Books published by Langaa RPCID

Sur l'invitation de son cousin Charlemagne, Benedict quitte Ndobo, son village natal au Mayuka, pour Touri dans l'Etat voisin de Jangaland. Mayuka est une colonie anglaise où son arrière-grand-père, Bante, roi de l'ethnie Magwa, s'était exilé. Bante avait quitté Jangaland précipitamment parce que les autorités coloniales étaient à ses trousses. On le soupçonnait d'être à l'origine d'un meurtre et aussi d'être à la tête d'une résistance à la colonisation française. Benedict prospère à Touri. Il tombe amoureux d'une jolie demoiselle du nom de Brigitte ; mais il a un rival, le cuisinier d'un commerçant français. Brigitte doit choisir entre Benedict et le cuisinier. Elle jette son dévolu sur Benedict. De là va naître une émouvante aventure qui mènera Benedict à l'avant-plan du champ politique à l'aube des mouvements des indépendances des Etats africains. Un périple parsemé d'embuches au cours duquel le jeune Benedict ira jusqu'au sacrifice suprême, au nom de la justice et de l'Egalite pour les siens.Cette oeuvre expose l'aliénation culturelle, le manque de patriotisme et l'hypocrisie des puissances coloniales, bref, le néo-colonialisme. Ce dernier à lui seul explique la mauvaise gestion du patrimoine national, l'effondrement économique, l'instabilité politique, les crises sociales, l'implosion de nombreux États avec pour conséquence l'afflux des réfugiés africains en Occident. Cette oeuvre tient toute sa pertinence du fait que les sujets y traités demeurent actuels.

The coronavirus has rattled humanity, tested resolve and determination, and redefined normalcy. This compelling collection of 29 short stories and essays brings together the lived experiences of covid19 through a diversity of voices from across the African continent. The stories highlight challenges, new opportunities, and ultimately the deep resilience of Africans and their communities. Bringing into conversation the perspectives of laypeople, academics, professionals, domestic workers, youth, and children, the volume is a window into the myriad ways in which people have confronted, adapted to, and sought to tackle the coronavirus and its trail of problems. The experiences of the most vulnerable are specifically explored, and systemic changes and preliminary shifts towards a new global order are addressed. Laughter as a coping mechanism is a thread throughout.

This poem is a bluesy-jazzy drama replete with metaphor, epic simile, analogy, personification, synecdoche, irony, satire, allegory, imagery, etc.

This richly sourced monograph develops the logical explanation that sticks together all forces that constrained Africans to give up labour to an industrial economy in Evaton.

Since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 a worldwide pandemic, humanity has been compelled to focus on its quantifiable aspects, that is, how many people were being infected each day, how many were confined to intensive care units and how many had died. These deadly statistics created an impression that all human beings are equal and that in charting the numbers, national governments are managing the crisis. However, and as social media conversation and the work of professionals beyond government has revealed, Covid-19 has significant social and psychological impacts. It has revealed social and class divides, the vulnerability of indigenous communities and the deleterious effects of extreme, narcissistic individualism.This anthology seeks tend to the range of human emotions experienced in the early phase of the pandemic. It uncovers an inner world that rarely featured in official narratives of the day. In the early days, the narratives and feelings of those under lockdown barely made it into headline news. The anthology therefore gives voice to feelings and seeks to render audible those currently silenced. The poems suggest that all communities speak. The marginalized speak against and through oppression. They are often audible but those in power often choose not to hear them. To emphasize this divide, the poet juxtaposes the emotions of the marginalized with strident, self-focused responses to the crisis, revealing a wide spectrum of human emotions and their impacts. A quiet offering of the book is that emotions matter and can provide deep insight into individual and national psyche.

This book contains dozens of haiku sequences. Each sequence consists of many haiku poems that revolve around the same topic and can be read sequentially and spatially. The poems in each sequence complement one another and shed contrastive and corroborative light on one another. They deal with many spiritual, moral, and realistic problems of contemporary humans and seek to develop the nature of haiku poetry itself.

