Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age is a compendium of innovating essays meticulously written by early and later diaspora people of African descent. Their speech arises from the depth of their experiences under the Baobab tree and offers to the world voices of resilience, newness/resurrection, hope, and life. Resolutely journeying on the trails of their ancestors, they speak about setbacks and forward-looking movements of liberation, social transformation, and community formation. The volume is a carefully woven conversation of intellectual substance and structure across time, space, and spirituality that is quintessentially “Africana” in its centering of methodological, theoretical, epistemological, and hermeneutical complexity that assumes nonlinear and dialogical approaches to developing liberating epistemologies in the face of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and religious intolerance. A critical part of this conversation is a reconceptualization and reconfiguration of the concept of religion in its colonial and imperial forms. Life Under the Baobab Tree examines how Africana peoples understand their corporate experiences of the divine not as “religion” apart from its intimate connections to social realities of communal health, economics, culture, politics, environment, violence, war, and dynamic community belonging. To that end Afro-Pessimistic formulations of life placed in dialogic relation Afro-Optimism. Both realities constitute life under the Baobab tree and represent the sturdiness and variation that anchors the deep ruptures that have affected Africana life and the creative responses. The metaphor and substance of the tree resists reductionist, essentialist, and assured conclusions about the nature of diasporic lived experiences, both within the continent of Africa and in the African Diaspora.

In Proverbs and the African Tree of Life Dorothy BEA Akoto-Abutiate juxtaposes chosen sayings from Proverbs and selected Ewe Folk proverbs using the agricultural metaphor of “grafting,” which she calls a “hermeneutic of grafting.” Though these two sets of sayings come from completely different cultural contexts, Akoto argues that folk sayings/proverbs, which abound in Africa, should be considered as an already mature, established tree on to which a piece of the biblical tree is spliced or engrafted to produce hybridized fruits that have uniquely different tastes than the fruits of each tree individually. This metaphorical grafting process allows the message of the Bible (in Proverbs) to be understood, imbibed and appropriated in Africa.

Modern humans, descendants of a founding population that separated from chimpanzees some five to eight million years ago, are today the only living representative of a branching group of African apes called hominins. Because of its extraordinary size and shape, the baobab (Adansonia digitata L.) has long been identified as the most striking tree of Africa’s mosaic savanna, the landscape generally regarded as the environment of hominin evolution. This book makes the case for identifying the baobab as the tree of life in the hunter-gatherer adaptation that was the economic foundation of hominin evolution. The argument is based on the significance of the baobab as a resource-rich environment for the Hadza of northeastern Tanzania, who continue to be successful hunter-gatherers of the African savanna.

This is the only comprehensive account of all eight species in the genus Adansonia. It describes the historical background from the late Roman period to the present. It covers the extraordinary variety of economic uses of baobabs. There are also appendices on vernacular names, gazetteer, economics, nutrition and forest mensuration. This book fills a gap in the botanical literature. It deals with a genus that has fascinated and intrigued scientists and lay persons for centuries.

This book takes on the challenge: What roles can and should African literature play in Africa's development? From a variety of critical stances and perspectives, the concepts of "literature" and of "development" are theorized, to include and extend beyond inherited concepts and boundaries in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, and thus, to engage peoples' everyday life experiences. Approaches to the question of Africa's literature and its development range from African feminism or feminist practices, to the economics and politics of public access to knowledge, information and literature, to communication networks and use of African languages in national education policies. Twenty essays constitute the volume's four parts which focus on: -- Diverse conceptualizations of African literature and development -- Critical studies of specific writers' works, linking their artistic development with issues and events of social or political development -- A philosophical consideration of the development's relationship to literature -- Models of activist pedagogy in African literature The structure of this volume is encompassed by two roundtable transcriptions with writers and critics for whom African literature and Africa's development is part of a larger struggle to create new space in which to thrive and envision new life, inside and outside the academy.