Soomaali Mi'yaa? invites you to explore what it means to be Somali in South Africa. This captivating ethnography is a deep dive into the heart of the Somali community in Cape Town, following a young Somali woman's journey of discovery as she grapples with her own sense of identity while uncovering the experiences of others. Through intimate conversations and insightful observations, Billan Omar reveals how this vibrant community navigates belonging in a dynamic and sometimes challenging context. She explores the intricate ways Somalinimo (Somaliness) is constructed and maintained through cultural tools like clan ties, language, and faith, showcasing the diverse experiences of Somali migrants and refugees. Blending personal reflection with rigorous research, Soomaali Mi'yaa? offers a nuanced understanding of identity formation, the challenges of belonging in the diaspora, and the search for home in a globalised world. Somalis in Cape Town are nimble-footed, forever marked by their journeys, and their Somalinimo travels with them. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in migration, culture, and the complexities of identity.

Billan Omar has written a moving and well-observed ethnography of Somali life in Bellville. The book delves into what is retained and what is lost through migration, and the fluidity and openness of Somali identity, or Somalinimo, in diasporic life. Matthew Wilhelm- Solomon (PhD), Senior Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

An insightful exploration of Somali identity in Cape Town, this work elegantly builds upon literature while offering fresh, reflexive insights. Drawing from auto-ethnographic methods, Billan Omar illuminates complex narratives of identity and belonging, significantly expanding connections and deepening understanding. Ingrid Brudvig (PhD) is a digital anthropologist and certified coach who works with global leaders to promote systems change in research, policy, and education

After centuries of colonial rule, the end of Angola's three-decade civil war in 2002 provided an irresistible opportunity for the government to reimagine the Luanda cityscape. Awash with petrodollars cultivated through strategic foreign relationships, President José Eduardo dos Santos rolled out a national reconstruction program that sought to transform Angola's capital into what he considered to be a modern, world-class metropolis. Until funds dried up in 2014, the program--in conjunction with sweeping private investments in real estate--involved mass demolitions of vernacular architecture to make way for high-rise buildings, large-scale housing projects, and commercial centers. The program thus underestimated the values enshrined in the materials and designs of Luanda's existing informally constructed neighborhoods, or musseques.

The Aesthetics of Belonging explores the political significance of aesthetics in the remaking of the city. Claudia Gastrow's archival and ethnographic work, which includes interviews with city planners, architects, nonprofit leaders, and urban dwellers, shows how government infrastructure projects and foreign-inspired designs came to embody displacement and exclusion for many. This, Gastrow argues, catalyzed a countermovement, an aesthetic dissent rooted in critically reframing informal urbanism as Indigenous--a move that enabled the possibility of recognizing the political potential of informal settlements as spaces that produce belonging.

• Winner - Nautilus Book Award 2022
• Winner - Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award 2022
• A Top Ten Expat Book for 2021 from Expat Nest

At a time when her friends were planning cushy retirements, Nancy Wesson instead walked away from a comfortable life and business to head out as a Peace Corps Volunteer in post-war Northern Uganda. She embraced wholeheartedly the grand adventure of living in a radically different culture, while turning old skills into wisdom. Returning home becomes a surreal experience in trying to reconcile a life that no longer fits. This becomes the catalyst for new revelations about family wounds, mystical experiences, and personal foibles.

Nancy shows us the power of stepping into the void to reconfigure life and enter the wilderness of the uncharted territory of our own memories and psyche, to mine the gems hidden therein. Funny, heartbreaking, insightful and tender, I Miss the Rain in Africa is the story of honoring the self, discovering a new lens through which to view life, and finding joy along the path.

Inspiring and educational when it comes to what we can accomplish when we put our best foot forward, I Miss the Rain in Africa shows how Nancy Daniel Wesson and others are putting the needs of others ahead of themselves--and what we can all do when it comes to stepping out on faith and choosing to act. -- Cyrus Webb, media personality and author, Conversations Magazine

I would think that many of us could learn or strive to live life to the fullest by following Nancy's example. Imagine venturing into new realms-especially at a later time in life when we possess meaningful knowledge for analyzing, but also for applying a critical philosophical perspective on new experiences. Gary Vizzo, former management & operations director, Peace Corps Community Development: African and Asia

I Miss the Rain in Africa is an absorbing record of the exploration of self by a woman who, at age 64, enters a remote area of Africa to work with an NGO. Part adventure, part interior monologue, this is an account of a 21^st century derring-do by an intrepid, intriguing and always optimistic woman who will, undoubtedly, enjoy a fourth and maybe even a fifth act wherever she may find herself. --Eileen Purcell, outreach literacy coordinator, Clatsop Community College, Astoria, Oregon

