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Politics

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- Aids and Power: Why There is no Political Crisis-yet (by Alex De Waal)
  
  $25.00
  
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  Why, twenty years into the crisis, are democratic governments performing so poorly in tackling AIDS in Africa? De Waal argues that existing approaches are driven by interests and frameworks that fail to engage with African societies' resilience and creativity. Already, African communities have confounded some of the worst predictions of disaster. If adequately supported, they will find ways of sustaining development and democracy in the midst of HIV/AIDS.
- Eating from One Pot: The Dynamics of Survival in Poor South African Households (by Sarah Mosoetsa)
  
  $34.95
  
  As poverty and unemployment deepen in contemporary South Africa, the burning question becomes, how do the poor survive? This book provides a compelling answer. Based on intensive fieldwork, it shows how many African households are on the brink of collapse. That they keep going at all can largely be attributed to the struggles of older women against poverty. They are the fulcrum on which household survival turns. This book describes how households in two different areas in KwaZulu-Natal are sites of both stability and conflict. As one of the interviewees put it: "We eat from one pot and should always help each other." Yet the stability of family networks is becoming fragile because of the enormous burden placed on them by unemployment and unequal power relations. Many of the households are extremely poor, relying on a total monthly income of less than R800. People live on little more than maize meal, tea and sugar. However, the book also demonstrates that they are not passive victims of poverty. Women, in particular, show impressive qualities of energy and resourcefulness. They engage in a number of informal sector activities, and many are active in a range of faith, and community and home-based care associations
- Darfur: A New History of a Long War (by Julie Flint& Alex De Waal)
  
  $18.00
  
  The humanitarian tragedy in Darfur has stirred politicians, Hollywood celebrities and students to appeal for a peaceful resolution to the crisis. Beyond the horrific pictures of sprawling refugee camps and lurid accounts of rape and murder lies a complex history steeped in religion, politics, and decades of internal unrest. Darfur traces the origins, organization and ideology of the infamous Janjawiid and other rebel groups, including the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement. It also analyzes the confused responses of the Sudanese government and African Union. This thoroughly updated edition also features a powerful analysis of how the conflict has been received in the international community and the varied attempts at peacekeeping.
- In the Fog of the Season's End (by Alex la Guma)
  
  $13.95
  
  a Guma's powerful, firsthand account depicts the dedicated South African people who risked their lives in the underground movement against apartheid. The main characters, Beukes and Elias, are among others determined to undermine apartheid's blatant oppression and demeaning tactics. The author's knack for rich descriptions and weaving the past with the present transports readers to the grind of working in an underground political organization and the challenges of confronting hardships, change, and injustice on a daily basis.
- Ways of Staying (by Kevin Bloom)
  
  $22.95
  
  After the brutal, random murder of his cousin, Kevin Bloom was left with shock, grief, and anger--and one burning question: "Why stay in South Africa?" As a journalist, Kevin Bloom had witnessed and reported on the rising tide of violence in post-Apartheid South Africa. But when his own cousin was killed in a vicious random attack, the questions he'd been asking about the troubling political and social changes in his country took on a sickeningly personal urgency. Suddenly, it felt as though this South Africa was no longer the place he'd grown up in or the place which felt like home. Still stunned by the loss, Bloom begins to trace the path of violence from the murder of his cousin in the hills of Zululand to the fatal shooting of the historian David Rattray, linking these individual crimes to the riven political landscape, and the riots and xenophobic attacks of 2008. Visceral, complicated, and compassionate, "Ways of Staying" is an eloquent account of how the white community is coping with black majority rule, and in particular how one family is coping in the aftermath of their own private tragedy.
- The Shackled Continent (by Robert Guest)
  
  $15.00
  
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  A former Africa editor for The Economist, Robert Guest addresses the troubled continent's thorniest problems: war, AIDS, and above all, poverty. Newly updated with a preface that considers political and economic developments of the past six years, The Shackled Continent is engrossing, highly readable, and as entertaining as it is tragic. Guest pulls the veil off the corruption and intrigue that cripple so many African nations, posing a provocative theory that Africans have been impoverished largely by their own leaders' abuses of power. From the minefields of Angola to the barren wheat fields of Zimbabwe, Guest gathers startling evidence of the misery African leaders have inflicted on their people. But he finds elusive success stories and examples of the resilience and resourcefulness of individual Africans, too; from these, he draws hope that the continent will eventually prosper. Guest offers choices both commonsense and controversial for Africans and for those in the West who wish Africa well.
- Why Africa is Poor And What Africans Can Do About It (by Greg Mills)
  
  $20.00
  
  Economic growth does not demand a secret formula. Good development examples now abound in East Asia and farther afield in others parts of Asia, and in Central America. But why then has Africa failed to realise its potential in half a century of independence? This book shows that African poverty is not because the world has denied the continent the market and financial means to compete: far from it. It has not been because of aid per se. Nor is African poverty solely a consequence of poor infrastructure or trade access, or because the necessary development and technical expertise is unavailable internationally. Why then has the continent lagged behind other developing areas when its people work hard and the continent is blessed with abundant natural resources? Stomping across the continent and the developing world in search of the answer, Greg Mills controversially shows that the main reason why Africa's people are poor is because their leaders have made this choice.
- Africa's Future: Darkness to Destiny (by Duncan Clarke)
  
