Facts Fiction And African Creative Imaginations

This volume brings together insights from distinguished scholars from around the world to address the facts, fiction and creative imaginations in the pervasive portrayals of Africa, its people, societies and cultures in the literature and the media. The fictionalization of Africa and African issues in the media and the popular literature that blends facts and fiction has rendered perceptions of Africa, its cultures, societies, customs, and conflicts often superficial and deficient in the popular Western consciousness. The book brings eminent scholars from a variety of disciplines to sort out the persistent fictionalization of Africa, from facts pertaining to the genesis of powerful cultural, political or religious icons, the historical and cultural significance of "intriguing" customs (such as tribal marks), gender relations, causes of conflicts and African responses, and creative imaginations in contemporary African films, fiction and literature, among others.

Since the beginnings of African cinema, the realm of beauty on screen has been treated with suspicion by directors and critics alike. James S. Williams explores an exciting new generation of African directors, including Abderrahmane Sissako, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Fanta Régina Nacro, Alain Gomis, Newton I. Aduaka, Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Mati Diop, who have begun to reassess and embrace the concept of cinematic beauty by not reducing it to ideological critique or the old ideals of pan-Africanism. Locating the aesthetic within a range of critical fields - the rupturing of narrative spectacle and violence by montage, the archives of the everyday in the 'afropolis', the plurivocal mysteries of sound and language, male intimacy and desire, the borderzones of migration and transcultural drift - this study reveals the possibility for new, non-conceptual kinds of beauty in African cinema: abstract, material, migrant, erotic, convulsive, queer. Through close readings of key works such as Life on Earth (1998), The Night of Truth (2004), Bamako (2006), Daratt (Dry Season) (2006), A Screaming Man (2010), Tey (Today) (2012), The Pirogue (2012), Mille soleils (2013) and Timbuktu (2014), Williams argues that contemporary African filmmakers are proposing propitious, ethical forms of relationality and intersubjectivity. These stimulate new modes of cultural resistance and transformation that serve to redefine the transnational and the cosmopolitan as well as the very notion of the political in postcolonial art cinema.

This book explores how African youth are depicted in contemporary literature and popular culture, and discusses the different ways by which they attempt to construct personal and cultural identities through popular culture and social media outlets. The contributors approach the subject from an interdisciplinary perspective, looking at images in children’s and adolescent literature from Africa, and the African diaspora, from Nollywood and Hollywood movies, from popular magazines, and from youth cultures encountered directly through field experiences. The findings reveal that there are many stereotypes about Africa, African youth and black cultures, and that African youth are aware of these. Since they juggle multiple identities shaped by their ethnicities, race and religion, it is often a challenge for them to define themselves. As they also share a global youth culture that transcends these cultural markers, some take advantage of media outlets to voice their concerns and participate in political struggles. Others simply use these to promote their personal interests. Contributors ponder the challenges involved in constructing unique identities, offering ideas on how African youth are doing so successfully or not in different parts of the continent and the African diaspora, and thus offer new possibilities for youth studies.

Africa is the birthplace of humanity and civilization. And yet people generally don’t want to accept the scientific impression of Africa as the birthplace of human civilization. The skeptics include Africans themselves, a direct result of the colonial educational systems still in place across Africa, and even those Africans who acquire Western education, particularly in the humanities, have been trapped in the symptomatology of epistemic peonage. These colonial educational systems have overstayed their welcome and should be dismantled. This is where African agency comes in. Agential autonomy deserves an authoritative voice in shaping the curricular direction of Africa. Agential autonomy implicitly sanctions an Afrocentric approach to curriculum development, pedagogy, historiography, literary theory, indigenous language development, and knowledge construction. Science, technology, engineering, mathematics?information and communications technology (STEM-ICT) and research and development (R&D) both exercise foundational leverage in the scientific and cultural discourse of the kind of African Renaissance Cheikh Anta Diop envisaged. “Mr. Francis Kwarteng has written a book that looks at some of the major distortions of African history and Africa’s major contributions to human civilization. In this context, Mr. Kwarteng joins a long list of thinkers who roundly reject the foundational Eurocentric epistemology of Africa in favor of an Afrocentric paradigm of Africa’s material, spiritual, scientific, and epistemic assertion. Mr. Kwarteng places S.T.E.M. and a revision of the humanities at the center of the African Renaissance and critiques Eurocentric fantasies about Africa and its Diaspora following the critical examples of Cheikh Anta Diop, Ama Mazama, Molefi Kete Asante, Abdul Karim Bangura, Theophile Obenga, Maulana Karenga, Mubabingo Bilolo, Kwame Nkrumah, Ivan Van Sertima, W.E.B. Du Bois, and several others. Readers of this book will be challenged to look at Africa through a critical lens.” Ama Mazama, editor/author of Africa in the 21st Century: Toward a New Future “There are countless books about the evolution of European intellectual thought but scarcely any that captures the pioneering contributions of Africans since the beginning of recorded knowledge in Kmet, a.k.a. Ancient Egypt. Well, that long drought has ended with the publication of Kwarteng's An Intellectual Biography of Africa: A Philosophical Anatomy of Advancing Africa the Diopian Way. Prepare to be educated.” Milton Allimadi, author of Manufacturing Hate: How Africa Was Demonized in the Media