Wesson offers a montage of stories and experiences that introduces the reader to the colorful people and challenging life in Uganda. Wesson's observations are shared with humor, respect, and compassion. For anyone who has ever won-dered what serving in Peace Corps or immersing oneself in a radically different life overseas might be like, this book provides a portal. --Kathleen Willis, Retired Peace Corps Volunteer-Community Organizer, former organizational development consultant

Learn more at www.NancyWesson.com

Using close readings of nine novels by African or African-descended novelists, this book examines three phases of African migration: departure, disillusionment and the impulse to return.

The experiences of African migrants in the diaspora are deeply inflected by the condition of living as Black bodies in white spaces. In this work, author Ernest Cole examines closely the narratives of migration and return presented in nine powerful novels by authors who include Chimamanda Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Teju Cole and others. The novels reveal a reversal of expectations that migrants from Africa experience upon arrival in the West, a reversal prompted in part by the racial prejudice they are confronted with as Black individuals. As the author notes, the novels also illustrate the desire to return to the homeland as a better alternative to the precarious life in the West, even though such a move is not without its complications.

The study is divided into three parts with seven chapters. The first two chapters deal with the reasons for the departure of migrants from the continent, the next two depict the experiences of migrants in the West, and the last three focus on contemplations of the return journey home. Collectively, the chapters lay out three phases in the migration process: departure from home, disillusionment in the West, and return to the country of origin. Within this framework, the book uses displacement and dislocation to examine a host of themes--social alienation, alterity and the precarity of Africans in the diaspora.

In recent years, migration across urban centers and national borders has radically reshaped West African societies and sparked a global debate on the legal and cultural processes of immigration. Along newly constructed international highways in southeastern Senegal, young men and women travel between regional centers and their hometowns in the wake of a gold-mining boom that has brought new opportunities as well as risks.

Previous scholarship on migration has often emphasized the movement of bodies and things. In The Verbal Art of Mobility in West Africa, instead of considering language primarily as a way to describe mobility as it happened, author Nikolas Sweet positions language as an essential infrastructure through which individuals forge material connections and communication channels across space and borders. This reinterpretation of migration emphasizes that language is a form of social action in its own right--one that does not merely reflect experiences in the world but can bring things into being. Mobility emerges not only from an individual's given mobile history, but also through an attention to the linguistic resources deployed in everyday interactions with others.

Based on ethnographic research on social interaction, verbal creativity, and mobility in southeastern Senegal, The Verbal Art of Mobility in West Africa reveals how migrants use language to build social networks and mitigate risk amid socioeconomic and environmental precarity.

This book represents a modest, albeit important attempt to introduce students to the basics of Sociology of Development, as one of the core areas of the study of Sociology that emphasises the place of Third World Countries and their varied problematiques of development. It is, therefore, a very important text and is recommended generally to students of social and management sciences Indeed, even advanced students of Sociology will find this book useful, as it addresses with clear illustrations some key development problems affecting Nigeria, viz. insecurity, poverty and corruption. Overall, this book is strongly recommended for all categories of social science students, as it provides a window to the general sociological issues of development. When looking through that small window, it would telescope the broader sub-field of Sociology of Development. - Professor Sulaiman KURA, Dept of Political Science, Usianu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto, Nigeria

In an era when the infleunce of the media on society has never been more extensive, Promoting, Protecting, and Preserving Human Dignity through Media Practices, a collection of scholarly and practice-based papers, delves into the essential role of personhood in media operations. These contributions navigate the complexities of con- temporary media practices. They disentangle the complicated threads that connect personhood, individual rights, and media professionals' ethical responsibilities.

Promoting, Protecting, and Preserving Human Dignity through Media Practices question conventional narratives, providing new perspectives on how the media may promote, protect, and preserve human dignity in an increasingly linked world. This is a compelling resource that invites academics, media practitioners, government officials, and everyone interested in the nexus of media and human rights to reflect on the tremendous impact of media practises on our collective well-being.

It is not enough to have good ideas, one has also to carry them out in an effective manner and in my view, the Institute of Humanities has done this magnificently, as a perusal of the contributions collected in Promoting, Protecting, and Preserving Human Dignity through Media Practices makes evident. I therefore warmly recommend this book as deserving of careful reading. I am certain that all who go through it with attention will be enriched by the experience, be they general readers, academics or practitioners.

