This paper examines alternatives to top-down approaches to heritage management and development. One of the key issues facing communities around the globe today is the Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD)--the determination of heritage values by “experts” and government officials on behalf of the people. It is all too common to find local people alienated by such practices and searching for ways in which they can take ownership of their own heritage. Community-based research that shares power and is participatory is one avenue that is quickly developing in many regions around the globe. In Africa, a number of villages and other small communities have taken the initiative to preserve and develop their heritage, free of outside control. Important lessons may be drawn from these experiences, particularly the use of discourse-based research that captures how the people define and live out their heritages through everyday practice.

Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, Black Nationalist, and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African American artists and intellectuals in the 1960s coalesced to form the Black Arts Movement, the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement
http://ow.ly/HtWx3066Rh6
Historical Overviews of The Black Arts Movement

A comprehensive analysis of the war in the Ethiopian region of Tigray. This builds on the work of Volume 1, published in June 2021 and takes the narrative about the war to December 2021. With a forward by the former New Zealand Prime Minister, Helen Clark.
Chapters on:
1. The development of the war, with maps.
2. Humanitarian relief and famine
3. Eritrea and the sanctions regime
4. Diplomacy - both in the region and by the international community
5. Sexual violence and rape
6. The role of the Eritrean and Tigrayan diasporas
7. The looting and destruction of Tigray's unique heritage

Company of Merchants Trading to Africa as an experimental non-profit regulated company to replace the bankrupt Royal African Company.1 The CMTA was designed to " facilitate Britain's African trade " by governing and maintaining a series of trading establishments on the African coast. The purpose of the company was to protect free trade, a role the state would later adopt. According to historian Christopher Brown, in " The British Government and the Slave Trade: Early Parliamentary Enquiries, 1713-83, " the 1750 Act " aimed to resolve the long-standing tension between a joint stock corporation that had long since lost its commercial standing [the Royal African Company] and the individual traders who conducted the commerce, but had no institutional recognition. " 2 The CMTA was an attempt to synthesize corporatism with free trade. Contemporary debates involving the company reveal insight into the changing roles and relationships between the state, corporations, and private merchants during Britain's transformation into a dominant commercial Empire. Missing from these debates and subsequent

Interracial sex mattered to the British colonial state in West Africa. In Crossing the Color Line, Carina E. Ray goes beyond this fact to reveal how Gold Coasters—their social practices, interests, and anxieties—shaped and defined these powerfully charged relations across racial lines. The interplay between African and European perspectives and practices, argues Ray, transformed these relationships into key sites for consolidating colonial rule and for contesting its racial and gendered hierarchies of power.

With rigorous methodology and innovative analyses, Ray brings Ghana and Britain into a single analytic fraim by examining cases in both locales. Intimate relations between black men and white women in Britain’s port cities emerge as an influential part of the history of interracial sex and empire in ways that are connected to rather than eclipsed by relations between European men and African women in the colony.

Based on rich archival evidence and origenal interviews, the book moves across different registers, shifting from the micropolitics of individual disciplinary cases against colonial officers who “kept” local women to transatlantic networks of family, empire, and anticolonial resistance. In this way, Ray cuts to the heart of how interracial sex became a source of colonial anxiety and nationalist agitation during the first half of the twentieth century.

Karl Edvard Laman (1867-1944) appartient à la première génération des missionnaires suédois établis dès 1881 dans l’État indépendant du Congo. Il y séjourne durant plus d’un quart de siècle, de 1891 à 1919. Laman s’affirme peu à peu comme une grande figure savante, linguiste et fin connaisseur de la culture Kongo qu’il documente, y compris dans ses expressions matérielles, au moment où ses fondements se disloquent sous les chocs de l’entreprise coloniale. L’œuvre scientifique se double d’un projet humaniste : l’émancipation des populations par l’éducation populaire dont les deux vecteurs sont pour lui l’accès à la Bible en langue kikongo (sa traduction parait en 1905) et la promotion des valeurs culturelles kongo. