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He was used to adventure. He was used to the high seas. He was Captain James Riley, American seaman and independent businessman bound for Europe in 1815. He never made it! Instead the young sea captain and his crew were shipwrecked off the coast of Muslim-controlled Morocco. The sea salt was still wet in their hair when the battered survivors were pounced upon by local natives, ensnared, enchained, and marched off into the horrors of African slavery. Riley s narrative reads like fiction but is based on solid fact. Most of his men died. A few were separated and sold into the interior of the continent, never to be seen again. He was the first American to venture near the legendary Timbuctoo. Yet the conditions were so barbaric, the food so scanty, and the beatings so regular that Riley dropped from 240 down to 90 pounds! After many desperate ordeals, the American sailor and a handful of his men were ransomed by a sympathetic English merchant who had learned of their plight. Upon his return to the United States, Riley penned Sufferings in Africa, which went on to become America s first best-seller, reportedly selling more than a million copies through various editions. Yet Sufferings in Africa is much more than just an adventure travel classic. In a time when the United States was grappling with the thorny issue of slavery within her own borders, Riley s startling book told a tale of Uncle Tom s Cabin in reverse. Here was a story of Caucasian Americans under the whip and in the chains that held millions of Black Americans at the same time. Scholars are currently researching clues that this deservedly famous book was read by a young Abraham Lincoln, and thus helped seal his own heart against slavery. A classic story of endurance and bravery then, this important American book remains as fresh today as the day it was first released.

b.A masterpiece of historical adventure, ISkeletons on the Zahara The western Sahara is a baking hot and desolate place, home only to nomads and their camels, and to locusts, snails and thorny scrub -- and its barren and ever-changing coastline has baffled sailors for centuries. In August 1815, the US brig Commerce was dashed against Cape Bojador and lost, although through bravery and quick thinking the ship's captain, James Riley, managed to lead all of his crew to safety. What followed was an extraordinary and desperate battle for survival in the face of human hostility, starvation, dehydration, death and despair. Captured, robbed and enslaved, the sailors were dragged and driven through the desert by their new owners, who neither spoke their language nor cared for their plight. Reduced to drinking urine, flayed by the sun, crippled by walking miles across burning stones and sand and losing over half of their body weights, the sailors struggled to hold onto both their humanity and their sanity. To reach safety, they would have to overcome not only the desert but also the greed and anger of those who would keep them in captivity. From the cold waters of the Atlantic to the searing Saharan sands, from the heart of the desert to the heart of man, Skeletons on the Zahara is a spectacular odyssey through the extremes and a gripping account of courage, brotherhood, and survival.

After a lifetime's close observation of the continent, one of the world's finest Africa correspondents has penned a landmark book on life and death in modern Africa. It takes a guide as observant, experienced, and patient as Richard Dowden to reveal its truths. Dowden combines a novelist's gift for atmosphere with the scholar's grasp of historical change as he spins tales of cults and commerce in Senegal and traditional spirituality in Sierra Leone; analyzes the impact of oil and the internet on Nigeria and aid on Sudan; and examines what has gone so badly wrong in Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo. Dowden's master work is an attempt to explain why Africa is the way it is, and enables its readers to see and understand this miraculous continent as a place of inspiration and tremendous humanity.

When the past is painful, as riddled with violence and injustice as it is in postapartheid South Africa, remembrance presents a problem at once practical and ethical: how much of the past to preserve and recollect and how much to erase and forget if the new nation is to ever unify and move forward? The new South Africa’s confrontation of this dilemma is Martin J. Murray’s subject in Commemorating and Forgetting. More broadly, this book explores how collective memory works—how framing events, persons, and places worthy of recognition and honor entails a selective appropriation of the past, not a mastery of history. How is the historical past made to appear in the present? In addressing these questions, Murray reveals how collective memory is stored and disseminated in architecture, statuary, monuments and memorials, literature, and art—“landscapes of remembrance” that selectively recall and even fabricate history in the service of nation-building. He examines such vehicles of memory in postapartheid South Africa and parses the stories they tell—stories by turn sanitized, distorted, embellished, and compressed. In this analysis, Commemorating and Forgetting marks a critical move toward recognizing how the legacies and impositions of white minority rule, far from being truly past, remain embedded in, intertwined with, and imprinted on the new nation’s here and now.

A history of slavery during the 19th and 20th centuries in three former French colonies.