This book offers a bold and illuminating account of the worldviews nurtured and sustained by indigenous communities from across continents, through their distinctive understanding of concepts such as space, time, joy, pain, life, and death. It demonstrates how this different mode of ‘knowing’ has brought the indigenous into a cultural conflict with communities that claim to be modern and scientific. Bringing together scholars, artists and activists engaged in understanding and conserving local knowledge that continues to be in the shadow of cultural extinction, the book attempts to interpret repercussions on identity and cultural transformation and points to the tragic fate of knowing the world differently. The volume inaugurates a new thematic area in post-colonial studies and cultural anthropology by highlighting the perspectives of marginalized indigenous communities, often burdened with being viewed as ‘primitive’. It will be useful to scholars and students of anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history, linguistics, literature, and tribal studies.

Originally published in 1982, this book explores concepts such as ‘traditional performance’ and African theatre’. It analyses the links between drama and ritual, and drama and music and diagnoses the confusions in our thought. The reader is reminded that drama is never merely the printed word, but that its existence as literature and in performance is necessarily different. The analysis shows that literature tends to replace performance; and drama, removed from the popular domain, becomes elitist. The book’s richness lies in the constantly stimulating analysis of ‘art’ theatre, as exemplified in protest plays, in African adaptations and transpositions of such classical subjects as the Bacchae and Everyman, in plays on African history, on colonialism and neo-colonialism. The final chapters argue that the form of African drama needs to evolve as the content does.

This collection of Edo (or Benin) folk tales is an oral history of Edo culture and tradition. It tells the story of how the ancient Edo conceived of the world and how they attempted both to explain the origins of their human existence on earth and to interpret their environment.

The Great Benin Empire was an empire kingdom in West Africa known for its great wealth, intricately planned cities, and beautiful bronze sculptures. It was one of the oldest and most highly developed empires in West Africa from the 13th century until the end of the 19th century. It attracted visitors from far away lands who came to trade and also marvel at its great wall. This story is told from the point of view of Osasu, a young Edo boy who lived in the Benin empire and enjoys the comfort and protection of the Great Wall of Benin that was built by his ancestors. Follow young Osasu, as he navigates life at the height of the ancient Benin civilization, the arrival of strange visitors, and the fall of the Great Benin Empire. A must-read for every child and teen interested in untold histories. (Note: This can be emphasized and highlighted) Apart from the entertainment value, readers will benefit from exploring important nuggets of African history and culture as they immerse themselves in this beautiful African story.

What connects Africa and the Caribbean is trans-Atlantic slavery which transported numerous sons and daughters of Africa to the plantations of the New World in the service of Western European capitalism. Because of this shared experience of trans-Atlantic slavery and European colonialism, issues of culture and identity are major concerns for African and Caribbean playwrights. Slavery and colonialism had involved systematic acts of cultural denigration, de-humanisation and loss of freedom, which left imprints on the collective psyches of the colonised Africans and enslaved peoples of African descent in the Caribbean. Both experiences brought intense cultural and psychic dislocations which still impact in various ways on the lives of Africans and peoples of African descent around the world. African and Caribbean playwrights try to help their peoples regain their dignities by affirming their cultures, histories and identities. The book focuses on the similarities and differences between Caribbean theatre and the theatre of sub-Saharan Africa, showing how identities and cultures are negotiated and affirmed in each case.

This book of knowledge is written as a source of awareness to the various cultures in the world and how their beliefs influence the lives of the groups within that culture and its environments. This book makes us aware that the world is a place of multicultural society, where everyone needs to understand the environment in which they live. This book is a material that promotes that natural wisdom of know-how in times when needed. This book can be used as quick referencing guides to information that may become or seem like puzzles in the human minds in the field of general knowledge and of wisdom at relevant times. This book is written with intent to share wisdom, knowledge, and information on world cultural heritage, how culture and environment affect our behaviours and thoughts, how people talk to one another and the mental reasoning that go along with it. This book is to enlighten the awareness of everyone and anyone, knowing that there is someone out there that knows more than they do, no matter what the status in education or otherwise their acquisition may have been. It is my passionate expectation that this book will educate and implant knowledge and wisdom to anyone that will read it, believing that they know it all.

Mothers, wives, concubines, entertainers, attendants, officials, maids, drudges. By offering the first comparative view of the women who lived, worked, and served in royal courts around the globe, this work opens a new perspective on the monarchies that have dominated much of human history. Written by leading historians, anthropologists, and archeologists, these lively essays take us from Mayan states to twentieth-century Benin in Nigeria, to the palace of Japanese Shoguns, the Chinese Imperial courts, eighteenth-century Versailles, Mughal India, and beyond. Together they investigate how women's roles differed, how their roles changed over time, and how their histories can illuminate the structures of power and societies in which they lived. This work also furthers our understanding of how royal courts, created to project the authority of male rulers, maintained themselves through the reproductive and productive powers of women.