Africa Books

The Poor Christ of Bomba was an assigned reading in my college seminar class dealing with French colonialism in Africa last semester. I enjoyed it immensely-it was enjoyable yet educational. The narrator speaks with a refreshing and poignant naive honesty. Whether you are interested in colonialism in Africa or a good read, please pick this novel up!

In this Book Mongo Beti castigates a system that must have first initiated him to the written word. The satire here is very subtle but hardly loses its potency. At first glance, The Reverend Father Superior comes across as the true believer that he is: a real man of God. He is well respected by the local people and even loved. But as is typical of the European expatriate community, he does not bother to find out what the people think. He comes as a benevolent spirit who is equiped with the message of Christ to save the "pagans", but somehow, only the women (most from polygamous households) and the children are interested in his salvation. The men, the real holders of power in the community are not ready to submit to his new doctrine. He believes this is because it requires them to give up their multiple wives and practice monogamy as his doctrine requires. He holds this assumption for twenty years until the time comes when his mission falls apart. This begins when the young women engaged to be married to some villagers, and who he has been charged to make into Christian wives, have instead become his indentured servants helping to build his mission. His other local employees, sensing that what is good for the goose is good for the gander, also take advantage of this opportunity to obtain sexual favors from this women. The good man of God, after twenty years of false belief finally gets the truth from his African cook. The local men believe, so the cook says, that the reverend father is hiding the truth from them. They do not want to hear about God, eternal life, and matters of the spirit. They knew these things long before the whiteman came. All they want to know is the whiteman's secret: his airplanes, and other issues of his technology which the reverend father does not want to divulge. This realization somehow hastens the good man's departure from Africa. He is a dissapointed man. This paradox of good intensions and failed hopes has characterized African/European encounters since. The European priest has come with readymade ideas of what he thinks Africans need. It turns out Africans do not want what he is offering. The Africans do no want to be led to the whiteman's religion. They want his airplanes, and his technology. They want his secret but not his doctrine. Mongo Beti portrays the reverend father as a good father who is pained by his wayward children. He exposes the failures of the missionary system without ridiculing it, no doubt keeping in mind from whom he himself got his first taste of the written word.

I've read other books by Cynthia Moss, and she's a great combination of passionate animal advocate and scientist. She knows her material and is well connected with other animal experts in the area. Just a great, great book, fascinating information given straight, neither sentimental nor overly gruesome, well interpreted, tempered, but above all an articulate voice for animals. She respects them and describes them exactly as they are and as they struggle to deal with growing human populations. She's done great things for animals and for humans by educating us; see her website and Amboseli National Park information.

This is it! The classic!
Moss covers the essentials of the large mammals of East Africa in readable but scientifically accurate descriptions -- describing not only the mammals but their behavior and habitat.
Every future traveler to East Africa would do well to read the sections of this book covering the animals the traveler expects to observe prior to traveling -- the first time and each time. This book is out of print, but widely available in libraries.

A PRIDE OF AFRICAN TALES is a collection of folktales which have their roots in several West African nations including Ghana, Cameroon, and Nigeria. Each story is preceded by a brief introduction which gives readers a little background on the history and origin of the particular tale. Although I enjoyed all of the stories in the collection, my two favorites were "Shansa Mutoungo Shima" and "The Roof of Leaves." "Shansa Mutoungo Shima" tells the story of Bwalya, a young woman who learns an important lesson about judging people by the way they look. In "The Roof of Leaves" a married couple has an argument followed by a misunderstanding, and both of them must learn an important lesson about swallowing their pride and more importantly about forgiveness.

In the introduction, author Donna L. Washington states that the stories which make up this collection are meant to be told not read, and she encourages readers to bring the stories to life. This book is a "must have" for any child's library, as it is the type of book that can be read over and over again. The book is well organized and the stories are diverse and will appeal to both boys and girls. Washington has compiled a wonderful collection which pairs West African Folktales with a splash of history. Additional resources are provided at the end of the book for readers wanting to learn more about the origins of a particular story and for further reading. James Ransome's eye-catching illustrations add yet another dimension to this collection, and I was impressed by the way the illustrations for each story were consistent with the setting in which it took place.

Reviewed by Stacey Seay
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers

I don't mean to take anything away from the compiler of these
tales (Donna Washington) because they are a fine group and
she does a wonderful job of retelling them. But I am a collector
of children's books and I collect with the quality of llustrations in mind. So my review is mostly about the illustrations.

James Ransome has had the happy fortune to often be associated with books of really high quality, and I would have to say that of all those that I am familiar with, this is probably his best. It is a great coming together of story, illustration, & printing that makes collecting children's books fun and satisfying.

