In Freedom Afrika, the sequel to Cosmo Starlight’s novel Freedom Incorporated, Noodle Church escapes solitary confinement to work with people against bombs, bullets, powders, and policemen. Found journeying across three continents, bringing a pack which rarely comes off his back, and wearing canvas pants he’s accustomed to sleeping in, Africans procure Noodle a home so he mustn’t live on the street during the holidays. They feed Noodle, lend him jackets to wear when it’s cold, and provide security ensured by honest, trustworthy relationships. At wildland that unfolds along a thousand kilometers of rugged coast to document his life in the system enslaving people with cameras and clandestine surveillance, someplace so remote footpaths replaced roads, Noodle thought he’d discovered freedom. But, where bulls bask in sun by the beach, he found wardens track him. The International Intelligence Service (IIS) recalls love he lost after detainment without charges, a trial, or records. A provocateur gained Noodle’s trust to compromise him so men riding dirt-bikes could push this blue-stained boy beyond the bounds of Freedom Inc.’s rule by catching him kill someone. Instead, Noodle fled into the wild without clean water or shelter before returning to the floor of an African snack shop where he awoke last Christmas. Agents tracked him there too; yet, after fighting a twenty-year-long war, townspeople excelled at security. People who’d witnessed brothers being shot, poisoned, and burned alive proclaimed, “If men wearing white suits and masks attached to breathing apparatuses allege Noodle Church has a rare disease nobody’s heard of then it doesn’t matter because we fought for independence. We’ll never let wardens take him, even if they say it’s a matter of national security!” Africans were poor but they reject bombs, bullets, powders, and policemen. Freedom Afrika teaches people need food, water, shelter, and love to live. Love is all Noodle needed!

Epistemic Freedom in Africa is about the struggle for African people to think, theorize, interpret the world and write from where they are located, unencumbered by Eurocentrism. The imperial denial of common humanity to some human beings meant that in turn their knowledges and experiences lost their value, their epistemic virtue. Now, in the twenty-first century, descendants of enslaved, displaced, colonized, and racialized peoples have entered academies across the world, proclaiming loudly that they are human beings, their lives matter and they were born into valid and legitimate knowledge systems that are capable of helping humanity to transcend the current epistemic and systemic crises. Together, they are engaging in diverse struggles for cognitive justice, fighting against the epistemic line which haunts the twenty-first century. The renowned historian and decolonial theorist Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni offers a penetrating and well-argued case for centering Africa as a legitimate historical unit of analysis and epistemic site from which to interpret the world, whilst simultaneously making an equally strong argument for globalizing knowledge from Africa so as to attain ecologies of knowledges. This is a dual process of both deprovincializing Africa, and in turn provincializing Europe. The book highlights how the mental universe of Africa was invaded and colonized, the long-standing struggles for 'an African university', and the trajectories of contemporary decolonial movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall in South Africa. This landmark work underscores the fact that only once the problem of epistemic freedom has been addressed can Africa achieve political, cultural, economic and other freedoms. This groundbreaking new book is accessible to students and scholars across Education, History, Philosophy, Ethics, African Studies, Development Studies, Politics, International Relations, Sociology, Postcolonial Studies and the emerging field of Decolonial Studies. The Open Access versions Chapter 1 and Chapter 9, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429492204 have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

A comprehensive synthesis of the ideal of freedom in African culture from a pan-African perspective after independence.

This moving and beautifully illustrated book, developed from an award-winning research project, examines the experience of African-American GIs in Germany since 1945 and the unique insights they provide into the civil rights struggle at home and abroad.

Barack Obama is the first African American President, but the history of African Americans in the White House long predates him. The building was built by slaves, and African Americans have worked in it ever since, from servants to advisors. In charting the history of African Americans in the White House, Kenneth T. Walsh illuminates the trajectory of racial progress in the US. He looks at Abraham Lincoln and his black seamstress and valet, debates between President Johnson and Martin Luther King over civil rights, and the role of black staff members under Nixon and Reagan. Family of Freedom gives a unique view of US history as seen through the experiences of African Americans in the White House.

Chronicling the lives of African American women in the urban north of America (particularly Philadelphia) during the early years of the republic, 'A Fragile Freedom' investigates how they journeyed from enslavement to the precarious state of 'free persons' in the decades before the Civil War.

Bondspeople who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the war produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, and as historian Jim Downs reveals in this groundbreaking volume, it had deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of freed people. In Sick from Freedom, Downs recovers the untold story of one of the bitterest ironies in American history--that the emancipation of the slaves, seen as one of the great turning points in U.S. history, had devastating consequences for innumerable freed people. Drawing on massive new research into the records of the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau-a nascent national health system that cared for more than one million freed slaves-he shows how the collapse of the plantation economy released a plague of lethal diseases. With emancipation, African Americans seized the chance to move, migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, and exposure. To address this crisis, the Medical Division hired more than 120 physicians, establishing some forty underfinanced and understaffed hospitals scattered throughout the South, largely in response to medical emergencies. Downs shows that the goal of the Medical Division was to promote a healthy workforce, an aim which often excluded a wide range of freedpeople, including women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and children. Downs concludes by tracing how the Reconstruction policy was then implemented in the American West, where it was disastrously applied to Native Americans. The widespread medical calamity sparked by emancipation is an overlooked episode of the Civil War and its aftermath, poignantly revealed in Sick from Freedom.