Gravitas: Poetic Consciencism for Cameroon is the poets requiem for the geographical expression code-named Cameroon. Vakunta speaks with the audacity of a daredevil and the certitude of a seer. This long poem has the twin virtues of gravity and clarity of purpose. The poet eschews the banality and sophistry characteristic of poetry for poetrys sake. Passion, sarcasm, and incisive irony are the hallmarks of this long didactic poem. The poet subscribes to Salman Rushdies pronouncement that a poets duty is to say the unutterable, name the unnamable, unmask masquerading miscreants and shame the scum of society. In this poem, music serves as a clarion call for examination of conscience, and alcohol ceases to serve as opium of the people. A bittersweet potion, this book echoes the defiant voice of a son-of-the-soil at odds with his native land gone topsy-turvy.

This book is a philosopher’s view into the chaotic postcolony of Zimbabwe, delving into Robert Mugabe’s Will to Power. The Will to Power refers to a spirited desire for power and overwhelming fear of powerlessness that Mugabe artfully concealed behind performances of invincibility. Nietzsche’s philosophical concept of the Will to Power is interpreted and expanded in this book to explain how a tyrant is produced and enabled, and how he performs his tyranny. Achille Mbembe’s novel concept of the African postcolony is mobilised to locate Zimbabwe under Mugabe as a domain of the madness of power. The book describes Mugabe’s development from a vulnerable youth who was intoxicated with delusions of divine commission to a monstrous tyrant of the postcolony who mistook himself for a political messiah. This account exposes how post-political euphoria about independence from colonialism and the heroism of one leader can easily lead to the degeneration of leadership. However, this book is as much about bad leadership as it is about bad followership. Away from Eurocentric stereotypes where tyranny is isolated to African despots, this book shows how Mugabe is part of an extended family of tyrants of the world. He fought settler colonialism but failed to avoid being infected by it, and eventually became a native coloniser to his own people. The book concludes that Zimbabwe faces not only a simple struggle for democracy and human rights, but a Himalayan struggle for liberation from genocidal native colonialism that endures even after Robert Mugabe’s dethronement and death.

Green Rape: Poetry for the Environment is an anthology of poems written in strong support of environmental literacy. Each poem is the poet's cry of protest against the rape of natural and built environments. The anthology examines a wide range of issues including the clash of global capitalism with environmental activism. It takes a close look at the major themes in international discourse on environmental degradation, climate change, renewable energy sources, global warming, Gene technology, biodiversity and more. The poet dispels a number of myths, notably the existence of an inexhaustible bank of natural resources at the disposal of Man. He attempts to provide a solution to the abusive and unbalanced utilization of scarce natural resources. In a unique way, the poems contribute to the fostering of environmental awareness that would contribute to the sustainable management of natural resources. The poet invites us to look beyond the doomsday rhetoric about the state of the environment and to commit more of our resources where they will do the most good to lifting the world's population out of poverty. The significance of this anthology to environmental education resides in its contribution to the debate on global sustainable development, especially efforts to protect the environment and eradicate poverty.

What God Has Put Asunder sounds like a misquote of Mark 10:9, the biblical consecration of marriage. But can a marriage fraught with infidelity, violence and abuse be considered as put together by God? Weka does not think so. She had reluctantly settled for Miche Garba as the lesser evil of two suitors who were being foisted on her by the authorities of the orphanage where she grew up. They stonewalled against her pleas to be on her own, claiming it would make her vulnerable. Or were they afraid she might become a permanent liability to the orphanage? Garba turns out a cheating, unloving partner, squandering on his many concubines, the proceeds from the farms and lands Weka inherited from her late parents, while neglecting her upkeep and her children’s. At the height of the disaffection, Weka runs off with her children to rehabilitate her family estate. Having failed to forcefully bring them back, Garba sues Weka for abandoning her conjugal home. Will the court sunder the marriage of inconvenience? And would it help matters if Weka’s full name were “West Kamerun”? This should unmask other ticket names like Sister Sabeth and Father UNOR. For these two What God Has Put Asunder is a call-out for double standards. Can they belatedly remedy the injustice of denying Weka the separate status which they granted, at the same time, to many other damsels who, to date, are far less endowed and more vulnerable than she was?

