The 'Kebra Nagast' (Glory of Kings) was written at least one thousand years ago, and takes its theme from much older sources, some going back to the first century AD. Written originally in the African classical language Ge'ez, the book tells the history of a Davidic line of African monarchs, descended from King Solomon of Israel and Maqeda, Queen of Sheba (Saba), who journeyed to the Levant specifically to visit the wise and far-famed monarch. It was a successful meeting of minds, and Maqeda proved the equal of Solomon the Wise in a series of long philosophical discussions. But the Hebrew monarch was not merely attracted to the African Queen's intellect - by means of a ploy, he seduced Maqeda, who gave birth to a son, Ebna-Lahakim. But this seduction proved to be Solomon's undoing. While in Israel, Prince Ebna-Lahakim gathered around him a group of royal nobles and together they seized the two most powerful symbols of Israel's compact with the Almighty - the Ark of the Covenant and the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. These trophies were carried back to Abyssinia where, it is said, they remain to this day.

An examination of one of the earliest Peace Corps programs in Africa

In 1961, the first group of Peace Corps volunteers in Tanzania--surveyors, engineers, and geologists--arrived in Dar es Salaam with three core objectives: meet the newly independent country's needs for trained personnel, promote a better understanding of Americans, and promote a better understanding of the people served by the volunteers. The Peace Corps in Tanzania traces the program's progress, successes, and challenges, including analysis of the tensions that led to the program's closure in 1969. The program eventually resumed in 1980, which required significant changes in US-Tanzania relations.

Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize
Named a Best of Book of the Year by The Economist and Foreign Affairs
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

The Dadaab refugee camp is many things: to the charity workers, it's a humanitarian crisis; to the Kenyan government, a nursery for terrorists; to the Western media, a dangerous no-go area. But to its half a million residents, it's their last resort.

Situated hundreds of miles from any other settlement, deep within the inhospitable desert of northern Kenya where only thorn bushes grow, Dadaab is a city like no other. Its buildings are made from mud, sticks, or plastic. Its entire economy is grey. And its citizens survive on rations and luck. Over the course of four years, Ben Rawlence became a firsthand witness to a strange and desperate place, getting to know many of those who had come seeking sanctuary. Among them are Guled, a former child soldier who lives for football; Nisho, who scrapes an existence by pushing a wheelbarrow and dreaming of riches; Tawane, the indomitable youth leader; and Kheyro, a student whose future hangs upon her education.

In City of Thorns, Rawlence interweaves the stories of nine individuals to show what life is like in the camp, sketching the wider political forces that keep the refugees trapped. Lucid, vivid, and illuminating, City of Thorns is an urgent human story with deep international repercussions, brought to life through the people who call Dabaab home.

In 1930, anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard journeyed deep into the Sudanese savanna to uncover the mysteries of the nomadic Nuer tribes - this book presents his compelling discoveries.

The harsh dry plains of the Sudan cannot sustain sufficient agriculture for the tribes; to thrive, the Nuer move their camps in accordance with the seasons. At the core of daily life are cattle whose milk and meat sustain the people; the cow's pliant, agreeable nature is ideal for a tribe to manage. Nuer children are raised to learn how to properly treat and nurture cattle, through milking and assisting in the birth of new calves, that the tribe may continue to flourish thereby. Conflict within the tribes, or with outside enemies, often involves the control of cattle herds.

More than eighty maps, charts and photographs are included in this study, helping the reader to understand the topics. The author sought to live with the Nuer; it took months for him to achieve acceptance, and only once he had gained a measure of trust did the tribe demonstrate their unique ways of living and respond to questions. Though the Nuer are by nature wary and reserved, once he was accepted the author beheld their kindness and bonds to one another.

Evans-Pritchard went on to revisit the Nuer on multiple occasions, writing further ethnological researches on their religious practices, political structures, and unique way of life.

Explore the history, culture, and lived experiences of Ethiopian Americans in the USA.
Ethiopia, in East Africa, is the second most populated country in Africa, home to over 125 million inhabitants. For centuries, many Ethiopians had little exposure to the outside world, and even less to Americans. However, that started to change in the 1970s. In 1974, a military-backed government deposed Emperor Haile Selassie I, and many Ethiopians emigrated to the West. Today, large populations of Ethiopian Americans live in cities such as Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. This book offers an accessible and detailed glimpse into their everyday lives. It includes an overview of Ethiopian art, media, and cuisine, biographies of accomplished Ethiopian Americans, and a revealing look into the ongoing struggle for equality and representation that many Ethiopian Americans experience.

These rare and elusive books offer valuable insights into the religious practices and beliefs of ancient Ethiopia, adding depth to our understanding of biblical history.

