In Light of Africa explores how the idea of Africa as a real place, an imagined homeland, and a metaphor for Black identity is used in the cultural politics of the Brazilian state of Bahia. In the book, Allan Charles Dawson argues that Africa, as both a symbol and a geographical and historical place, is vital to understanding the wide range of identities and ideas about racial consciousness that exist in Bahia’s Afro-Brazilian communities. In his ethnographic research Dawson follows the idea of “Africa” from the city of Salvador to the West African coast and back to the hinterlands of the Bahian interior. Along the way, he encounters West African entrepreneurs, Afrobeat musicians, devotees of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé, professors of the Yoruba language, and hardscrabble farmers and ranchers, each of whom engages with the “idea of Africa” in their own personal way.

In Light of Africa explores how the idea of Africa as a real place, an imagined homeland, and a metaphor for Black identity is used in the cultural politics of the Brazilian state of Bahia. In the book, Allan Charles Dawson argues that Africa, as both a symbol and a geographical and historical place, is vital to understanding the wide range of identities and ideas about racial consciousness that exist in Bahia's Afro-Brazilian communities. In his ethnographic research Dawson follows the idea of “Africa” from the city of Salvador to the West African coast and back to the hinterlands of the Bahian interior. Along the way, he encounters West African entrepreneurs, Afrobeat musicians, devotees of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé, professors of the Yoruba language, and hardscrabble farmers and ranchers, each of whom engages with the “idea of Africa” in their own personal way.

From one of Africa’s most influential and eloquent essayists, a posthumous collection that highlights his biting satire and subversive wisdom on topics from travel to cultural identity to sexuality “A fierce literary talent . . . [Wainaina] shines a light on his continent without cliché.”—The Guardian “Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. . . . Africa is to be pitied, worshipped, or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.” Binyavanga Wainaina was a pioneering voice in African literature, an award-winning memoirist and essayist remembered as one of the greatest chroniclers of contemporary African life. This groundbreaking collection brings together, for the first time, Wainaina’s pioneering writing on the African continent, including many of his most critically acclaimed pieces, such as the viral satirical sensation “How to Write About Africa.” Working fearlessly across a range of topics—from politics to international aid, cultural heritage, and redefined sexuality—he describes the modern world with sensual, emotional, and psychological detail, giving us a full-color view of his home country and continent. These works present the portrait of a giant in African literature who left a tremendous legacy.

Light from Ancient Africa is a critical contribution to what might be called the Re-Africanization of Psychology Project. It was within this project that we came to realize that the notion of human psychology was and remains an African invention...In this book, Na'im Akbar provides the reader with a clear and concise understanding of the African (Kemetic) origins of psychology, and provides the insightful guidelines to modern-day implications and applications of the field. From foreword by Wade W. Nobles

In its earliest days, photography was seen as depicting its subjects with such objectivity as to be inherently free of ideological bias. Today we are rightly more skeptical -- at least most of the time. When it comes to photography from the past, we tend to set some of our skepticism aside. But should we? In Light on Darkness? T. Jack Thompson, a leading historian of African Christianity, revisits the body of photography generated by British missionaries to sub-Saharan Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and demonstrates that much more is going on in these images than meets the eye. This volume offers a careful reassessment of missionary photographers, their photographs, and their African and European audiences. Several dozen fascinating photographs from the period are included.

More than 25 years have passed since South Africans were being shot or hacked or burned to death in political violence, and the memory of the trauma has faded. Nevertheless, some 20 500 people were killed between 1984 and 1994. Conventional wisdom has it that most died as a result of the ANC's people's war. Many books have been written on South Africa's political transition, but none has dealt adequately with the people's war. This book does. It shows the extraordinary success of the people's war in giving the ANC a virtual monopoly on power, as well as the great cost at which this was done. The high price of it is still being paid. Apart from the terror and killings it sparked at the time, the people's war set in motion forces that cannot easily be tamed. Violence, once unleashed, is not easy to stamp out. 'Ungovernability', once generated, is not readily reversed. For this new edition, Anthea Jeffery has revised and abridged her seminal work. She has also included a brief overview of the ANC's National Democratic Revolution for which the people's war was intended to prepare the way. Since 1994, the NDR has been implemented in many different spheres. It is now being speeded up in its second and more radical phase.