“A vivid portrait of a troubled country.”—The New York Times Corruption, drug smuggling, rampant human rights abuses—New York journalist Lindsay Cameron finds plenty to report, covering the regime of Nigeria’s President Michael Olumide. But in the aftermath of two probable assassinations, her inquiries attract unwanted government attention. As rebel factions call for free elections, Lindsay races to penetrate the intricate network of corrupt government officials, oil interests, and CIA agents who really run the Nigerian show. Meanwhile, her entanglement with a rare art dealer leads her still deeper into terrain that’s confounding in every respect, from matters of the heart to those of politics and trade. Drawing from Nina Darnton’s own experiences living in Africa during the mid-1970s—including imprisonment in Nigeria with her two small children—An African Affair is an edge-of-your-seat debut thriller in the bestselling tradition of The Constant Gardener and The Last King of Scotland.

African Affairs is the top journal in African Studies and has been for some time. This book draws together some of the most influential, important, and thought provoking articles published in its pages over the last decade. In doing so, it collates essential cutting-edge research on Africa and makes it easily available for students, teachers, and researchers alike. The African Affairs Reader is broken down into four sections that cover some of the biggest themes and questions facing the continent today, including: the African State, the Political Economy of Development, Africa's Relationship with the World, and Elections, Representation & Democracy. Within each section, articles deal with some of the most significant recent trends and events, such as the prospects for democratization in Ghana and Nigeria, the factors underpinning Rwanda's economic success, the rise of political corruption in South Africa, the spread of the drugs trade, the struggle against gender based violence, and the growing influence of China. Each section is introduced by a new purpose-written essay by the journal's editors that explains the evolution of the wider debate, highlights key contributions, and suggests new ways in which the discussion can be taken forward. Taken together, the essays and articles included in the volume provide both a coherent introduction to the study of Africa and a compelling commentary on the current state of play on the continent.

The Atlas of African Affairs is divided into five sections dealing with environmental, historical, political and economic issues and with Southern Africa. Throughout, the book presents an interdisciplinary, integrated perspective on African affairs. Most of the chapters deal with continent-wide themes and are illustrated by maps of Africa as a whole drawn to a standardised outline of the same map projection and scale. Other chapters, often by way of example, discuss parts of the continent or individual countries and are illustrated with appropriate maps. The basic format of integrated text and maps is supplemented by guides to further reading at the end of each section as well as a series of detailed statistical tables at the end of the book.

The aim of this Handbook is to present a global overview of developments in education and policy change during the last decade. It has the objective of providing both a strategic education policy statement on recent shifts in education and policy research globally and offers new approaches to further exploration, development and improvement of education and policy making. The Handbook attempts to address some of the above issues and problems confronting educators and policy makers globally. Different articles seek to conceptualize the on-going problems of education policy formulation and implementation, and provide a useful synthesis of the education policy research conducted in different countries, and practical implications. The Handbook, by focusing on such issues as - the OECD (2001) model of the knowledge society, and associated strategic challenge and 'deliverable goals' (OECD 2001:139) - UNESCO-driven lifelong learning paradigm, and its relevance to education policy makers, globally - different models of policy planning, and equity questions that are raised by centralization/decentralization, diversity/uniformity and curriculum standardization issues - the 'crises' of educational quality, the debate of standards and excellence, and good and effective teaching. - will contribute to a better and more holistic understanding of the education policy and research nexus; offering possible strategies for the effective and pragmatic policy planning and implementation at the local, regional and national levels.

Imagine a history of the United States written from the perspective of the African-American community. Imagine that the story of this community is told not only from the viewpoint of its leaders--the middle-class elites--but also from the viewpoint of sharecroppers, industrial workers and others living on the margins of American culture. And finally, imagine that this is not only about political and economic relations but also about "race," class, gender, and religious relations, about the lived experiences of one community that both reflect and represent fundamental issues of power and resistance in an entire society. This is what Les Switzer has tried to do with his book Power and Resistance in an African Society. Scholars who have read it suggest that this is the first attempt to write a history of South Africa from the perspective of one subordinate community in South Africa. The reult is a transformed history "from below." The names, dates, events, and issues of conventional textbook history lose their meaning in the process of reconstructing a history that seeks to free the African from the domain of South Africa's ruling culture. The book also offers a unique contribution to African studies in sub-Saharan Africa, because it explores the material and symbolic manifestations of power and resistance in a pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial setting. The Ciskei region in the eastern Cape was selected as the case study. This was the historic zone of conflict between European and Bantu-speaking African in southern Africa--the Cape-Xhosa wars in this region lasting a century. The contemporary African nationalist movement in South Africa first emerged in a variety of organizational forms in the Ciskei during the 1870s and 1880s. The strategy of petitionary protest probably persisted longer here than anywhere else in South Africa in the post-colonial period, but popular resistance found a variety of windows outside organized African politics. The Ciskei, for example, was a focal point of rural resistance in the 1920s and early 1930s and again between the early 1940s and early 1960s. The gap between rural and urban dissidents in South Africa, moreover, was first bridged in the Ciskei and its environs during the 1952 Defiance Campaign. Finally, the Ciskei's segregated African reserve, where economic conditions were judged to be most serious, emerged as a primary site of struggle on South Africa's periphery during the 1970s and 1980s. The focus of this study is on the Xhosa-speaking peoples who lived in the Ciskei region in the first century after conquest. To highlight the linkages between regional and national issues, the Xhosa in the Ciskei are examined in the context of unfolding events in the Cape Colony and in the unified settler state of South Africa after 1910. A distinct plurality of voices would be formed in the complex interplay between color, consciousness, and class, as this community sought space for itself within the domain of South Africa's ruling culture.

Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this important new account of decolonization reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world. Adom Getachew shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal, political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and creating the New International Economic Order. Using archival sources from Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, Worldmaking after Empire recasts the history of decolonization, reconsiders the failure of anticolonial nationalism, and offers a new perspective on debates about today’s international order.

Who is an African? At face value, the answer seems obvious. Surely, everyone knows who the African is, it would seem. But the answer becomes less obvious once other probing qualifiers are added to the question. How is the African identity constructed in the face of the mosaic of identities that people of African ancestry living within and beyond the continent bear? Do all categorised as Africans or as having an African pedigree perceive themselves as Africans? Are all who perceive themselves as Africans accepted as such? Are there levels of "e;Africanness"e;, and are some more African than others? How does African identity interface with other levels of identity and citizenship in Africa? And what are the implications of the contentious nature of African identity and citizenship for the projects of pan-Africanism, the making of the Africa-nation, and Africa's development trajectories? Contributors to the volume, including Ali Mazrui, Kwesi Prah, Gamal Nkrumah, Helmi Sharawy and Marcel Kitissou, address these questions and more. They examine the issues of African identity and citizenship, the politics spurned by the co-existence of peoples of different Africanities in the same country, and the prospects of constructing an Africa-Nation in which Africans of all hues are as sentimentally attached to, as say, the Europeans are attached to Europe. Though the projects of pan-Africanism and the making of the Africa-nation have not achieved the desired levels of success, some of the contributors found sufficient grounds for optimism: These grounds include the deepening democratic ethos in the continent, which is believed will unleash a love of freedom that will supersede the fissiparous tendencies that underlie the various notions of Africanity; and the rise of new economic powers such as India and China, which are increasingly looking towards Africa as the next big destination. The emergence of Barrack Obama, whose father is Kenyan, as the President of the United States of America, also appears to be unleashing a new wave of can-do attitude. It is argued that for many Africans, Obama is both an African name they can relate to, and a metaphor expressing that anything is possible if you strive hard for it with the 'right attitude.' This 'right attitude' is an attitude that is post-chauvinism, for it is only by being post-racial and a reconciler that a Blackman, with an African Muslim father, who was not born into privilege, could emerge president of the most powerful country in the world. This lesson is not lost on Africans and it is a powerful boost to the African unity project.

An African Volk explores how the apartheid state sought to maintain power as the world of white empire gave way to a new post-colonial environment that repudiated racial hierarchy.

This book is a philosopher’s view into the chaotic postcolony of Zimbabwe, delving into Robert Mugabe’s Will to Power. The Will to Power refers to a spirited desire for power and overwhelming fear of powerlessness that Mugabe artfully concealed behind performances of invincibility. Nietzsche’s philosophical concept of the Will to Power is interpreted and expanded in this book to explain how a tyrant is produced and enabled, and how he performs his tyranny. Achille Mbembe’s novel concept of the African postcolony is mobilised to locate Zimbabwe under Mugabe as a domain of the madness of power. The book describes Mugabe’s development from a vulnerable youth who was intoxicated with delusions of divine commission to a monstrous tyrant of the postcolony who mistook himself for a political messiah. This account exposes how post-political euphoria about independence from colonialism and the heroism of one leader can easily lead to the degeneration of leadership. However, this book is as much about bad leadership as it is about bad followership. Away from Eurocentric stereotypes where tyranny is isolated to African despots, this book shows how Mugabe is part of an extended family of tyrants of the world. He fought settler colonialism but failed to avoid being infected by it, and eventually became a native coloniser to his own people. The book concludes that Zimbabwe faces not only a simple struggle for democracy and human rights, but a Himalayan struggle for liberation from genocidal native colonialism that endures even after Robert Mugabe’s dethronement and death.