Best of
Africa

1979

The Joys of Motherhood


Buchi Emecheta - 1979
    Nnu Ego is a woman who gives all her energy, money and everything she has to raising her children - leaving her little time to make friends.

A Dry White Season


André P. Brink - 1979
    A simple, apolitical man, he believes in the essential fairness of the South African government and its policies—until the sudden arrest and subsequent "suicide" of a black janitor from Du Toit's school. Haunted by new questions and desperate to believe that the man's death was a tragic accident, Du Toit undertakes an investigation into the terrible affair—a quest for the truth that will have devastating consequences for the teacher and his family, as it draws him into a lethal morass of lies, corruption, and murder.

African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms


John M. Chernoff - 1979
    . . . Not many scholars will ever be able to achieve the kind of synthesis of 'doing' and 'writing about' their subject matter that Chernoff has achieved, but he has given us an excellent illustration of what is possible."—Chet Creider, Culture"Chernoff develops a brilliant and penetrating musicological essay that is, at the same time, an intensely personal and even touching account of musical and cultural discovery that anyone with an interest in Africa can and should read. . . . No other writing comes close to approaching Chernoff's ability to convey a feeling of how African music 'works'"—James Koetting, Africana Journal"Four stars. One of the few books I know of that talks of the political, social, and spiritual meanings of music. I was moved. It was so nice I read it twice."—David Byrne of "Talking Heads"The companion cassette tape has 44 examples of the music discussed in the book. It consists of field recordings illustrating cross-rhythms, multiple meters, call and response forms, etc.

Unity and Struggle


Amilcar Cabral - 1979
    Cabral launched the Partido Africano da Independência de Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC) in 1956, and, by 1973, when he was assassinated, his movement had effectively defeated the Portuguese colonialists. As Basil Davidson states in his introduction, "Cabral can be recognized even now as being among the great figures of our time. We do not need to wait for history's judgment to tell us that. The evidence is available. Among this evidence are the texts that follow here."

African Art in Motion


Robert Farris Thompson - 1979
    Textiles, sculptures, masks, costumes, and a variety of implements and musical instruments are lavishly illustrated and interpreted from the aesthetic that in Africa, 'icon' and 'act' are one, that African art can best be understood in the context of dance.The work is divided into three sections:(1) a list of highly abstract concepts such as 'ephebism' and 'coolness' which Thompson contends underlie African aesthetics;(2) an extended analysis of the significance of sculptures standing, sitting, riding, kneeling, supporting, and balancing; and(3) descriptions of six different dance events combining masks, poetry, music, and religious ritual, and their effects on their audiences.Representing scholarship and writing at its best, the work is a major contribution to the study of the arts as they are conceived, combined, and criticized by Africans.

Travels with Fortune - an African Adventure


Christina Dodwell - 1979
    She was twenty-four when she and three companions crossed the Sahara by Landrover. But the two men of the party took the car and left her and her friend Lesley stranded in the middle of Nigeria.Recounted with modesty and good humour, it is a story of great tenacity and incredible courage. Christina travelled by horse, camel, on foot, hitching lifts from time to time—even hailing passing airplanes out of the sky!The author shared meals with cannibals, was treated by witch-doctors, learned to pan gold, and was imprisoned on a boat by a sexually perverse sea captain. She and her friend journeyed almost a thousand miles down the Congo River in a dugout canoe: the first women in the world to accomplish such a hazardous journey.This is a truly extraordinary travel book. It is a brilliant account of Africa, its sights and smells, its many races, seen through the eyes of an English girl. It is also the story of the education of innocence, a deeply honest self-portrait of Christina Dodwell’s reactions to herself in Africa—and how Africa changed her.

Myths and Legends of Southern Africa


Penny Miller - 1979
    This is its great fascination. Living here today are people whose culture is still in the late stone age, others who live in the iron age, and yet others belonging to the age of the atom. These are people from the east, from the west, from the north, people like the Bushmen who were here so far back that they always seem part of the sundrenched landscape.In the varied scenic setting of Southern Africa, all these people in widely different ways confronted nature, come to metaphysical terms with the wonders of the land around them, devised their own explanations, myths, legends and romances about the mystery of nature, their own beginnings, the parallel community of ghosts, demons, fairies, monsters and other creatures, good and bad, of the dream world.

