Western Africa

Wanda Sykes, LeVar Burton, Leslie Odom, Jr., and Gabourey Sidibe head a cast of beloved actors performing 23 selections from the speeches, sermons, and essays of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—many never recorded during his lifetime. For the first time, teachers, students, and thoughtful listeners can hear dramatic interpretations of Dr. King’s words, chosen and introduced by Cornel West.

Rich Benjamin’s mother, Danielle Fignolé, grew up the eldest in a large family living a comfortable life in Port-au-Prince. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a populist hero—a labor leader and politician. The first true champion of the black masses, he eventually became the country’s president in 1957. But two weeks after his inauguration, that life was shattered. Soldiers took Danielle’s parents at gunpoint and put them on a plane to New York, a coup hatched by the Eisenhower administration. Danielle and her siblings were kidnapped, and ultimately smuggled out of the country.

The Buffalo Soldiers were the first peacetime all-Black regiment of the US Army. Created around the time of the Civil War, they fought bravely in several wars, and also played an important role in the history of the American West.

In the grand scheme of things, very little is known of Mansa Musa’s life. We know that he was one of the greatest emperors of the Mali Empire. And we know that he was actually one of the richest men of all time due to the enormous gold deposits in West Africa that were under his dominion, but large parts of Mansa Musa’s life remain a mystery.

Vodun: West African Spiritual Life explores and explains this often-misunderstood religion. It invites listeners to open their eyes and their minds to what Vodun is, where and why began, and how it’s practiced. You may think you know everything you need to know, because you’ve seen Hollywood’s interpretation of these spiritual practices, but this book proves those theories, misconceptions, artistic licenses, and theories wrong.

The defining experience of Chinua Achebe's life was the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967-1970. The conflict was infamous for its savage impact on the Biafran people, Chinua Achebe's people, many of whom were starved to death after the Nigerian government blockaded their borders. Immediately after, Achebe took refuge in an academic post in the United States, and for more than 40 years he has maintained a considered silence on the events of those terrible years. Now, decades in the making, comes a towering reckoning with one of modern Africa's most fateful events.

One night in April 2014, members of the terrorist organization Boko Haram raided the small town of Chibok in northeast Nigeria and abducted 276 young girls from the local boarding school. The event caused massive, international outrage. Using the hashtag "Bring Back Our Girls", politicians, activists, and celebrities from all around the world - among them First Lady Michelle Obama and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai - protested.

In 2014, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea suffered the worst epidemic of Ebola in history. The brutal virus spread rapidly through a clinical desert, where basic health-care facilities were few and far between. Causing severe loss of life and economic disruption, the Ebola crisis was a major tragedy of modern medicine. But why did it happen, and what can we learn from it?

Fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, the Clotilda became the last ship in history to bring enslaved Africans to the United States. The ship was scuttled and burned on arrival to hide the wealthy perpetrators to escape prosecution. Despite numerous efforts to find the sunken wreck, Clotilda remained hidden for the next 160 years. But in 2019, journalist Ben Raines made international news when he successfully concluded his obsessive quest through the swamps of Alabama to uncover one of our nation’s most important historical artifacts.

Contains all six A Miller's Pointe Christmas novellas.

When Regina Burns married Blue Hamilton, she knew he was no ordinary man. Regina enjoyed a circle of engaging friends and her own work as communications consultant, but she especially relished the company of her husband, who never ceased to be a source of passion and delight. Then everything changes. Frightened women are showing up in West End, seeking Blue's protection from lovers who have suddenly become violent.

Africa in the 13th century lay in ruins due to countless civil wars and the ensuing famine. Amid the hopelessness arose a man who began to rebuild the ravaged diaspora. He instituted a government that was so efficient at managing the country of Mali that soon it was the most progressive nation on the continent. Not long after, one by one, the neighboring countries began to join the fold, until all of West Africa constituted a single empire.

Atlanta’s West End district has always been a haven and home to a coterie of unique characters - artists and thinkers, dreamers and doers. Folks here know one another’s names, keep their doors unlocked, and look out for their neighbors. Anyone planning to sell drugs, vandalize, or rob a little old lady should think twice before hitting this part of town. And Blue Hamilton, West End’s unofficial mayor and longtime protector, will see to it that you do. Blue wears many hats here. Blue is also the man you pay your respects to if you’re looking to set up shop in this urban enclave....

Catherine, busy working with refugee and immigrant women through her small firm, Babylon Sisters, has taken on a powerful new client. She doesn't have much time for Phoebe's complicated questions of paternity - that is, until Phoebe's real father, B. J., a renowned investigative reporter, shows up in town to work on a story connected to Catherine.

When the sacred is challenged, the ancestors awaken... When the sacred priest of Mali's Dogon tribe warns of infiltrators threatening to steal ancient cosmic secrets, four villagers are sent on a sacred mission to expose the truth. But as they search for enemies in cowboy boots, they uncover something far more complex—a plot that stretches from West Africa to Texas, and from oral tradition to interdimensional surveillance. Blending speculative fiction with real Dogon cosmology and political allegory, Dogon Country is a bold, thought-provoking tale about spiritual guardianship, betrayal, ...

First published in 1993, on the one-year anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, Race Matters became a national best seller that has gone on to sell more than half a million copies. This classic treatise on race contains Dr. West's most incisive essays on the issues relevant to black Americans, including the crisis in leadership in the Black community, Black conservatism, Black-Jewish relations, myths about Black sexuality, and the legacy of Malcolm X.

Just when it appears that all her hard work on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is about to pay off with a White House job, 35-year-old Ida B. Wells Dunbar finds herself on Washington, DC’s post-election sidelines even as her 20something counterparts overrun the West Wing. Adding to her woes, her father, the Reverend Horace A. Dunbar, Atlanta civil rights icon, is notoriously featured on an endlessly replayed YouTube clip in which his pronouncements don’t exactly jibe with the new era in American politics.

From about the ninth to fifth centuries BCE, the population of Greece grew unprecedentedly large, expanding from about 800,000 people to as many as 13 million. About a quarter million of these lived in Athens. The average size of urban households during this period grew considerably, a fact that suggests that food was suddenly available in excesses sufficient to keep larger families healthy and alive much more effectively than just a millennium earlier. Bigger families meant bigger armies and larger communities that would eventually grow into the metropolises of Classical Greece.

This is a historical narrative and analysis of the unconstitutional changes of government in most West African countries where military rule became institutionalised more than in any other part of the continent from the sixties to the nineties. There is no specific reason why the region has suffered from usurpation of power by soldiers more than any other part of the continent, besides the desire by soldiers to rule, recently demonstrated by coups in Mali in 2020 and 2021, Guinea in 2021, and Burkina Faso in 2022. Governments in West Africa are no more unstable or weaker than their ...

The gripping story of 200 freed Mississippi slaves who sailed to Liberia to build a new colony - where the colonists' repression of the native tribes would beget a tragic cycle of violence. When a wealthy Mississippi cotton planter named Isaac Ross died in 1836, his will decreed that his plantation, Prospect Hill, should be liquidated and the proceeds from the sale be used to pay for his slaves' passage to the newly established colony of Liberia in western Africa.