Africa English

In this incandescent novel, V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man, an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.

On October 3, 1993, Task Force Ranger was dispatched to seize two high-profile lieutenants of a Somali warlord. Special Forces troops were transported by ground vehicles and helicopters, and the mission was meant to be over within the hour. They quickly found themselves under heavy fire, and two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down. With a hastily organized relief column many hours away, the American troops faced a desperate battle for survival.

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it - from garden seeds to Scripture - is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

Spanning more than 200,000 years, from the emergence of the first humans to the rise of megacities, Africa explores the history and cultures of the world's second-largest continent in vivid detail. It brings to life the stories that shaped Africa and the world around it, from powerful empires and kingdoms such as Mali and Benin, through the struggle against colonisation and the fight for independence, to Africa's place on the global stage today.

In "Africa to Arizona–Memories of a South African Scatterling" Tihêhô takes listeners on a captivating journey through his life, spanning continents and cultures. Born and raised on the picturesque farm of Wintershoek in South Africa, his childhood is filled with adventures, close encounters with wildlife, and the unique experiences of rural life. Tihêhô's early years are rich with memories that shaped his identity. His years in the military also left scars on him–both psychological as well as physical.

Pick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book tells a different story. Interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, Michael Gomez unveils a new vision of how categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and caste emerged in Africa and in global history.

A sweeping history of the fortune seekers, adventurers, despots, and thieves who have ruthlessly endeavored to extract gold, diamonds, and other treasures from Africa and its people.

In 1958 in Accra, Ghana, the Hands Off Africa conference brought together the leading figures of African independence in a public show of political strength and purpose. The charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, who had just won Ghana’s independence, led a determined appeal for Pan-Africanism. Young, idealistic leaders across the continent, as well as African Americans seeking civil rights at home, heeded his call. Yet, a moment that signified a new era of African freedom simultaneously marked a new era of foreign intervention and control.

In captivating detail, Stevenson provides a fast-paced, hour-by-hour narration from the hijacking of Air France Flight 139 to the final 90-minute mission. In addition to discussing the incredible rescue itself, Stevenson also covers the political backdrop behind the hijacking, especially Ugandan President Idi Amin's support for the hijackers, which marked one of the first times a leader of a nation had backed terrorist activities.

Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe's dehumanizing engagement with the "dark" continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe's yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies in the heart of West Africa.

Meet extraordinary black heroes throughout history—biographies for kids ages 8 to 12. You’re invited to meet ancient Egyptian rulers, brilliant scientists, legendary musicians, and civil rights activists—all in the same book! Black Heroes introduces you to 51 black leaders and role models from both history and modern times. This black history book for kids features inspirational biographies of trailblazers from the United States, Egypt, Britain, and more.

It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Here, seventy-year-old Mary Leakey enlists Grace to sort and pack her fifty years of work and memories. Their interaction reminds Mary how she pursued her ambitions of becoming an archeologist in the 1930s by sneaking into lectures and working on excavations.

In the late 1890s, Edmund Dene Morel, a young British shipping company agent, noticed something strange about the cargoes of his company's ships as they arrived from and departed for the Congo. Incoming ships were crammed with valuable ivory and rubber. Outbound ships carried little more than soldiers and firearms. Correctly concluding that only slave labor could account for these cargoes, Morel almost singlehandedly made this slave-labor regime the premier human rights story in the world.

Africa is the continent where the first humans were born. They explored the vast land and produced the first tools. And although we migrated from that continent, we never completely abandoned it. From the beginning of time, humans lived and worked in Africa, leaving evidence of their existence in the sands of the Sahara Desert and the valleys of the great rivers such as the Nile and the Niger.

Livingstone's first book revolutionized the way European readers saw Africa and made him a hero in England. He returned again to the Zambesi with his brother Charles and others, this time with more equipment and funds. Again he faced hippopotami, crocodiles, impossible terrain, and disease, but his greatest enemies on this trip prove to be human. The British eventually lost faith in the expedition, but Livingstone proved in the end to have had tremendous foresight.

Recounting the three weeks of blood, sweat, and tearsthat make up a 7,000 mile journey from the glitzy streets of Paris to the hinterland of northwestern Africa, this incredible tale highlights the most arduous and notorious off-road motorsports event on the planet, the Paris-Dakar Rally. Since its inception in 1979, the rally has attracted more than 3,000 participants from all walks of life.

In unforgettable tales of innocence lost under African skies, we follow Godwin's awakening to the often savage struggle between Whites and Blacks, his horror when he is forced to fight in a civil war he detests, and his experiences as a journalist covering the country's violent transition to Black rule as Rhodesia's colonial era comes to an end and the new state of Zimbabwe is born from its bloody ashes. Mukiwa is a poignant, compelling memoir and an invaluable addition to the literature of southern Africa.

A stunning behind-the-curtain look into the last years of the illegal transatlantic slave trade in the United States.

After his father's heart attack in 1984, Peter Godwin began a series of pilgrimages back to Zimbabwe, the land of his birth, from Manhattan, where he now lives. On these frequent visits to check on his elderly parents, he bore witness to Zimbabwe's dramatic spiral downward into the jaws of violent chaos, presided over by an increasingly enraged dictator. And yet long after their comfortable lifestyle had been shattered and millions were fleeing, his parents refuse to leave, steadfast in their allegiance to the failed state that has been their adopted home for 50 years.

His second major venture into nonfiction (after Death in the Afternoon, 1932), Green Hills of Africa is Ernest Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in the great game country of East Africa, where he and his wife, Pauline, journeyed in December of 1933. Hemingway's well-known interest in - and fascination with - big-game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative account of his trip.