For centuries Western scholarship, and the African scholars seduced by this body of knowledge, have not been interested in African religions per se, but what was worse, African scholars began not to study indigenous African spirituality on its own terms but through European eyes and intellectual categories. Okot p'Bitek, who is best known for Song of Lawino, was one of the first African scholars to call attention to this situation and argue African scholars need not Hellenize African spiritual practices and ideas and that what we have come to think as African religions are European versions in African disguise. This publication, along with a new introduction by Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu, reintroduces a classic work to a new generation, especially for those with an interest in African spiritual cultures and in need of decolonizing them so that they be studied, appreciated, and engaged on their own cultural and historic terms.

BECOMING A MODERN HEALER FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD OF AKƆM is a memoir of Nana Kwaku Sakyi's transnational experiences in becoming a healer. Guided by African healing savants, Nana Sakyi became the first diasporic African to become a spiritualist-healer in the ancient market town and spiritual center of Takyiman, Ghana. Becoming a Modern Healer is a remarkable portrait of a people who activate the crucial links between Africa and its American diaspora, the fusing of ancient knowledge with modern life, and the importance of healing, ritual, coded wisdom, and following one's path in life.

Nothing in Deborah Jones's formative years could have prepared her for life in the Us Organization. She, like many of her generation, was Black and Proud before the phrase became popular. She believed-and still believes-in the principles for which the organization stood. But her life took a horrific turn on Mother's Day, 1970, leaving her in trauma and in silence. In this never-before-told account, Jones tells her inspiring story.

Created by Marvel Comics Legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, The Black Panther is considered the first Black superhero in American mainstream comics. Through a textual analysis, this book narrates the history of the character from his first appearance in 1966--the same year, the Black Panther Party was formed in Oakland, California--through Ta-Nehisi Coates' version in 2015. It tells the story of how Black and white writers envisioned the character between those years, as a Patrice Lumumba to a Sidney Poitier to a Nelson Mandela to a hip-hop cool to a reflective, 21st century king. Along the way, the limitations of white liberalism and the boundless nature of the Black imagination are revealed. Marvel's Black Panther is the first textual study of a superhero comic book character, examining its writers and the stories they have created over a fifty year period.

Warrior Princess: A People's Biography of Ida B. Wells is the story of a young Black woman who decided to fight and protect Black people her entire life, and did so admirably. Ida B. Wells was a prominent journalist, activist, and suffragist who lived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She was defiant, courageous, and committed to her life's work. For that reason, she endured violent threats from racist white men, and was ostracized by many Black male leaders. She spoke, wrote, and organized. But more importantly, she learned to believe in herself and her mission. As Wells herself wrote: Let the Afro-American depend on no party, but on himself, for his salvation.

The present volume is quite different from the other two autobiographies by Du Bois not only because of its additional two-decade span, and the significantly altered outlook of its author, but also because in it-unlike the others-he seeks, as he writes, to review my life as frankly and fully as I can. Of course, with the directness and honesty which so decisively characterized him, he reminds the reader of this book of the intense subjectivity that inevitably permeates autobiography; hence, he writes, he offers this account of his life as he understood it and as he-would like others to believe-it to have been. Certainly, while Dr. Du Bois was deep in his ninth decade when he died, longevity was the least remarkable feature of his life. As editor, author, lecturer, scholar, organizer, inspirer, and fighter, he was among the most consequential figures of the twentieth century. Necessarily, therefore, the full and final accounting of that life and his times becomes an indispensable volume.

