Books published by Langaa RPCID

This volume critically interrogates, from different angles and dimensions, the resilience of conflict and violence into 21st century Africa. The demise of European colonial administration in Africa in the 1960s wielded fervent hope for enduring peace for the people of Africa. Regrettably, conflict alongside violence in all its dimensions - physical, religious, political, psychological and structural - remain unabated and occupy central stage in contemporary Africa. The resilience of conflict and violence on the continental scene invokes unsettling memories of the past while negatively influencing the present and future of crafting inclusive citizenship and statehood. The book provides fresh insightful ethnographic and intellectual material for rethinking violence and conflict, and for fostering long-lasting peace and political justice on the continent and beyond. With its penetrating focus on conflict and associated trajectories of violence in Africa, the book is an inestimable asset for conflict management practitioners, political scientists, historians, civil society activists and leaders in economics and politics as well as all those interested in the affairs of Africa.

Gravitas: Poetic Consciencism for Cameroon is the poet's requiem for the geographical expression code-named Cameroon. Vakunta speaks with the audacity of a daredevil and the certitude of a seer. This long poem has the twin virtues of gravity and clarity of purpose. The poet eschews the banality and sophistry characteristic of poetry for poetry's sake. Passion, sarcasm, and incisive irony are the hallmarks of this long didactic poem. The poet subscribes to Salman Rushdie's pronouncement that a poet's duty is to say the unutterable, name the unnamable, unmask masquerading miscreants and shame the scum of society. In this poem, music serves as a clarion call for examination of conscience, and alcohol ceases to serve as opium of the people. A bittersweet potion, this book echoes the defiant voice of a son-of-the-soil at odds with his native land gone topsy-turvy.

Despite all the talk about African Renaissance, much of the continent is plagued by poverty and instability. To break out of that cycle, the guardians of African heritage (the old independence freedom fighters turned political leaders and their successors) and much of Afrocentric literature rightly promotes African ideas and solutions for African problems. While the idea in itself is noble, the danger is for Africa to close itself off and ignore 'outside' technical and intellectual innovations that it desperately needs to advance further. Africa through Structuration Theory - ntu joins the discourse by attempting to restore intellectual freedom and convincingly defends structuration theory not only as the way forward for Africa but also as a legitimately African concept. It is innovative, refreshing and deserves to be heard across the world and appreciated especially by African graduates, current and future leaders of various African institutions or businesses, non-Africans who might hesitate to refer to such a theory when trying to understand and deal with African problems and the wider public who constitute the audience for this book. New in this edition: All chapters have been tightened up to make a clearer and more robust case. Chapter three, in particular, has been developed further in an attempt to demonstrate how Ubuntu is an African version of structuration theory. Overall, having both approached the subject from a rational perspective and presented Ubuntu in its preferred version, it became imperative to discuss the status/role of the African body in the expression of human agency and characterise different leadership practices in Africa that do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Ubuntu. Hence, Chapter 6: Body sociology and Africa and Chapter 7: The FS (fear and self-scrutiny) methodology of Ubuntu: a mapping of the field.

This is a comprehensive text on the function of thought in the history and political sociology of Cameroon. The book brings out how the "hidden hand of history" fashions a political thought which, in turn, creates its own history. Instead of Cameroonians making history, history makes Cameroonians. The book shows how political ideas are fashioned in a post-colonial context in which Europeans impose a superordinate arrangement on a people together with its philosophers. "Thinking the nation" in Cameroon on behalf of Europeans, especially after the leaders of the national liberation struggle were all eliminated, European philosophers put in place a "repressive machine" under which Cameroonians were subjected between 1958 and 1990. Repression gave way to a refined form of enslavement - a modernised version of slavery. Cameroonians joined the bandwagon and have been producing and reproducing Western industrial economies while day-dreaming of what they will never become. The whole idea of nation-building in post-colonial Africa is put in question. This book offers students of political studies, sociology, anthropology and history compelling evidence to grapple with questions as to whether Cameroon is a state or a nation and questions of sovereignty and citizenship.

From 1910 to the 1930s, educating Africans was a major preoccupation in the metropole and in the colonies of imperial Britain. This richly researched book untangles the discourse on education for African leaders, which involved diverse actors such as colonial officials, missionaries, European and American educationists or ideologues in Africa and diaspora. The analysis is presented around two foci of decision-making: one is the Memorandum on Education Policy in British Tropical Africa, issued by the British Colonial Office in 1923; another is the Achimota School established on the Gold Coast Colony (present-day Ghana) as a model school in 1927. Ideas brought from different sources were mingled and converged on the areas where the motivations of actors have coincided. The local and the global was linked through the chains of discourse, interacting with global economic, political and social concerns. The book also vividly describes how the ideals of colonial education were realized in Achimota School.

