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Letters of Catherine Benincasa St. Catherine This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. |
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Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey Stanley B. Alpern The only thoroughly documented Amazons in world history are the women warriors of Dahomey, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western African kingdom. Once dubbed a 'small black Sparta,' residents of Dahomey shared with the Spartans an intense militarism and sense of collectivism. Moreover, the women of both kingdoms prided themselves on bodies hardened from childhood by rigorous physical exercise. But Spartan women kept in shape to breed male warriors, Dahomean Amazons to kill them. Originally palace guards, the Amazons had evolved by the 1760s into professional troops armed mainly with muskets, machetes and clubs. By the 1840s their numbers had grown to 6,000. The Amazons served under female officers and had their own bands, flags and insignia: they outdrilled, outshot and outfought men, became frontline troops and fought tenaciously and with great valor till the kingdom's defeat by France in 1892. Updated with a new preface by the author, Amazons of Black Sparta is the product of meticulous archival research and Alpern's gift for narrative. It will stand as the most comprehensive and accessible account of the woman warriors of Dahomey. |
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The Legacies of Transition Governments in Africa: The Cases of Benin and Togo Jennifer C. Seely The revolutionary political upheavals in Africa in the early 1990s continue to have an impact almost two decades later. Drawing on original interviews, this book argues we must look to the defining period of transition, and the workings of the transition governments, to understand how politics in these countries changed since the fall of dictatorial one-party states. Transition governments leave legacies with respect to the relevant political players and their strategies, the institutions of government, and the nature of the political agenda. These legacies are apparent in Benin, which successfully transitioned to democracy, as well as Togo, which failed to democratize. |
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Letters of Catherine Benincasa (Illustrated) St. Catherine of Siena Saint Catherine of Siena (25 March 1347 in Siena – 29 April 1380 in Rome), nee Catherine Benincasa, was a tertiary of the Dominican Order, and a Scholastic philosopher and theologian. She was born in Siena, Italy, to Giacomo di Benincasa, a cloth dyer who ran his enterprise with the help of his sons, and Lapa Piagenti, possibly the daughter of a local poet.The house where Catherine grew up is still in existence. Born in 1347, she arrived when the black death struck the area; Siena was badly ravaged.
She also worked to bring the papacy of Gregory XI back to Rome from its displacement in France, and to establish peace among the Italian city-states. She was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1970. She is one of the two patron saints of Italy, together with Francis of Assisi.
This edition of her letters is specially formatted with a Table of Contents and several images of St. Catherine. . |
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Once Upon a Kingdom: Myth, Hegemony, and Identity Isidore Okpewho "Isidore Okpewho has written another landmark study.... Written with exceptional clarity, accessible, yet vigorously argued and sparkling with illustrative insights, Once Upon a Kingdom is immeasurably delightful to read. Like anything Okpewho has ever written, the boook has set the terms for future studies in the field." —World Literature Today "Okpewho gives us yet again a work of outstanding scholarship that is also a joy to read." —Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart "Indispensable for collections of black or oral literature and history... " —Choice "An incisive analysis by one of the leading Africanist scholars that manages to be at once enjoyable, informative and challenging. This timely and authoritative book represents a new stage in the study of African narrative which will interest and challenge (or arouse) students of narrative whatever their geographical specialism." —Ruth Finnegan The communities that once lived in the pale of the West African kingdom of Benin still tell stories that show traces of their ingrained resentment of the kingdom. Isidore Okpewho uses stories he collected from narrators in these communities to reveal an effort by marginalized peoples to defend themselves and their place in an uneven socio-political landscape. |
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Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey Edna G. Bay Wives of the Leopard explores power and culture in a pre-colonial West African state whose army of women and practice of human sacrifice earned it notoriety in the racist imagination of late nineteenth-century Europe and America. Tracing two hundred years of the history of Dahomey up to the French colonial conquest in 1894, the book follows change in two central institutions. One was the monarchy, the coalitions of men and women who seized and wielded power in the name of the king. The second was the palace, a household of several thousand wives of the king who supported and managed state functions. Looking at Dahomey against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave trade and the growth of European imperialism, Edan G. Bay reaches for a distinctly Dahomean perspective as she weaves together evidence drawn from travelers' memoirs and local oral accounts, from the religious practices of vodun, and from ethnographic studies of the twentieth century. Wives of the Leopard thoroughly integrates gender into the political analysis of state systems, effectively creating a social history of power. More broadly, it argues that women as a whole and men of the lower classes were gradually squeezed out of access to power as economic resources contracted with the decline of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. In these and other ways, the book provides an accessible portrait of Dahomey's complex and fascinating culture without exoticizing it. |
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Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil (Cass Series--British Politics and Society,) As a result of new research, we can now paint a more complex picture of peoples and cultures in the south Atlantic, from the earliest period of the slave trade up to the present. The nine papers in this volume indicate that a dynamic and continuous movement of peoples east as well as west across the Atlantic forged diverse and vibrant re-inventions and re-interpretations of the rich mix of cultures represented by Africans and peoples of African descent on both continents. |
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Ouidah: Social History Of Western African Slaving Port (Western African Studies) Robin Law |
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The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America This is the biography of an American slave who was born in Africa. His adventures brought him to Rio de Janeiro, New York, Boston, Canada, and Britain; he knew Arabic, Dendi, probably Hausa, Portuguese, English, and French. In recent times scholars raised the doubt that such biographies of slaves born in Africa were only partially true, the editors traveled to Diougou and Brazil and followed the traces of Baquaqua, collection, documents, oral hisrtory and written reports. They photographed the sites described by Baquaqua and included them in the book. They have also added several letters and other documents to the 1854 original edition. Baquaqua was enslaved in northern Benin in the early 1840s when he was about 20. At the time he was a bodyguard for the ruler of a subordinate town. He was abducted, taken south through Togo to Ouidah, a port in Dahomey, shipped to Pernambuco in Brazil, and sold to a merchant from Rio, who sold him to another Rio merchant, who took him by ship to New York City, where a little-known black group, the New York Vigilance Society, convinced him to jump ship. He escaped to Boston and traveled to Haiti, the only free Black state, where he was picked up by the Free Baptist Mission. Here Baquaqua converted to Christianity. He later returned to the U.S. and attended college, and traveled extensively. Robin Law, University of Stirling, Scotland, is the author of The Slave Coast of West Africa. Paul E. Lovejoy, York University, is the editor of Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. |
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Slavery, Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640-1960 (African Studies) Patrick Manning The small but important region of Dahomey (now the People's Republic of Benin) has played an active role in the world economy throughout the era of mercantile and industrial capitalism, beginning as an exporter of slaves and becoming an exporter of plain oil and palm kernels. This book covers a span of three centuries, integrating into a single framework the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial economic history of Dahomey. Mr Manning has pieced together an extensive body of new evidence and new interpretations: he has combined descriptive evidence with quantitative data on foreign trade, slave demography and colonial government finance, and has used both Marxian and Neoclassical techniques of economic analysis. He argues that, despite the severe strain on population and economic growth caused by the slave trade, the economy continued to expand from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and the colonial state acted as an economic depressant rather than a stimulant. |