Effective peace agreements are rarely accomplished by idealists. The process of moving from situations of entrenched oppression, armed conflict, open warfare, and mass atrocities toward peace and reconciliation requires a series of small steps and compromises to open the way for the kind of dialogue and negotiation that make political stability, the beginning of democracy, and the rule of law a possibility. For over forty years, Charles Villa-Vicencio has been on the front lines of Africa's battle for racial equality. In Walk with Us and Listen, he argues that reconciliation needs honest talk to promote trust building and enable former enemies and adversaries to explore joint solutions to the cause of their conflicts. He offers a critical assessment of the South African experiment in transitional justice as captured in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and considers the influence of ubuntu, in which individuals are defined by their relationships, and other traditional African models of reconciliation. Political reconciliation is offered as a cautious model against which transitional politics needs to be measured. Villa-Vicencio challenges those who stress the obligation to prosecute those allegedly guilty of gross violation of human rights, replacing this call with the need for more complementarity between the International Criminal Court and African mechanisms to achieve the greater goals of justice and peace building.

Stereomodernism and amplifying the Black Atlantic -- Sight reading: early Black South African transcriptions of freedom -- Négritude musicology: poetry, performance and statecraft in Senegal -- What women want: selling hi-fi in consumer magazines and film -- 'Soul to soul': echo-locating histories of slavery and freedom from Ghana -- Pirate's choice: hacking into (post- )pan-African futures -- Epilogue: Singing songs.

In this epic tale of fate, fortune and legacy, Jennifer Makumbi vibrantly brings to life this corner of Africa and this colourful family as she reimagines the history of Uganda through the cursed bloodline of the Kintu clan. The year is 1750. Kintu Kidda sets out for the capital to pledge allegiance to the new leader of the Buganda kingdom. Along the way he unleashes a curse that will plague his family for generations. Blending oral tradition, myth, folktale and history, Makumbi weaves together the stories of Kintu’s descendants as they seek to break free from the burden of their past to produce a majestic tale of clan and country – a modern classic.

Penda Diakité joins forces with her award-winning author/artist father to give a charming peek at everyday life in Africa. "This fact-based story of losing a tooth while visiting family in Mali rings with authenticity and good humour...[T]he illustrations exude happiness and togetherness." - The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

In 1969 Gerhard Kubik chanced to encounter a Mozambican labor migrant, a miner in Transvaal, South Africa, tapping a cipendani, a mouth-resonated musical bow. A comparable instrument was seen in the hands of a white Appalachian musician who claimed it as part of his own cultural heritage. Through connections like these Kubik realized that the link between these two far-flung musicians is African-American music, the sound that became the blues. Such discoveries reveal a narrative of music evolution for Kubik, a cultural anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. Traveling in Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, and the United States, he spent forty years in the field gathering the material for Africa and the Blues. In this book, Kubik relentlessly traces the remote genealogies of African cultural music through eighteen African nations, especially in the Western and Central Sudanic Belt. Included is a comprehensive map of this cradle of the blues, along with 31 photographs gathered in his fieldwork. The author also adds clear musical notations and descriptions of both African and African American traditions and practices and calls into question the many assumptions about which elements of the blues were "European" in origin and about which came from Africa. Unique to this book is Kubik's insight into the ways present-day African musicians have adopted and enlivened the blues with their own traditions. With scholarly care but with an ease for the general reader, Kubik proposes an entirely new theory on blue notes and their origins. Tracing what musical traits came from Africa and what mutations and mergers occurred in the Americas, he shows that the African American tradition we call the blues is truly a musical phenomenon belonging to the African cultural world [Publisher description].

What is the just measure of Western obligations to Africa? As Africans and their supporters mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the United States and Great Britain, the question becomes increasingly salient. Calls for reparations for the evils of slavery, as well as for past colonial and current economic and political abuses, can be heard across Africa and the African diaspora. Human rights scholar Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann examines these calls for redress in Reparations to Africa. Her study analyzes the reparations movement from the perspectives of law, philosophy, political science, and sociology. While acknowledging the brutal background of the slave trade and colonialism, and the mistreatment of the peoples of Africa, Howard-Hassmann finds that the complexity of this history, along with facts of the contemporary situation, weakens the case for financial compensation, although she does recommend acknowledgment of, and apologies for, some actions. The book not only provides a bold reckoning of the root causes, both internal and external, of African underdevelopment and unrest but also suggests alternative means for restorative justice and examines the role that institutions such as the International Criminal Court can play. By including the voices of 74 African academics, diplomats, and activists interviewed by Howard-Hassmann and Anthony P. Lombardo, Reparations to Africa makes a valuable contribution to the reparations debate. In an emotionally and politically charged postcolonial environment, this book serves as a judicious guide to the search for economic justice for Africans today and into the future.

The problem of environmental degradation on the African continent is a severe one. In this book, Cajetan Iheka analyzes how African literary texts have engaged with pressing ecological problems in Africa, including the Niger Delta oil pollution in Nigeria, ecologies of war in Somalia, and animal abuses. Analyzing narratives by important African writers such as Amos Tutuola, Wangari Maathai, J. M. Coetzee, Bessie Head, and Ben Okri, Iheka challenges the tendency to focus primarily on humans in the conceptualization of environmental problems, and instead focuses on how African literature demonstrates the interconnection and 'proximity' of human and nonhuman beings. Through this, Iheka ultimately proposes a revision of the idea of agency based on human intentionality in African literary studies and postcolonialism: that texts yoke the exploitation of Africans to the despoliation of the environment, and they recommend responsibility toward human and nonhuman beings as crucial for ecological sustainability and addressing climate change.