Author: Joseph A. Walker Publisher: Samuel French, Inc. ISBN: 9780573614811 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 108
Book Description
The River Niger is about Jeff Williams, a young African-American man returning home to his family in Harlem after several years in the Air Force. ... When Jeff finally arrives, he is greeted by his childhood friend Mo and Mo's men, a small group of revolutionaries who try to bully Jeff into joining their organization.
Author: Jean-Marie Gibbal Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 9780226290522 Category : Family & Relationships Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
The river Niger, a source of life and danger for the people in impoverished eastern Mali, is also the origin of elaborate mythology. From his travels through Mali and down the Niger in a dugout canoe, Jean-Marie Gibbal has created a personal documentary of the cultures of the region. The result is at once an ethnography of cultures in crisis and a poetic evocation of the environment and people he encountered. Gibbal portrays the river as the dominant, cohesive force among people in the face of social and environmental strife. He focuses on the Ghimbala healing cult, which centers on the river, and how the cult structures social relations in the region. Gibbal vividly recreations the Ghimbala rites, nocturnal ceremonies of spirit possession and seance which animate the water spirits, or genii, that inhabit the river. The genii, he finds, provide the strength of social identity in a world where famine and competing versions of Islam threaten to overpower traditional culture. In its original French publication, The Genii of the River Niger was honored with an Alexandra David-Neel literary prize in 1989. Its powerful lyricism, combined with fascinating ethnographic depth, will delight general readers and specialists alike and will stir debates among specialists in African studies, the anthropology of religion, and literature.
Author: Chinua Achebe Publisher: Penguin Books ISBN: 0307473864 Category : Young Adult Fiction Languages : en Pages : 98
Book Description
After an 11-year-old Nigerian boy leaves his small village to live with his uncle in the city, he is exposed to a range of new experiences and becomes fascinated with crossing the Niger River on a ferry boat.
Author: David Lambert Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022607823X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 318
Book Description
In Mastering the Niger, David Lambert recalls Scotsman James MacQueen (1778–1870) and his publication of A New Map of Africa in 1841 to show that Atlantic slavery—as a practice of subjugation, a source of wealth, and a focus of political struggle—was entangled with the production, circulation, and reception of geographical knowledge. The British empire banned the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery itself in 1833, creating a need for a new British imperial economy. Without ever setting foot on the continent, MacQueen took on the task of solving the “Niger problem,” that is, to successfully map the course of the river and its tributaries, and thus breathe life into his scheme for the exploration, colonization, and commercial exploitation of West Africa. Lambert illustrates how MacQueen’s geographical research began, four decades before the publication of the New Map, when he was managing a sugar estate on the West Indian colony of Grenada. There MacQueen encountered slaves with firsthand knowledge of West Africa, whose accounts would form the basis of his geographical claims. Lambert examines the inspirations and foundations for MacQueen’s geographical theory as well as its reception, arguing that Atlantic slavery and ideas for alternatives to it helped produce geographical knowledge, while geographical discourse informed the struggle over slavery.
Author: Ernest J. Gaines Publisher: Bantam ISBN: 030783025X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 274
Book Description
“Grand, robust, a rich and big novel.”—Alice Walker, The New York Times Book Review “In [Jane Pittman], Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure. . . . Gaines’s novel brings to mind other great works: The Odyssey, for the way his heroine’s travels manage to summarize the American history of her race, and Huckleberry Finn, for the clarity of [Pittman’s] voice, for her rare capacity to sort through the mess of years and things to find the one true story of it all.”—Newsweek Miss Jane Pittman. She is one of the most unforgettable heroines in American fiction, a woman whose life has come to symbolize the struggle for freedom, dignity, and justice. Ernest J. Gaines’s now-classic novel—written as an autobiography—spans one hundred years of Miss Jane’s remarkable life, from her childhood as a slave on a Louisiana plantation to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. It is a story of courage and survival, history, bigotry, and hope—as seen through the eyes of a woman who lived through it all. A historical tour de force, a triumph of fiction, Miss Jane’s eloquent narrative brings to life an important story of race in America—and stands as a landmark work for our time.
Author: MacGregor Laird Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136979468 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 482
Book Description
First Published in 1971. This book detail an attempt to open a direct commercial intercourse with the inhabitants of Central Africa.Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Author: Martha G. Anderson Publisher: University of Washington Press ISBN: Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 370
Book Description
The essays assembled in this lavishly illustrated volume are unique in considering issues of cultural convergence and divergence within a single region in Africa. They examine and celebrate the "water-related" ethos and the "warrior" ethos that are present throughout the Delta and explore the influence of its unique environment on beliefs and material culture.
Author: Bryan R. Davies Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 9401732906 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 788
Book Description
Our understanding of the ecology of running waters has come a long way during the past few years. From being a largely descriptive subject, with a few under tones concerned with such things as fisheries, pollution or control of blackflies, it has evolved into a discipline with hypotheses, such as the River Continuum Concept (Vannote et a/. 1980), and even a book suggesting that it offers opportunity for the testing of ecological theory (Barnes & Minshall 1983). However, perusal of the literature reveals that, although some of the very early studies were concerned with large rivers (references in Hynes 1970), the great mass of the work that has been done on running water has been on streams and small rivers, and information on larger rivers is either on such limited topics as fisheries or plankton, scattered among the journals, or not available to the general limnologist. The only exceptions are a few books in this series of publications, such as those on the Nile (Rz6ska 1976), the Volga (Morduckai Boltovskoi 1979) and the Amazon {Sioli 1984), and the recent compendium by Whitton (1984) on European rivers, among which there are a few that rate as large.
Author: Roderick James McIntosh Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 0631173617 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 378
Book Description
The Peoples of the Middle Niger This book provides the first comprehensive history of the peoples of the Middle Niger written by an English-speaking scholar. ‘The Island of Gold’ was the medieval Muslim and later European name for a fabled source of gold and other tropical riches. Although the floodplain of the Niger river lies far from the goldfields, the mosaic of peoples along the Middle Niger created a wealth of grain, fish, and livestock that supported some of Africa’s oldest cities, including Timbuktu. These ancient cities of the region that came to be known as Western Sudan were founded without outside stimulation and their inhabitants long resisted the coercive, centralized state that characterized the origins of earliest towns elsewhere. In this book, Roderick James McIntosh uses the latest archaeological and anthropological research to provide a bold overview of the distant origins of life for the inhabitants of the Middle Niger, and an explanation for their social evolution. He shows, for instance, the difficulties the peoples faced in adapting to an unpredictable climate, and how their particular social organization determined the unusual nature of their responses to that change. Throughout the book oral traditions are integrated into the story, providing vivid insights into the inhabitants' complex culture and belief systems.
Author: Joseph A. Walker
Author: Jean-Marie Gibbal
Author: Chinua Achebe
Author: Inger Andersen
Author: David Lambert
Author: Ernest J. Gaines
Author: MacGregor Laird
Author: Martha G. Anderson
Author: Bryan R. Davies
Author: Roderick James McIntosh