Juan Manuel Elegido, Professor of Business Ethics, Institute of Humanities. Former Vice-Chancellor, Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos

In this open access book, Maasai leader and activist Meitamei Dapash teams with historian Mary Poole to offer a new version of Maasai history based on Maasai memory and concerns. Through their rich and detailed narrative, we learn not only about the history of the Maasai as they understand it, but also about the relations between politics and Western history; about the untold history of Kenya both pre- and post-nationhood; about why the creation of nation-states is not synonymous with liberation; and about how and why Indigenous approaches to land obstruct global processes of resource extraction. All of this finds wider resonances that upend received narratives of post-independence Africa and offer new opportunities for the emancipation of Indigenous communities from neo-colonial regimes the world over.
Theebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Digital Youth and Social Movements (Perspectives from Nigeria) is an incisive and significant book that engages the reader in a survey of three significant hashtags and social movements in Nigeria's digital history - #OccupyNigeria (2012), #EndSARS (2020) and #Obidient (2023). Essentially different from each other, but with a major commonality: they were all digitally-mediated youth movements. This book curates the generational differences among these protest movements. It presents an opportunity to reflect on how the promises of technology have been fulfilled but also how they have been thwarted by anti-democratic actors in Africa.

Egbunike's Digital Youth and Social Movements (Perspectives from Nigeria) illuminate pathways to the efficacy and sustainability of social movements and their agenda. It is, therefore, a valuable source of insights and direction for movement builders and online activists - whether they are promoting political, social, environmental or other social justice causes - to navigate some of the perils that undermine digital technology's contribution to building inclusive, cohesive, and democratic societies in Africa.

- Wairagala Wakabi, PhD. Executive Director, CIPESA (Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa), Uganda

In addition to his 2018 book - Hashtags: social media, politics and ethnicity in Nigeria, Nwachukwu Egbunike has also published several scholarly essays on the intersections of social media and social movements in a Global South context. His new book, Digital Youth and Social Movements (Perspectives from Nigeria), builds on this solid scholarship, establishing him as a powerful voice on the subject of digital media, youth culture, and civic engagement in Nigeria.

- James Yékú, PhD. Assistant Professor of African Digital Humanities, University of Kansas

Mobility has been part of human ways for millennia. With the emergence of nation-states, regulating it became a critical part of public policy, generating contestation within and among nations. Migration in South Africa: Conflicts and Identities explores this contestation, migration patterns and policy debates in the country today. This book traces how African migration experiences are similar to those in other regions of the world but also informed by the unique history of a continent whose nation-states were carved artificially by colonial powers. The South African experience of migration is explored in this context. Authors interrogate the resentment of marginalised 'native' communities struggling to access benefits that were meant to come with political freedom; issues of identity; and prejudices that prompt the 'othering' of migrants. Contributors argue too that turning a blind eye to social concerns feeds xenophobic impulses. Some of the chapters provide insights into the mutual benefits accruing in areas where migrants have settled, and how citizens and migrants have come together to fight struggles in occupations such as domestic work. The many attempts - within South Africa, the region and globally - to find sustainable approaches to the migration challenge are considered Authors highlight how the more securitised the approach, the more the human ingenuity of desperation comes into play, rendering such efforts largely ineffective. Migration in South Africa: Conflicts and Identities approaches the issue of migration from a transdisciplinary perspective, straddling social economic factors as well as gender, race, culture and identity, and the elusive sense of belonging. What emerges is that a humanitarian approach needs to be combined with the effective application of laws, with the ultimate aim of achieving Africa's long-term objective of the free movement of goods and people.

Nigeria: Tariff and Non-Tariff Policies and Impacts on Industrial Development delves into the intricate world of trade policies and their profound effects on industrial development. With a keen focus on the theory of tariff protection, this book unravels the nuanced dynamics between tariffs, non-tariff policies, and their inextricable links to industrial growth. It provides a comprehensive exploration of how tariff protection influences industrial sectors and shapes the trajectory of economies at large. Through meticulous research and compelling analysis, the author unveils the far-reaching consequences of tariff protection on domestic industries. Exploring both the advantages and drawbacks of this economic strategy, the author sheds light on the various ways in which tariffs can shape and mould industrial sectors, ultimately determining their success or stagnation. Whether you are an economist, policymaker, or enthusiast seeking a deeper understanding of trade policies' ramifications, this book is an indispensable resource as it offers valuable insights and a balanced research analysis on tariff and non-tariff policies and its impacts on industrial development.