Situated along the Senegal River, the Kingdom of Waalo was the smallest of the Wolof states of Senegal, but it illustrates the broader consequences of a shift from trans-Saharan to trans-Atlantic commerce during a time of competing European, Muslim, and indigenous African forces. From the establishment of a French trading post in 1659 to the early nineteenth century, the history of Waalo was closely tied to French interests in St. Louis, popular revolutionary Islamic movements, and internal rivalries between competing royal families and provincial leaders. Stimulating Waalo's socio-political changes were the devastations and fluctuations of the Atlantic slave trade, as well as the Muslim attack on its aristocracy. Torn by internal divisions, devastated by French and Berber incursions, Waalo's institutions and its economy declined. Residents of Waalo sought their own solutions only for external agents to ruin their efforts. By the nineteenth century, the French attempted to establish a plantation economy in Waalo, culminating in their military control of the state and the Senegal valley. This newly translated study is a vital tool in our understanding of Senegal's history, its place in the era of trans-Saharan and trans-Atlantic commerce, and its development into the present. The book should be of value to African studies scholars, anthropologists, and historians of Africa, colonialism, empire, and post-colonialism.

Using diverse and new sources (archaeological, biomedical, climatological, linguistic, ethno-musical, oral and documentary sources in various languages), this groundbreaking study tells the story of a West African people, the origins and character of their cultural forms and ideas, and how these Akan, or pioneering peoples, shaped the politics and societies of their homeland as well as the European colonies that received their enslaved members. The book demonstrates how these peoples organized themselves into clans connected by shared sociocultural features, formed polities, fought wars yet engaged in extensive diplomacy, traded with yet competed against one another, and ultimately their members became a force in the Americas, despite their relatively small numbers. As enslaved, marooned, or legally emancipated peoples, they foregrounded and yet went beyond the diasporic themes of maroonage, resistance, and freedom. Locating the Akan variable in the African diasporic equation allows scholars and students of Africa and the Americas to better understand how African histories and diasporic experiences cohere and how both are still evolving.

Transatlantic Africa examines the internal workings of African and diasporic slave societies in the transatlantic era. Emphasizing a global context and the multiplicity of African experiences during that period, historian Kwasi Konadu interprets transatlantic slaving and its consequences through African and diasporic primary sources. Based on careful reading of Africans' oral histories, archival documents, and visual evidence, the book connects those experiences to local and international slaving systems. It also tackles the themes of commodification, capitalism, abolitionism, and reparations. By integrating these views with critical interpretations, Transatlantic Africa balances intellectual rigor with broad accessibility, helping readers to think anew about how transoceanic slaving made the modern world

A View from The East represents a second edition built upon expanded archival research and a contextualizing of the organization within the African American civil rights and black power movements. At the heart of The East was Uhuru Sasa Shule, an independent African-centered school whose curriculum and pedagogy were rooted in Kawaida philosophy and concepts of education for self-reliance. In addition, The East became a center for the arts. On weekends, it served as a literary salon and hosted concerts by black musicians. Many of the great jazz artists and poets performed there, as it became a well-known and highly sought-after venue. With fresh insight and great detail, Kwasi Konadu excavates the history of The East, exploring the confluence of cultural nationalism, education, economic self-sufficiency, and the arts during the Black Power period. Drawing on extensive interviews and primary research, Konadu vividly brings to life the people and events that shaped this remarkable institution and outlines the rich lessons it provides for future community building organizations.

The Atlantic slave trade caused havoc on the cultures and political states of Africa and led to the forced migration of millions of Africans to the Americas. The Africans could not bring their material cultures and artifacts, but most important, they brought their histories and cultures-philosophies, languages, political structures, and religious and artistic expressions. Hundreds of societies were established throughout the Americas by Africans who had freed themselves. These societies were called maroons in the United States, palenques in the Spanish-speaking countries, and quilombos or mocambos in Brazil. The most famous mocambo was the Quilombo dos Palmares, which existed for almost one hundred years as an independent nation made up of Africans, indigenous peoples, and poor whites. Many of these societies had their system of self-defense or martial arts, which, not surprisingly, had their origins in Africa. Africans practiced a variety of martial arts. From the top of northern Africa to the bottom of southern Africa, there were and still are hundreds of fighting styles that emphasized skill, technique, and intelligence over brute force. One of the martial arts that sprang from the connection between Africa and the Americas is capoeira angola, which is still played in Brazil and around the world today. Design for young readers, and packed with over 30 illustrations, this book tells the story of Capoeira Angola.

