Award-winning writer Laura Resnick recounts her harrowing eight-month journey across the Dark Continent in wonderful style! She was attacked by bandits, arrested in two countries, played with wild gorillas, and went spear hunting with pygmies!

In an alternate world in which Africans enslaved Europeans, Doris, an Englishwoman, is captured and taken to the New World, where the hardships she endures as a slave are offset by dreams of escape and home.

Traces the cultural history of the giraffe, includes ancient and contemporary descriptions, and studies the impact of giraffes on the human imagination.

Discover the untold story of African surf culture in this glorious and colorful collection of profiles, essays, photographs, and illustrations. AFROSURF is the first book to capture and celebrate the surfing culture of Africa. This unprecedented collection is compiled by Mami Wata, a Cape Town surf company that fiercely believes in the power of African surf. Mami Wata brings together its co-founder Selema Masekela and some of Africa's finest photographers, thinkers, writers, and surfers to explore the unique culture of eighteen coastal countries, from Morocco to Somalia, Mozambique, South Africa, and beyond. Packed with over fifty essays, AFROSURF features surfer and skater profiles, thought pieces, poems, photos, illustrations, ephemera, recipes, and a mini comic, all wrapped in an astounding design that captures the diversity and character of Africa. A creative force of good in their continent, Mami Wata sources and manufactures all their wares in Africa and works with communities to strengthen local economies through surf tourism. With this mission in mind, Mami Wata is donating 100% of their proceeds to support two African surf therapy organizations, Waves for Change and Surfers Not Street Children.

In recent decades Africa has emerged as a sporting giant. The African sporting phenomenon has been addressed in the popular press and it has also attracted scholarly interest; however, this interest is almost entirely focussed on men. Yet women’s participation in recreational and elite sport is worthy of exploration and research. This path-breaking collection of essays provides an introduction to a variety of dimensions of women’s participation in African sports. Several key concepts are addressed in the book: women and media, women and sport-migration, sport and empowerment, sporting and social development, women’s sport and postcolonial Africa, and professional sport and economic development. This collection, authored by established scholars, will attract readership from students from Sports Studies to African Studies and from undergraduate students to university teachers. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

“As far as neatly and efficiently chronicling African Americans and the importance of their hair, Hair Story gets to the root of things.” —Philadelphiaweekly.com Hair Story is a historical and anecdotal exploration of Black Americans’ tangled hair roots. A chronological look at the culture and politics behind the ever-changing state of Black hair from fifteenth-century Africa to the present-day United States, it ties the personal to the political and the popular. Read about: Why Black American slaves used items like axle grease and eel skin to straighten their hair. How a Mexican chemist straightened Black hair using his formula for turning sheep’s wool into a minklike fur. How the Afro evolved from militant style to mainstream fashion trend. What prompted the creation of the Jheri curl and the popular style’s fall from grace. The story behind Bo Derek’s controversial cornrows and the range of reactions they garnered. Major figures in the history of Black hair are presented, from early hair-care entrepreneurs Annie Turnbo Malone and Madam C. J. Walker to unintended hair heroes like Angela Davis and Bob Marley. Celebrities, stylists, and cultural critics weigh in on the burgeoning sociopolitical issues surrounding Black hair, from the historically loaded terms “good” and “bad” hair, to Black hair in the workplace, to mainstream society’s misrepresentation and misunderstanding of kinky locks. Hair Story is the book that Black Americans can use as a benchmark for tracing a unique aspect of their history, and it’s a book that people of all races will celebrate as the reference guide for understanding Black hair. “A comprehensive and colorful look at a very touchy subject.” —Essence

This book examines the role of social process and routinised violence in the use of underaged soldiers in the country now known as South Sudan during the twenty-one-year civil war between Sudan’s northern and southern regions. Drawing on accounts of South Sudanese who as children and teenagers were part of the Red Army—the youth wing of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA)—the book sheds light on the organised nature of the exploitation of children and youth by senior adult figures within the movement. The book also includes interviews with several of the original Red Army commanders, all of whom went on to hold senior positions within the military and government of South Sudan. The author chronicles the cultural transformation experienced by members of the Red Army and considers whether an analysis of the processes involved in what was then Africa’s longest civil war can aid our understanding of South Sudan’s more recent descent into ethnicised conflict. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, and political science with interests in ethnography, conflict, and the military exploitation of children.

A rogue’s gallery of the most glamorous and dastardly villainesses in Golden Age comics.

The Eloquence of Silence makes a critical departure from more traditional studies of Algerian women--which usually examine female roles in relation to Islam--and instead takes an interdisciplinary look at the subject, arguing that Algerian women's roles are shaped by a variety of structural and symbolic factors. These elements include colonial domination, demographic change, nationalism, socialist development policy of the 1960s and 70s, family formation and the progressive shift to a capitalist economy. Covering both pre-colonial and colonial eras as well as the independence period, this book focuses on the changes that took place in family structure and law, customs, education, and the war of decolonization as they affected gender relations. Marnia Lazreg approaches the post-colonial era through an examination of how Algeria's model of economic development, structural adjustment policies, and the rise of religious-political opposition affected women's lives.

Despite being written mainly in the third person, this book enables the perceptive reader to study a dramatic part of South Africas history through the experiences of the main protagonist. Because of his legal background, Daniel is able to see how an initially fair legal system is corrupted in order to serve the increasingly desperate needs of the White minority. This is a mere backdrop, however, to a love story that grows closer to tragedy as time passes because the heroine is an alcoholic. The arrival of the computer alters the career of the hero dramatically and sends him on some overseas adventures to learn more about the legal implications of the new machine. As a leader of a missionary team to Malawi, Daniel also gets to grips with people with a totally different background and a differing worldview. The book is sensitive to background and atmosphere, and the hero encapsulates some of this in a few poems that form part of the main text. Jealousy, that green-eyed monster, also rears its head occasionally and further complicates relationships.