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The inspirational story of how an African-owned coffee company became a profitable global brand offers an argument for trade as opposed to aid, and a lesson in how Africa can dictate the terms of its future Since it was founded in 2003, Good African Coffee has helped thousands of farmers earn a decent living, send their children to school, and escape a spiral of debt and dependence. Africa has received more than $1 trillion in aid over the last 50 years and yet despite these huge inflows, the continent remains mired in poverty, disease, and systemic corruption. Here, Andrew Rugasira argues that trade has achieved what years of aid failed to deliver, and has provided a tantalizing glimpse of what Africa could be. As he recounts the very personal story of his company and the challenges that he has faced and overcome as an African entrepreneur—from the impossibility of finding capital to discrimination at every step to close calls with lions in the foothills of the Rwenzori mountains—Rugasira discusses the barriers that currently prevent fair and equal trade between Africa and the rest of the world. He sets out the arguments for building a sustainable trade framework and reducing dependency on handouts, and he builds up a manifesto for a revolution in the way that Africa is perceived. (Released Date: September 24, 2013)

Renowned worldwide, as novelist and dramatist, Ngugi wa Thiongo's contributions to the body of critical writing on African literature, politics and society have been highly significant. His best known critical work is Decolonising the Mind, which since publication in 1986 has profoundly influenced other writers, critics, scholars and students. These latest essays reflect Ngugi's continuing interests and enthusiasms. His choice of writers is original. He makes us look again at their novels to address his lifelong concerns with the ways to independence, the meanings of colonialism and the takeover by neo-colonialism, and the functions of literature in political as well as literary terms. They will appeal not only to his international band of supporters. They will also introduce his views to young people discovering African and Caribbean literature.

Africa has been coveted for its riches ever since the era of the Pharaohs. In past centuries, it was the lure of gold, ivory, and slaves that drew fortune-seekers, merchant-adventurers, and conquerors from afar. In modern times, the focus of attention is on oil, diamonds, and other valuable minerals. Land was another prize. The Romans relied on their colonies in northern Africa for vital grain shipments to feed the population of Rome. Arab invaders followed in their wake, eventually colonizing the entire region. More recently, foreign corporations have acquired huge tracts of land to secure food supplies needed abroad, just as the Romans did. In this vast and vivid panorama of history, Martin Meredith follows the fortunes of Africa over a period of 5,000 years. With compelling narrative, he traces the rise and fall of ancient kingdoms and empires; the spread of Christianity and Islam; the enduring quest for gold and other riches; the exploits of explorers and missionaries; and the impact of European colonization. He examines, too, the fate of modern African states and concludes with a glimpse of their future. His cast of characters includes religious leaders, mining magnates, warlords, dictators, and many other legendary figures--among them Mansa Musa, ruler of the medieval Mali empire, said to be the richest man the world has ever known. "I speak of Africa," Shakespeare wrote, "and of golden joys." This is history on an epic scale.

Winner of the PEN/ Hemingway Award Winner of the NBCC's John Leonard Award A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, Time, Oprah.com, Harper's Bazaar, San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Esquire, Elle, Paste, Entertainment Weekly, the Skimm, PopSugar, Minneapolis Star Tribune, BuzzFeed, The Guardian, Financial Times Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi's extraordinary novel illuminates slavery's troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed--and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.

In "Grandma Comes to Stay, " three-year-old Stephanie helps her mother tidy up, go shopping at the market, and cook in preparation for Grandma's stay. When she arrives, Grandma gives Stephanie a box of pencils and reads her favorite book. The next day she shows Stephanie how to tie a head-dress, and Stephanie shows Grandma how to kick a ball, play with dolls, and bang a drum. At bedtime Grandma tells her a wonderful story, and when Grandma leaves the next morning Stephanie says, "Come back soon, Grandma!" Written and photographed by an award-winning author, this is a uniquely heartwarming book to share with all young children. (Ages 4-7)

A reissue of this proclaimed novel, and Zimbabwean classic, that won both the Zimbabwe Book Publishers' Association first prize for literature, and the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa in 1989. The story is the sensitive evocation of Marita, a farm- worker, whose only son joined the freedom fighters in Zimbabwe's war of liberation. The poetic language is rich in Shona idiom.