The Political Economy of Race and Class in South Africa


Bernard M. Magubane - 1979
    

I Live On Fruit


Essie Honiball - 1979
    

Yoruba Beliefs and Sacrificial Rites


J. Omosade Awolalu - 1979
    This serious study gives valuable material for other approaches to religion-comparative, scientific and theological in addition to providing a point to reference for further studies of socio-religious change and a glimpse into the potential future of the Yoruba religion.

The Cockroach Dance


Meja Mwangi - 1979
    Dusman Gonzaga lives in a squalid tenement building overrun with cockroaches and inhabited by strange characters. His is a world of poverty, fights, bar women and visits to a doctor who doesn't understand him.

White Man, We Want to Talk to


Denis Herbstein - 1979
    

The Past is Another Country: Rhodesia 1890-1979


Martin Meredith - 1979
    The Past is Another Country is a meticulous and authoritative account of 15 years of blunderingly tortuous efforts to bring Rhodesia to legal independence. It is a genuinely tragic story chronicled with the critical detachment of a historian and the readability of a journalist. Meredith shows the skilful manoeuvring by which Ian Smith retained the support of the white population whilst keeping the country economically afloat and holding at bay a succession of politicians and possible mediators from Harold Wilson to Henry Kissinger, from 'Tiny' Rowland to Andrew Young. But it was Smith's intransigence in negotiation that galvanized the black population, despite the internal divisions among its leaders, into warfare. Central to this book is the account of how the guerilla movement developed after years of failure and incompetence into the force which turned Rhodesia into Zimbabwe.

A History of the Sudan: From the Coming of Islam to the Present Day


P.M. Holt - 1979
    This extended coverage considers the last years of Jaafar Nimeiri's government to his fall from power in 1985; the subsequent transitional military regime; the return to parliamentary rule, and the current attempts to establish an Islamic state under a renewed military regime. More than a political narrative, this book shows how the modern Sudan has been shaped by three key elements in its history: the influence of the Ottoman Empire; the impact of British domination; and, above all else, the enduring indigenous tradition of the region, produced by the intermingling of its African and Arab Muslim inheritance.

Greek Coins and Their Values Volume 2: Asia and Africa


David R. Sear - 1979
    The primary arrangement is geographical (clockwise around the Mediterranean basin) and the listings for Asia Minor are divided between Archaic issues (before circa 480 BC) and Classical and Hellenistic (later 5th century down to 1st century BC).

Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa


John Biggers - 1979
    The deeply felt words and pictures in this book record his discoveries. Biggers provides an intimate view of "the web of life" in West Africa. In his own words, "My intention was to discover and to portray what was intrinsically African. I was not interested in showing the degree to which Africans measured up to American or European standards in materialistic acquisitions; I was solely interested in capturing something universal in the many . . . washerwomen, farming women, fishermen, lumber workers, market women, mothers, fathers, and children. "I envisioned three general geographical areas that offered contrasts: life near the sea, life in the forest region, and life on the open plains. Yet I wanted to show in these contrasting areas a thread of homogeneity that held the people together, that linked them in their struggle, in their destiny. The eighty-nine drawings in this book represent my effort."

Toads of War


Eddie Iroh - 1979
    

A Modern History of Tanganyika


John Iliffe - 1979
    After introductory chapters on the nineteenth century, Dr Iliffe concentrates on the colonial period, and especially on economic, social and intellectual change among Africans as the core of their colonial experience and the basis of their political behaviour. Particularl attention is paid to the consequences for small-scale societies of their incorporation into the international order; the impact of capitlaism and the emergence of capitalist relationships and attitudes; African attempts to defend or reform indigenous institutions and to organise movements of protest or revolt against European control; the successive formation and dissolution of a specifically colonial society; and the effects of economic change on Tanganyika's ecology in modern times. The book brings together the research which scholars of many nationalities have carried out in Tanzania over the last twenty years, and attempts to synthesise their findings with the evidence available from African and European records in Tanzania, Britain and Germany.

The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1840


Richard Elphick - 1979
    Part one deals with the major groups in the colony: chapter one with the Khoisan indigenes, chapter two with the free European agriculturalists (freeburghers), and chapter three with the Asian and African slaves. The final chapter of part one describes several processes of interaction among these three groups and introduces a fourth group, the free blacks.