In Freedom Afrika, the sequel to Cosmo Starlight’s novel Freedom Incorporated, Noodle Church escapes solitary confinement to work with people against bombs, bullets, powders, and policemen. Found journeying across three continents, bringing a pack which rarely comes off his back, and wearing canvas pants he’s accustomed to sleeping in, Africans procure Noodle a home so he mustn’t live on the street during the holidays. They feed Noodle, lend him jackets to wear when it’s cold, and provide security ensured by honest, trustworthy relationships. At wildland that unfolds along a thousand kilometers of rugged coast to document his life in the system enslaving people with cameras and clandestine surveillance, someplace so remote footpaths replaced roads, Noodle thought he’d discovered freedom. But, where bulls bask in sun by the beach, he found wardens track him. The International Intelligence Service (IIS) recalls love he lost after detainment without charges, a trial, or records. A provocateur gained Noodle’s trust to compromise him so men riding dirt-bikes could push this blue-stained boy beyond the bounds of Freedom Inc.’s rule by catching him kill someone. Instead, Noodle fled into the wild without clean water or shelter before returning to the floor of an African snack shop where he awoke last Christmas. Agents tracked him there too; yet, after fighting a twenty-year-long war, townspeople excelled at security. People who’d witnessed brothers being shot, poisoned, and burned alive proclaimed, “If men wearing white suits and masks attached to breathing apparatuses allege Noodle Church has a rare disease nobody’s heard of then it doesn’t matter because we fought for independence. We’ll never let wardens take him, even if they say it’s a matter of national security!” Africans were poor but they reject bombs, bullets, powders, and policemen. Freedom Afrika teaches people need food, water, shelter, and love to live. Love is all Noodle needed!

This book studies tabloid journalism newspapers within the broader context of press freedom in Africa. After defining tabloid journalism and professional practices within various political contexts, the book then proceeds to consider tabloids in Southern Africa and emerging cyberspace laws. Many factors of press freedom are considered, including the impact of public order and national security laws on tabloids in North Africa, the impact of defamation laws on tabloids in West Africa, the impact of the fake news laws on tabloids in East Africa, and the impact of sedition and treason laws on tabloids in Central Africa. Exploring tabloid journalism and press freedom in Arabic, Portuguese, and Francophone speaking countries across Africa, this book is a unique addition to this emerging field. The book concludes by providing a synthesis of the developing patterns from the cases analysed and by looking to the future to make recommendations and map the challenges and the successes.

Freedom has become a labor camp. Cameras, cyber surveillance, and clandestine security contain truth as free-citizens engineer systems to restrict children inside a police state. Set in 2042, society’s day-wardens fight those managing the Corporation at night while super-wardens expand their government. Prisoner Noodle Church doesn't mind working in Freedom Incorporated. Yet refusal to call it freedom lands Noodle in Freedom Inc.’s medium-security ward where day-wardens pressure him to reveal work at night. And when Noodle exercises his right to remain silent, because living in Freedom is easier that way, super-wardens take the hero for interrogation. A beacon of freedom in day and night wardens’ bi-polar war for power, Noodle is moved to high-security but before getting locked-up in a super-max facility wardens offer a deal. Noodle can work in Freedom’s low-security ward if he pleads insanity then testifies clandestine security caught pursuing were a figment of his imagination. Noodle refuses to call this freedom! Night-shift wardens try murdering him then day-shift wardens place Noodle in solitary confinement. From here his character writes the prisoners of Freedom Incorporated, asking for freedom to lead without bombs, bullets, powders, or policemen.

During the final fifteen years of the Cold War, southern Africa underwent a period of upheaval, with dramatic twists and turns in relations between the superpowers. Americans, Cubans, Soviets, and Africans fought over the future of Angola, where tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers were stationed, and over the decolonization of Namibia, Africa's last colony. Beyond lay the great prize: South Africa. Piero Gleijeses uses archival sources, particularly from the United States, South Africa, and the closed Cuban archives, to provide an unprecedented international history of this important theater of the late Cold War. These sources all point to one conclusion: by humiliating the United States and defying the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro changed the course of history in southern Africa. It was Cuba's victory in Angola in 1988 that forced Pretoria to set Namibia free and helped break the back of apartheid South Africa. In the words of Nelson Mandela, the Cubans "destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor . . . [and] inspired the fighting masses of South Africa."