A passionate witness to the colossal upheaval that has transformed her native South Africa, Gillian Slovo has written a memoir that is far more than a story of her own life. For she is the daughter of Joe Slovo and Ruth First, South Africa's pioneering anti-apartheid white activists, a daughter who always had to come second to political commitment. While recalling the extraordinary events which surrounded her family's persecution and exile, and reconstructing the truth of her parents' relationship and her own turbulent childhood, leading her at one point to a chilling interview with one of the men responsible for her mother's death, Gillian Slovo has reated an astonishing portrait of a courageous, beautiful mother and a father of integrity and stoicism.

Slasher meets satire in this darkly comic novel set in Nigeria about a woman whose younger sister has a very inconvenient habit of killing her boyfriends

A funny, heartwarming story set in modern-day Zambia. One morning twelve-year-old Fred wakes up with an unaccountable sense of foreboding, which his friend Bul-Boo, one of the twins from next door, insists is just in his imagination. However, the feeling persists – and grows stronger when Fred’s terrifying great-granny, Nokokulu, asks him to accompany her on a trip to an ancient burial site known as the Place of Death. Then Bul-Boo overhears her parents talking about patients going missing from her mother’s AIDS clinic, and when one of the patients turns out to be Fred’s Aunt Kiki, the children suddenly view Nokokulu’s trip in a different light. Could the two events somehow be linked? As the three friends and the old woman journey into the heart of Zambia, each of them hopes to right wrongs, both past and present … but dark clouds are gathering and ancient magic is in the air.

When a bomb explodes in a downtown Nairobi hotel, private detectives Ishmael and Odhiambo quickly make the connection to a murder case they’re investigating. It’s the first big break for their new detective agency, Black Star, formed after they were teamed together as policemen and they tracked down a Rwandan war criminal through the violent Kenyan underworld. But then the CIA and the local police claim the bombing was the work of Al Qaeda, though it’s clear to Ishmael and O. that something else is going on. They’re under pressure to back off from the investigation, until a startling act of violence tips the scales—and the detectives take off on a round-the-globe pursuit of the shadowy forces that appear to be behind it all. With Kenya riven by ethnic violence, following the disputed elections of 2007, and Obama on the campaign trail in the United States, Ishmael, an American cop who’d made a new life for himself in Africa, confronts a changed world, where everything he thought he knew gets thrown into doubt—and the only way to find the answers is to go to extremes. A thrilling, hard-hitting sequel to Nairobi Heat, from a major new crime talent.

Hailed as "a monumental history . . . more exciting than any novel" (NRC Handelsblad),David van Reybrouck’s rich and gripping epic, in the tradition of Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, tells the extraordinary story of one of the world's most devastated countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo. Epic in scope yet eminently readable, penetrating and deeply moving, David van Reybrouck's Congo: The Epic History of a People traces the fate of one of the world's most critical, failed nation-states, second only to war-torn Somalia: the Democratic Republic of Congo. Van Reybrouck takes us through several hundred years of history, bringing some of the most dramatic episodes in Congolese history. Here are the people and events that have impinged the Congo's development—from the slave trade to the ivory and rubber booms; from the arrival of Henry Morton Stanley to the tragic regime of King Leopold II; from global indignation to Belgian colonialism; from the struggle for independence to Mobutu's brutal rule; and from the world famous Rumble in the Jungle to the civil war over natural resources that began in 1996 and still rages today. Van Reybrouck interweaves his own family's history with the voices of a diverse range of individuals—charismatic dictators, feuding warlords, child-soldiers, the elderly, female merchant smugglers, and many in the African diaspora of Europe and China—to offer a deeply humane approach to political history, focusing squarely on the Congolese perspective and returning a nation's history to its people.

Set on the campus of a Nigerian university, Double Yoke tells the story of two undergraduates who must confront the conflicting demands of tradition and modernity. While Nko pursues an education despite the resistance of those who feel a woman's identity is assumed in traditional marriage, Ete Kamba's love for her is severely tested as he is himself locked into the rigid attitudes from which Nko is attempting to break free. Nko must further contend with unscrupulous professors who would take advantage of her tenuous role as a woman in a male-dominated environment. As the author candidly portrays the status of women in emerging African nations, the choices facing Ete Kamba and Nko are neither clearcut nor perfect. In Double Yoke, Buchi Emecheta faces them head on.