Books published by African Books Collective

Each rich essay hints, in different ways, at alternative conceptions of the universal that emerge in collective struggles, enriching understanding of the creative capacity of African communities to make their own history.

What happens at the interface between Afrocentricity and COVID-19 is cause for wonder in a world that is anxious to short circuit global solidarity by trampling Pan-Africanism. Revolutions, including the Fourth Industrial Revolution, are rarely contextualised within the framework of Pan-Africanism and Afrocentricity even when they are celebrated as beneficial to the world. Interfacing Afrocentricity, COVID-19, Pan-Africanism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, this book teases out the profound challenges of the 21st century. Calling for African solutions premised on African solidarity, the book critically engages the contemporary technological solutionism and technological evangelism that undergirds the Fourth Industrial Revolution and efforts to find vaccines for COVID-19. Unflinchingly interrogating these issues, the book is useful for scholars and activists in education, African languages, sociology, social anthropology, political science, history, religious studies, development studies, communication, medical sciences and legal studies.

Little Gabriel of Perpignan does not like to read. He adores video games! However, he likes to visit libraries just to accompany his friends or to play there. One day in a library, he meets Mr. Gopte, a writer and researcher from Africa. Henceforth, Gabriel's relationship with reading will never be the same again.

Ceded at Dawn identifies and examines decolonization as the principal source of the smoldering tension that persisted between the two former United Nations Trust Territories in Cameroon which finally exploded into an armed conflict in 2017. French Cameroon (now the Republic of Cameroon) was decolonized while the decolonization of British Cameroons was abandoned unfinished. The international experiment on independence by joining was an exceptional route selected for the decolonization of British Southern Cameroons and was defended with the untenable arguments that British Southern Cameroons was too small and too poor to be granted sovereign independence. Both British Southern Cameroons and French Cameroon rejected independence by joining - the latter registering her objection in a "No" vote at the General Assembly meeting in April 1961. In British Southern Cameroons on the other hand, the suppression of bilateral agreement on confederation of states of equal status, the nullification of their self-governing status and worst of all the wrongful transfer of that self-governing state to the Republic of Cameroon on no known terms became a complete recipe for a disaster awaiting outburst and eruption. Ceded at Dawn documents and methodically analyzes these developments using archival and recently declassified British colonial sources. Historians, diplomats, political scientists, scholars of the UN system and international law as well experts on decolonization will find this volume it very illuminating.

Independent African, first published in 1958, is still one of the few serious attempts to write a history of an African Rising against European rule south of the Sahara.

This provocative book on The Future of Africa addresses fundamental genealogical developmental challenges of vital concern to Africa's transformation is premised on the orientation that the continent's future is up to Africans, cognizant of the fact that Africans cohabit the same diversified and inter-connected planet with others.

É quase injusto celebrarmos a força feminina em situações como as das personagens Zola e Mvelo, em que a única opção dada às mulheres é serem fortes: nos guetos do apartheid não há outra escolha senão resistir. Precisamos olhar mais fundo, para além da sobrevivência, e ver o que estas mulheres foram capazes de preservar da sua identidade individual, o que puderam guardar intocado mesmo diante da degradação a que foram submetidas. Se acompanhamos a história de Zola, temos um testemunho vivo de integridade e autonomia. Numa época em que o feminismo mal tinha palavras às quais se agarrar, Zola mantém-se sólida e determinada a seguir seus próprios princípios. E, se olharmos com atenção, encontraremos em Mvelo a infância que, roubada tão precocemente, se fez durar um pouco mais ao subsistir na inocência de uma menina que se alimenta de esperança.

There are milliards of off beam assumptions that Africa will always remain immobile in development of whatever type. This view has mainly been propounded by Western thinkers in order to make Africans internalise and reinforce this supposed dependency. Africa needs to embark on paradigm shift; and tweak and turn things around. Africa has what it take to do so quickly, especially now that new economic powers such as China and India are evolving as counterweight to the West. Shall Africa use these new economic forces to its advantage based on fair and win-win cooperation? To do so, Africa must make sure that it does not slink back into business as usual vis-a-vis beggarliness, dependence, frailty, gullibility, made-up backwardness, monkey business, and pipedreams, not to mention the nasty and narcissistic behaviours of its venal and navel-gazing rulers. Verily, Africa needs, inter alia, to use its God-given gifts, namely, immense resources, young population, abundance of vast and unexploited amounts of land. Equally, Africa must, without equivocation, invest copiously and earnestly in its people, the youth in the main. Most of all, Africa needs to shy away from all colonial carryovers and encumbrances. This volume shows many ways through and by which Africa can reverse the current imbroglio-cum-no-go it faces for the better; and thereby actualise the dream of being truly independent and prosperous.

