Colonial Africa

This work is a study of Uganda as a nation during the post-colonial era. Godfrey Mwakikagile looks at the problems the country faced during its first years of independence including the constitutional crisis following the abolition of the kingdoms; the demand by the Buganda kingdom for federal status and its refusal to accept a unitary state; the ouster of Kabaka Mutesa II from the presidency and his subsequent exile to Britain; the paradoxical nature of the demand by Buganda kingdom for federal status under a unitary state and of having a hereditary ruler, Mutesa, the king of Buganda, ...

In the popular imagination the picture of slavery, frozen in time, is one of huge cotton plantations and opulent mansions. However, in over a hundred years of history detailed in this book, the hard reality of slavery in Mississippi's antebellum world is strikingly different from the one of popular myth. It shows that Mississippi's past was never frozen, but always fluid. It shows too that slavery took a number of shapes before its form in the late antebellum mold became crystalized for popular culture.

For decades, African nations have fought for the return of countless works of art stolen during the colonial era and placed in Western museums. In Africa's Struggle for Its Art, Bénédicte Savoy brings to light this largely unknown but deeply important history. One of the world's foremost experts on restitution and cultural heritage, Savoy investigates extensive, previously unpublished sources to reveal that the roots of the struggle extend much further back than prominent recent debates indicate, and that these efforts were covered up by myriad opponents.

From 1754 to 1755, the slave ship Hare completed a journey from Newport, Rhode Island, to Sierra Leone and back to the United States - a journey that transformed more than 70 Africans into commodities, condemning some to death and the rest to a life of bondage in North America. In this engaging narrative, Sean Kelley painstakingly reconstructs this tumultuous voyage, detailing everything from the identities of the captain and crew to their wild encounters with inclement weather, slave traders, and near-mutiny.

In 1984, the landscape historian Mac Griswold was rowing along a Long Island creek when she came upon a stately yellow house and a garden guarded by looming boxwoods. She instantly knew that boxwoods that large - 12 feet tall, 15 feet wide - had to be hundreds of years old. So, as it happened, was the house: Sylvester Manor had been held in the same family for 11 generations. Formerly encompassing all of Shelter Island, a pearl of 8,000 acres caught between the North and South Forks of Long Island, the manor had dwindled to 243 acres.

In 1656, a planter in colonial Maryland tortured and killed one of his slaves, an Angolan man named Antonio who refused to work the fields. Over three centuries later, a Detroit labor organizer named Simon Owens watched as strikebreakers wielding bats and lead pipes beat his fellow autoworkers for protesting their inhumane working conditions. Antonio and Owens had nothing in common but the color of their skin and the economic injustices they battled - yet the former is what defines them in America’s consciousness.

In Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, Catherine Higgs traces the early-twentieth-century journey of the Englishman Joseph Burtt to the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe - the chocolate islands - through Angola and Mozambique, and finally to British Southern Africa. Burtt had been hired by the chocolate firm Cadbury Brothers Limited to determine if the cocoa it was buying from the islands had been harvested by slave laborers forcibly recruited from Angola, an allegation that became one of the grand scandals of the early colonial era.

The author looks at the imperial conquest of Africa and the devastating impact it has had and continues to have on her people. It includes conquest of the mind which, he contends, is the worst form of imperial subjugation. The work is also about the destiny of Africa which is being partly shaped by the forces of globalisation beyond the capacity of Africans to resist or control. The author contends this is the era of a new form of imperialism – “globalisation” its euphemism – dominated by the big powers and other industrialised nations to the detriment of Africa's wellbeing.

On Sunday, September 9, 1739, 20 Kongolese slaves armed themselves by breaking into a storehouse near the Stono River south of Charleston, South Carolina. They killed 23 white colonists, joined forces with other slaves, and marched toward Spanish Florida. There they expected to find freedom. One report claims the rebels were overheard shouting, "Liberty!" Before the day ended, however, the rebellion was crushed, and afterwards many surviving rebels were executed.

The saga of the Orisha people continues as they are forced to flee westward from the savage might of their Saracen persecutors, whose soul aim is for their annihilation. It is a tale of brute survival and spiritual fortitude, where strategy and deception are weapons as vital as a blade. Makeri, the ingenuous blacksmith, and the enchanting Priestess Mariami, with her magical powers, navigate the trials that come with leading a people towards their destiny. The Nine-Sided Talisman and its great magical powers, is used by the Great Spirit Hogan to bring Priestess Mariami under his spell, ...

The work focuses on the history and multicultural nature of Belize, formerly British Honduras, whose national identity is a product of multiple ethnic and cultural identities amalgamated, and sometimes fused, to form a single nation.

The island of Antigua comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate taxi chauffeur who makes his living along the roads that pass through the only towns he has ever seen and the graveyard where he will be buried. The sun shines squarely overhead, the ocean lies on every side, and suppressed passion fills the air. Ignoring the legacy of his father, a poor fisherman, and his mother, who took her own life, Mr. Potter struggles to live at ease amid his surroundings: to purchase a car, to have girlfriends, and to shake off the encumbrance of his daughters.