The illustrations are vivid, lush, and provide a real sense of
place. Ransome captures the villages, the market place, the
forests & grasslands of Africa that I have found equalled only by illustrator Trina Schart Hyman.

A wonderful bonus to the book is the map in the front and
the "Story Notes and Further Reading" in the back. A perfect
book for a school library.

This book is laugh-out-loud-hilarious. The first time I read this story, I was giggling so hard that I could barely speak. A very cute story for young and old alike.

This rhythmic story to keeps cleverness of monkeys while "love conquers all". King Gorilla discovers a keg of vinegar water. He challenges anyone who can drink this new kind of water..can marry King Gorilla's beautiful daughter. (Catchy) All fail but the clever monkey(s). In the end she only marries for love.
A must-do story for you teller of tales!

The late Byron Farwell has to be the ultimate historian of Victorian military history, and this is one of his best works, along with "Queen Victoria's Little Wars" and "The Great War in Africa". The story of the Mahdi and his fundamentalist revolt in the Sudan in the late 1880s is the stuff that movies are made of (ie., "Khartoum", "The Four Feathers"), but what makes this book work is its detailed description of the trials and tribulations of 3 Western prisoners of the Mahdi who survived harrowing ordeals in the Sudan but lived to tell the story. Their stories are woven around such climactic battles as the siege of Khartoum and the Battle of Omdurman, giving these two pivotal events a more human feel, given the masterly work of the author. The events in the Sudan in the late 19th Century continue to effect us in the 21st Century, and the Mahdi was the first modern promoter of the type of militant fundamentalist Islam that is so occupied by the headlines of today. Although he was rebelling against a corrupt Egyptian (and British influenced) occupational administration, the excesses and barbarities of his reign were eggregious to the extreme, and Farwell puts everything into a fascinating perspective where you simulateously admire and despise the man. He remains a cultural hero and icon to many people in the Muslim world of today. A fascinating and highly recommended read.

The author gives a vivid picture of all the major figures involved in the Mahdist revolt, from Mohammed Ahmed and the Khalifa Abdullahi to the three main European prisoners. With detailed accounts of military engagements, the stories of those trapped in the Sudan, and escape attempts, this is very engrossing reading.

I had read The Good Doctor and enjoyed it plenty for great characters, great writing and a slow-building, relentless tension. The Quarry has the same great characterization and prose, but nothing at all slow about it. The beginning of the story is enthralling, both the introduction to the main character and the first incident at the quarry (best not read liner notes etc more max effect). What continues seems a combination of Greene's "Power and Glory" (in terms of "feel") and Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians" (in terms of suspense and pace). A fantastic aspect is the power of the not explicitly stated (e.g. main character's real name never revealed, ). And the construction and build-up to the denoument is something Tolstoy - like. The Quarry is clearly another example of the spectacular literature of South Africa.

In this stunning novel, Mr Galgut tells the story of a fugitive from justice hitchhiking in the desolate backdrop of South Africa and who is picked up by a driver, a minister on his way to a remote parish. When the minister discovers that the hitchhiker is a fugitive and confronts him in a disused quarry, the response is lethal.
This novel is a masterpiece featuring a story and characters utterly compelling. The author shows that even the quietest spots on earth can seethe with repressed violence. A blunt and tense read about guilt and evasion of truth. Justly enough, Mr Galgut has been compared to the greatest South African writers like Andr? Brink, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee and Achmat Dangor.

The late Stuart Munro-Hay was the world's foremost Aksum historian and arguably the world's most knowledgable scholar on anything related to the so-called Ark of the Covenant. His work leaves in the dust all the popular works by such pseudo-scholars as Laurence Gardner (who once applied to work as Munro-Hay's research assistant and was turned down for lack of credentials).

The work covers much more than just Ark history, digging deep into Ethiopia's past, and as such is highly recommended for anyone in Ethiopian studies.

For the serious scholar of Ethiopia and medieval African texts, this book is essential. The title of this book is unfortunate in that regard. Billed as something populist (for the Ark of the Covenant obsessed), it is actually something much more. It would have been better titled something like "Twenty Centures of Primary Sources related to the Ethiopian Text Kebra Nagast (The Glory of the Kings)." The late Munro-Hay has done something extraordinary for scholars, he has put together a library of primary sources, many of them never before translated into English, never cited in books about Ethiopia, or never checked in the original. I am in awe of the archival work he has done. Many scholars without access to archives in Portugal, Spain, Italy, England, or Ethiopia will be very grateful to Munro-Hay's exhaustive list of African, Middle Eastern, and European texts that discuss the Kebra Nagast. He uses these to make an incredibly well-thought out argument about the actual dates of the Kebra Nagast and the many stories it contains. Although he concludes that the ark of the covenant was not in Aksum, he provides so many of the primary sources that others inclined otherwise can use his own work to argue with him. Perhaps most important, he does support very early datings of versions of the Kebra Nagast, in particular a very early date for the first versions of stories about the encounter between Solomon and Sheba resulting in a child that became the beginning of an Ethiopian dynasty. Although the book has a slightly rushed-into-print feel (the sources are not always as fully documented in the text the first time they appear) this is a small flaw in what is really a towering achievement.