An insightful examination of the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and African Independence on jazz in the 1950s and 60s, Freedom Sounds traces the complex relationships among music, politics, aesthetics, and activism through the lens of the hot button racial and economic issues of the time. Ingrid Monson illustrates how the contentious and soul-searching debates in the Civil Rights, African Independence, and Black Power movements shaped aesthetic debates and exerted a moral pressure on musicians to take action. Throughout, her arguments show how jazz musicians' quest for self-determination as artists and human beings also led to fascinating and far reaching musical explorations and a lasting ethos of social critique and transcendence.Across a broad body of issues of cultural and political relevance, Freedom Sounds considers the discursive, structural, and practical aspects of life in the jazz world in the 1950s and 1960s. In domestic politics, Monson explores the desegregation of the American Federation of Musicians, the politics of playing to segregated performance venues in the 1950s, the participation of jazz musicians in benefit concerts, and strategies of economic empowerment. Issues of transatlantic importance such as the effects of anti-colonialism and African nationalism on the politics and aesthetics of the music are also examined, from Paul Robeson's interest in Africa, to the State Department jazz tours, to the interaction of jazz musicians such Art Blakey and Randy Weston with African and African diasporic aesthetics.Monson deftly explores musicians' aesthetic agency in synthesizing influential forms of musical expression from a multiplicity of stylistic and cultural influences--African American music, popular song, classical music, African diasporic aesthetics, and other world musics--through examples from cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and the avant-garde. By considering the differences between aesthetic and socio-economic mobility, she presents a fresh interpretation of debates over cultural ownership, racism, reverse racism, and authenticity.Freedom Sounds will be avidly read by students and academics in musicology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music, African American Studies, and African diasporic studies, as well as fans of jazz, hip hop, and African American music.

This book gives an overview of current debates surrounding press freedom in Africa in response to ongoing contestations between media and governments on the continent. Through case studies of individual African countries as well as international comparisons, a wide range of global contributors provide critical assessments of the state of press freedom on the continent and critical perspectives on the dominant discourses around freedom and democracy. Some fear an alarming slide towards a media-intolerant environment in South Africa, and the proposed Media Appeals Tribunal and the Protection of State Information Bill (POSIB) have met with strong criticism from journalism practitioners and educators. This book examines these and other recent developments seen to represent a threat to press freedom on the African continent. Contributors to the volume take a comparative look at the situation in South Africa within a broader, global context of transitions to democracy and globalised marketization of the media, as well as inspecting specific African examples that may serve to illuminate broader trends. Case studies from different African countries are examined, but in the process the discourses around press freedom are also subjected to critical scrutiny. Critics state that the South African media are not without fault, and that part of journalism scholarship’s role is to continue to point to these shortcomings and to suggest ways of improving the media’s democratic responsibility. Press Freedom in Africa provides a range of perspectives on the heated debates surrounding press freedom. It illustrates the importance of research-based, scholarly interventions into the often emotional and rhetorical debates surrounding the role of the media in African society. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies.

In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik celebrated with song the revolutions spreading across Africa. In Ghana and South Africa, drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin fused local musical forms with the dizzying innovations of modern jazz. These four were among hundreds of musicians in the 1950's and '60's who forged connections between jazz and Africa that definitively reshaped both their music and the world. Each artist identified in particular ways with Africa's struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, demands for independence and self-determination. That music was the wild, boundary-breaking exultation of modern jazz. The result was an abundance of conversation, collaboration, and tension between African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization. This collective biography demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered politics and culture on both continents. In a crucial moment when freedom electrified the African diaspora, these black artists sought one another out to create new modes of expression. Documenting individuals and places, from Lagos to Chicago, from New York to Cape Town, Robin Kelley gives us a meditation on modernity: we see innovation not as an imposition from the West but rather as indigenous, multilingual, and messy, the result of innumerable exchanges across a breadth of cultures.

Recent years have seen considerable growth in the media in Africa with increases in the number of newspapers and radio and television stations. At the same time there has been an increase in the number of arrests of journalists and broadcasters and various forms of censorship have been introduced. The essays in this volume examine press censorship, past and present, and bring a fresh perspective to the position of the mass media in the African continent.

Babatune Olatunji's record album Drums of Passion proclaimed that the time had come for America to recognize Africa's cultural contributions to the music world. Through his many albums and live performances, the Nigerian drummer popularized West African traditional music and spread his message of racial harmony. In this long-awaited autobiography, Olatunji presents his life story and the philosophy that guided him. Olatunji influenced and inspired musicians for more than forty years - from luminaries to music students and the many ordinary people who participated in his drum circles. He writes about rhythm being "the soul of life," and about the healing power of the drum. Ultimately, The Beat of My Drum shows why at the time of his death in 2003, Olatunji had become, according to The New York Times, "the most visible African musician in the United States."

Celebrate the heroic individuals, dramatic turning points, and exultant moments of triumph that defined the struggle for Civil Rights in America and independence throughout the African Diaspora. Here are 365 stories that forged the Freedom Days. Freedom Days offers daily affirmation of how acts of faith and daring can and do make a difference. Let these shining examples illuminate your future.