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This House Has Fallen Karl Maier 'This is an example of a country that has fallen down; it has collapsed. This house has fallen.' - Chinua Achebe. Nigeria is one of the most complex and fascinating countries in the world. It is staggeringly diverse, its population (twice that of Britain's) is split into some 300 different ethnic groups and its geography ranges from the dense tropical jungles of the south to the arid Sahel of the north. One in six of all Africans live in Nigeria. "This House Has Fallen" is both a gripping account of the contemporary crisis in a country seemingly always on the edge of a nervous breakdown and an evocation of the reality of day to day life under impossible circumstances. |
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A History of Nigeria Toyin Falola, Matthew M. Heaton Nigeria is Africa's most populous country and the world's eighth largest oil producer, but its success has been undermined in recent decades by ethnic and religious conflict, political instability, rampant official corruption and an ailing economy. Toyin Falola, a leading historian intimately acquainted with the region, and Matthew Heaton, who has worked extensively on African science and culture, combine their expertise to explain the context to Nigeria's recent troubles through an exploration of its pre-colonial and colonial past, and its journey from independence to statehood. By examining key themes such as colonialism, religion, slavery, nationalism and the economy, the authors show how Nigeria's history has been swayed by the vicissitudes of the world around it, and how Nigerians have adapted to meet these challenges. This book offers a unique portrayal of a resilient people living in a country with immense, but unrealized, potential. |
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There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra Chinua Achebe From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart comes a longawaited memoir about coming of age with a fragile new nation, then watching it torn asunder in a tragic civil war
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. By then, Chinua Achebe was already a world-renowned novelist, with a young family to protect. He took the Biafran side in the conflict and served his government as a roving cultural ambassador, from which vantage he absorbed the war’s full horror. Immediately after, Achebe took refuge in an academic post in the United States, and for more than forty years he has maintained a considered silence on the events of those terrible years, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Now, decades in the making, comes a towering reckoning with one of modern Africa’s most fateful events, from a writer whose words and courage have left an enduring stamp on world literature.
Achebe masterfully relates his experience, bothas he lived it and how he has come to understand it. He begins his story with Nigeria’s birth pangs and the story of his own upbringing as a man and as a writer so that we might come to understand the country’s promise, which turned to horror when the hot winds of hatred began to stir. To read There Was a Country is to be powerfully reminded that artists have a particular obligation, especially during a time of war. All writers, Achebe argues, should be committed writers—they should speak for their history, their beliefs, and their people.
Marrying history and memoir, poetry and prose, There Was a Country is a distillation of vivid firsthand observation and forty years of research and reflection. Wise, humane, and authoritative, it will stand as definitive and reinforce Achebe’s place as one of the most vital literary and moral voices of our age. |
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Folk Stories From Southern Nigeria, West Africa (1910) Elphinstone Dayrell This book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. |
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The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey Randy J. Sparks In 1767, two "princes" of a ruling family in the port of Old Calabar, on the slave coast of Africa, were ambushed and captured by English slavers. The princes, Little Ephraim Robin John and Ancona Robin Robin John, were themselves slave traders who were betrayed by African competitors--and so began their own extraordinary odyssey of enslavement. Their story, written in their own hand, survives as a rare firsthand account of the Atlantic slave experience. Randy Sparks made the remarkable discovery of the princes' correspondence and has managed to reconstruct their adventures from it. They were transported from the coast of Africa to Dominica, where they were sold to a French physician. By employing their considerable language and interpersonal skills, they cleverly negotiated several escapes that took them from the Caribbean to Virginia, and to England, but always ended in their being enslaved again. Finally, in England, they sued for, and remarkably won, their freedom. Eventually, they found their way back to Old Calabar and, evidence suggests, resumed their business of slave trading. The Two Princes of Calabar offers a rare glimpse into the eighteenth-century Atlantic World and slave trade from an African perspective. It brings us into the trading communities along the coast of Africa and follows the regular movement of goods, people, and ideas across and around the Atlantic. It is an extraordinary tale of slaves' relentless quest for freedom and their important role in the creation of the modern Atlantic World. |
