Books published by Diasporic Africa Press

The Atlantic slave trade caused havoc on the cultures and political states of Africa and led to the forced migration of millions of Africans to the Americas. Africans brought with them their histories and cultures--philosophies, languages, political structures, and religious and artistic expressions. Many African societies and those they created in the Americas had their system of self-defense or martial arts. In Africa, there were and still are hundreds of fighting styles that emphasized skill, technique, and intelligence over brute force. One of the martial arts that sprang from the connection between Africa and the Americas is capoeira angola, which is still played in Brazil and around the world today. This coloring book introduces young children to the story of Capoeira Angola using over 30 original illustrations, promoting brain development through colors, shapes, interpretations, and imagined stories!

The Atlantic slave trade caused havoc on the cultures and political states of Africa and led to the forced migration of millions of Africans to the Americas. The Africans could not bring their material cultures and artifacts, but most important, they brought their histories and cultures-philosophies, languages, political structures, and religious and artistic expressions. Hundreds of societies were established throughout the Americas by Africans who had freed themselves. These societies were called maroons in the United States, palenques in the Spanish-speaking countries, and quilombos or mocambos in Brazil. The most famous mocambo was the Quilombo dos Palmares, which existed for almost one hundred years as an independent nation made up of Africans, indigenous peoples, and poor whites. Many of these societies had their system of self-defense or martial arts, which, not surprisingly, had their origins in Africa. Africans practiced a variety of martial arts. From the top of northern Africa to the bottom of southern Africa, there were and still are hundreds of fighting styles that emphasized skill, technique, and intelligence over brute force. One of the martial arts that sprang from the connection between Africa and the Americas is capoeira angola, which is still played in Brazil and around the world today. Design for young readers, and packed with over 30 illustrations, this book tells the story of Capoeira Angola.

A View from The East represents a second edition built upon expanded archival research and a contextualizing of the organization within the African American civil rights and black power movements. At the heart of The East was Uhuru Sasa Shule, an independent African-centered school whose curriculum and pedagogy were rooted in Kawaida philosophy and concepts of education for self-reliance. In addition, The East became a center for the arts. On weekends, it served as a literary salon and hosted concerts by black musicians. Many of the great jazz artists and poets performed there, as it became a well-known and highly sought-after venue. With fresh insight and great detail, Kwasi Konadu excavates the history of The East, exploring the confluence of cultural nationalism, education, economic self-sufficiency, and the arts during the Black Power period. Drawing on extensive interviews and primary research, Konadu vividly brings to life the people and events that shaped this remarkable institution and outlines the rich lessons it provides for future community building organizations.

Using diverse and new sources (archaeological, biomedical, climatological, linguistic, ethno-musical, oral and documentary sources in various languages), this groundbreaking study tells the story of a West African people, the origins and character of their cultural forms and ideas, and how these Akan, or "pioneering peoples," shaped the politics and societies of their homeland as well as the European colonies that received their enslaved members. The book demonstrates how these peoples organized themselves into clans connected by shared sociocultural features, formed polities, fought wars yet engaged in extensive diplomacy, traded with yet competed against one another, and ultimately their members became a force in the Americas, despite their relatively small numbers. As enslaved, marooned, or legally emancipated peoples, they foregrounded and yet went beyond the diasporic themes of maroonage, resistance, and freedom. Locating the Akan variable in the African diasporic equation allows scholars and students of Africa and the Americas to better understand how African histories and diasporic experiences cohere and how both are still evolving.

Warrior Princess: A Peoples Biography of Ida B. Wells is the story of a young Black woman who decided to fight and protect Black people her entire life, and did so admirably. Ida B. Wells was a prominent journalist, activist, and suffragist who lived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She was defiant, courageous, and committed to her lifes work. For that reason, she endured violent threats from racist white men, and was ostracized by many Black male leaders. She spoke, wrote, and organized. But more importantly, she learned to believe in herself and her mission. As Wells herself wrote: ';Let the Afro-American depend on no party, but on himself, for his salvation.'

In Kwame Nkrumah and the Dream of African Unity, Lansine Kaba describes some of the epic phases of Kwame Nkrumah's struggle for the independence of his country, Ghana, and the unity of his continent, Africa. These two tasks were gigantic, complex, and even frightening. Each separately was promethean in scope, perhaps beyond the capacity of a single leader, however able and determined. Yet, Nkrumah dared to accomplish them and thus deserves a place among the great figures of his world. Far from being a hagiography or a biography, or an essay on the ideology and foreign politics of Nkrumah, this work follows the adventures of his dream of African unity, from the years studying across the Atlantic to the Accra Summit in 1965 and the coup d'etat in 1966. Throughout, the analysis tries to understand the genesis of the dream and the effort required for its realization. These discussions deal with the difficulties of implementing a policy of regrouping independent states into a continental body.