Radical land reform programmes generate changes in agrarian structures and capital accumulation trajectories in the countryside. This book examines how capital accumulation is being reshaped by changing financing and marketing of agricultural commodities and presents an emerging Quadi-PMMR-model agrarian structure composed of the poor, middle, middle-to-rich peasants and some rich capitalists with a growing middle scale farmer base constituting two thirds of the rural population in Zimbabwe. This evidence based assessment, 15 years after the FTLRP, sheds light on policy outcomes and impacts on communities, revealing the changing production, marketing, capital accumulation and class formation tendencies across Zimbabwe's settlement models and agro-ecological settings. The book fuses the reliance on agrarian political economy lenses and factor component analysis to reveal the dynamics of agrarian change and to explore the dialectic between production and circulation and between the centre and periphery in exceptional fashion that expands our understanding of Zimbabwe's agrarian transition.

Since the discovery and exploitation of minerals like gold, diamond and copper in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Malawi has played the role of a labour supplier. Malawians were attracted by the relatively higher wages obtaining in the South African mines up to the period of the decline in mine migrancy at the end of the 1980s. Following this decline, a cross-section of Malawians continued to emigrate to South Africa to seek various jobs in the burgeoning informal sector and also for trade purposes. Migration from Malawi to South Africa sheds light on the problems that labour migrants and traders encounter as they are 'toing' and 'froing' between Malawi and South Africa in pursuit of their respective goals. It shows that migration, which initially was exclusively done for wage employment, is becoming more complex by the day. This is a result of the infusion of elements of commercial migration, smuggling and human trafficking. The book advances the argument that the numbers of migrants to South Africa increased in the post-1994 period partly as a result of mal-administration by the successive democratically-elected governments in Malawi. This development weakened Malawi's otherwise promising economy and impoverished the rural masses. The book 'sees' forlorn hope in the future of labour migrants and traders, unless the Malawi Government starts to genuinely have the welfare of the populace at heart! The book is relevant and accessible to policy-makers, university and college students interested in migration studies, general readers and migrants, themselves

This is a study on the creative appropriation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) by mobile Africans and the communities to which they belong, home and away. With a focus on Cameroonian migrants from Pinyin and Mankon who are currently living in Cape Town and the Netherlands, this book examines the workings of the social fabric of mobile communities. It sheds light on how these communities are crafting lives for themselves in the host country and simultaneously linking up with the home country thanks to advances in ICTs and road and air transport. ICTs and mobilities have complemented social relational interaction and provide migrants today with opportunities to partake in cultural practices that express their Pinyin-ness and Mankon-ness. Pinyin and Mankon migrants are still as rooted in the past as they are in the present. They were born into a community with its own sense of home, moral ethos and cultural pride but live in a context of accelerated ICTs and mobility that is fast changing the way they live their lives. Drawing on this detailed ethnographic case study and related literature, Henrietta Nyamnjoh argues that while ICTs continue to enhance mobility for those who move and for those who stay put, they have become inextricably linked in forging networks and reconfiguring existing ones. Contrary to earlier studies that predicted radical social change and the passing of traditional societies in the face of new technologies, ICTs have been appropriated to enhance the workings of existing social relations and ways of life while simultaneously pointing to new directions in ever more creative and innovative ways.

Yves R. Simon (1903-1961), one of the greatest contemporary philosophers, gives a modern formulation for many classical philosophical concepts such as authority, the common good, and natural law. These topics have received extensive attention from scholars. Simon also discusses the nature of human virtue, moral and intellectual, but this topic has been less studied until now. The idea of virtue, and in our case virtue in political life, runs through Simon's works. Through a close study of Simon's works and the relevant secondary literature, this book explores Simon's definition of virtue in order to highlight its originality, and show how he weaves the need for it into the fabric of three facets of political life, namely, the common good, the virtue of the ruler and the ruled, and the law. These ideas are important for the ruler-ship of any country and especially of developing nations which are populated by sit-tight dictators. Philosophy can be dry and abstract, yet in this case we deal with one of its more practical manifestations.

The Ways We Stretch Toward One Another is a collection of essays on the work of Pamela Reynolds. The essays take cues from Reynolds' decades-long contributions to the field of anthropology in different ways. The authors weave Reynolds' groundbreaking scholarship on the anthropology of childhood--of labour, of family, of resistance, justice, war and suffering--through the terms of their own work, in places and contexts that may at first appear quite distant from the villages of Zimbabwe and townships of South Africa that feature in Reynolds' ethnographies. The Ways We Stretch Toward One Another is about anthropologists stretching in thought and practice toward one another, between generations, toward the people encountered in the field, through worlds entered and past, and how, in turn, these worlds lean into our own. At the core of each essay is a question about how we learn, how we pass lessons on, how we assume the mantle of anthropology for understanding the contemporary world--something that often requires folding intellectual friendships into the tools of our practice. The Ways We Stretch Toward One Another demonstrates how a master anthropologist has come to shape the priorities of others, in terms that are both creative and aware.Contributors: Thomas Cousins, Stefanos Geroulanos, Todd Meyers, Pamela Reynolds, Fiona Ross, and Vaibhav Saria; and a Foreword by Francis B. Nyamnjoh

One of the fundamental challenges in deconstructing, rethinking and remaking the world from a Pan African vantage point is that some captives have tended to delight in the warmth of the [imperial] predator's mouth. In other words, some captives forget that the imperial predator's mouth gets warm because empire is eating and heating up from prey on the continent. (De-)Militarisation, Transnational Land Grabs and Restitution in an Age of the New Scramble for Africa: A Pan African Socio-Legal Perspective is a book that knocks on key aspects relating to land, militarisation, a PostAfrican World Order and a chaotic Post-God World Order, which require critical scholarly and policy attention in the quest to free Africa from centuries-old imperial depredations. The book carefully navigates the imperial entrapments which are designed to focus African attention only on decolonising African minds without also engaging in the [imperially more unsettling] decolonisation of African materialities.