Dzigbordi Dzordzome, a young woman from a strict Ghanaian home, struggles between the desire to forge her own identity, please her parent, and marry her college sweetheart Maxwell Owusu. Dzigbordi eventually leaves for the US, where she has to adjust to the realities of a culture she has imagined from books and movies. Her friendships and experiences in the US inevitably affect her relationships back in Ghana, and change her perceptions of herself and her homeland.

This newly edited volume, Bali Nyonga Today covers about thirty years of (1985-2015) developments in Bali Nyonga, Cameroon. Already well-established as a city-state prior to German colonization in the 19th century, Bali Nyonga continues to adapt to national and global changes since its incorporation into the modern state of Cameroon. With fresh contributions from 12 leading scholars, this volume covers a wide variety of themes and issues including; geographical and historical updates on Chamba migration and settlement in its present homeland in Northwestern Cameroon, an in-depth description of Bali Nyonga cultural associations within the country and the Bali diaspora in the United States, the coexistence of traditional and modern religious worldviews, traditional medicinal practices and life-cycle rituals of significance. Of noteworthy are two chapters devoted to Mungaka, the language of the Balis and its revival in the context of new language policies and developments in African linguistic. Spiced with numerous photos, many of which have never been published, the book is a welcome addition to studies in contemporary African history, culture and society.

Africa's Best and Worst Presidents seeks to deconstruct the current superstructure that colonialism created and maintains. It chastises and challenges Africans, academics in the main, to revisit and write a true history of Africa. Written by Africans themselves, such rewritten histories should aim to counter the counterfeit narratives which have proliferated, poisoned and diminished African sense of self and self-confidence. The history centred on African perspectives and experiences should go a long way in our quest to truly unfetter Africa from dependency, desolations and mismanagement. This book calls upon all Africans to stand up fearlessly and tirelessly to take on decadent and despotic regimes that have always held Africa at ransom as they get lessons from the best managers of state affairs on whose feats they must expand. The option to critique, cross-examine and dissect past African presidents and their excesses is aimed at giving the young and frustrated generations of Africans the intellectual resources they need to arm themselves in resolve and pursuit of Africa's emancipation.

This book argues that since the emergence of the Cameroon National Union (CNU) and the one-party state in 1966, Cameroonians have progressively degenerated into the syndrome of collective amnesia inspired by a culture of sycophancy, glorifying and deifying political leadership. These developments stand in stark contrast to what obtained in the nascent Southern Cameroons - the UN Trust territory administered by Britain until 1961 when its population voted overwhelmingly by 70.5% to gain their independence by establishing a federation with the then French-speaking Republic of Cameroon. From the late 1950s until the dismantling of the Cameroon Federation, Southern Cameroons and later West Cameroon had a vibrant parliament, a House of Chiefs (or Senate), an independent Judiciary, an ideal, corruption-free Public Service, a state government with ministers presided over by an Executive Prime Minister and, for a decade, West Cameroon provided the Vice Presidency for the Federal Republic of Cameroon. In what may be accurately described as Prof Anthony Ndi's seminal work, he contends and rightly so that solutions to the legion of problems that plague contemporary Cameroon may be easily found in the pages of The Golden Age of Southern Cameroons. Agents for this transformation do not have to be invented or imported from Mars; all we need is a patriotic spirit, political will, readiness to dialogue, transparency and commitment to democracy.

Healing Stings is an astonishing collection of poems that depict a society battling social, global and postcolonial challenges. Through a combination of terse and elegantly composed verse, this collection provides viable tools with which to overcome the hassles and possibly check the erosion of time-honoured moral values. Using the linguistic channels of distinction, perception and representation, the discourses of moods, subjectivity, atmosphere, generic hybridity amongst others, Healing Stings demonstrates that social ills like corruption, greed, intolerance, delinquency, chauvinism, gender-sensitive biases, and religious and cultural prejudices can be curbed and society made a better place. This is premised on the assumption that the right tools such as social dialogue, patriotism, love, tolerance, honesty, good governance, personal and communal creative initiatives, and the change of mentality should be harnessed for improvement, educating, mending, and governing. By changing our attitudes within the context of unity in diversity, we are guaranteed a set of resources that will bring about development, security, national unity and peace building.