The book is accompanied by a comprehensive commentary, providing contextual information, historical analysis, and guidance for interpretation.

The stunning illustrations, inspired by Ethiopian art and culture, enhance the reading experience.
The Apocrypha Books of the Bible is an invaluable academic resource for scholars, researchers, and students of theology, biblical history, and religious studies.

It offers an engaging reading experience, allowing readers to deepen their understanding of biblical history and spirituality.
The book can be used for personal exploration, academic research, and teaching aids.

Order your copy today to unlock the secrets of these long-forgotten scriptures.

This book traces histories of development in - and crucially, visions of development for - the Kilombero valley of south-central Tanzania. Taking the notion of development planning as a form of 'future making', the book examines the many visions or 'past futures' projected onto Kilombero by colonial and national governments, by international organisations, syndicates, and individuals. It examines how such plans were conceived, evaluates their successes, and analyses their shortcomings against changing political and economic landscapes. Four key themes - agricultural intensification, ecology control, infrastructure and (re)settlement - are shown to persistently surface and continue to shape the valleyscape today.

By considering past future visions for the reorganisation of rural life in Tanzania, the book reveals how even recent initiatives have suffered through their failure to learn from this history. Offering fresh insights and approaches to the historiography of development, Visions for an African Valley shows Kilombero to be a prism which refracts broader phenomena across more than a century.

Tanzania, the land and the people have been subject of a great deal of historical research, but there remains no readily accessible and concise history of the country. The aim of this volume is to fill that void. A New History of Tanzania takes its name from a lecture series introduced at the University of Dar es Salaam by Professor Isaria Kimambo in 2002. Prior to that, a book titled, A History of Tanzania, had been published in 1969 by East African Publishing House in Nairobi for the Tanzania Historical Association. That book is currently out of print and this is not a reprint. In this book, Prof. Kimambo has been joined by two other colleagues; Prof. Gregory H. Maddox of Texas Southern University, Houston (USA) and Salvatory S. Nyanto, a Tanzanian, Lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam, and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Iowa (USA); together they have produced an outline history of Tanzania that covers all important aspects from antiquity to the present that is different from and richer than its predecessor. Sources from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, biology, genetics and oral tradition have been used to produce this excellent book.

A New History of Tanzania is a timely contribution to academic requirements for teaching and learning Tanzania's history. It is also a possible exemplar to the writing of other countries' histories, departing as it does, from the traditional historiography that is influenced by colonial and postcolonial apologists of nefarious external influences on Africa's history. It will also interest other Tanzanians and visitors to Tanzania who are interested in understanding the country from when it was a territory with more than one hundred and twenty ethnic groups, to a nation with an unmistakable identity as it marches forward.

In the last three decades, Somalia has been associated with such horrible terms as 'state collapse', 'civil wars', 'foreign intervention', 'warlordism', 'famine', 'piracy' and 'terrorism'. This depiction was in contradiction to its earlier images as the cradle of the human race, the kernel of ancient civilizations, the land of Punt, a homogeneous nation-state and the first democratic state in Africa. So how did things fall apart in the country?

This Volume 1 of a two-volume narrative, Dr. Abdullahi explores the history of the people of Somali peninsula since ancient times, the advent of Islam and colonialism, the rise and fall of Somali nationalism and the perspectives of the Somali state collapse. The book uses a unique thematic approach and analysis to make sense of Somali history by emphasizing the responsibility of Somali political elites in creating and perpetuating the disastrous conditions in their country.

Darkness fell almost immediately, and everything became extraordinarily still. The silence of an African jungle on a dark night needs to be experienced to be realised; it is most impressive, especially when one is absolutely alone and isolated from one's fellow creatures, as I was then.

In the late 19th century, the British began construction on a railway linking Uganda with the Indian Ocean. The railroad's passage through Africa crossed over the Tsavo River in Kenya, and thus the British Army brought Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson in to lead the thousands of workers as they began the bridge's construction. Throughout the next nine months, the construction site encountered a pair of lions that would stalk the campsite, drag workers from their tents, and devour those workers at nighttime. The killings occurred daily and the lions became bolder with each passing week. Nothing seemed to work for Patterson to stave off the lion attacks.

Patterson published The Man-Eaters of Tsavo in 1907 to chronicle those nine months where the lion attacks intensified to the point where the bridge's construction had to be halted. Included in Patterson's account of the Man-Eaters at Tsavo are other stories from his time in East Africa.

