Research Africa News: November 28, 2021
Afro-Bolivians: Inside One Of The Last Tribal Kingdoms In The Americas Bolivia Parker Diakite Parker Diakite, Apr 16, 2021
Landlocked between Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, Bolivia is often ignored by its South American neighbors, but it’s truly a gem. There are majestic mountains, stunning rainforests, and rich culture. Located outside the Capital City of La Paz is an area known as the Yungas Region. It’s not an easy area to access because of the jungles and rivers, but it’s home to the Afro-Bolivian community: one of the last remaining tribal kingdoms in the world. The Afro-Bolivians are descendants of African slaves during the Spanish Empire. The more than 2,000 people in the kingdom are mainly farmers who grow cocoa, coffee, and more. In Mururata, a village of around 350 people, is the center of the kingdom where Julio Bonifaz Piñedo is the king.
Read the research article here.
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Nobel: The Right Award for the Wrong Reason
By Meg Arenberg Meg Arenberg, is a writer, November 10, 2021
In their announcement of Zanzibar-born Abdulrazak Gurnah as the 2021 winner in literature, the Nobel Prize committee once again surprised the world. Only the sixth author from Africa to have received the prize in its 120-year history, Gurnah was lauded “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” Readers less familiar with Gurnah could be forgiven for imagining in this description a body of work reinscribing a “clash of cultures” between Africa and Europe or a singular preoccupation with Africa’s colonial encounter with the West.
Read the research article here.
ART X Lagos is raising the bar for African art and culture
By Dele Yusuf Posted on Monday, 8 November 2021 15:51,
SCALING THE HEIGHTS ART X Lagos is raising the bar for African art and culture By Dele Yusuf Posted on Monday, 8 November 2021 15:51, updated on Tuesday, 9 November 2021 13:04 ART X Lagos Fair Showcases Best Of African Art Alonhomba 1, The Power of Alliances by Nuits Balnéaires presented at ART X Lagos 2021 ART X Lagos is running as a physical fair from November 4-7, while its online version runs from November 4-21. Works of young and veteran artists dot the galleries, each telling a unique story about Africa’s culture and lost identities.
When Tokini Peterside launched ART X Lagos as West Africa’s pre-eminent international art fair in 2016, she wanted to restore visual arts back to its former glory and bring it back to its rightful place in the national conversation.
Read the rest of the article here.
‘We have nothing left’ – the catastrophic consequences of criminalising livelihoods in west Africa
By Ini Dele-Adedeji, Amanda Schmid-Scott and Gernot Klantschnig, November 9, 2021
We were in Obalende: a bustling working-class neighbourhood of office buildings, shops and residential areas, on Lagos Island, Nigeria. During the day, the neighbourhood teems with small market stalls selling all manner of things, from fruit and vegetables to electronics, tailored clothes and everyday household items. In the evenings, new stalls spring up to cater for commuters queuing for buses, and noisy street-side bars open to provide distraction and refreshment for people coming back from a long day at work.
Read the rest of the article here.
NEW BOOKS كتب جديدة
Covid-19 and the Dialectics of Global Pandemics in Africa
[جائحة كوفيد وتجليات الأوبئة العالمية في إفريقيا]
Author: (Ed.) Munyaradzi Mawere, Bernard Chazovachii, Francis Machingura
Since 2019, the Coronavirus has forced most economies onto a downward spiral. Despite concerted global attempts at observing World Health Organization guidelines, the Coronavirus has been changing peoples’ lives, forcing most economies onto their knees, endangering lives and livelihoods, making a mockery of global medicine and causing the widespread despair and helplessness that has come to be known as ‘the new normal’. The volume’s 16 well-researched chapters argue that despite Covid-19’s enormous lessons and predictions about even greater future pandemics, humanity can ill-afford to relent in its determination to conquer the pandemic in the same way that human resolve has defeated past pandemic. As such, the volume provides hope and direction to the global community on how best to deal with Covid-19 and pandemics of similar or even higher magnitude in the future.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2021.
