African Town

African Town
Author: Charles Waters
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2022-01-04
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0593322894

Chronicling the story of the last Africans brought illegally to America in 1860, African Town is a powerful and stunning novel-in-verse. Cover may vary. In 1860, long after the United States outlawed the importation of enslaved laborers, 110 men, women and children from Benin and Nigeria were captured and brought to Mobile, Alabama aboard a ship called Clotilda. Their journey includes the savage Middle Passage and being hidden in the swamplands along the Alabama River before being secretly parceled out to various plantations, where they made desperate attempts to maintain both their culture and also fit into the place of captivity to which they'd been delivered. At the end of the Civil War, the survivors created a community for themselves they called African Town, which still exists to this day. Told in 14 distinct voices, including that of the ship that brought them to the American shores and the founder of African Town, this powerfully affecting historical novel-in-verse recreates a pivotal moment in US and world history, the impacts of which we still feel today.

Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town

Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town
Author: Adeline Masquelier
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2009-10-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0253003466

In the small town of Dogondoutchi, Niger, Malam Awal, a charismatic Sufi preacher, was recruited by local Muslim leaders to denounce the practices of reformist Muslims. Malam Awal's message has been viewed as a mixed blessing by Muslim women who have seen new definitions of Islam and Muslim practice impact their place and role in society. This study follows the career of Malam Awal and documents the engagement of women in the religious debates that are refashioning their everyday lives. Adeline Masquelier reveals how these women have had to define Islam on their own terms, especially as a practice that governs education, participation in prayer, domestic activities, wedding customs, and who wears the veil and how. Masquelier's richly detailed narrative presents new understandings of what it means to be a Muslim woman in Africa today.

The African City

The African City
Author: Bill Freund
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2007-03-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139459554

This book is comprehensive both in terms of time coverage, from before the Pharaohs to the present moment and in that it tries to consider cities from the entire continent, not just Sub-Saharan Africa. Apart from factual information and rich description material culled from many sources, it looks at many issues from why urban life emerged in the first place to how present-day African cities cope in difficult times. Instead of seeing towns and cities as somehow extraneous to the real Africa, it views them as an inherent part of developing Africa, indigenous, colonial, and post-colonial and emphasizes the extent to which the future of African society and African culture will likely be played out mostly in cities. The book is written to appeal to students of history but equally to geographers, planners, sociologists and development specialists interested in urban problems.

Ancient African Town

Ancient African Town
Author: Fiona Macdonald
Publisher: Franklin Watts
Total Pages: 45
Release: 1998
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780531144800

A tour of Benin City, a West African town and capital of the Edo Empire, located in present-day Nigeria.

Nourishing Life

Nourishing Life
Author: Arianna Huhn
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2020-09-10
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1805399071

In this accessible ethnography of a small town in northern Mozambique, everyday cultural knowledge and behaviors about food, cooking, and eating reveal the deeply human pursuit of a nourishing life. This emerges less through the consumption of specific nutrients than it does in the affective experience of alimentation in contexts that support vitality, compassion, and generative relations. Embedded within central themes in the study of Africa south of the Sahara, the volume combines insights from philosophy and food studies to find textured layers of meaning in a seemingly simple cuisine.

The Negro Motorist Green Book

The Negro Motorist Green Book
Author: Victor H. Green
Publisher: Colchis Books
Total Pages: 222
Release:
Genre: History
ISBN:

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a groundbreaking guide that provided African American travelers with crucial information on safe places to stay, eat, and visit during the era of segregation in the United States. This essential resource, originally published from 1936 to 1966, offered a lifeline to black motorists navigating a deeply divided nation, helping them avoid the dangers and indignities of racism on the road. More than just a travel guide, The Negro Motorist Green Book stands as a powerful symbol of resilience and resistance in the face of oppression, offering a poignant glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of the African American experience in the 20th century.

Ghana on the Go

Ghana on the Go
Author: Jennifer Hart
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2016-10-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253023254

As early as the 1910s, African drivers in colonial Ghana understood the possibilities that using imported motor transport could further the social and economic agendas of a diverse array of local agents, including chiefs, farmers, traders, fishermen, and urban workers. Jennifer Hart's powerful narrative of auto-mobility shows how drivers built on old trade routes to increase the speed and scale of motorized travel. Hart reveals that new forms of labor migration, economic enterprise, cultural production, and social practice were defined by autonomy and mobility and thus shaped the practices and values that formed the foundations of Ghanaian society today. Focusing on the everyday lives of individuals who participated in this century of social, cultural, and technological change, Hart comes to a more sensitive understanding of the ways in which these individuals made new technology meaningful to their local communities and associated it with their future aspirations.

Cradock

Cradock
Author: Jeffrey Butler
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2017-12-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813940591

Cradock, the product of more than twenty years of research by Jeffrey Butler, is a vivid history of a middle-sized South African town in the years when segregation gradually emerged, preceding the rapid and rigorous implementation of apartheid. Although Butler was born and raised in Cradock, he avoids sentimentality and offers an ambitious treatment of the racial themes that dominate recent South African history through the details of one emblematic community. Augmenting the obvious political narrative, Cradock examines poor infrastructural conditions that typify a grossly unequal system of racial segregation but otherwise neglected in the region’s historiography. Butler shows, with the richness that only a local study could provide, how the lives of blacks, whites, and mixed-race coloreds were affected by the bitter transition from segregation before 1948 to apartheid thereafter.

The African City

The African City
Author: Anthony O'Connor
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2013-01-11
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1135671354

This book explores various characteristics of tropical African cities, with special reference to change in the post-independence period. It stresses the diversity of urban forms and urban experience to be found within the region, distinguishing the more general features from those peculiar to individual cities. Much has been written about urban Africa, but nearly all relates to particular cities: this book provides a context for such studies. This review provides an essential foundation both for theoretical clarification of the processes of urbanization and for practical planning decisions. The topics covered range from rural-urban migration and national urban systems to the urban economy, housing , and the spatial structure of cities. The sharp contrasts between indigenous and colonial urban traditions are emphasized, but so also is the evidence for convergence today, as indigenization takes place in the colonial cities while Westernization proceeds ini those of indigenous origin. This book was first published in 1983.