In 1966, after serving first as Kenya's Foreign Minister and then as Vice-President, Joseph Murumbi resigned from Government. Having concluded that the country had made a wrong turn away from a concern for the poor and the ideals he believed in, Morumbi told an old friend that he could no longer 'be part of corruption in this country'. Tribalism, too, which was to take Kenya to the brink of disaster years later, had already become firmly entrenched, and he wanted no part of it.

Today, Murumbi stands as a symbol of what Kenya could have become, and still could be. As the son of a Goan father and a Maasai mother, he disdained prejudice of any kind. As someone plucked from relative obscurity by Jomo Kenyatta thanks to his hard work and talents as an organiser, he was dismissive of those who depended on family or ethnic connections. And as a strong advocate of embracing and preserving African culture, he was a champion of African artists and their works.

This book, which combines interviews done with Murumbi in the 1970s with historical information and recollections of the people who knew him.

Food stood at the centre of Mussolini's attempt to occupy Ethiopia and build an Italian Empire in East Africa. Seeking to redirect the surplus of Italian rural labor from migration overseas to its own Empire, the fascist regime envisioned transforming Ethiopia into Italy's granary to establish self-sufficiency, demographic expansion and strengthen Italy's international political position. While these plans failed, the extensive food exchanges and culinary hybridizations between Ethiopian and Italian food cultures thrived, and resulted in the creation of an Ethiopian-Italian cuisine, a taste of Empire at the margins.

In studying food in short-lived Italian East Africa, Gastrofascism and Empire breaks significant new ground in our understanding of the workings of empire in the circulation of bodies, foodways, and global practices of dependence and colonialism, as well as the decolonizing practices of indigenous food and African anticolonial resistance. In East Africa, Fascist Italy brought older imperial models of global food to a hypermodern level in all its political, technoscientific, environmental, and nutritional aspects. This larger story of food sovereignty-entered in racist, mass settler colonialism-is dramatically different from the plantation and trade colonialisms of other empires and has never been comprehensively told.

Using an original decolonizing food studies approach and an unprecedented variety of unexplored Ethiopian and Italian sources, Cinotto describes the different meanings of different foods for different people at different points of the imperial food chain. Exploring the subjectivities, agencies and emotions of Ethiopian and Italian men and women, it goes beyond simple colonizer/colonized binaries and offers a nuanced picture of lived, multisensorial experiences with food and empire.

The fires of transformation blaze in this superbly delightful portmanteau of a book. Brenda Smith undergoes a revolution in consciousness as she warily leaves the ordinary behind, steps off the comfort train, and careens into the strange and fantastic world of rafting crocodile-infested rivers and climbs high into the African sky. With her journey, the stitches that hold her tamed world together come undone, and an enthralled eyewitness to the wonders of the world emerges. Richard Bangs, one of Explorersweb's 100 greatest explorers of the last 100 years

Coerced by her boss and fellow rivers guides, Brenda Smith reluctantly embarks on a rafting trip through a vast Tanzanian game reserve. If she can survive twelve days on the remote jungle rivers, then she must scale Africa's tallest mountain. After twenty-eight years of a safe and predictable life, Brenda is terrified of what awaits her in these dangerous wildernesses.

She comes face to face with angry hippos, roaring lions and stealthy crocodiles, and struggles with the extremes of unbearable heat and hypothermia.

Despite the harsh external threats she conquers, her greatest challenge is a profound inner journey-a courageous transformation as she uncovers the internal source of her fears and discovers the personal strength to do anything.

Becoming Fearless is an inspirational true story that showcases what is possible when you step out of your comfort zone into the wild.

From a new star of American journalism, a riveting murder mystery that reveals the forces roiling today's Africa

From Rwanda to Sierra Leone, African countries recovering from tyranny and war are facing an impossible dilemma: to overlook past atrocities for the sake of peace or to seek catharsis through tribunals and truth commissions. Uganda chose the path of forgetting: after Idi Amin's reign was overthrown, the new government opted for amnesty for his henchmen rather than prolonged conflict.

Ugandans tried to bury their history, but reminders of the truth were never far from view. A stray clue to the 1972 disappearance of Eliphaz Laki led his son to a shallow grave--and then to three executioners, among them Amin's chief of staff. Laki's discovery resulted in a trial that gave voice to a nation's past: as lawyers argued, tribes clashed, and Laki pressed for justice, the trial offered Ugandans a promise of the reckoning they had been so long denied.

For four years, Andrew Rice followed the trial, crossing Uganda to investigate Amin's legacy and the limits of reconciliation. At once a mystery, a historical accounting, and a portrait of modern Africa, The Teeth May Smile But the Heart Does Not Forget is above all an exploration of how -- and whether -- the past can be laid to rest.

One of Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2009