Placing security studies in the context of contemporary discourses about the "colonial comeback" and posthumanism, this book postulates the notion of staticide which avers that the effacement of African state sovereignty is crucial for the security of the oncoming empire. Understood in the light of posthumanism, antihumanism, animism, postanthropocentrism and transhumanism; African human security has evidently been put on a recession course together with African state security. Much as African states are demonised as so failed, defective, corrupt, weak and rogue to require recolonisation; transhumanism also assumes that human bodies are so corrupt, imperfect, defective, failed, rogue and weak to require not only enhancements or augmentation but also to beckon recolonisation. Also, deemed to be ecologies, human bodies are set to be liberalised and democratised in the interest of nonhuman viruses, nanobots, microchips, bacteria, fungi and other pathogens living within the bodies.The book critically examines the security implications of theorising human bodies as ecologies for nonhuman entities. Reading staticide together with transhumanism, this book foresees transhumanist new eugenics that are accompanying the new empire in a supposedly Anthropocene world that serves to justify the sacrifice and disposability of some surplus humans living in the recesses and nether regions of the empire. Paying attention to the "colonial comeback", the book urges African scholars not to mistake imperial transformation for decolonisation. The book is invaluable for scholars and activists in African studies, anthropology, decoloniality, sociology, politics, development studies, security studies, sociology and anthropology of science and technology studies, and environmental studies.

Climate change is the topic of the century. It is a subject of discussion by sceptics, heretics and those that have immersed in it as a serious debate for engagement. In this volume, the matter is localised to the plateau bordered by the great rivers of Limpopo to the south and Zambezi to the north. Evidence has it that climate change is inducing immense environmental change hitherto unknown including water stress and droughts, heat waves and flooding. The effects span across all sectors - agriculture, forestry, engineering, construction and other socio-economic dimensions of life. When an issue becomes such topical, it becomes political but also courts policy debate. The thrust of this volume is to explore into climate change as an environmental concern begging government attention and requiring prioritisation as a shaper of our future, whether we set to put mitigation or adaptation measures in place, or we choose to do nothing about it, as sceptics would perhaps suggest.The book explores climate change as a theoretical, policy, technical and practical debate as it affects sectors and rural and urban spatialities in Zimbabwe. Contributions explore such themes as regional research, gender, disaster preparedness, policymaking, resilience, governance, urban planning, risk management, environmental law, and the food-water-health-energy-climate change nexus.

This book aims to expand on the notion of being, becoming, and being-becoming that manifests across the literature of liminality, crossroads and borderlands. Looking to overcome the limitations of these grounding concepts, the metaphor of the shadowlands is proposed. Moving away from dualities and binaries, challenging the spatial metaphors, which imply clear and defined boundaries and spring from an objective construction of 'reality', and coping with the idea of incompleteness, unfinishedness, are the challenges of the shadowlands. Through the prism of this newly conceptualised analytical and epistemological tool, the authors intend to grasp a fresh understanding of the processes of being, becoming and being-becoming in both their singular and multiple manifestations. As an epistemological concept, the shadowlands imply that anthropologists must not only identify these uncanny spaces of junction in their research, but also shadowlands in the ethnographic papers that they produce. In addition to a better understanding of the continuous fabrication of temporalities and being-becoming, the concept puts into perspective the discipline of anthropology itself. Throughout the chapters, the different authors permit to grasp the various applications of the shadowlands, allowing to project the concept in particular contexts and through specific angles of analysis.

Saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war was the main motivation for creating the United Nations. Given the ongoing conflicts, wars and terrorist attacks today one is forced to ask: Is there Hope for International Peace and Security? Where have the safeguards gone to? Has the United Nations become powerless in the face of absence of the "safeguards"? In this book, Professor Tatah Mentan examines the transformation in UN peace and security operations, analysing its changing role and structure. Tatah Mentan argues that the enemy of peace and security in the global system is the dictatorship of predatory bailed out monopoly capitalism that tells us that building war ships is more important than building alternate energy infrastructure. The real enemies are therefore the publicly bailed-out monopolies, Big Media, Big Pharma, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc. that deny the truth about conflicts and insecurity. As he emphasises, the enemies are those who refuse to think critically, not being intellectually curious, and accepting the supremacist, fascist, and misgovernance that is reducing the world collectively to being cogs in a diabolical machine of neoliberal global capitalism.

