Africa has received over $1 trillion in aid over the last fifty years and yet despite these huge inflows, the continent remains mired in poverty, disease and systemic corruption. In A Good African Story, Andrew Rugasira argues that trade has achieved what years of aid failed to deliver, and has provided a tantalising glimpse of what Africa could be.As he recounts the very personal story of his company and the challenges that he has faced – and overcome – as an African entrepreneur, Rugasira discusses the barriers that currently prevent fair and equal trade between Africa and the rest of the world. He sets out the arguments for building a sustainable trade framework and reducing dependency on handouts. And he builds up a manifesto for a revolution in the way that Africa is perceived. This is a book about Africa taking its destiny in its own hands, and dictating the terms of its future.

    In this crowded and often hostile place, she must carve out her new existence, always protecting her mute brother Hagos.A moving portrait of a woman of courage and intelligence, an insider’s view of the textures of life in a refugee camp, and a compelling story of exile, survival and love, Silence is My Mother Tongue bears vivid testimony to the power of imagination and illusion and the infinite reach of human minds to reinvent themselves.Both intimate and epic, Sulaiman Addonia’s extraordinary, subversive and sensual second novel dissects society’s ability to wage war on its own women and explores the stories we must tell to survive in a broken, inhospitable environment.

    But for a one small boy in the leafy northern suburbs of Johannesburg ... his beloved housekeeper is serving fish fingers for lunch.This is the tale of Hamish Charles Sutherland Fraser – chorister, horse rider, schoolboy actor and, in his dreams, 1st XV rugby star and young ladies’ delight. A boy who climbs trees in the spring and who loves a girl named Reggie.An odd child growing up in a conflicted, scary, beautiful society.A young South African who hasn’t learnt the rules.

    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.

    In Me Against My Brother, he brings these events together for the first time to record a collapse that has had an impact far beyond African borders.In Somalia, Peterson tells of harrowing experiences of clan conflict, guns and starvation. He met with warlords, observed death intimately and nearly lost his own life to a Somali mob. From ground level, he documents how the US-UN relief mission devolved into all out war - one that for America has proven to be the most formative post-Cold War debacle. In Sudan, he journeys where few correspondents have ever been, on both sides of that religious front line, to find that outside relief has only prolonged war. In Rwanda, his first-person experience of the genocide and well-documented analysis provide rare insight into this human tragedy.Filled with the dust, sweat and powerful detail of real-life, Me Against My Brother graphically illustrates how preventive action and a better understanding of Africa - especially by the US - could have averted much suffering. Also includes a 16-page color insert.

    Following the Rwandan genocide, an idealistic group of young rebels overthrew the brutal regime in Kigali, ushering in an era of peace and stability that made Rwanda the donor darling of the West, winning comparisons with Switzerland and Singapore. But the truth was considerably more sinister.  Vividly sourcing her story with direct testimony from key participants, Wrong uses the story of the murder of Patrick Karegeya, once Rwanda’s head of external intelligence and a quicksilver operator of supple charm, to paint the portrait of a modern African dictatorship created in the chilling likeness of Paul Kagame, the president who sanctioned his former friend’s assassination.

    . . An engaging and accessible account.” —Publishers WeeklyIn 1820, a small group of African Americans reversed the course of centuries and sailed to Africa, to a place they would name after liberty itself. They went under the aegis of the American Colonization Society, a white philanthropic organization with a dual agenda: to rid America of its blacks and to evangelize Africa. The settlers, eventually numbering in the thousands, broke free from the ACS and, in 1847, established the Republic of Liberia.James Ciment, in his enthralling history Another America, shows that the settlers struggled to balance their high ideals with their prejudices. On the steamy shores of West Africa, they re-created the only social order they knew, that of an antebellum Dixie, with themselves as the master caste, ruling over a native population that outnumbered them twenty to one. They built plantations, held elegant dances, and worked to protect their fragile independence from the predations of foreign powers. Meanwhile, they fought, abused, and even helped to enslave the native Liberians. The persecuted became the persecutors—until a lowly native sergeant murdered their president in 1980, ending 133 years of Americo-Liberian rule and inaugurating a quarter century of civil war.Riven by caste, committed to commerce, practicing democratic and Christian ideals haphazardly, the Americo-Liberians created a history that is, to a surprising degree, the mirror image of our own.

    Its gold had fuelled the economies of Europe and Islamic world since around 1000, and its sophisticated kingdoms had traded with Europeans along the coasts from Senegal down to Angola since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies - most importantly shells: the cowrie shells imported from the Maldives, and the nzimbu shells imported from Brazil.Toby Green's groundbreaking new book transforms our view of West and West-Central Africa. It reconstructs the world of kingdoms whose existence (like those of Europe) revolved around warfare, taxation, trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, royal display and extravagance, and the production of art.Over time, the relationship between Africa and Europe revolved ever more around the trade in slaves, damaging Africa's relative political and economic power as the terms of monetary exchange shifted drastically in Europe's favour. In spite of these growing capital imbalances, longstanding contacts ensured remarkable connections between the Age of Revolution in Europe and America and the birth of a revolutionary nineteenth century in Africa.A Fistful of Shells draws not just on written histories, but on archival research in nine countries, on art, praise-singers, oral history, archaeology, letters, and the author's personal experience to create a new perspective on the history of one of the world's most important regions.

    

    In captivating prose, Dowden spins tales of cults and commerce in Senegal and traditional spirituality in Sierra Leone; analyzes the impact of oil and the internet on Nigeria and aid on Sudan; and examines what has gone so badly wrong in Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo. From the individual stories of failure and success comes a surprising portrait of a new Africa emerging--an Africa that, Dowden argues, can only be developed by its own people. Dowden's master work is an attempt to explain why Africa is the way it is and calls for a re-examination of the perception of Africa as "the dark continent." He reveals it as a place of inspiration and tremendous humanity.

    It tells what happened next in Valerie Poore's life in South Africa's rural Kwa-Zulu Natal in the 1980s. More bittersweet than the first book, Val and her family move down the mountain from the farm where they spent the three happy years described in African Ways. In this second book, life changes dramatically for the author and her small daughters, but the anecdotes she shares are still filled with colour, humour and everything that she loves about Africa and its people.

    And home to Jama, a ten year-old boy. But then his mother dies unexpectedly and he finds himself alone in the world.Jama is forced home to his native Somalia, the land of his nomadic ancestors. War is on the horizon and the fascist Italian forces who control parts of East Africa are preparing for battle. Yet Jama cannot rest until he discovers whether his father, who has been absent from his life since he was a baby, is alive somewhere.And so begins an epic journey which will take Jama north through Djibouti, war-torn Eritrea and Sudan, to Egypt. And from there, aboard a ship transporting Jewish refugees just released from German concentration camps, across the seas to Britain and freedom.This story of one boy's long walk to freedom is also the story of how the Second World War affected Africa and its people; a story of displacement and family.

    When the US grants approximately 4,000 unaccompanied minors political asylum, Majok becomes Michael, and he is given a new start in the US. Yet his life is not without trauma, culminating when a fellow student betrays him. This is the story of a survivor who summons the courageous spirit of millions of refugees throughout history—and it lives on today.

    With warmth and humanity these four stories illuminate her love both for the African people, their dignity and traditions, and for the beauty and wildness of the landscape. The first three were written in the 1950s and the last, 'Echoes from the Hills', was written especially for this volume in the summer of 1960 when the author was in her seventies. In all they provide a moving final chapter to her African reminiscences.