By the late eighteenth century, the ever-increasing British need for local labour in West Africa based on malarial, climatic, and manpower concerns led to a willingness of the British and Kru (West African labourers from Liberia) to experiment with free wage labour contracts. The Kru’s familiarity with European trade on the Kru Coast (modern Liberia) from at least the sixteenth century played a fundamental role in their decision to expand their wage earning opportunities under contract with the British. The establishment of Freetown in 1792 enabled the Kru to engage in systematized work for British merchants, ship captains, and naval officers. Kru workers increased their migration to Freetown establishing what appears to be their first permanent labouring community beyond their homeland on the Kru Coast. Their community in Freetown known as Krutown provided a readily available labour pool and ensured their regular employment on board British commercial ships and Royal Navy vessels circumnavigating the Atlantic and beyond. In the process, the Kru established a network of Krutowns and community settlements in many Atlantic ports including Cape Coast, Fernando Po, Ascension Island, Cape of Good Hope, and in the British Caribbean in Demerara and Port of Spain. Outsourcing African Labour in the Nineteenth Century: Kru Migratory Workers in Global Ports, Estates and Battlefields structures the fragmented history of Kru workers into a coherent global framework. The migration of Kru workers in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans, in commercial and military contexts represents a movement of free wage labour that transformed the Kru Coast into a homeland that nurtured diasporas and staffed a vast network of workplaces. As the Kru formed permanent and transient working communities around the Atlantic and in the British Caribbean, they underwent several phases of social, political, and economic innovation, which ultimately overcame a decline in employment in their homeland on the Kru Coast by the end of the nineteenth century by increasing employment in their diaspora. There were unique features of the Kru migrant labour force that characterized all phases of its expansion. The migration was virtually entirely male, and at a time when slavery was widespread and the slave trade was subjected to the abolition campaign of the British Navy, Kru workers were free with an expertise in manning seaborne craft and porterage. Kru carried letters from previous captains as testimonies of their reliability and work ethic or they worked under the supervision of experienced workers who effectively served as references for employment. They worked for contractual periods of between six months and five years for which they were paid wages. The Kru thereby stand out as an anomaly in the history of Atlantic trade when compared with the much larger diasporas of enslaved Africans.

What does it mean to be a child in Africa? In the detached Western media, narratives of penury, wickedness and death have dominated portrayals of African childhood. The hegemonic lens of the West has failed to take into account the intricacies of not only what it means to be an African child in local and culturally specific contexts, but also African childhood in general. Challenging colonial discourses, this edited volume guides the reader through different comprehensions and perspectives of childhood in Africa. Using a blend of theory, empiricism and history, the contributors to this volume offer studies from a range of fields including African literature, Afro-centric psychology and sociology. Importantly, in its eclectic geographical coverage of Africa, this book unashamedly presents the good, the bad and the ugly of African childhood. The resilience, creativity, pains and triumphs of African childhood are skilfully woven together to present the myriad of lived experiences and aspirations of children from across Africa. As an important contribution to African childhood studies, this book has the potential to be used by policymakers to shape, sustain or change socio-cultural, economic and education systems that accommodate African childhood dynamics and experiences at different levels.

This volume attempts to insert itself within the larger discussion of Africa in the twenty-first century, especially within the realm of world politics. Despite the underwhelming amount of attention given to Africa's role in international politics in popular news sources, it is evident that Africa has a consistent record of participating in world politics- one that pre-dates colonization and continues today. In continuance of this legacy of active participation in global political exchanges, Africans today can be heard in dialogues that span the world and their roles are impossible to replace by other entities. It is evident that a vastly different Africa exists than ones that bolster images of starvation, corruption, and compliance. The essays in this volume center on Africa and Africans participating in international political discourses, but with an emphasis on various forms of expression and philosophies, as these factors heavily influence Africa's role as a participant in global politics. The reader will find a variety of essays that permeate surface discussions of politics and political activism by inserting African culture, rhetoric, philosophies into the larger discussion of international politics and Africa's role in worldwide political, social, and economic debates.

This book offers an in-depth African perspective to the major issues in demographic discourse in sub-Saharan Africa. It provides comprehensive analysis of sub-Saharan African censuses, profiling demographic changes, trends, patterns and consequences in the region. Interdisciplinary, comprehensive, accessible, simple and topical, this volume is perfectly suited to researchers, students and lecturers who are interested in understanding sub-Saharan African population dynamics and issues.