In 1990, when thousands of teenage fighters, including young men wearing women's clothing and bizarre objects of decoration, laid siege to the capital, the world took notice. Since then Liberia has been through devastating civil upheaval. What began as a civil conflict, has spread to other West African nations.Eschewing popular stereotypes and simple explanations, Stephen Ellis traces the history of the civil war that has blighted Liberia in recent years and looks at its political, ethnic and cultural roots. He focuses on the role religion and ritual have played in shaping and intensifying this brutal war. In this edition, with a new preface by the author, Ellis provides a current picture of Liberia and details how much of the same problems still exist.

    Ben's most thought-provoking works. This critical examination of the history, beliefs and myths, remains instructive and fresh. By highlighting the African influences and roots of these religions, Dr. Ben reveals an untold history that is completely unknown, Dr. Ben says covered up by the White race, by the rest of the world.

    Hard-headed and impetuous, Rayne Gallagher flees his native South Africa after a tragic accident and joins the Rhodesian Light Infantry. He is embroiled in a war in which he has neither interest or cause when, unable to resist the lure of danger, he is recruited to lead a mission for the CIA in Mozambique. Amassed at the port of Beira is a vast military force led by Russian General Vorotnikov, which is preparing to invade Rhodesia. The general's grand scheme will shatter British plans for a peaceful transition from colony to democracy and create a major political and economic base for the USSR on South Africa's borders. Gallagher and a select group of mercenaries must ensure that the invasion never takes place. Theirs is a fight to the death - with the future of the whole of Southern Africa in the balance.

    Written with passion and from the heart, We Will Be Free is more than just another travel book, it is a modern manifesto, a declaration of independence and self sufficiency. “From the title to the very last page of the book, I was intrigued and entertained! It is full of unabashedly honest and hilarious metaphors describing life on the road and what it's like to be a part of the "overlanding tribe."Graeme makes you feel like you are a part of the travel adventure as he divulges his raw, poetic and amusing consciousness.This book is both a salty and a tender work of art about a beautiful family. The Bell family, on paper and in real life, will inspire you to live life fully and in your own way.Overland The Americas”.

    Focusing first on the cultures of Central Africa from which the slaves came--Ndembu, Imbangala, Kongo, and others--Sweet identifies specific cultural rites and beliefs that survived their transplantation to the African-Portuguese diaspora, arguing that they did not give way to immediate creolization in the New World but remained distinctly African for some time.Slaves transferred many cultural practices from their homelands to Brazil, including kinship structures, divination rituals, judicial ordeals, ritual burials, dietary restrictions, and secret societies. Sweet demonstrates that the structures of many of these practices remained constant during this early period, although the meanings of the rituals were often transformed as slaves coped with their new environment and status. Religious rituals in particular became potent forms of protest against the institution of slavery and its hardships. In addition, Sweet examines how certain African beliefs and customs challenged and ultimately influenced Brazilian Catholicism.Sweet's analysis sheds new light on African culture in Brazil's slave society while also enriching our understanding of the complex process of creolization and cultural survival.

    This House Has Fallen is a bracing and disturbing report on the state of Africa's most populous, potentially richest, and most dangerously dysfunctional nation. Each year, with depressing consistency, Nigeria is declared the most corrupt state in the entire world. Though Nigeria is a nation into which billions of dollars of oil money flow, its per capita income has fallen dramatically in the past two decades. Military coup follows military coup. A bellwether for Africa, it is a country of rising ethnic tensions and falling standards of living, very possibly on the verge of utter collapse -- a collapse that could dramatically overshadow even the massacres in Rwanda. A brilliant piece of reportage and travel writing, This House Has Fallenlooks into the Nigerian abyss and comes away with insight, profound conclusions, and even some hope. Updated with a new preface by the author.

    A historian and journalist who was one of the earliest and staunchest Afrikaner opponents of apartheid, Hermann Giliomee weaves together life stories and historical interpretation to create a narrative history of the Afrikaners from their beginnings with the colonization of the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch East India Company to the dismantling of apartheid and beyond. The Afrikaners emphasizes the crucial role played by historical actors without underplaying the impact of social forces over which they had little control. Throughout their history, Giliomee's Afrikaners are both colonizers and colonized. Actual or virtual servants of the Dutch East India Company, the Dutch "burghers" nonetheless owned slaves and commanded servant labor. The British conquests of 1795 and 1806 extended the rights of British subjects to Afrikaners, even as they took away the Afrikaners' political autonomy and confirmed an economic and cultural subordination that was only partly alleviated by their dominance of South African politics in the latter part of the twentieth century.Demographically squeezed between far more numerous Africans (and other nonwhite groups) and their more affluent and culturally confident English compatriots, the Afrikaners forged a language-based national identity in which die-hard defense of privilege and opposition to various forms of British domination are inextricably intertwined with fears about cultural and even physical group survival. This nationalism underlay the Great Trek, in which Afrikaners opposed the abolition of slavery and legalized racial discrimination by the British; the irony of their becoming the twentieth century's first fighters against imperial domination in the Boer War; and the Afrikaners' rise to political dominance over their English rivals and nonwhite South Africans alike, even as they remained economically and culturally subordinate to the former. This same language-based nationalism spawned the blunders and horrors of apartheid, but it also led the Afrikaners to relinquish power peacefully when this seemed the safest route to their survival as a people.While documenting--and in important ways revising--the history of the Afrikaners' pursuit of racial domination (as well as British contributions to that enterprise), Giliomee supplies Afrikaners' own, often divided, perspectives on their history, perspectives not always or entirely skewed by their struggle for privilege at Africans' expense. The result is not only a magisterial history of the Afrikaners but a fuller understanding of their history, which, for good or ill, resonates far beyond the borders of South Africa.