  $32.95
  
  Throughout the centuries, Africa has concealed multiple secrets, waylaying and confounding the unwary. Today, as economists, politicians, experts and the cognoscenti from within and outside the continent seek to "fix" Africa and its perceived problems, the need to understand its mysteries has never been greater. Africa's future tells the tale of Africa's economic evolution, providing unique prisms through which to view the continent's panoramic story - ultimately one of triumph over the influences of nature and over multiple political tragedies. It explains how Africa in effect went backwards for one and a half thousand years, from the Roman Empire to 1500 CE. Only in more recent times has Africa gradually begun to evolve and grow, to the point at which its modern and archaic economies uneasily coexist today. Modern Africa has developed diverse economic pathways to betterment - yet survivalist economies still litter the landscape. The continent's paradox of "subsistence with many faces" is manifested in its tiny middle class, its growing numbers of rich, and the ever-greater numbers of poor expected in the future.
- Defeating Dictators: Fighting Tyranny in Africa and Around the World (by George B.N. Ayittey)
  
  $22.00
  
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  Despite billions of dollars of aid and the best efforts of the international community to improve economies and bolster democracy across Africa, violent dictatorships persist. As a result, millions have died, economies are in shambles, and whole states are on the brink of collapse. Political observers and policymakers are starting to believe that economic aid is not the key to saving Africa. So what does the continent need to do to throw off the shackles of militant rule? African policy expert George Ayittey argues that before Africa can prosper, she must be free. Taking a hard look at the fight against dictatorships around the world, from Ukraine's orange revolution in 2004 to Iran's Green Revolution last year, he examines what strategies worked in the struggle to establish democracy through revolution. Ayittey also offers strategies for the West to help Africa in her quest for freedom, including smarter sanctions and establishing fellowships for African students.
- Interventions: A Life in War and Peace (by Kofi Annan and Nader Mousavizadeh)
  
  $28.00
  
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  The first sub-Saharan African to hold the position of Secretary-General, Annan has led an extraordinary life in his own right. His idealism and personal politics were forged in the Ghanaian independence movement of his adolescence, when all of Africa seemed to be rising as one to demand self-determination. Schooled in Africa, Europe, and the United States, Annan ultimately joined the United Nations in Geneva at the lowest professional level in the still young organization. Annan rose rapidly through the ranks and was by the end of the Cold War prominently placed in the dramatically changing department of peacekeeping operations. His stories of Presidents Clinton and Bush, dictators like Saddam Hussein and Robert Mugabe, and public figures of all stripes contrast powerfully with Annan's descriptions of the courage and decency of ordinary people everywhere struggling for a new and better world. Showing the successes of the United Nations, Annan also reveals the organization's missed opportunities and ongoing challenges--inaction in the Rwanda genocide, continuing violence between Israelis and Palestinians, and the endurance of endemic poverty. Yet Annan's great strength in this book is his ability to embed these tragedies within the context of global politics, demonstrating how, time and again, the nations of the world have retreated from the UN's founding purpose. From the pinnacle of global politics, Annan made it his purpose to put the individual at the center of every mission for peace and prosperity.
  A personal biography of global statecraft, Annan's "Interventions" is as much a memoir as a guide to world order--past, present, and future.
- Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of Continental Catastrophe (by Gerard Prunier)
  
  from $19.95
  
  The Rwandan genocide sparked a horrific bloodbath that swept across sub-Saharan Africa, ultimately leading to the deaths of some four million people. In this extraordinary history of the recent wars in Central Africa, Gerard Prunier offers a gripping account of how one grisly episode laid the groundwork for a sweeping and disastrous upheaval. Prunier vividly describes the grisly aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, when some two million refugees--a third of Rwanda's population--fled to exile in Zaire in 1996. The new Rwandan regime then crossed into Zaire and attacked the refugees, slaughtering upwards of 400,000 people. The Rwandan forces then turned on Zaire's despotic President Mobutu and, with the help of a number of allied African countries, overthrew him. But as Prunier shows, the collapse of the Mobutu regime and the ascension of the corrupt and erratic Laurent-D sir Kabila created a power vacuum that drew Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and other African nations into an extended and chaotic war. The heart of the book documents how the whole core of the African continent became engulfed in an intractible and bloody conflict after 1998, a devastating war that only wound down following the assassination of Kabila in 2001. Prunier not only captures all this in his riveting narrative, but he also indicts the international community for its utter lack of interest in what was then the largest conflict in the world.
- It's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower (by Michela Wrong)
  
  $15.99
  
  In January 2003, Kenya was hailed as a model of democracy after the peaceful election of its new president, Mwai Kibaki. By appointing respected longtime reformer John Githongo as anticorruption czar, the new Kikuyu government signaled its determination to end the corrupt practices that had tainted the previous regime. Yet only two years later, Githongo himself was on the run, having secretly compiled evidence of official malfeasance throughout the new administration. Unable to remain silent, Githongo, at great personal risk, made the painful choice to go public. The result was a Kenyan Watergate. Michela Wrong's account of how a pillar of the establishment turned whistle-blower--becoming simultaneously one of the most hated and admired men in Kenya--grips like a political thriller while probing the very roots of the continent's predicament.