Africa English

A Fatherless People: The Secret Story of How the Nigerians Missed the Road to the Promised Land tells the story of Nigeria from its early conceptualization by British colonialists in the aftermath of the abolition of the slave trade up to the present day. Comprehensive and compelling, it confirms Dele Ogun as one of the foremost experts on Africa in the modern era.

An astonishing 94.6 percent of businesses fail to sell. They close at an enormous cost to the owner, their family, their staff and the economy. Most business owners realise too late that there are only two destinations for any business: a sale or closure. You’ve got to build to $ell. Sweat, Scale, Sell shares real business-building stories about how ordinary business owners took charge of their fate using the Asset of Value™ method.

As World War II raged in North Africa, General Erwin Rommel was guided by an uncanny sense of his enemies' plans and weaknesses. In the summer of 1942, he led his Axis army swiftly and terrifyingly toward Alexandria, with the goal of overrunning the entire Middle East. Each step was informed by detailed updates on British positions. The Nazis, somehow, had a source for the Allies' greatest secrets.

It evolved from various traditional African religions and practices, and in the American South, incorporated elements of indigenous botanical knowledge. These practices taught believers how to invoke the blessings of spirits and deities through persuasion powers, herbs, rituals, spells, talismans, roots and nature.

With the passing of Nelson Mandela, ‘the father of the nation’, comes the end of an era, and the moment to look back on his remarkable saving, and remaking, of South Africa. After years of oppression and racial inequality, concentrated violence and apartheid, Mandela led the country to unite ‘for the freedom of us all’ as the country’s first black President.

The People Remember tells the journey of African descendants in America by connecting their history to the seven principles of Kwanzaa. It begins in Africa, where people were taken from their homes and families. They spoke different languages and had different customs. Yet they were bound and chained together and forced onto ships sailing into an unknown future. Ultimately, all these people had to learn one common language and create a culture that combined their memories of home with new traditions that enabled them to thrive in this new land.

Nigeria was an unpopular destination for European settlement, thanks to its punishing climate and proliferation of tropical disease, so it saw very little direct European influence. Europeans were posted to Nigeria or sought employment purely to satisfy the needs of administration, and, of course, the various Christian missionary organizations were led largely by whites. Christian missions, incidentally, succeeded spectacularly in the spreading of Christianity across the animist south, but they made absolutely no inroads in the Muslim north.

In 1940 a group of artists, sculptors, film makers, theatre designers and set painters came together to form the Camouflage Unit. Led by Major Geoffrey Barkas and including among their number the internationally renowned stage magician Jasper Maskelyne, the unit's projects became a crucial battlefield weapon.

On the West coast of Africa there once, the Mali empire in its Golden Age was once bigger than the entirety of Western Europe put together, made possible by the efforts of one man Mansa Musa the Sultan of Mali. He was the richest man to have ever lived, worth 400 billion dollars in today's terms, his gold mines supplied the British Empire and the rest of the European Empires for 800 years, despite the dry desolate environment of Mali he founded the greatest center of learning in all of world Timbuktu, his great holy pilgrimage to Mecca was the greatest the world had seen.

In the summer of 1716, a Cornish cabin boy named Thomas Pellow and 52 of his comrades were captured at sea by the Barbary corsairs. Their captors, fanatical Islamic slave traders, had declared war on the whole of Christendom. Thousands of Europeans had been snatched from their homes and taken in chains to the great slave markets of Algiers, Tunis and Sale in Morocco to be sold to the highest bidder.

Max Einstein is not your typical genius. She hacks the computer system at NYU to attend classes, builds inventions to help the homeless, and talks to Albert Einstein! (Okay, that's just in her imagination). But everything changes when Max is recruited by a mysterious organization! Their mission: solve some of the world's toughest problems using science. She's helped by a diverse group of young geniuses from around the globe as they invent new ways to power the farthest reaches of the planet. But that's only if the sinister outfit known only as The Corporation doesn't get to her first.

Why has land reform been such a failure in South Africa? Will expropriation without compensation solve the problem? What can be done to get the land programme back on track? Tembeka Ngcukaitobi tackles these questions and more. Going back in history, he shows how Africans’ communal land ownership was used by colonial rulers to deny that Africans owned the land at all. He explores the effect of the Land Acts, Bantustans and forced removals. And he considers the ANC’s policies on land throughout the 20th century, during the negotiations of the 1990s, and in government.

At once a deeply personal memoir and an examination of a violent and stratified country, The House at Sugar Beach tells of tragedy, forgiveness, and transcendence with unflinching honesty and a survivor's gentle humor. And at its heart, it is a story of Helene Cooper's long voyage home.

In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that had fallen into obscurity. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the incredible story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, later became one of the world's greatest and most brazen smugglers.

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. Some of the earliest great civilizations were born there, and they give us an insight into the smaller kingdoms of ancient Africa.

Greater Than a Tourist: Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa offers the inside scoop on Johannesburg. Most travel guides tell you how to travel like a tourist. As part of the Greater Than a Tourist series, this guide will give you travel tips from someone who has lived at your next travel destination.

Acclaimed cookbook author Jessica B. Harris weaves an utterly engaging history of African American cuisine, taking the listener on a harrowing journey from Africa across the Atlantic to America, and tracking the trials that the people and the food have undergone along the way. From chitlins and ham hocks to fried chicken and vegan soul, Harris celebrates the delicious and restorative foods of the African American experience and details how each came to form an important part of African American culture, history, and identity.

Robert Forczyk covers the development of armored warfare in North Africa from the earliest Anglo-Italian engagements in 1940 to the British victory over the German Afrikakorps in Operation Crusader in 1941. The war in the North African desert was pure mechanized warfare, and in many respects the most technologically advanced theatre of World War II. It was also the only theatre where for three years British and Commonwealth, and later United States, troops were in constant contact with Axis forces.

During the reign of the New Kingdom of Egypt, the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun ruled and died tragically young. In order to send him on his way into the afterlife, his tomb was filled with every treasure he would need after death. And then, it was lost to time, buried in the sands of the Valley of the Kings. His tomb was also said to be cursed. Centuries later, as Egypt-mania gripped Europe, two Brits - a rich earl with a habit for gambling and a disreputable, determined archeologist - worked for years to rediscover and open Tutankhamun's tomb.

Brimming with rich, electrifying tales of the precious dye and its ancient heritage, Indigo is also the story of a personal quest: Catherine McKinley is the descendant of a clan of Scots who wore indigo tartan; Jewish "rag traders"; a Massachusetts textile factory owner; and African slaves - her ancestors were traded along the same Saharan routes as indigo, where a length of blue cotton could purchase human life.