Grace, Tenacity and Eloquence

The Struggle for Women’s Rights in Africa

Edited by Partrick Burnett, Shereen Karmali, Firoze Manji

The articles first appeared in the prize-winning weekly electronic newsletter, Pambazuka News. They provide students, activists and others with an easy-to-read introduction to the struggle for women’s rights in Africa. The traditional perception of African women is that they toil day and night amidst grinding poverty while facing harsh cultural, traditional and social prejudices. Yet while it is true that, like elsewhere in the world, African women are not yet equal to men, this is only… (more information)

Where is Uhuru?

Reflections on the Struggle for Democracy in Africa

Issa Shivji

The neoliberal project, led by the IMF and World Bank, promised to correct distortions in the African postcolonial environment and to expand democratic space. For a people who had suffered years of statism, these promises were persuasive. However, several decades down the line, Issa G. Shivji aptly asks, Where is Uhuru? These essays show that the reform period opened the continent to greater privation by a more emboldened local political class who, by acquiescing to foreign imperialist forces,… (more information)

Africa’s Liberation

The Legacy of Nyerere

Edited by Chambi Chachage, Annar Cassam

The death in 1999 of Julius Kambarage Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, left a cavern in the consciousness and conscience of the people of Tanzania and Africa.Nyerere was not simply a player on the national terrain. He was a Pan-Africanist and an internationalist – in thoughts, writings and, crucially, in his practice. A unique advocate, strategist and leader, Nyerere spoke out loud against injustices across the world. A decade later, his words, actions, achievements and shortcomings… (more information)

SMS Uprising

Mobile Activism in Africa

Edited by Sokari Ekine

SMS Uprising provides a unique insight into how activists and social change advocates are addressing Africa’s many challenges from within, and how they are using mobile telephone technologies to facilitate these changes. This collection of essays by those engaged in using mobile phone technologies for social change provides an analysis of the socio-economic, political and media contexts faced by activists in Africa today. The essays address a broad range of issues including inequalities… (more information)

Reclaiming African History

Jacques Depelchin

Depelchin’s thought-provoking essays show that through African histories it is possible to reconnect to all the histories of those who have been disconnected: shackdwellers, the poor, the dispossessed. His analysis of African history demonstrates how peoples have been forced into looking at their own histories through a shattered mirror, deliberately and forcefully crushed so as to render the exercise impossible. But, Depelchin says, history could be written in a way that would help break… (more information)

Women and Security Governance in Africa

Edited by Awino Okech, ‘Funmi Olonisakin

When United Nations Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security was adopted in October 2000, it was hailed by policy analysts and international observers alike as a pathbreaking move. It was the first time that the security concerns of women in situations of armed conflict and their role in peace building were placed on the agenda of the UN Security Council. In the field of international security there is a tendency to relegate discussions on women and children to the margins. This book addresses… (more information)

No Land! No House! No Vote!

Voices from the Symphony Way

Symphony Way Pavement Dwellers

Many outside South Africa imagine that after Mandela was freed and the ANC won free elections all was well in the Rainbow Nation. But although a few black South Africans have become wealthy, the struggle against apartheid never ended because apartheid continues to live. In 2007 hundreds of families living in shacks across the new ‘integrated’ township of Delft in Cape Town were moved into houses they had been waiting for since the end of apartheid. But soon they were told that the move… (more information)

African Sexualities

A Reader

Edited by Sylvia Tamale

This groundbreaking volume, the first of its kind written by African activists themselves, aims to inspire a new generation of students and teachers to study, reflect and gain fresh and critical insights into the complex issues of gender and sexuality. It opens a space – particularly for young people – to think about African sexualities in different ways. This accessible but scholarly multidisciplinary text, from a distinctly African perspective, is built around themed sections each… (more information)

Catastrophe

What Went Wrong in Zimbabwe?