Abebi tells the story of the incredible journey of a female warrior and apprentice healer of the Come-if-yuh-Dare Maroons, a mythical seventeenth century band of runaway slaves in the Jamaica Blue Mountains. When her idyllic life is violently upended by a series of natural and spiritual disasters, she is forced to take drastic measures to endure. Dripping with mystical realism, this novel takes you on Abebi's sacred journey as she confronts real and psychological demons in her quest for identity, redemption, and a way back home. The novel celebrates the will to love and survive even in the darkest of times.

A Guyanese by birth and a Kenyan by citizenship, Ras Makonnen would still regard these two aspects of his life as accidents of historyhis roots and destiny are in the continent of Africa. For the last half of the twentieth century, he has striven, along with the other major architects of pan-Africanism, to reconcile the forces that still divide the continent. This volume is a further contribution to that struggle. Makonnen's analysis of the pan-African movement starts in the former British Guiana (Guyana) in the early twenties, warms up to the North American scene where, as a young man, he got increasingly more aware of the African and diasporic African person's position in world history. He then describes his days in London and Manchester from the mid-thirties to the fifties; Accra (Ghana) until the fall of Kwame Nkrumah in 1966 and thereafter Nairobi (Kenya), where he worked and made his transition.Although the narrative is peppered with the most delightful character sketches of early African and other Black leaders, the author's main concern is to interpret the quality of life amongst Black people at home and abroad. He does so by employing a wide historical perspective and by infusing into his study of particular pan-African actors his knowledge of the intellectual and political climate at large. He produces in the process a vivid participator's commentary on whole areas that have been quite neglected in conventional studies of pan-Africanism. Black intergroup relations in North America and the African diaspora in the Caribbean; race relations in Britain; Black intellectuals and the white Left; Black expatriates and African socialismthese are just a few of the themes examined against a background of individual famous personalities as well as others not documented before. With an autobiographical thread that runs throughout, Makonnnen's narrative is a uniquely diversified pan-African portrait.

This interdisciplinary study sheds light on the communal creative process of music and discusses the process of music change in Bumba-meu-Boi, and provides an example of exo-semantic analysis in the quest for the truth of this folk drama in Brazil. It argues that Bumba-meu-Boi sheds light on eighteenth century Brazil and reveals existing levels of interaction between classes (master-slave, oppressor-oppressed) on sugar cane plantations and mills. A sociologist perspective demonstrates that the structure of the Bumba-meu-Boi reflects a similar network of relations, as they exist in communities where it was and still is performed.

The Black Terrorist is a fictional account built around the true, extraordinary, but little-known story of Addi B. Addi B was born in Guinea about 1916, brought to France in the late 1930s, and became a riflemen in the Twelfth Regiment de Tirailleurs Senegalais (African soldiers from French colonies) fighting for France during World War II. Captured after the Battle of the Meuse, Addi escapes from German forces, wanders in the forests, before finding refuge in a village in the Vosges, where he encounters the French Resistance and becomes a leader of a Resistance network. However, Addi is captured, tortured, and executed in December 1943. His military exploits against the Germans earned him the name ';the black terrorist.'The story of Addi B is told sixty years later from a number of perspectives, though largely from Germaine Tergoresse, who was a young girl during the war, now eighty years old relating her memories to B's nephew. But who betrayed Addi B? One of its many lovers? A professional collaborator? Or just the rivalry between the Tergoresses and the Rapennes, two families who have been feuding since the First World War? This African and Muslim fighter of Free France was awarded the Medal of the Resistance in 2003, sixty years after his execution. The Black Terrorist (Le terroriste noir) was awarded the Erckmann-Chatrian Prize in 2012, and both the Palatine Grand Prize and the Ahmadou-Kourouma Prize in 2013.

Virgin Islands-born, Harlem-based, Hubert H. Harrison's "When Africa Awakes: The "Inside Story" of the Stirrings and Strivings of the New Negro in the Western World" is a collection of over fifty articles that detail his pioneeringtheoretical, educational, and organizational role in the founding and development of the militant, World War I era "New Negro Movement." Harrison was a brilliant, class and race conscious, writer, educator, orator, editor, book reviewer, political activist, and radical internationalist who was described by J. A. Rogers as "perhaps the foremost Aframerican intellect of his time" and by A. Philip Randolph as "the father of Harlem Radicalism." He was a major radical influence on Randolph, Marcus Garvey, and a generation of "New Negro" activists. This new Diasporic Africa Press edition includes the complete text of Harrison's original 1920 volume; contains essays from publications Harrison edited in the 1917-1920 period including The Voice (the first newspaper of the "New Negro Movement"), The New Negro, and the Garvey movement's Negro World; and offers a new introduction, biographical sketch, and supplementary notes by Harrison's biographer, Jeffrey B. Perry.

