This uniquely designed book and kit with a detachable plexiglass spine contains nearly 2,000 colorful beads and instructions to make a variety of jewelry items while learning about African culture. 100 illustrations.

African Beads: Jewels of a Continent is the first book dedicated exclusively to African-made beads. In detailed chapters organized by material (bone and shell, wood and amber, stone, metal, glass) authors Evelyn Simak and Carl Dreibelbis trace the historical journey of bead making in Africa. Prefaced with an essay by Lois Sherr Dubin and accompanied by 163 color photographs, this magnificent book is a showcase for some of the rarest, most beautiful and most collectible beads in the world.

Catalog of an exhibition held at Smith College Museum of Art, Feb. 1-Jun. 15, 2008.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The plot provided by the universe was filled with starvation, war and rape. I would not—could not—live in that tale.” Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years migrating through seven African countries, searching for safety—perpetually hungry, imprisoned and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were dead or alive. When Clemantine was twelve, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the United States; there, in Chicago, their lives diverged. Though their bond remained unbreakable, Claire, who had for so long protected and provided for Clemantine, was a single mother struggling to make ends meet, while Clemantine was taken in by a family who raised her as their own. She seemed to live the American dream: attending private school, taking up cheerleading, and, ultimately, graduating from Yale. Yet the years of being treated as less than human, of going hungry and seeing death, could not be erased. She felt at the same time six years old and one hundred years old. In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clemantine provokes us to look beyond the label of “victim” and recognize the power of the imagination to transcend even the most profound injuries and aftershocks. Devastating yet beautiful, and bracingly original, it is a powerful testament to her commitment to constructing a life on her own terms.

The beadwork designs of the Zulu-speaking people of southern Africa have evolved from a craft tradition that developed over many generations. Carefully researched and filled with exciting photographs, 'Speaking with Beads' presents jewelry, ornamental headdresses, capes, aprons, beaded panels and other decorative forms.

Beads of Life is a fascinating exploration of traditional beadwork from eastern and southern Africa, as well as the socio-religious principles upon which many aesthetic choices were based. The author concludes with an examination of contemporary beadwork as seen, in particular, through the eyes of Canadians from these regions.

Informative guide to decorative beads from around the world. Listing of bead societies, organizations and publications. Quarto.

Sakina is an embroidery artist growing up in the shanty town of Indian Nairobi, a railroad settlement in British East Africa in the early 1900s. At home there are many storytellers like her stepmother, grandfather and uncle whose stories blend into histories of India and East Africa that flare her child's imagination. In her tormented married life, while becoming a woman, Sakina finds comfort in the art of the beadwork of the Maasai.Bead Bai is one woman's story inspired by lives of Asian African women who sorted out, arranged and generally looked after huge quantities of ethnic beads in urban and isolated rural parts of the British East African Empire. The availability of wide varieties of beads and colours from the entrepreneurial Indian bead merchant reaching out to the most distant communities, heightened diverse vernacular expressions of body décor. Often it was the Bead Bai - the merchant's wife, mother and daughter, who handled beads that today comprise singularly the most significant material for maintenance of this feminine and indigenous art heritage of East Africa. This is a historical novel drawn from domestic and community lives evolving around women's art. Both are of considerable social and artistic values among two culturally unalike people living side by side as separate yet inter-reliant societies on the savannah. One object is the bandhani shawl of the Satpanth Ismailis, a trading settler Asian African community adhering austerely to a distinct faith tradition rooted in Sufism and Vedic beliefs that imbibed Sakina's spiritual life. The other is the emankeeki, a beaded neck to chest ornament of the Maasai, a pastoralist African people to whom the savannah is the ancestral home and source of their art, spirituality and well-being that Sakina came to value as a part her own life.Note: From the 1970s following the expulsion of Asians from Uganda, Satpanth Ismailis from East Africa began coming to the West, particularly to Canada, in large numbers. Many Bead Bais came with their families to the new country. Some lived through their senior years with their sons and daughters, and some died in nursing homes. Today their descendents live across the provinces of Canada and the greater Asian African diaspora.

Beads of Life explores the ornamental beadwork of eastern and southern Africa, through pieces found in the collections of several Canadian museums and universities. The author examines the functions and meanings of traditional beadwork and looks at the socio-religious principles upon which many aesthetic choices were based. The book also describes materials used in traditional clothing and adornments before the arrival of glass beads, materials that both provided protection to the wearer and indicated social status. The book concludes with an examination of contemporary beadwork, particularly as seen through the eyes of Canadians from eastern and southern Africa.