Africa Books

After visiting Londolozi and purchasing this book there, it was wonderful to learn about the background and evolution of this very unique game reserve from the founding family. This book is a must for those planning a trip to the "bush" as well as for those fortunates that have been to Londolozi or anywhere to share space with the magnificent animals of the transvaal.

I visited Londolozi in 1997. I ordered and received the book almost a year after I returned home. It captured everything I remember from the animals and the landscape to the wonderful people themselves. I am able to pick up the book, now 2 years later, and still get the same feeling.

Realistic illustrations and clear text not only explain the pyramids and embalmment, but also show people going about their everyday lives.

Thsi was agreat book, it told about the Egyotian people of the early years of civilization lived their lives. It will give you facts like why the Egyptians shoes wore out and how they built their graves. This is a great book if you are interested about the Egypian style of life.

Ian Sinclair's Field Guide to the Birds of Southern Africa (Photographic Field Guides)To have a photographic guide for indenification is a very necessary tool. This book is well written and was well worth the wait I had in receiving it. I recommend it for anyone taking a trip to Southern Africa, because after you have seen all the large game a number of times, birds become a challenge, beside being very beautiful.

I love the birds in Southern Africa, but I am also very bad at identifying them, so this book makes birding fun for me. I can quickly find the bird I just saw by flipping through the book. The downside is there is not always pictures of the bird at different angles or of the immatures. However, if you're a novice like me, it shouldn't matter much at all. Get Ian Sinclair's illustration version if you're more serious about birding.

Thus far Iboga: The Visionary Root of African Shamanism is the best book on the subject of Iboga to the credit of Nganga Mallendi's input. For some reason, Mallendi is the first Ngagna to inform on the subject. I only regret that Nganga Mallendi did not write the whole book.

I have read everything on the subject of Iboga since 1990. My interest in Iboga (folkloric Benzogho similarly) has to do with coming to terms with loss of a loved one. I have used Iboga w/Nganga, to mediate the forces of life & death & to soothe (not remove) the grieving process with very positive, enduring results.

New age collections strong in visionary plants and African shaman rituals will be intrigued by the very specific discussions of iboga, which has been suppressed by the FDA since the 1960s and which provides the power to break addictions. The followers of the Bwiti religion know well its many attributes, which are surveyed here in an overview of the traditions, techniques and spirituality of African shamans and iboga's use in their world.

Autobiographical and historical and cultural all rolled up in one. With the holidays coming up, these great stories and recipes of great african and african-american dishes--dishes from people and lands of color--would go perfectly with each serving of yams, blackeyed peas and rice and collards. Foods of defiance, comfort, strength. Presented by the superb Ntozake Shange. (For my two cents, all the schoolkids ought to be taught how really influential Ntozake was in black entertainment, period, not just literature. But that sounds like a discussion for another review.)

I am not an African-American but through Shange's words I can feel the grief, the sorrow, and the triumphs of the African-American experience. By talking about food, which everybody needs and relates to, she paints a far more vivid picture of the African people in the Diaspora than a scholarly historian might. Many of her recipes call for ingredients I've hardly heard of, but her evocative descriptions of the food almost make me able to taste it.

Very informative and excellent editorial! (Good research on graphics and pictures too!) It's definitely one of the best History publications that I ever read on SA. The best part I found about this book is its excellent chronological order way down to the earliest time before the Dutch moved-in in the early 16th century. Which is good because most of the publication I come across seems to ignore it. In add-ons, the book also comprises different points of view from not only from the old ruling class (Afrikaners) but also includes the voices of people from different ethnics. In all, it is truly a book of which contents extensive information on history; politics; social development of South Africa. And it is definitely a book for everyone SA history lovers should have!

Very informative and excellent editorial! (Good research on graphics and pictures too!) It's definitely one of the best History publications that I ever read on SA. The best part I found about this book is its excellent chronological order way down to the earliest time before the Dutch moved-in in the early 16th century. Which is good because most of the publication I come across seems to ignore it. In add-ons, the book also comprises different points of view from not only from the old ruling class (Afrikaners) but also includes the voices of people from different ethnics. In all, it is truly a book of which contents extensive information on history; politics; social development of South Africa.Anyone who are interested in SA history should have a copy at home!

I could hardly be able to have any breaks in reading before I was finished with the book! The same thing happened to me with Brink's "Devil's Valley". I really enjoy his stories!

Imaginings of Sand - André Brink

This beautifully crafted and sensitive book deals with many of the important issues which South Africans must now face in the post-apartheid era. The novel begins with the return of Kristien Muller to her dying grandmother's bedside. The grandmother is a wonderful character, full of enchantment, mischief, energy and most importantly stories. She is the keeper of stories about the family's history and origins, in particular the parallel histories and stories of the women in their family throughout the generations. This is part of the reason for Kristien's return, to receive the gift of stories and memory from her grandmother before the old woman dies. While the novel centres around the relationship between Kristien and her grandmother, Ouma Kristina, the novel is also a complex matrix of parallel and interconnected dialogues with the other characters in the novel, from the past and the present, which constantly interrupt and participate in the central dialogue. Brink deals with the themes of returning home, the re-imagining of the past in order to move forward, recognising roots and ancestry and their implications in the present and the exploration of the dynamics between history and story, the real and the imaginary, and fact and fiction. Brink captures the mood of South Africa on the eve of the elections very accurately, he portrays the heightened states of fear, cynicism and evil alongside the passion, hope, excitement and idealism with sensitivity and compassion, while still conveying a powerful warning to those who wish to thwart the much needed and inevitable transition to democracy. In Ouma Kristina's stories there is a distinctly African flavour, which can be linked to the rediscovery of African tradition in South Africa and the move away from Eurocentric ideologies. Ouma Kristina's stories combine Afrikaner legends and stories with those of the indigenous African people, the KhoiSan and in doing so Brink demonstrates how interconnected the histories of these two groups are, and there is perhaps the suggestion that in rediscovering a shared history lies the hope for conciliation and a better understanding of one another in the future. While this novel has many distinctly South African nuances to it, it should still appeal to a wide readership because apart from the sheer brilliance of Brink's story-telling, the broader themes that are dealt with are really universal in nature and effect most of us at some time in our lives.

