Think African

With more than 900 million consumers, the continent of Africa is one of the world’s fastest growing markets. In Africa Rising, renowned global business consultant Vijay Mahajan reveals this remarkable marketplace as a continent with massive needs and surprising buying power. Crossing thousands of miles across the continent, he shares the lessons that Africa’s businesses have learned about succeeding on the continent...shows how global companies are succeeding despite Africa’s unique political, economic, and resource challenges...introduces local entrepreneurs and foreign investors who are building a remarkable spectrum of profitable and sustainable business opportunities even in the most challenging locations...reveals how India and China are staking out huge positions throughout Africa...and shows the power of the diaspora in driving investment and development. Recognize that Africa is richer than you think Africa is richer than India on the basis of gross national income (GNI) per capita, and a dozen African countries have a higher GNI per capita than China. Aim for Africa Two Opportunities exist in all parts of the market, particularly the 400 million people in the middle of the market. Find opportunities to organize the market From retailing to cell phones to banking, companies are succeeding by building infrastructure. Develop strategies for the most youthful market in the world Companies are recognizing opportunities from diapers to music to medicine in a market growing younger every day. Understand that Africa is not a “media dark” continent From Nollywood to satellite to broadband, media is exploding on the continent. Recognize the hidden strength of the African diaspora The African diaspora brings resources and knowledge to African development and expands the African opportunity beyond the continent. Build Ubuntu markets Create profitable businesses, sustainable growth, and social organizations by meeting basic human needs.

Each essay looks at an African concept, attitude or person, or a combination of these, and hopes to stimulate further reading and reflection on the reader's part."--BOOK JACKET.

About Ubuntu, unifying leadership and a new world. Is it a coincidence that recent leaders have African roots? Charismatic people like Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, Paul Kagame and Barack Obama have been praised for their knowledge, vision, skills, unifying ability and their thoroughness. These are leaders who focus on vision, courage, passion and compassion. They are builders, peacemakers and campaigners for equal rights. A substantial part of this leadership style is the African philosophy of Ubuntu. Ubuntu means simply 'I exist because of we.' Connecting is central. You cannot function as a human being without being part of a greater whole. Africans apply this humanistic philosophy to every sector of society, from politics, law and religion, to healthcare, education and the economy. In The Power of African Thinking, Leontine van Hooft convincingly demonstrates that Ubuntu is the answer to contemporary western issues. With her own company as an example, she shows you how to integrate Ubuntu into your own organisation, and be ready for tomorrow's inevitable problems. Leontine van Hooft and her husband are joint owners of GreenDreamCompany BV. The company works from a clear vision of People, Planet, Profit, Passion and Pleasure with particular regard to Africa, using tourism as a tool for development. Leontine is a corporate anthropologist, and has more than fifteen years experience as a trainer/coach in the field of inter-cultural management.

Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’; it suffocates African thought and denies African agency. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. He finds ‘decolonisation’ of culture intellectually unsound and wholly unrealistic, conflating modernity with coloniality, and groundlessly advocating an open-ended undoing of global society’s foundations. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers. This powerful, much-needed intervention questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Táíwò’s is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.

For the better part of two centuries, racial domination has been the central concern of African social thought. Other questions, among them national identity, the role of chieftaincy, representation, justice, and constitutional design, have often been defined in relation to a preoccupation with racial and colonial forms of domination. This book, by examining the history of African thought, will prove an invaluable tool to those new thinkers who have begun to revisit the intellectual history of Africa at the outset of the twenty-first century.

Africa Must Think delivers 30 hard-core messages to challenge and inspire anyone who seeks to understand Africa's problem and desires to be part of its future. Although the title calls upon "Africa" to think, discerning readers will immediately recognize that this work is actually speaking to all continents! Africa Must Think transcends Africa and Africans. It is actually a collective call to humanity, as the author said: "Although I write as a Ghanaian, African or Black person, the world is my audience. For I write as a citizen of the world to come."

An unparalleled eye for detail presents electrifying images of life in the Sudan.

This book is an in-depth, comparative study of two of the most popular and influential intellectual and spiritual traditions of West Africa: Tijani Sufism and Ifa. Employing a unique methodological approach that thinks with and from—rather than merely about—these traditions, Oludamini Ogunnaike argues that they contain sophisticated epistemologies that provide practitioners with a comprehensive worldview and a way of crafting a meaningful life. Using theories belonging to the traditions themselves as well as contemporary oral and textual sources, Ogunnaike examines how both Sufism and Ifa answer the questions of what knowledge is, how it is acquired, and how it is verified. Or, more simply: What do you know? How did you come to know it? How do you know that you know? After analyzing Ifa and Sufism separately and on their own terms, the book compares them to each other and to certain features of academic theories of knowledge. By analyzing Sufism from the perspective of Ifa, Ifa from the perspective of Sufism, and the contemporary academy from the perspective of both, this book invites scholars to inhabit these seemingly “foreign” intellectual traditions as valid and viable perspectives on knowledge, metaphysics, psychology, and ritual practice. Unprecedented and innovative, Deep Knowledge makes a significant contribution to cross-cultural philosophy, African philosophy, religious studies, and Islamic studies. Its singular approach advances our understanding of the philosophical bases underlying these two African traditions and lays the groundwork for future study.