The year of 1980 marked a pivotal turning point in the American political landscape: the electoral victory of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan; the beginnings of the public hysteria and eventual legislative dismantling of affirmative action and other civil rights initiatives; the dawn of the ruthless reign of neo-conservatism; and, in some ways serving as the glue, the ascent of neo-liberalism as the prevailing ideology and standard logic of viewing and ordering the world. Some thirty-five years later, it is almost difficult to remember a world, and more precisely a moment in United States history, when these things were not so dominant. When thinking about the lasting impact of that moment, David Harvey writes, "Future historians may well look upon the years 1978-1980 as a revolutionary turning-point in the world's social and economic history... revolutionary impulses seemingly spread and reverberated to remake the world around us in a totally different image." In short, this was an instance of profound transformation; it was the dawn of the counterrevolution. By no means immune to the changes in the larger political landscape, Black activists and intellectuals also felt the ground moving beneath their feet in 1980, as many would gradually shift from an all out advance towards liberation to a posture concerned with what James Turner described as "the preservation of the modest gains made by African Americans over the last decade." The previous decade witnessed an obvious waning in the Black liberation movement, a slew of high-profile manhunts, arrests, court cases and outright criminalizing of radical activists, the unearthing of Cointelpro, the blooming of the liberation movement in Southern Africa, a taxing debate around various articulations of Marxism and Black nationalism, the full swing of feminism, and a full decade of Africana Studies, which also meant institutionalized space to foster such discussions. It was these changing times that provided the context for the important gathering of Black activists and intellectuals in Ithaca, New York, during September 1980 at the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell, and the content for this book. Bound together by the dual purposes of both assessing the road traveled and preparing for the journey ahead, the ensemble in attendance gathered to ponder, "the Next Decade"-as the conference theme spelled out plainly. A quick glance at the conference's list of attendees demonstrates the extraordinary sphere of activity that was the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell. Participants and attendees at this historic meeting included Toni Cade Bambara, Lerone Bennett, Johnella Butler, John Henrik Clarke, Gayla Cook, Louis Farrakhan, Hoyt Fuller, Ewart Guinier, Vincent Harding, Robert Harris, Stephen Henderson, Robert Johnson, George Kent, George Lamming, Tilden Lemelle, Bernard Magubane, Manning Marable, William Nelson, William Sales, Michael Thelwell, Bettye Collier-Thomas, Eleanor Traylor, Ivan Van Sertima, Ronald Walters, Shirley Weber, Sylvia Wynter, Howard Dodson, William Strickland, and two of the visual artists featured in this book, David Bradford and Bertrand Phillips. This book is both a contribution to the historiography of the Black/African Studies movement and an intellectual treasure, representing the ideas and visions of many of the best minds at a crucial juncture in the African world.

Black Folk Here and There is a seminal work that attempts to combine anthropology and comparative history in a study of the Black Experience from the beginning of literate cultures to the advent of the transatlantic slave trade and the White Racism that quickly developed as its ideological support. In this volume, the Black experience is conveyed through the Judaic, Greek and Roman cultures to European Christendom and the Muslim World in the period before the great diasporafrom Africa to the West began in the sixteenth century CE.

This is the first complete English translation of Ludewig Ferdinand Rømer's sensitive account of the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) in the mid-eighteenth century. A vital resource on the history of West Africa, Rømer's work offers rich descriptions of African societies, trading practices with Europe, and religion. Ludewig Ferdinand Rømer was employed in West Africa from 1739 to 1749 by the Danish West India and Guinea Company. He published two books about the Gold Coast, a short one in 1756, and then his more substantial A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea in 1760. Rømer deals with the operation of the various European trading companies, and discusses the African-European relations that he had witnessed. But the real value of his work lies in his descriptions of the local context-the African traders and customers, their societies, practices and religion. And he was much interested in African history, particularly from oral traditions.This edition (principally of Rømer's 1760 text, but drawing on his 1756 volume too) makes available an uncommon source for the history of West Africa. This edition of Rømer's volume was runner-up for the African Studies Association's Texts Prize, 2001.

The present volume is quite different from the other two autobiographies by W. E. B. Du Bois not only because of its additional two-decade span, and the significantly altered outlook of its author, but also because in it-unlike the others-he seeks, as he writes, "to review my life as frankly and fully as I can." This is an indispensable volume.