The Ropes That Bind: Based on a True Story of Child Sexual Abuse


Tracy Stopler - 2016
    Blaming herself for the heinous crime that happened because she didn't "go straight to school," Tali is bound by invisible chains of secrecy, shame, and self-imposed isolation. Her harrowing and illuminating journey to recovery begins in her twenties with the support of her mentor, Dr. Daniel Benson, with whom she experiences deep love and then heartbreak. Feeling lost, Tali travels to Israel where Kabbalah sparks her spiritualism, and then to Africa where an arduous climb up Mount Kilimanjaro ignites a newfound feeling of empowerment. Only when Tali goes back to the Bronx and learns that her unreported crime scene has become the site of a rehabilitation center, does she understand that there is one more road to travel prior to reaching freedom.

The Upside of Down: How Chaos and Uncertainty Breed Opportunity in South Africa


Bruce Whitfield - 2020
    You are wasting your time.In a world of fake news, deep-fakes, manipulated feeds of information and divisive social-media agendas, it's easy to believe that our time is the most challenging in human history. It's just not true.It is a time of extraordinary opportunity. But only if you have the right mindset. Fear of the future breeds inaction and leads to strategic paralysis. We put off decisions until we can have certainty. We look for signals. We wait. And while we do that, the world moves on around us.Problem-solvers thrive in chaotic and uncertain times because they act to change their future. Winners recognise that in a world of growing uncertainty, you need to resort to actions on things you can control.And the only things over which you have absolute control are your attitude and your mindset. These, in turn, determine the actions you will take and that will define your future.A robust mindset is the one common characteristic Bruce Whitfield has identified in two decades of interrogating how South Africa's billionaires and start-up mavericks think differently. They are not naive Pollyannas. They don't ignore risk or hope that problems will go away. They constantly measure, manage, consider and weigh up opportunities in a tumultuous sea of uncertainty and find ways around obstacles.If, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller suggests, the stories we tell affect economic outcomes, then we need to tell different stories amidst the noise and haste of a rapidly evolving world.

Empires in the Sun: The Struggle for the Mastery of Africa


Lawrence James - 2016
    His narrative is laced with the experiences of participants and onlookers and introduces the men and women who, for better or worse, stamped their wills on Africa. The continent was a magnet for the high-minded, the adventurous, the philanthropic, the unscrupulous. Visionary pro-consuls rubbed shoulders with missionaries, explorers, soldiers, big-game hunters, entrepreneurs, and physicians.Between 1830 and 1945, Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, Italy and the United States exported their languages, laws, culture, religions, scientific and technical knowledge and economic systems to Africa. The colonial powers imposed administrations designed to bring stability and peace to a continent that appeared to lack both. The justification for occupation was emancipation from slavery—and the common assumption that late nineteenth-century Europe was the summit of civilization.By 1945 a transformed continent was preparing to take charge of its own affairs, a process of decolonization that took a quick twenty years. This magnificent history also pauses to ask: what did not happen and why?

The Last Expedition: Stanley's Mad Journey Through the Congo


Daniel Liebowitz - 2005
    Traces Henry Morton Stanley's three-year African expedition that was launched with the official intention of rescuing Emin Pasha, governor of the southern Sudan, in an account that reveals Stanley's secret agenda of territorial expansion.

Into Africa


Thomas Sterling - 2016
    But neither that simple drawing nor his matter-of-fact description gave Caillié's countrymen a sufficiently colorful picture to match their preconceptions of how Africa should look. They turned their backs on the young explorer, ignored his accomplishments, and let him die neglected. Here are the epic adventures of the European explorers who opened Africa – from Mongo Park and Vasco da Gama to Francis Burton and David Livingstone and Henry Stanley.

Victoria's Walk


Christopher Nicole - 1986
    Having spent six years in Africa with her English missionary husband, she knows that the desert is not as empty of water as most suppose, if one knows where to look. Thus she leads her party on an epic two hundred mile walk to gain the fertile grassland to the south. To achieve this, she must drive them ever onwards, quell two mutinies and watch some of her party die. Their lives are saved when they reach an oasis, but to gain true safety they must now face Arab slaver traders, bloodthirsty Ashanti warriors, and the all-consuming forest. Victoria's walk has hardly begun. Set at the turn of the 20th Century, when the British Empire was approaching its zenith, with a handful of administrators and soldiers endeavoring to rule vast areas and dominate peoples they did not understand, VICTORIA'S WALK is a tale of the human spirit at its highest and lowest, its most courageous and its most bestial, of one woman's unceasing fortitude, of the men who loved her, and the women who hated her.

Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror


Mahmood Mamdani - 2009
    In Saviors and Survivors, Mahmood Mamdani explains how the conflict in Darfur began as a civil war (1987—89) between nomadic and peasant tribes over fertile land in the south, triggered by a severe drought that had expanded the Sahara Desert by more than sixty miles in forty years; how British colonial officials had artificially tribalized Darfur, dividing its population into “native” and “settler” tribes and creating homelands for the former at the expense of the latter; how the war intensified in the 1990s when the Sudanese government tried unsuccessfully to address the problem by creating homelands for tribes without any. The involvement of opposition parties gave rise in 2003 to two rebel movements, leading to a brutal insurgency and a horrific counterinsurgency–but not to genocide, as the West has declared.Mamdani also explains how the Cold War exacerbated the twenty-year civil war in neighboring Chad, creating a confrontation between Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi (with Soviet support) and the Reagan administration (allied with France and Israel) that spilled over into Darfur and militarized the fighting. By 2003, the war involved national, regional, and global forces, including the powerful Western lobby, who now saw it as part of the War on Terror and called for a military invasion dressed up as “humanitarian intervention.”Incisive and authoritative, Saviors and Survivors will radically alter our understanding of the crisis in Darfur.

African Experience: From "Lucy" to Mandela


Kenneth P. Vickery - 2006
    Finding the "Lost Continent" 2. Africa's Many Natural Environments 3. A Virtual Tour of the Great Land 4. The Cradle of Humankind 5. Crops, Cattle, Iron-Taming a Continent 6. Kinship and Community-Societies Take Shape 7. Like Nothing Else-The Ancient Nile Valley 8. Soul and Spirit-Religion in Africa 9. Ethiopia-Outpost of Christianity 10. West Africa's "Golden Age" 11. The Swahili Commercial World 12. Great Zimbabwe and the Cities of the South 13. The Atlantic Slave Trade-The Scope 14. The Atlantic Slave Trade-The Impact 15. South Africa-The Dutch Cape Colony 16. South Africa-The Zulu Kingdom 17. South Africa-The Frontier and Unification 18. South Africa-Diamonds and Gold 19. Prelude to the "Scramble for Africa" 20. European Conquest and African Resistance 21. Colonial Africa-New Realities 22. Colonial Africa-Comparisons and Change 23. The Lion Awakens-The Rise of Nationalism 24. The Peaceful Paths to Independence 25. The Congo-Promise and Pain 26. Segregation to Apartheid in South Africa 27. The Armed Struggles for Independence 28. The First Taste of Freedom 29. The Taste Turns Sour 30. The World Turns Down-The "Permanent Crisis" 31. A New Dawn? The Democratic Revival 32. The South African Miracle 33. The Unthinkable-The Rwanda Genocide 34. The New Plague-HIV/AIDS in Africa 35. Zimbabwe-Background to Contemporary Crisis 36. Africa Found

Africans: The History of a Continent


John Iliffe - 1995
    Africans have been pioneers struggling against disease and nature, and their social, economic and political institutions have been designed to ensure their survival. In the context of medical progress and other twentieth-century innovations, however, the same institutions have bred the most rapid population growth the world has ever seen. The history of the continent is thus a single story binding living Africans to their earliest human ancestors. John Iliffe was Professor of African History at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of St. John's College. He is the author of several books on Africa, including A modern history of Tanganyika and The African poor: A history, which was awarded the Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association of the United States. Both books were published by Cambridge University Press.

Khartoum: The Ultimate Imperial Adventure


Michael Asher - 2005
    The story begins with the massacre of the 11,000 strong Hicks Pasha column in 1883. Sent to evacuate the country, British hero General Gordon was surrounded and murdered in Khartoum by an army of dervishes led by the Mahdi. The relief mission arrived 2 days too late. The result was a national scandal that shocked the Queen and led to the fall of the British government. Twelve years later it was the brilliant Herbert Kitchener who struck back. Achieving the impossible he built a railway across the desert to transport his troops to the final devastating confrontation at Omdurman in 1898. Desert explorer and author Michael Asher has reconstructed this classic tale in vivid detail. Having covered every inch of the ground and examined all eyewitness reports, he brings to bear new evidence questioning several accepted aspects of the story. The result is an account that sheds new light on the most riveting tale of honour, courage, revenge and savagery of late Victorian times.

After Mandela: The Struggle for Freedom in Post-Apartheid South Africa


Douglas Foster - 2012
    Recent works have focused primarily on Nelson Mandela's transcendent story. But Douglas Foster, a leading South Africa authority with early, unprecedented access to President Zuma and to the next generation in the Mandela family, traces the nation's entire post-apartheid arc, from its celebrated beginnings under "Madiba" to Thabo Mbeki's tumultuous rule to the ferocious battle between Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. Foster tells this story not only from the point of view of the emerging black elite but also, drawing on hundreds of rare interviews over a six-year period, from the perspectives of ordinary citizens, including an HIV-infected teenager living outside Johannesburg and a homeless orphan in Cape Town. This is the long-awaited, revisionist account of a country whose recent history has been not just neglected but largely ignored by the West.