This book explores the concept of re-engineering underutilized renewable energy concepts and applications in Africa, focusing on technical solutions that can drive sustainable energy development in the region. It delves into topics such as biomass applications and technical innovations, including the potential for advancements in biomass utilization practices. The book also examines the potential of hydrogen as a clean energy carrier for Africa and evaluates hydrogen storage technologies. It explores waste-to-energy sources and waste recovery technologies, highlighting their role in sustainable resource management. Additionally, the book discusses cutting-edge technical solutions for renewable energy, including emerging technologies that can enhance the performance and scalability of renewable energy systems in Africa.

In Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism, Mingwei Huang traces the development of new forms of racial capitalism in the twenty-first century. Through fieldwork in one of the China malls that has emerged along Johannesburg's former mining belt, Huang identifies everyday relations of power and difference between Chinese entrepreneurs and African migrant workers in these wholesale shops. These relations, Huang contends, replicate and perpetuate global structures of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and colonialism, even when whiteness is not present. Huang argues that this dynamic reflects the sedimented legacies and continued operation of white supremacy and colonialism, which have been transformed in the shift of capitalism's center of gravity toward China and the Global South. These new forms of racial capitalism and empire layer onto and extend histories of exploitation and racialization in South Africa. Taking a palimpsestic approach, Huang offers tools for understanding this shift and decentering contemporary Western conceptions of race, empire, and racial capitalism in the Chinese Century.

In Indenture Aesthetics, Jordache A. Ellapen examines the visual and performance art practices of feminist, queer, femme, and gender-nonconforming Afro-Indian and South African black artists to understand the paradoxes of freedom in contemporary South Africa. Tracing the afterlife of apartheid-era racial categories and revisiting Bantu Stephen Biko's Black Consciousness, Ellapen theorizes South African blackness through the Indian Ocean World, showing how the development of an Afro-Indian identity after generations of indentured labor and segregation troubles persistent racial hierarchies. Staging unexpected encounters between artists such as Sharlene Khan, Mohau Modisakeng, Lebohang Kganye, and Reshma Chhiba, he analyzes how their works challenge these racial categories to create new imaginaries of freedom. Situated in a context in which the authentic (hetero)normative black subject of the post-apartheid state is bracketed from other formulations of blackness, these artists' aesthetic practices, alongside those of other artists like Ellapen himself, disrupt desires for national belonging and catalyze alternative and transgressive politics and subjects. By rethinking the relationship between blackness, Afro-Indianness, and Africanness, Ellapen highlights the role of the aesthetic in crafting a blueprint for coalitional building across difference in contemporary South Africa.

This book is a collection of essays on the history of museums and art in Africa. The publication addresses the decolonization of African museums before analysing forms and encounter, a major aspect in the African artistic creation. The issue of repatriation is also addressed not only in the complexity of the phenomenon but also as resulting to conflicting sovereignties in Africa. The collection in the end discusses the role of art in nation building in the context of Benin Republic and how museum cooperation could enhance the museum sector.

Working without seeking any recognition and at times under very challenging circumstances Effiboley's excellent efforts in trying to address the subject of African art, museums and restitution in a realistic and holistic way, grounded in tradition has often been thwarted by some who would have been expected to advocate for similar views. This collection of works of over 20 years demonstrates a commitment to a cause and speaks for itself not only in terms of recognizing the place of African heritage or African Art but the need to decolonize the mind, the practice and the narratives. Persistent on this journey of questioning the abnormal made normal, this body of works stands out as a true example of a cause sincerely in need of addressing. Professor George Abungu, Emeritus Director General of the National Museums of Kenya

Effiboley gives us a pivotal work at a vital moment when African voices will define the future of museums in Africa. His voice of deep scholarly experience guides us how to change the ways we think about art, museums and culture in Africa. Michael Rowlands, Emeritus Professor, Department of Anthropology, University College London.

After centuries of colonial rule, the end of Angola's three-decade civil war in 2002 provided an irresistible opportunity for the government to reimagine the Luanda cityscape. Awash with petrodollars cultivated through strategic foreign relationships, President José Eduardo dos Santos rolled out a national reconstruction program that sought to transform Angola's capital into what he considered to be a modern, world-class metropolis. Until funds dried up in 2014, the program--in conjunction with sweeping private investments in real estate--involved mass demolitions of vernacular architecture to make way for high-rise buildings, large-scale housing projects, and commercial centers. The program thus underestimated the values enshrined in the materials and designs of Luanda's existing informally constructed neighborhoods, or musseques.

