African Town

Chronicling the story of the last Africans brought illegally to America in 1860, African Town is a powerful and stunning novel-in-verse. Cover may vary. In 1860, long after the United States outlawed the importation of enslaved laborers, 110 men, women and children from Benin and Nigeria were captured and brought to Mobile, Alabama aboard a ship called Clotilda. Their journey includes the savage Middle Passage and being hidden in the swamplands along the Alabama River before being secretly parceled out to various plantations, where they made desperate attempts to maintain both their culture and also fit into the place of captivity to which they'd been delivered. At the end of the Civil War, the survivors created a community for themselves they called African Town, which still exists to this day. Told in 14 distinct voices, including that of the ship that brought them to the American shores and the founder of African Town, this powerfully affecting historical novel-in-verse recreates a pivotal moment in US and world history, the impacts of which we still feel today.

This book is comprehensive both in terms of time coverage, from before the Pharaohs to the present moment and in that it tries to consider cities from the entire continent, not just Sub-Saharan Africa. Apart from factual information and rich description material culled from many sources, it looks at many issues from why urban life emerged in the first place to how present-day African cities cope in difficult times. Instead of seeing towns and cities as somehow extraneous to the real Africa, it views them as an inherent part of developing Africa, indigenous, colonial, and post-colonial and emphasizes the extent to which the future of African society and African culture will likely be played out mostly in cities. The book is written to appeal to students of history but equally to geographers, planners, sociologists and development specialists interested in urban problems.

As the slave trade entered its last, illegal phase in the 19th century, the town of Lagos on West Africa's Bight of Benin became one of the most important port cities north of the equator. Slavery and the Birth of an African City explores the reasons for Lagos's sudden rise to power. By linking the histories of international slave markets to those of the regional suppliers and slave traders, Kristin Mann shows how the African slave trade forever altered the destiny of the tiny kingdom of Lagos. This magisterial work uncovers the relationship between African slavery and the growth of one of Africa's most vibrant cities.

In this accessible ethnography of a small town in northern Mozambique, everyday cultural knowledge and behaviors about food, cooking, and eating reveal the deeply human pursuit of a nourishing life. This emerges less through the consumption of specific nutrients than it does in the affective experience of alimentation in contexts that support vitality, compassion, and generative relations. Embedded within central themes in the study of Africa south of the Sahara, the volume combines insights from philosophy and food studies to find textured layers of meaning in a seemingly simple cuisine.

A tour of Benin City, a West African town and capital of the Edo Empire, located in present-day Nigeria.

Cradock, the product of more than twenty years of research by Jeffrey Butler, is a vivid history of a middle-sized South African town in the years when segregation gradually emerged, preceding the rapid and rigorous implementation of apartheid. Although Butler was born and raised in Cradock, he avoids sentimentality and offers an ambitious treatment of the racial themes that dominate recent South African history through the details of one emblematic community. Augmenting the obvious political narrative, Cradock examines poor infrastructural conditions that typify a grossly unequal system of racial segregation but otherwise neglected in the region’s historiography. Butler shows, with the richness that only a local study could provide, how the lives of blacks, whites, and mixed-race coloreds were affected by the bitter transition from segregation before 1948 to apartheid thereafter.

In the small town of Dogondoutchi, Niger, Malam Awal, a charismatic Sufi preacher, was recruited by local Muslim leaders to denounce the practices of reformist Muslims. Malam Awal's message has been viewed as a mixed blessing by Muslim women who have seen new definitions of Islam and Muslim practice impact their place and role in society. This study follows the career of Malam Awal and documents the engagement of women in the religious debates that are refashioning their everyday lives. Adeline Masquelier reveals how these women have had to define Islam on their own terms, especially as a practice that governs education, participation in prayer, domestic activities, wedding customs, and who wears the veil and how. Masquelier's richly detailed narrative presents new understandings of what it means to be a Muslim woman in Africa today.

Enjoy the beautiful curated photographs (in color) of Cape Town in South Africa The photos captures the quintessential stunning landmarks, scenery and architectural buildings of the country and city from day to night without no words (texts) This full page picture book will make a great home coffee table decor accessory or as a gift for a loved one 8.5" x 11" / large size Glossy softcover