The Heartbeat Of Indigenous Africa

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Empowered by findings and insights from the wit and wisdom of the indigenous Chaga educational system, Dr. Mosha contends that an authentic educational program in Tanzania and elsewhere should be holistic in its unrelenting quest to educate the entire person: body, mind, and spirit. He provides a comprehensive description of the indigenous schooling process and its underlying fundamental virtues and then proposes that modern education should give equal emphasis to both the spiritual development of students as well as to their intellectual growth in knowledge, science, and technology. Dr. Mosha argues that for its own advantage and survival, education has to prioritize moral consciousness and responsibility in its students in order to attain academic excellence. Without a consistent moral living and moral action by all who teach and learn, education eventually plunges into hopeless mediocrity, It becomes the proverbial salt which loses its saltiness. This book provides several unique contributions to the academy. First, it illustrates how the Chaga people of N. Tanzania cherish everyday experience and every here-and-now situation as teachable moments, teaching moments, and learning moments. It is also uniquely rich in its description of stories, riddles, proverbs, and rituals as powerful tools of holistic education. Thirdly, the book breaks ground by comprehensively articulating specific indigenous virtues such as reverence, self-control, silence and thoughtfulness, courage, diligence in work, and communality. This book therefor makes a unique contribution in the areas of Indigenous Knowledge, Spirituality, Education, African American Studies, African Studies, Religious Studies, Anthropology, et cetera. The author's stories, personal experiences, and thick descriptions are so fundamental that every reader will rediscover, in this book, similar experiences in his/her own life.

This volume is an attempt to provide this intersectional and reflexive space. The thinking behind the book began in Lamu in mid-2010. It was a time when growing community resistance emerged towards the Kenyan government's plan to build a second seaport under a trans-frontier infrastructural project known as the Lamu Port- South Sudan-Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET). The editors agreed that a book that draws community activists, academics, researchers and policy makers into a discussion of the predicament of indigenous rights and development against the backdrop of the Endorois case was timely and needed. Assembled here are the original contributions of some of the leading contemporary thinkers in the area of indigenous and human rights in Africa. The book is an interdisciplinary effort with the single purpose of thinking through indigenous rights after the Endorois case but it is not a singular laudatory remark on indigenous life in Africa. The discussion begins by framing indigenous rights and claims to indigeneity as found in the Endorois decision and its related socio-political history. Subsequent chapters provide deeper contextual analysis by evaluating the tense relationship between indigenous peoples and the post-colonial nation-state. Overall, the book makes a peering and provocative contribution to the relational interests between state policies and the developmental intersections of indigeneity, indigenous rights, gender advocacy, environmental conservation, chronic trauma and transitional justice.

Can a white man thrive living as an African in a village in Africa? Philo’s adventure takes him to the fictional African country of Holima, where he is adopted by an African tribe. Should Philo follow Western wisdom, and cause problems through generous giving? Or can he convince Western people that a vulnerable approach is the best way to reach Africa? Jim Harries’ new novel of Christian fiction is broadly based on his true-life experiences, and shows how God performs his powerful acts through human weakness.

This book critically opens new pathways for de-colonial scholarship and the reclamation of indigenous self-definition by women scholars. Indigenous peoples around the world are often socially egalitarian and gender equal, matricentric, matrifocal, matrilineal, less violent, beyond heteronormative, ecologically sensitive, and with feminine or two-gender deities or spirits, and more. Bernedette Muthien has contributed to several publications over the years, while June Bam has made numerous key contributions in the field of rethinking and rewriting the African past more generally. In this book, indigenous women write their own herstory, define their own contemporary cultural and socio-economic conditions, and ideate future visions based on their lived realities. All chapters herstoricise the accepted 'histories' and theories of how we have come to understand the African past, how to problematise and rethink that discourse, and provide new and different herstorical lenses, philosophies, epistemologies, methodologies and interpretations. In a first of its kind in Africa and the world, this collection of essays is written by, with and for indigenous southern African women from matricentric societies.

This book addresses major sociological issues in sub-Saharan African education today. Its fourteen contributors present a thoroughly African world-view within a sociology of education theoretical framework, allowing the reader to see where that theory is relevant to the African context and where it is not. Several of the chapters bring a much-needed cultural nuance and critical theoretical perspective to the issues at hand. The sixteen chapters thus aim to be of interest internationally, to those who work in such fields as social and political foundations of comparative and international education, and development studies, including university professors, teacher educators, researchers, school teachers, tertiary education students, consultants and policy makers.