The Aesthetics of Belonging explores the political significance of aesthetics in the remaking of the city. Claudia Gastrow's archival and ethnographic work, which includes interviews with city planners, architects, nonprofit leaders, and urban dwellers, shows how government infrastructure projects and foreign-inspired designs came to embody displacement and exclusion for many. This, Gastrow argues, catalyzed a countermovement, an aesthetic dissent rooted in critically reframing informal urbanism as Indigenous--a move that enabled the possibility of recognizing the political potential of informal settlements as spaces that produce belonging.

Draws on indigenous African political thought in order to construct a political philosophy that will resist and restrain necropolitics and promote human flourishing in Africa.

Lifemaking offers a fresh frame for analyzing contemporary African politics and imagining its future. Rooted in the indigenous political philosophy of lifemaking of the Kalabari-Ijo people of the Niger Delta, this work is a counterpoint to the necropolitics that dominates African political practice. For practitioners and analysts for whom Africans and their polities are caught in the TINA (There Is No Alternative) syndrome, this book offers inspiration for an alternative to the current necropolitics. Because the book's thesis is an unreserved celebration of lifemaking, it identifies collective human flourishing as essential to politics.

There has been a long standing belief and misconception that 'relevant' history is shelved and can only be retrieved from written documentation. This conviction systematically diminished in importance with the emergence and approach of Africanist scholarship in the 1960s which increasingly exposed the pitfalls of religiously relying on paper- inscribed or engraved historical sources. This twist away from recorded history gave premium to a craving for the exploration and exploitation of material and immaterial heritage sources to understand and communicate connections between heritage and history in Africa. This compendium of interlacing themes on Cameroon threads the multiple but complex ways by which vestiges; natural and man-made, and social memory merges into confi guration of perspectives on historical representation of people, environment, and society in Africa. Designed in seven grand themes with a conceptual lead on heritage and presented in sixteen chapters, this book generally provides reliable non-documented sources that help construct the African indigenous knowledge as experienced by themselves from their heritage. This volume is highly recommended for use by scholars, students, practitioners, promoters and lovers of heritage values.

Whose knowledge counts? Why delve deep to understand self, history and intercontinental relations? How do people and communities heal from the wounds of colonization and related trauma passed from generation to generation? Such intractable questions are explored in this collection of essays on decolonization. To decolonize means to humxnize, which is of even greater urgency in the 21 st century with colonization showing itself in new forms. Perspectives from several continents suggest pathways toward more convivial and equitable relations in society, and each chapter is presented in conversation with an illustration. The book will inspire young leaders, educators, activists, policymakers, researchers, and anyone resisting colonization and its effects and working for a kinder, gentler world.

These 13 instructive and sometimes personal chapters speak to the urgency of decolonization, building on a culture of ubuntu or recognizing oneself in others.

- François-Joseph Azoh, Psychologist, Lecturer at Ecole Normale Supérieure of Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire

Connections between colonization, racism, and other isms are addressed, as are rehumxnizing intercontinental movements such as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and #RhodesMustFall.

- Dr. Wanja Njuguna, Senior Lecturer, Journalism and Media Technology, Namibia University of Science and Technology

Embrace this read and learn how we humXns are the X-factor in the liberation from mental and physical bondage.

- Larry Lester, activist and President of the Greater Kansas City Black History Study Group, a branch of ASALH

Decolonization brings a progressive transformation of the world.

- Therese Mungah Shalo Tchombe, Emeritus Professor/Honorary Dean of Education, University of Buea, Cameroon

Since the 1980s, Cameroon has been facing an economic crisis that has resulted in widespread unemployment and poverty. In response, civil society organisations, including churches, have called for the introduction of democratic institutions, believing that bad governance is at the root of the country's economic problems. At the same time, a growing number of Pentecostal churches, especially in Anglophone Cameroon, have begun offering a message of salvation to the suffering masses. This study examines how the new gospel of accumulation and prosperity preached by these churches relates to the material predicaments of Cameroonians. It investigates the proliferation of Pentecostalism and the ongoing defection of members of the mainline churches to the new Pentecostal groups that are propagating the gospel of prosperity as opposed to the ascetic doctrine of mainline groups. In contrast to mainline churches, which have been vocal in their fight against the crisis by issuing pastoral letters, organising conferences, and criticising the government, Pentecostal churches have been relatively silent. This study compares the reactions of the two churches and suggests that the Pentecostal churches have used the crisis as an opportunity to grow their membership.