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The Crippled Giant: Nigeria since Independence Eghosa E. Osaghae "Crippled Giant is an excellent summary of Nigerian political history.... The work is notable for even-handed analysis of both history and theory. The result is an introduction of the highest quality to the study of Nigerian politics." —African Studies Review "Osaghae, an academic with a refreshingly neutral and understated approach to the maddening follies of his government, has produced a highly readable overview of Nigeria's politics, economy, and foreign relations. Rich in detail, his account is also a useful tour of earlier thematic treatments of the subject." —Foreign Affairs "... well-written, coherent narrative and thoughtful, balanced analysis of Nigeria's political history from 1960 to 1996."Â —A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, St. Antony's College, Oxford Eghosa Osaghae's study leads him to the conclusion that Nigeria's problems are not of recent making but can be traced to structural impediments from colonial times. |
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Mary Slessor - Everybody's Mother: The Era and Impact of a Victorian Missionary Jeanette Hardage How did a petite redhead from the slums of Dundee become a role model for a hundred years? How did she come to wield influence in the land known to her compatriots as the white man's grave? Why are there statues of her holding twins in Nigeria' How did she develop her missionary fervor combined with down-to-earth common sense? How did she overcome difficult situations throughout her life in ways that set her apart from many Victorians? Her eccentricities are often cited: She climbed trees, marched barefoot and bareheaded through the forest, declined to filter her water, and shed her Victorian petticoats. On the other hand, because of her understanding of and rapport with the Africans among whom she lived, the British government appointed her their first woman magistrate anywhere in the world and later awarded her the highest honor then bestowed on a woman commoner. Mary Slessor - Everybody's Mother examines the era and influence of this extraordinary woman, who spent thirty-eight years serving as a Presbyterian missionary in Calabar. The work answers questions about the public Mary Slessor. It also looks at her private life. The author makes use of materials not found elsewhere, including Slessor's own writings and those of others of her era, reminiscences of her adopted Nigerian son, and assessments from contemporary sources. Slessor's audacity in remote areas of Nigeria contrasted with her timidity in public meetings in Scotland. She shunned the limelight and wondered why anyone would want to know about her. Her fame continues, especially in Nigeria and Scotland. She was certain God called her to serve in Calabar, the home she claimed as her own, where she became "eka kpukpru owo - everybody's mother." |
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The Advance of African Capital: The Growth of Nigerian Private Enterprise Tom Forrest The Advance of African Capital provides the most detailed and extensive account of medium- and large-scale African business yet published. Up-to-date and comprehensive, it examines the growth of private enterprise in Nigeria, giving profiles of the country's key entrepreneurs. Not only an invaluable digest of Nigeria's business activity, this important study also challenges existing views about African enterprise and is highly relevant to policy-makers concerned with economic development. |
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A Swamp Full of Dollars: Pipelines and Paramilitaries at Nigeria's Oil Frontier Michael Peel The largest U.S. trading partner in sub-Saharan Africa, petroleum-rich Nigeria exports half its daily oil production to the United States. Like many African nations with natural resources coveted by the world's superpowers, the country has been shaped by foreign investment and intervention, conflicts among hundreds of ethnic and religious groups, and greed. Polio has boomed along with petroleum, small villages face off with giant oil companies, and scooter drivers run their own ministates. The oil-rich Niger Delta region at the heart of it all is a trouble spot as hot as the local pepper soup. Blending vivid reportage, history, and investigative journalism, in A Swamp Full of Dollars journalist Michael Peel tells the story of this extraordinary country, which grows ever more wild and lawless by the day as its refined petroleum pumps through our cities. Through a host of colorful characters--from the Area Boy gangsters of Lagos to a corrupt state governor who stashed money in his London penthouse, from the militants in their swamp forest hideouts to oil company executives--Peel makes the connection between Western energy consumption and the breakdown of the Nigerian state, where the corruption of the haves is matched only by the determination and ingenuity of the have-nots. What has happened to Nigeria is a stark warning to the United States and other economic powers as they grow increasingly frantic in their search for new oil sources: unbridled plunder eventually rebounds on those who have done the taking. A Swamp Full of Dollars--shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award--shows that if the Arab world is the precarious eastern battle line in an intensifying world war for crude, then Nigeria has become the tumultuous western front. |
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Home and Exile Chinua Achebe More personally revealing than anything Achebe has written, Home and Exile-the great Nigerian novelist's first book in more than ten years-is a major statement on the importance of stories as real sources of power, especially for those whose stories have traditionally been told by outsiders.
In three elegant essays, Achebe seeks to rescue African culture from narratives written about it by Europeans. Looking through the prism of his experiences as a student in English schools in Nigeria, he provides devastating examples of European cultural imperialism. He examines the impact that his novel Things Fall Apart had on efforts to reclaim Africa's story. And he argues for the importance of writing and living the African experience because, he believes, Africa needs stories told by Africans. |