Faith, War, and Slavery: A History of the Colonial Conquest of Sudan (1881-1898)
[الدين والحرب والعبودية: تاريخ الفتح الاستعماري للسودان (1881-1898)]
Author (s): Patricia Teixeira Santos and Suresh Kumar
This book is a deep study on the roots of the present Sudan that project light over Sudanese history and invites readers for a future visit. Sudan and its traditions are not easy to be disclosed, at first glance, and its wealth is not immediately perceived. Patricia Teixeira manages to pursue this task with great ability and wisdom and unveils present history and traditions that are still valid and daily cultivated to the readers.
Publisher: Om Publications, India, 2021.
Uganda’s Civil Society
[المجتمع المدني في أوغندا]
Author: (Ed.) John De Coninck and Arthur Larok.
Is the notion of ‘civil society’ helpful in understanding Uganda’s history and in positing scenarios for the future? Has civil society made a mark over the years? What drives its development and how does it relate to the State? What values inform the sector, what are current challenges and how might these be addressed? The editors have brought together twenty articles, focused on Uganda’s civil society, its history, characteristics, challenges and prospects: a first home for a range of thought-provoking views – whether previously published or not. The editors argue that, if civil society is to help citizens control their destinies, its leaders must spell out how they believe substantive change can happen, and relearn the value of solidarity and collective action, rather than get caught up in the cutthroat competition that celebrates brands and logos.
Publisher: Fountain Publishers, Uganda, 2021
The Algerian Dream: Youth and the Quest for Dignity
[الحلم الجزائري: الشباب والبحث عن صون ماء الوجه ]
Author: Andrew Farrand
This book invites readers to discover this generation, their hopes for the future and, most significantly, the frustrations that have brought them into the streets en masse since 2019, peacefully challenging a long-established order. After seven years living and working alongside these young people across Algeria, Andrew G. Farrand shares his insights on what makes the next generation tick in North Africa’s sleeping giant. Few outsiders have had the privilege to get to know Algeria and its youth so intimately-or to observe firsthand this pivotal chapter in the nation’s history. It’s a story that reveals much about the relationship between citizens and leaders, about the sanctity of human dignity, and about the power of dreams and the courage to pursue them.
Publisher: New Degree Press, 2021
Empire of Rubber: Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia
[ إمبراطورية المطاط: تدافع شركة فايرستون على البلاد والسلطة في ليبيريا]
Author: Gregg Mitman
In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation’s explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic.
Publisher: New Press , 2021.
A Tapestry of African Histories With Longer Times and Wider Geopolitics
[نسيج من التاريخ الأفريقي ذي الأزمنة النائية والجغرافيا السياسية المتشابكة]
Author: Nicholas K. Githuku
In A Tapestry of African Histories: With Longer Times and Wider Geopolitics, contributors demonstrate that African historians are neither comfortable nor content with studying continental or global geopolitical, social, and economic events across the superficial divide of time as if they were disparate or disconnected. Instead, the chapters within the volume reevaluate African history through a geopolitically transcendent lens that brings African countries into conversation with other pertinent histories both within and outside of the continent. The collection analyzes the pre- and post-colonial eras within African countries such as Kenya, Malawi, and Sudan, examining major historical figures and events, struggles for independence and stability, contemporary urban settlements, social and economic development, as well as constitutional, legal, and human rights issues that began in the colonial era and persist to this day.
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.
Amílcar Cabral: The Life of a Reluctant Nationalist
[أميلكار كابرال: حياة مناضل وطني متحير]
Author: António Tomás
On 20 January 1973, the Bissau-Guinean revolutionary Amílcar Cabral was killed by militants from his own party. Cabral had founded the PAIGC in 1960 to fight for the liberation of Portuguese Guinea and Cape Verde. The insurgents were Bissau- Guineans, aiming to get rid of the Cape Verdeans who dominated the party elite. Despite Cabral’s assassination, Portuguese Guinea became the independent Republic of Guinea- Bissau. The guerrilla war that Cabral had started and led precipitated a chain of events that would lead to the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Lisbon, toppling the forty-year-old authoritarian regime. This paved the way for the rest of Portugal’s African colonies to achieve independence.
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2020.
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