Given the circularity of the witchcraft complex in Africa, given its performative potential, isn't the flood of anthropological publications on the topic counter-productive insofar as it feeds what it pretends to analyse, and even stigmatize? Wouldn't the social scientists be well advised not to emulate the media and the Evangelical preachers and to avoid bestowing on Africa the dubious privilege of being no more than a shadow theatre devoid of substance on the stage of which everything - power, work, production, economy, the family - would actually be played in the occult? In this publication, eight scholars - namely: Jean-Pierre Warnier, Didier Péclard, Julien Bonhomme, Patrice Yengo, Jane Guyer, Joseph Tonda, Francis Nyamnjoh and Peter Geschiere - engage in a lively and contradictory debate on witchcraft/sorcery in Africa in a controversial historical context.

Through poetry and fiction that engage the reader's heart and mind, Loretta Burns explores the beauties, perils, and mysteries of day to day life. With a graceful simplicity of style and an often intimate voice, she represents a range of experiences and observations that include stories and memories of childhood, encounters with nature and music, and poignant reminders of America's racial history. With delicate craftsmanship and an ear attuned to the eloquence of everyday language, she moves from quiet contemplation to youthful exuberance and from love to the pain of loss with sensitivity and understanding. Implicit throughout is a resilient affirmation of the fractured joy of being human.

Perpetual Search is a nerve-numbing piece of poetry that challenges all humans. The odes here want everybody to ask themselves who they think they are. So, too, it explores human nature based on both sides of the coin of the exemplification of human comportment. It is the pursuit aimed at interrogating some human behaviours and practices that are sometimes taken for granted despite having indelible impacts on people's lives. It is about the quest for aptness, communitas, love, happiness, power, wealth, life without questioning how they are attained. It raises questions that seem to be simple but are in fact difficult. The quest for human desire based on the search for a better life and for perfection is at the heart of this collection.

Through multiple points of resistance, The Repressed Expressed underscores how hard it is to build a community in any nation with no beneficial qualities of hope and transparency. This informative collection of essays highlights that wherever stability and order are lacking, the universal appeal is to express that which is suppressed. Also, like a map or guidebook, The Repressed Expressed indicates how people in such geographical prisons strive to transform their agitation into spiritual and political pathways, free of pain and hurt from, and anger towards a dirty and corrupted world. It thus, underpins discord and brings to the fore the authority's penchant for heaping abuse upon those caused to live in fear. In short, The Repressed Expressed is an impressive compilation of literary evidence informing scholarship on opinions and beliefs relating to repression, its expression, and the immeasurable associated cost.

The volume draws from René Devisch’s encounters with groups in southsaharan Africa, primarily. The author had the privilege to immerse himself, around the clock, in the Yakaphones’ activities and thoughts in southwest DR Congo from 1972 to 1974, and intermittently in Kinshasa’s shanty towns, from 1986 to 2003. The author first examines what sparked his choice to come to Congo, and then to pursue research among the Yakaphones in the borderland with Angola. He then invites us to follow the trajectory of his plural anthropological view on today’s multicentric world. It leads us to his praise for honorary doctor Jean-Marc Ela’s work. He then examines the proletarian outbursts of violence that rocked Congo’s major cities in 1991 and 1993. These can be read as a settling of scores with the disillusioning colonial and missionary modernisation, along with president Mobutu’s millenarian Popular Movement of the Revolution. Furthermore, after considering the morose reduction of a major Yaka dancing mask into a mere museum-bound curio in Antwerp, the book unravels the Yakaphones’ perspectives on spirits and sorcery’s threat. It also analyses their commitment to classical Bantu-African healing cults, along with their parallel consulting physicians and healers. By sharing the Yakaphones’ life-world, the analysis highlights their body-group-world weave, interlaced by the principle of co-resonance. A phenomenological and perspectivist look unfolds the local actors’ views, thereby disclosing the Bantu-African genius and setting for a major reversal of perspectives. Indeed, seeing 'here' from 'there' allows the author to uncover some alienating dynamics at work in his native Belgian Flemish-speaking culture. To better grasp the realm of life beyond the speakable and factual reasoning, the approach occasionally turns to the later Lacan’s focus on the unconscious desire, the body and its affects. The book addresses students and researchers in the humanities and, more broadly, all those immersed in the heat of the encounter with the culturally different.