The author, Alon Peled, examines the question as to whether or not subjected ethnic groups (i.e. 'trojan horses') can be trusted in the army. Peled briefly cites the recent Yugoslavia conflict and Czechoslovakia in 1938 as two well-known examples of successful trojan horses. The Yugoslav army disintegrated and was turned into a Serb ethnic militia, and the Czechoslovak gov't stood down under the combined threat of hostile German invasion and internal subversion by Sudeten Germans. In the last section, he describes the horrendous ethnic genocide in Rwanda that could have been instantly quelled had Rwanda had a truly ethnically integrated military. With this unnerving history, can subjected ethnic groups ever be trusted with weapons in their nation's army?

Peled looks at the three historical cases of ethic integration or disintegration within the military. First, he examines how South Africa, even when under the severest terms of apartheid, managed to slowly but successfully integrate first coloreds, then Indians, and finally blacks into the SADF. This highly-sensitive political issue in apartheid South Africa was handled very deftly by its leaders. Singapore, on the other hand, started with a military almost purely staffed by an ethnic minority and wound up almost entirely excluding them (Muslim Malays) within Singapore's defense establishment. And finally, Israel has integrated some ethnic groups (e.g. Druze, Christian Arabs) while continuing to exclude others (i.e. Muslim Arabs).

Peled defines two types of integration, horizontal and vertical. Horizontal integration is basically the increase in number the number of ethnic enlisted soldiers, while vertical integration is the promotion of ethnic soldiers into positions of leadership and sensitive areas (intelligence, operations, etc.). Peled states that for ethnic recruitment to be successful that horizontal integration must be followed by vertical integration. If not, the subjected ethnic group feels used, remains alienated, and represents a continued threat to internal security.

This is an important book on a rarely discussed, but highly important, topic. The description of the defense organizations in South Africa, Singapore, and Israel were quite interesting in and of themselves, while the ethnic integration/exclusion process was fascinating. (Ethnic leaders often negotiate the recruitment of their youth with the dominant gov't leaders.) I enjoyed this book, but more importantly, I believe that military manpower specialists will find this book an excellent introduction to the issue.

Alon Peled, a Harvard Ph.D who has achieved world-wide acclaim for his knowledge of both empirical political "events" and the theory that underlies these events, has written a truly brilliant book. It is my understanding that Peled visited several foreign countries, among them Singapore and Israel (Peled himself was a decorated Israeli officer) as he wrote this book, which arose from his doctoral dissertation, written under the auspices of the late Judith Shklar, who was a genius in her own right. Peled's analysis is inspirational in its breadth, thoroughness, and mostly in the piercing insight he offers. He is razor blade brilliant, and I am sure anyone interested in international affairs, military issues, Israel, political theory or the world as a whole will benefit from it immensely. I would like to add that I once had the good fortune of meeting Dr. Peled, and I am sure that he is a man of honor and decency whose interests transcend the intellectual realm and are aimed at the greater good of our society, our children, and ultimately ourselves. I have read many books in my day, yet none are more probing, more carefully thought out, nor more brilliantly written than that of Dr. Peled. We should count ourselves fortunate to have him among us!

Photographing Innovation Art is considered one the wonderful natural world books. In this book, Art Wolf mirrors the virgin reforents area in elegant manner. Art Wolf knows quite well when and where to boast these rare places, animals, and plants that live in. His representation style is unequal to any other works, particularly in clear views, which express the theme he wants to convey in detailed natural views. It looks like hand made artistic works. Art Wolf has high skills and capabilities in views production. His views are wonderful and have natural beauty, which makes you feel, taste, and sees natural elegance and expressive views as we have seen in his previous works. The text and photo are complementary to each other. Both seek to achieve one goal- to save the area from surrounding danger as depicted in Wolfs work. Generally it is a wonderful book indeed by art Wolf. It makes us astonished by its expressive and moving pictures. He allows us see the photos from any angles to get different impression. This book is recommended for those who love unique natural world and high standards photos

A book that is spectacular to look through and educational in content. A Christmas gift that was truly special.

Stunning, breath-taking, can't put it down. This author is the Finest Living Writer in the English Language and this is her best work.

I've read this book 3 times. It gets better every time. The action, the drama, the gut-wrenching story line between the three-position rotary switches and tractor lamps...just breath-taking! Five stars!