Francophone Literature/Anthologie de littérature francophone contemporaine

Edited by Jacques Bourgeacq and Liliane Ramarosoa

There is currently in Madagascar a rich literary production (short stories, poetry, novels, plays) that has not yet reached the United States for lack of diffusion outside the country. Until recently, Madagascar suffered from political isolation resulting from its breakup with France in the 1970s and the eighteen years of Marxism that followed.

With little hope that their voices would be heard outside the island, writers nevertheless have continued to express themselves in French (alongside a literature written in the Malagasy language). Malagasy literature in French had begun in the colonial era with three poets: Jean–Joseph Rabearivelo, Jacques Rabemananjara, and Flavien Ranaivo, all three presented in Léopold Senghor’s celebrated Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (1948).

More recently, although a few Malagasy writers living outside the country have been published in France, the bulk of Malagasy literature today has remained largely unpublished, circulating locally mostly in manuscript form. Voices from Madagascar will bring a wide selection of these texts, both in French and in English, to the North American public.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/0896802183.
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The Struggle for Meaning

Sun, 15 Dec 2002

The Struggle for Meaning
Reflections on Philosophy, Culture, and Democracy in Africa

By Paulin J. Hountondji

The Struggle for Meaning is a landmark publication by one of African philosophy's leading figures, Paulin J. Hountondji, best known for his critique of ethnophilosophy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In this volume, he responds with autobiographical and philosophical reflection to the dialogue and controversy he has provoked. He discusses the ideas, rooted in the work of such thinkers as Husserl and Hountondji's former teachers Derrida, Althusser, and Ricoeur, that helped shape his critique.

Applying his philosophical ideas to the critical issues of democracy, culture, and development in Africa today, he addresses three crucial topics: the nexus between scientific extraversion and economic dependence; the nature of endogenous traditions of thought and their relationship with modern science; and the implications--for political pluralism and democracy--of the emergence of "philosophies of subject" in Africa.

While the book's immediate concern is with Africa, the densely theoretical nature of its analyses, and its bearing on current postmodern theories of the "other," will make this timely and elegant translation of great interest to many disciplines, especially ethnic, gender, and multicultural studies.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Struggle+for+Meaning.
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