Ce livre veut faire état de l'appropriation des technologies, dans divers contextes africains, par les enseignants et les apprenants de l'enseignement primaire, secondaire et universitaire. Pour ce faire, il présente les travaux de chercheurs de différents pays d'Afrique - Bénin, Burkina Faso, Cameroun, Cote d'Ivoire, Mali, Niger et Sénégal.Surgissent de ces recherches plusieurs réflexions et questions qui interpellent tous ceux qui ont à cœur la compréhension du potentiel des technologies éducatives. Quelles sont les représentations sociales que les enseignants, les élèves et les étudiants ont des technologies ? Quelles sont les modalités administratives, pédagogiques et techniques à mettre en œuvre pour la formation continue à distance des enseignants avec l'aide des technologies ? Comment soutenir l'acquisition des compétences technopédagogiques ? Quelles sont les réelles potentialités des technologies de l'information et de la communication pour soutenir les réformes en éducation ? Les technologies sont-elles une source de motivation ou de démotivation, un levier pour les approches socioconstructivistes ?Cet ouvrage intéressera toute personne qui souhaite mieux comprendre l'éducation en Afrique et plus particulièrement la place que la technopédagogie est appelée à jouer dans l'Afrique du 21e siècle.

Unravelling the mysteries of Africa's underdevelopment presents an Afrocentric ideological understanding of the continent's fragmentation; a scientific and objective (Mijadala) discourse as well as an approach of how to move progressively and sustainably Africa forward. The breadth and depth of the book shows the unwavering impoverishment and urgent need for the continent to stand up and take the bull by the horn. It offers an inspiring means of grappling with the continent's problems to build the change we want - An African Wealth of Nation - not the continent of collapsed, failed states under the governance construct of centralised authoritarian regimes It is a thought-provoking discourse that challenges us all to be inherent participants in the reconstruction of a Brave New Africa far beyond the 21st Century.

This volume brings together seven empirically grounded contributions by African social scientists of different disciplinary backgrounds. The authors explore the social impact of religious innovation and competition in present day Africa. They represent a selection from an interdisciplinary initiative that made 23 research grants for theologians and social scientists to study Christianity and social change in contemporary Africa. These contributions focus on a variety of dynamics in contemporary African religion (mostly Christianity), including gender, health and healing, social media, entrepreneurship, and inter-religious borrowing and accommodation. The volume seeks to enhance understanding of religion's vital presence and power in contemporary Africa. It reveals problems as well as possibilities, notably some ethical concerns and psychological maladies that arise in some of these new movements, notably neo-Pentecostal and militant fundamentalist groups. Yet the contributions do not fixate on African problems and victimization. Instead, they explore sources of African creativity, resiliency and agency. The book calls on scholars of religion and religiosity in Africa to invest new conceptual and methodological energy in understanding what it means to be actively religious in Africa today.

Sustainability is often just looked into as found at the intersection between economic, environmental and equity (3Es) variables, also referred to as production, planet and people (3Ps). However, the major determinants of global environmental change are the human species themselves. While they are part of the three Es, they go further to create a fourth pillar, the institutions, partly to manage complexity as they cause it. The complexity of people as the key definer of sustainability lies in the fact that Homo Sapiens are animals of politics and socio-economic reasoning. As they wrestle in the rationality and decision-making space, natural resources, and any other resources (human, capital, financial and social relations) are configured and reconfigured in such a way that sustainability becomes the major goal under threat. Using Zimbabwe as a case study, the contributors in this volume dissect development as an endangered species needing the key actors involved to rethink their decisions and actions in the interest of more sustainable and desirable futures.

Positing the notions of coloniality of ignorance and geopolitics of ignorance as central to coloniality and colonisation, this book examines how colonialists socially produced ignorance among colonised indigenous peoples so as to render them docile and manageable. Dismissing colonial descriptions of indigenous people as savages, illiterate, irrational, prelogical, mystical, primitive, barbaric and backward, the book argues that imperialists/colonialists contrived geopolitics of ignorance wherein indigenous regions were forced to become ignorant, hence containable and manageable in the imperial world. Questioning the provenance of modernist epistemologies, the book asks why Eurocentric scholars only contest the provenance of indigenous knowledges, artefacts and scientific collections. Interrogating why empire sponsors the decolonisation of universities/epistemologies in indigenous territories while resisting the repatriation/restitution of indigenous artefacts, the book also wonders why Westerners who still retain indigenous artefacts, skulls and skeletons in their museums, universities and private collections do not consider such artefacts and skulls to be colonising them as well. The book is valuable to scholars and activists in the fields of anthropology, museums and heritage studies, science and technology studies, decoloniality, policymaking, education, politics, sociology and development studies.