A Hunter's Wanderings in Africa


Frederick Courteney Selous - 1881
    His real-life adventures inspired Sir H. Rider Haggard to create the fictional Allan Quatermain character. Selous was also a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, Cecil Rhodes and Frederick Russell Burnham. He was pre-eminent within a select group of big game hunters that included Abel Chapman and Arthur Henry Neumann. Going to South Africa when he was 19, he travelled from the Cape of Good Hope to Matabeleland, which he reached early in 1872, and where (according to his own account) he was granted permission by Lobengula, King of the Ndebele, to shoot game anywhere in his dominions.From then until 1890, with a few brief intervals spent in England, Selous hunted and explored over the then little-known regions north of the Transvaal and south of the Congo Basin, shooting elephants and collecting specimens of all kinds for museums and private collections. His travels added greatly to the knowledge of the country now known as Zimbabwe. He made valuable ethnological investigations, and throughout his wanderings—often among people who had never previously seen a white man—he maintained cordial relations with the chiefs and tribes, winning their confidence and esteem, notably so in the case of Lobengula. In 1890, Selous entered the service of the British South Africa Company, at the request of magnate Cecil Rhodes, acting as guide to the pioneer expedition to Mashonaland. Over 400 miles of road were constructed through a country of forest, mountain and swamp, and in two and a half months Selous took the column safely to its destination. He then went east to Manica, concluding arrangements which brought the country there under British control. Coming to England in December 1892, he was awarded the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in recognition of his extensive explorations and surveys. Chapter I. - Land at Algoa Bay - Diamond Fields - Trading Trip through Griqualand - The Chief Manchuran - Batlapin Village - Bushman's Lair - Klas Lucas, the Koranna Chief - Bechuanas at Lange Chapter II. - Seventy-eight Elephants shot - Chief, Montsua - Secheli - Bamangwato First Giraffe-hunt - Lost in the Veldt - Tati Gold Fields - Mashuna Diggings Chapter III. - Massacre of a Tribe Lobengula, King of the Matabele - Umziligazi - Slaughter of the "Headmen" - Battle of Zwang Indaba - Terrible Adventure with a Lion - Mashunas Chapter IV. - Eland shot - Abundance of Game - Rain - Hardship - "Bill" and the Crocodile Chapter V. -"Inxwāla" Dance - Matabele War Dress - Black Rhinoceros - Bull Elephants - Linquāsi Valley - Hunting in the "Fly - Varieties of Fauna - Sable Antelope - A "Skerm" - A Grand Elephant-hunt - Narrow Escape of a Kafir ... continues with... Chapter VI - Chapter XXIX This book published in 1881 has been reformatted for the Kindle and may contain an occasional defect from the original publication or from the reformatting. .

When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa


Robert H. Bates - 2008
    States failed, governments became predators, and citizens took up arms. In When Things Fell Apart, Robert H. Bates advances an explanation of state failure in Africa. In so doing, he not only plumbs the depths of the continent's late-century tragedy, but also the logic of political order and the foundations of the state. This book covers a wide range of territory by drawing on materials from Rwanda, Sudan, Liberia, and Congo. Written to be accessible to the general reader, it is nonetheless a must-read for scholars and policy makers concerned with political conflict and state failure.

Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century


Carolyn Nordstrom - 2004
    She captures the human face of the front lines, revealing both the visible and the hidden realities of war in the twenty-first century. Shadows of War is grounded in ethnographic research carried out at the epicenters of political violence on several continents. Its pages are populated not only with the perpetrators and victims of war but also with the scoundrels, silent heroes, and average families who live their lives in the midst of explosive violence. War reconfigures our most basic notions of humanity, Nordstrom demonstrates. This book, of crucial importance at the present moment, shows that war is enmeshed in struggles over the very foundations of the sovereign state, the crafting of economic empires both legal and illegal, and innovative searches for peace. Nordstrom describes the multi-trillion-dollar international financial networks that support warfare. She traces the entangled routes by which illegal drugs, precious gems, weapons, basic food supplies, and pharmaceuticals are moved by an international cast of businesspeople, profiteers, and black-market operators. Shadows of War demonstrates how the experiences of both the architects of war and of ordinary people are deleted from media accounts and replaced with stories about soldiers, weapons, and territory. For the first time, this book retrieves from the shadows the faces of those whose stories seldom reach the light of international recognition.

Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests and Captivity in the 17th-Century Mediterranean


Adrian Tinniswood - 2010
    From the coast of Southern Europe to Morocco and the Ottoman states of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, Christian and Muslim seafarers met in bustling ports to swap religions, to battle and to trade goods and slaves - raiding as far as Iceland and New England in search of their human currency. Studying the origins of these men, their culture and practices - from pirate etiquette to intimidation tactics - Adrian Tinniswood expertly recreates the twilight world of the corsairs in fascinating detail, and uncovers a truly remarkable clash of civilisations.Pirates of Barbary draws on an incredible wealth of material, from furious royal proclamations to the private letters of pirates and their victims, as well as recent Islamic accounts to provide a new perspective on the corsairs, both as criminals and as devout warriors engaged in a battle against European incursions. The result is a kaleidoscopic image of a wild and exotic people, place and time, and a fascinating insight into what it meant to sacrifice all you have for a life so violent, so uncertain, and so alien that it set you apart from the rest of mankind.