In this book, one of the pioneers of twentieth century African history examines the perceptions and responses of Africans to European colonialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This edition of Boahen's text, originally published in 1989, is contextualized in a new foreword by John Lonsdale, updating some of Boahen's findings and interpretations while maintaining that the best, totally unambiguous, legacy of this republication would surely be the inspiration of a new generation of African scholars, locally based, as clear-minded and outspoken as Adu Boahen himself.

In The World-System and Africa, Immanuel Wallerstein examines three important, interconnected themes that link Africa and the capitalist world-system of the last 500 years. While drawing attention to the structural crisis of the modern world-system, Wallerstein uses the first set of essays to explore the impact of this worldwide structural crisis on Africa. Next, he turns to identity politics, a political stance that came to prominence in the last thirty years, and considers the world-system context for the African dilemmas posed by this approach. Not unique to Africa, identity politics has become central to political struggles everywhere in the world-system. Finally, Wallerstein reflects on African thinkers' analyses of current affairs both in the world-system and in Africa. Coming from someone who has been involved in writing about Africa for over seventy years, Wallerstein argues that if Africa is going to play an appropriate and significant role in resolving the structural crisis of the modern world-system, it is crucial that there continue to be a well-informed and intellectually relevant debate about the issues involved, the moral choices to be made, and the political strategies to follow.

Black Folk Here and There is a seminal work that attempts to combine anthropology and comparative history in a study of the Black Experience from the beginning of literate cultures to the advent of the transatlantic slave trade and the White Racism that quickly developed as its ideological support. In this volume, the Black experience is conveyed through the Judaic, Greek and Roman cultures to European Christendom and the Muslim World in the period before the great diaspora from Africa to the West began in the sixteenth century CE.

Discourse on Africana Studies: James Turner and Paradigms of Knowledge is both a reader and an introspective tribute, comprised of writings by James Turner and commentary from several of his former students. The book strives to underscore critical connections between multiple dimensions of Turner's legacy (as scholar, activist, institution-builder, teacher, and mentor), while also aiming to contribute to the growing historicized literature on the Black Studies movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The contributors to this book hope to influence this early phase in Black/Africana Studies historiography and provide a resource for discourse on the future of the discipline.

Freedom by a Thread: The History of Quilombos in Brazil brings together some of the best scholars in the world working on the history of quilombos (maroon societies) in Brazil from a variety of perspectives and approaches. Over 40 percent of the total volume of captive Africans arrived in Brazil during a 400-year period of legal and contraband transatlantic slaving. If slavery penetrated every aspect of Brazilian life, so did resistance--and co-existence with it--in the form of small to large-scale quilombos. Palmares and the other quilombos built an exciting history of freedom. Yet, it is a history filled with traps and surprises, advances and setbacks, conflict and commitments, while advancing their immediate interests and more ambitious projects of liberty. These events and many others are part of the history told in this book.