"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've all heard that quote. Some of us even know who said it. However, if that's all you know about Henry Morgan Stanley, you are in for a treat when you read Imperial Footprints. In his time, Stanley was compared with Christopher Columbus, and Newman makes it clear why. This is a well-written and very readable story. Newman has done an excellent job of capturing the adventure of Stanley's seven(!) African journeys, as well as his very interesting younger life. Did you know that Morgan fought in the American Civil War? On both sides??? I give Imperial Footprints my highest recommendation. If you like adventure stories, if you like well-written biography, Imperial Footprints is the book for you.

A hundred years after Henry Morton Stanley's death, his own African explorations have receded from public memory in favor of critical reviews of European colonialist expansion in Africa. James L. Newman returns Stanley's importance to the world with Imperial Footprints: Henry Morton Stanley's African Journeys, a re-creation of his seven African journeys which explains why and how he made them, and their lasting impact on the modern world. The blend of history, biography and travelogue makes for an exciting blend of researched fact and drama which reads like fiction, giving Imperial Footprints an edge over other coverages on Stanley.

by Brian L. Frye
Robert Flaherty invented ethnographic filmmaking, and Jean Rouch transformed it into sociology. But Robert Gardner made it an art form. If his predecessors created films of practical beauty, Gardner infused his own with an exquisite aesthetic rigor. While documenting life in pre-modern--sometimes nearly primeval--societies, they preserve something of the pleasures peculiar to such a life, sacrificed for the pleasures of modernity.

Over nearly 50 years, Gardner has assembled an eclectic collection of documentaries, notably DEAD BIRDS, on the primitive Dani of Papua New Guinea, RIVERS OF SAND, on the Hamar of southern Ethiopia, and FOREST OF BLISS, on funeral practices in Benares, India. THE IMPULSE TO PRESERVE: REFLECTIONS OF A FILMMAKER compiles journals Gardner kept while making those films and others, as well as essays on his subjects and documentary filmmaking more generally. Copiously illustrated with photographs, stills, and documents, most created by Gardner himself, the book is a pleasure to browse. And Gardner's spare, lucid prose makes it a pleasure to read, too. Not to mention a perfect complement to his occasionally enigmatic movies.

But it's also an elliptical polemic on the ethos of ethnographic filmmaking. Gardner rejects relativism, advocating a kind of aspirational ethnography. "I don't think anthropology is doing its job by being value free. I do think it should accept its responsibility to look for larger truths." And yet his aspirations are less ideological than aesthetic.

Rather than merely catalog human existence, Gardner searches for particular expressions of human genius. "I have always thought populations undergoing change were the business of sociologists and of those anthropologists interested in change for its own sake. My own interests are to look for that which is an apt symbol or sign and, at the same time, is distinctive in and of itself." He finds it in traditions truly born of time immemorial, the remnants of a history as archeological as anthropological.

As Isaiah Berlin explained, in admiring the virtues of classical society we recognize their incompatibility with our own. Gardner admires the mythical world of the Dani, despite its brutal violence, and despises the preening puerility of the Hamar. Unlike his postmodern peers, he realizes refusing to judge a society is the profoundest form of contempt. In judging, he testifies to the fantastic truths only history and experience can reveal.

I think Wade Davis (AUTHOR: Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), Shadows in the Sun (1998) and Light at the Edge of the World (2001)) said it best:

"This book is less a text than a vision, a series of reflections and recollections that come together as a prayer, a cry from the heart of an extraordinary artist and ethnographer who long before anyone else noticed recognised and described the central backdrop of our age. In the year Robert Gardner was born there were 6000 languages spoken on Earth, each a flash of the human spirit, an old growth forest of the mind. Today fully half of these are not being taught to children or whispered into the ears of infants. Within a generation we are, by definition, losing half of humanity's intellectual, social, and spiritual legacy. He saw this unfolding in New Guinea, South Asia, Africa and in the mountains of Colombia, the Kogi heart of the world. He has devoted his life to this tale, inspiring generations of students, firing the heart of scores of young scholars of anthropology. I know this to be true, for I was one of them."

Barley writes about his experiences studying hill people near Poli, Cameroon - mainly about the local culture and the misfortunes that befell him. I have been through some of the same places and the stories may be a bit exaggerated, but all seem plausible. Quite funny, in a gentle way

I am an anthropology buff, not an anthropologist. But I am a scientist, and this book marvelously pokes fun at how scientists become introduced to field work and the ramification of their naivete. Of course, doing field work in another culture and in the third world only enhances the comedy of it all. Wonderfully easy and quick to read, the book leaves one wishing for more