Richard Bourne

No one in 1980 could have guessed that Zimbabwe would become a failed state on such a monumental and tragic scale. In this incisive and revealing book, Richard Bourne shows how a country which had every prospect of success when it achieved a delayed independence in 1980 became a brutal police state with hyperinflation, collapsing life expectancy and abandonment by a third of its citizens less than thirty years later. Beginning with the British conquest of Zimbabwe and covering events up to the… (more information)

Congo Masquerade

The Political Culture of Aid Inefficiency and Reform Failure

Theodore Trefon

Congo Masquerade is about mismanagement, hypocrisy and powerlessness in what has proved to be one of Africa’s most troublesome and volatile states. In this scathing study of catastrophic aid inefficiency, Trefon argues that whilst others have examined war and plunder in the Great Lakes region, none have yet evaluated the imported ‘template format’ reform package pieced together to introduce democracy and improve the well-being of ordinary Congolese. It has, the book demonstrates… (more information)

Charles Taylor and Liberia

Ambition and Atrocity in Africa’s Lone Star State

Colin Waugh

Campaigner, insurgent, arms dealer, warlord, commodity trafficker, elected president, international fugitive and finally prisoner, Charles Taylor sought to lead his native Liberia to change but instead destroyed it in a frenzy of violence, greed and uncontrolled personal ambition. In the process he threw much of Liberia’s neighbouring region into turmoil for over a decade, finally facing judgment in The Hague for his role in the Sierra Leone conflict. In this remarkable and eye-opening book… (more information)

Maldevelopment

Anatomy of a Global Failure, 2nd edition

Samir Amin

In this updated edition of his 1990 book Samir Amin explains with great clarity the complex changes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including the transformations in Eastern Europe and in the world economy, the growth of capitalism in China and, despite the West riding on the crest of new technologies, its materialist goals being increasingly questioned by new social movements including the Greens. In this context, Amin examines the failure of development from a political stand-point… (more information)

Getting Somalia Wrong?

Faith, War and Hope in a Shattered State

Mary Harper

Somalia is a failed state, representing a threat to itself, its neighbours and the wider world. In recent years, it has become notorious for the piracy off its coast and the rise of Islamic extremism, opening it up as a new ‘southern front’ in the war on terror. At least that is how it is inevitably portrayed by politicians and in the media. In Getting Somalia Wrong? Mary Harper presents the first comprehensive account of the chaos into which the country has descended and the United… (more information)

India in Africa

Changing Geographies of Power

Edited by Emma Mawdsley, Gerard McCann

”An indispensable book for those who want to understand the compulsion and politics of recent Chinese and Indian involvement in Africa, written by experts in a language accessible to the non-expert.” Yash Ghai, Activist, and scholar of international law, and Chairman of the Constitution of Kenya Review Commission 2000-2004. Major changes are taking place in the global economy and polity. While China’s relationship to Africa is much examined, knowledge and analysis of India&rsquo… (more information)

From the Slave Trade to Free Trade

How Trade Undermines Democracy and Justice in Africa

Edited by Partrick Burnett, Firoze Manji

Leading up to the 200th commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade and the 50th anniversary of Ghana’s independence, Pambazuka News carried a series of four special issues during 2006 and 2007 that included articles designed to raise awareness and debate on issues of trade and justice. These and other articles from Pambazuka News have been gathered in this book. We have chosen a deliberately provocative subtitle for this book: ‘How trade undermines democracy and justice&rsquo… (more information)

To Cook a Continent

Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa

Nnimmo Bassey

People in Africa argue that natural resources are a blessing; it is the way these are plundered and used that can turn them into a curse. The continent has plenty of experience of such plunder. Rich in resources, Africa is a net supplier of energy and raw materials to the North. The climate crisis confronting the world today is rooted mainly in the wealthy economies’ abuse of fossil fuels, indigenous forests and global commercial agriculture. But, without agreement about how to tackle this… (more information)

Africa to the Rescue of Africa

Sanou Mbaye

What has happened that the hopes born during decolonisation are now so dissipated? How can Africa escape its current impasse? Since independence, the development model imposed on Africa by the west has utterly failed but Sanou Mbaye shows that Africa already has the cards in its hands to carry out its own development. The author dissects the structural causes of the failure that has dragged African people into a spiral of poverty and violence. He makes western responsibilities clear without hiding… (more information)