Carter G. Woodson's classic text on the emergence of African American churches, chronicling their story out of the eighteenth-century evangelical revivals and their transformations through the nineteenth and early twentieth century, is important for reasons other than black church history. With the exception of recent books, such as C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya's The Black Church in the African-American Experience, Woodson's text remains one of the best overviews of the topic. But Woodson's text is also a significant account of the ways in which Christian-based instruction and socialization shaped not only class divisions and vetted leadership among, but also shaped who/what became the Negro/Colored/Black/African American. For even the Father of Black History, as Woodson is often called, could not escape the spell casted by the prevailing Christian ideology of his time, and in the earlier periods he investigated. In fact, Woodson viewed Christianity as] a rather difficult religion for the] undeveloped mind of the enslaved African] to grasp, and never questioned this Christianity or probed the African basis of rituals and ideas among the enslaved and the emancipated. Instead, Woodson extols the virtues of Christianity among the converted, and the men who established the various churches in African descended communities, including the educative, social, economic, and political roles played by these institutions after the U. S. Civil War. There is little here about those who adhered to spiritual or religious practices and ideas that remained as close to Africa as possible. For Woodson, then, the ministry was one of the highest callings and occupations to which African American male leaders could aspire, and from which they accrued prominence within their communities at a time when religious instruction was the primary schooling option available. These educated Negroes, as Woodson called them, were now armed with the Christian religion, Christian names, and a dream to partner (in an inferior position) with the dominant values and views of white society, which all created sectarianism and, eventually, two divergent visions among African descended peoples in North America. Nineteenth century converts split along class lines, and urbanized elites developed a Christian distaste for their kinfolk who continued to engage in African-based rituals and practices, such as the ring shout. By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, these elites began to seek equal rights and full acceptance by whites-thus the need to distance themselves from things African and despite the fact that a few church organizations kept the term African as part of their name. The majority of the African-based community saw racism and its insidiousness as deeply rooted in their fight for human rights, while the elites viewed slavery and discrimination as obstacles which prevented their particular progress rather than a collective advancement. Since Woodson, writing in the first quarter of the twentieth century, had access to individuals who were either enslaved or children of the enslaved, his account is still therefore relevant as both a source and as a story that captures some of the foregoing processes in African and African American history.

The Black Terrorist is a fictional account built around the true, extraordinary, but little-known story of Addi B . Addi B was born in Guinea about 1916, brought to France in the late 1930s, and became a riflemen in the Twelfth Regiment de Tirailleurs S n galais (African soldiers from French colonies) fighting for France during World War II. Captured after the Battle of the Meuse, Addi escapes from German forces, wanders in the forests, before finding refuge in a village in the Vosges, where he encounters the French Resistance and becomes a leader of a Resistance network. However, Addi is captured, tortured, and executed in December 1943. His military exploits against the Germans earned him the name the black terrorist.

The story of Addi B is told sixty years later from a number of perspectives, though largely from Germaine Tergoresse, who was a young girl during the war, now eighty years old relating her memories to B 's nephew. But who betrayed Addi B ? One of its many lovers? A professional collaborator? Or just the rivalry between the Tergoresses and the Rapennes, two families who have been feuding since the First World War? This African and Muslim fighter of Free France was awarded the Medal of the Resistance in 2003, sixty years after his execution. The Black Terrorist (Le terroriste noir) was awarded the Erckmann-Chatrian Prize in 2012, and both the Palatine Grand Prize and the Ahmadou-Kourouma Prize in 2013.

In Kwame Nkrumah and the Dream of African Unity, Lansin Kaba describes some of the epic phases of Kwame Nkrumah's struggle for the independence of his country, Ghana, and the unity of his continent, Africa. These two tasks were gigantic, complex, and even frightening. Each separately was promethean in scope, perhaps beyond the capacity of a single leader, however able and determined. Yet, Nkrumah dared to accomplish them and thus deserves a place among the great figures of his world. Far from being a hagiography or a biography, or an essay on the ideology and foreign politics of Nkrumah, this work follows the adventures of his dream of African unity, from the years studying across the Atlantic to the Accra Summit in 1965 and the coup d' tat in 1966. Throughout, the analysis tries to understand the genesis of the dream and the effort required for its realization. These discussions deal with the difficulties of implementing a policy of regrouping independent states into a continental body.

Candombl is an African-Brazilian religion that has over two million adherents throughout Brazil, but also in the Americas and in Europe. Despite the popularity of Candombl , many people still confuse the religion with a cult, or perceive it as part of other religions, such as Spiritualism, Umbanda, or even non-orthodox Catholicism. Candombl is an independent religion with a composite philosophical base derived from a number African cultures, and has its own corpus of orally-transmitted texts, ancient rituals, and organic lifestyle. Initiation into Candombl takes the reader through the foundational ideas and practices of this composite religion, guided by an author who is not only a scholar but also a practitioner of Candombl .