The Tragedy Of The Stupid Nation retraces three decades of political instability during which the people of the Central African Republic suffered from several waves of violence that lead to the breakdown of the social cohesion between the different communities (first along ethnic, then along religious lines). This book is a personal and collective account of the massacres, looting and fleeing and an indictment of misgovernance, nepotism and political inequality. The consequences of which are, too often, carried by the population. Combining different literary genres, Max-Landry Kassaï gives the reader an appreciation of what it is to come of age in the Central African Republic.

This collection of articles is based on presentations and discussions at the 2018 African Potentials Forum, held in Accra, Ghana. This forum was a part of the African Potentials Project, which aims to clarify the latent problem-solving abilities, ways of thinking, and institutions that have been created, accumulated, unified, and deployed in the everyday experiences of Africans. The notion of Africa's latent power/potential is not related to romanticisation of the traditional knowledge of African society and its institutions as fixed, essentialised 'magic wands'. This notion also raises objections against political dogmas that seek to smoke out and eliminate thought and values originating in Western modernity. The keyword of the Accra Forum was futurity. Africa's future is laden with possibilities, latent power, and potential. It is bright and hopeful but, simultaneously, bleak and thought-provoking. For nascent democracies and economically challenged communities, the value of this potential lies not in its static qualities but in how these qualities can be harnessed and translated into beneficial practical outcomes. As a concept, 'potential' connotes a time to come; a futurity that is full of known and unknown possibilities, challenges, and opportunities.

Bill F. Ndi's Sacred Songs is a collection of 95 sonnets deeply rooted in the tradition of spiritual testimony of faith. The personae in the poems are a creed of believers who are never far away from their God to whom be all glory. These poems are all in praise of the works of the Almighty God in the life of all. Bill F. Ndi in his characteristic simplicity and songlike style stays close to his humanist vision, and socio-political anguish, which he skillfully weaves in spirituality. Tacitly assuming responsibility for his foibles as human, the poet forfeits every other hard-to-overcome obstacle of divine nature, into the hands of God Almighty. This collection embraces, in a refreshing way, biblical precepts of freedom as well as contemporary social, economic, political, and even philosophical notions of freedom and oppression. This is a pleasurable collection to read in its entirety; it is a man's sobering reflection on and of the divine.

In South Africa issues of identity remain a pressing concern and preoccupation. For some, the experience of feeling that one does not belong in South Africa, especially among Africans and African descendants, appears to be intensifying. In this first collection of poems, Rosabelle Boswell speaks of the many places in which ordinary Africans born outside of South Africa try to achieve belonging. They do so in the family context, the backyard, language, the meeting, familiar landscapes and dreams. The poems also foreground the tumult of emotions that rise from the experience of exclusion and the results of pressure when one must conform. There is panic and dislocation, desperation, fear and sense of marginality when one’s work and achievements are reduced to whether one is born in South Africa or not. According to the poet, in such a context, one can only achieve true freedom from the tyranny of belonging by psychologically walking away from the expectations of those in power and putting oneself in a ‘clearing’ where flexibility, openness and newness reside. The forest of expectations remains, but we can achieve temporary respite from it by walking away now and again. The collection spans two years of writing identity in a different form, poetry.

In 2005, a United Nations study reported that half of the world's languages (estimated at 6,000) would disappear by the end of this century. A third of these endangered languages are in Africa where, according to the same study, nearly 250 languages have disappeared in the last century. Language is the heart, identity, storage system for the collective and unique memory and experience of every culture, people, including their natural habitat. Loss of language means loss of the ability to retain and pass on not just a belief system but also invaluable knowledge to future generations.This English-Lekongho/Lekongho-English Dictionary is a modest first attempt to minimize the envisaged sad phenomenon of language loss. Nkongho-Mbo people speak Lekongho, one of the five variants of the Mbo language of the Mbo ethnic group of Cameroon, with their ancestral home in the Kupe Muanenguba Administrative Area of the South-west Region. With this book, the authors' fervent hope is that there will no longer surface any justification to continue to refrain from speaking Lekongho on a daily basis. This effort will help to regionalize, nationalize and internationalize the Lekongho language since Nkongho people are spread all over the country, Africa and the world.