This is a vivid, thought-provoking and fascinating text on some contentious issues in contemporary medical ethics. The book acknowledges the contribution of African tradition and Western scholarship to the development of medical ethics as a university discipline. It questions the lack of consensus around such biomedical issues as euthanasia and traditional medicine. In many countries, the failure has resulted in public outcries. Its thrust centres on the nexus of practice and theory, and the importance of pragmatism and critical questioning in dealing with different cases on and around biomedicine. Its virtue is its significant shift from the traditional positions on selected biomedical issues to a more rigorous, pragmatic and critical questioning and understanding of the reasoning and positions of all involved and/or affected parties.

This study raises awareness to the emergence of a new genre in world literature-hybridized literature. It rejects the assumption according to which literatures written in less commonly taught languages should be subsumed into one universally accessible global idiom. Instead, Vakunta challenges literary scholars and readers of literature to regard untranslatability as the key to cross-cultural engagement. The book's multiple approaches and innumerable sources generate complex interdisciplinary connections and provide an excellent introduction to a complex literary phenomenon alien to literati resident outside the officially bilingual multicultural and multilingual Republic of Cameroon.

The essays collected in this volume are, by the depth of their analysis and the breath of their vision, indeed No Trifling Matter. They are a chronicle of the events in contemporary Cameroonian society, especially as concerns the conduct of public affairs therein. Over and above its relevance for our own time, this chronicle will, in the decades that lie ahead, serve as a rich source of information, opinion and comment which future generations, anxious to understand the making of an era whose impact, positive or negative, is destined to survive long after the longest-living of its principal actors and actresses shall have disappeared from the face of the Earth, will find a great benefit. Rotcod Gobata has, through these essays, lit and placed on a pedestal, a candle whose flame shall never die and whose glow shall serve as a beacon to guide and to inspire generations yet unborn.

In many European countries the extreme right have refined their electoral programmes under the rubric of nationalist-populist slogans and have adopted subtle forms of racism. The move away from overt neo-fascist discourse has, allowed these parties to expand their electoral support as populist nationalist parties. Paradoxically, this has led to an increase in racist and anti-Semitic discourse. In this on-site analysis, Michal Krzyzanowski and Ruth Wodak describe a confluence of racism and xenophobia, and show how that union creates a new kind of racism. The "new" racism differs from the older kinds in that it is usually not expressed in overtly racial terms. Instead, the justifications that are typically employed concern protecting jobs, eliminating abuse of welfare benefits, or cultural incompatibilities. The new racism exploits xenophobia rooted in ethnocentrism, male chauvinism, and ordinary prejudices that are often unconscious or routinized. For these reasons, the new racism can be defined as "syncretic," a mixture of many, sometimes contradictory, racist and xenophobic beliefs and stereotypes. Racism as ideology and practice is alive and well. This important book aims to provide understanding of the many socio-political and historical processes involved in such expressions of institutional and individual racism--processes which are not necessarily evident from more overt or traditional expressions of racism. This is an innovative look at the political study of language as well as new instances of race, ethnicity, and class in present-day Europe.

Dr. Frederick Ngenito shocks his entire ethnic community by finally marrying a girl whose rejection of him had cost him an enviable job. But this is nothing compared to the ire of the ancestors when he hides the facts surrounding his irate father's suicide and he is buried without the traditional cleansing, and which reduces him to a wreck. Harrowing but thoroughly enjoyable, this spellbinder of a novel is a brash standoff between filia and eros, science and fetish fears. Bloodcurdling premonitions and raspy raw effects make of this novel of many parts a story of dogged intolerance and catastrophe of half measures and falsification as quick solutions. Here is an unputdownable teeming with vivid true blood characters you cannot forget: Fred, brilliant, handsome, naïvely supercilious, the dream of every beautiful young girl; Beatrice, his wife, beautiful, proud, sensitive but unforgiving; Chief Mutare, Fred's father, the very incarnation of brute force, raw, untouched either by surface culture or inner human feelings. Upon the fatalistic relationship between these three characters, Asong builds this grim tale of great passions, of a love that is doomed. In this book stamped with an incomparable aura of authenticity, we see why Asong's novels are sometimes mistaken for case histories.