    This book is not for the squeamish. It blends the intrinsic pathos and humor peculiar to war with face-to-face combat in the bush and death at point-blank range. Now, here is your chance to read what several critics have called the best book on the Rhodesian War ever written.

    Their mission is simply to provide a temporary Top Secret special intelligence communications center to support U.S. members of a high level Allied war planning meeting.An easy mission quickly goes awry. Only two months after the Allied assault and occupation of Casablanca (Operation TORCH), the city remains a hotbed of Vichy and German sympathizers and spies. One unexpected event leads to another. Things get dicey, with life threatening situations, shots fired and dead bodies. Tony is diverted from Casablanca on a brief classified fact-finding mission to a neutral country's island. That mission gets complicated and ultimately results in spy catching and another death. Returning to Casablanca, events result in Tony meeting Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.Between "Casablanca's" covers are communications intelligence, counter-intelligence, military politics, diplomatic tension, WWII history, family dynamics, and in the final analysis, a very exciting, twisting and fast moving story.

    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.

    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.

    Grace in Mombasa is an intriguing historical saga of betrayal and loss, romance and heartbreak, and one woman’s journey in faith. From the day she was born, Grace Clifton has navigated a life of loss and heartbreak, without a mother to guide her and through the ravages of two World Wars. With England in the midst of a Second World War, Grace experiences the excitement of love and romance, but all too soon, it turns to heartbreak. Through it all, Grace is sustained by her unwavering faith in God, but when all she holds dear is ripped away from her, Grace is left devastated and doubting everything she’s ever believed in. As the world slowly recovers from war, Grace too begins the process of healing from bitterness and the deep wounds inflicted by life. However, her steadfastness to God is lost and she determines never to pray again. When an unexpected opportunity comes up in Kenya, Grace seizes the chance to escape the memories, hoping to find a purpose and build a new life for herself. In the city of Mombasa, Grace soon begins to realise she can’t ever distance herself from life’s complications, but if she’s prepared to open her heart, maybe her shattered faith will once more bring her hope, love and the healing that she desperately needs. Grace in Mombasa is a story about a woman with amazing faith that is shattered when her life falls apart, but will God simply let her go? If you like heartfelt dialogue, stories seeped in fact and history, and memorable characters, then you’ll love Tracy Traynor’s moving and inspirational novel. Read Grace in Mombasa to escape into a story of yesteryear and the evocative dream that is Kenya!

    Though his mother died giving birth, he spent a contented childhood working the fields, setting traps in the jungle, and living off the land. Still, as strange and wondrous flying machines crisscrossed the skies overhead, Ousman dreamed of a different life. And so, when he was only twelve years old, he left his village and began what would be a five-year journey to Europe.Every step of the way, as he traveled across the Sahara desert, through the daunting metropolises of Accra, Tripoli, Benghazi, and Casablanca, and over the Mediterranean Sea aboard a packed migrant dinghy, Ousman was handed off like merchandise by a loose network of smugglers and in the constant, foreboding company of “sinkers”: other migrants who found themselves penniless and alone on their way north, unable to continue onward or return home.But on a path rife with violence, exploitation, and racism, Ousman also encountered friendship, generosity, and hope. North to Paradise is a visceral true story about the stark realities of life along the most dangerous migrant route across Africa; it is also a portrait of extraordinary resilience in the face of unimaginable challenges, the beauty of kindness in strangers, and the power of giving back.

    Rounded up in a group of other anti-apartheid activists under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act, designed for the security police to hold and interrogate people for as long as they wanted, she was taken away. She had no idea where they were taking her or what would happen to her children. For Winnie Mandela this was the start of a 491-day period of detention and two trials. Forty-one years after Winnie’s release on 14 September 1970, Greta Soggot, the widow of David Soggot, one of Winnie Mandela’s advocates during the 1969–70 trials, handed her a stack of papers that included a journal and notes that she had written in detention. Their arrival brought back vivid and horrifying memories and uncovered a unique and personal slice of South Africa’s history. 491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69 shares with the world Winnie Mandela’s moving and compelling journal as well as some of the letters written between affected parties at the time, including Winnie and Nelson Mandela, who by then had been in prison for nearly seven years. Readers gain insight into the brutality she experienced, her depths of despair as well as her resilience and defiance under extreme pressure. This young wife and mother emerged after 491 days in detention unbowed and determined to continue the struggle for freedom.

    Serious allegations surface against three prominent National Party cabinet ministers, one of them the second-most powerful man in the country. They are, it is said, regularly abusing young boys on an island just off the coast of Port Elizabeth. From opposite ends of South Africa, a brave cop and a driven journalist investigate. Mark Minnie and Chris Steyn independently uncover evidence of a dark secret. But the case only surfaces briefly before it disappears completely. Thirty years later, the two finally connect the dots to expose this shocking story of criminality, cover-ups and official complicity in the rape and possible murder of children, most of them vulnerable and black.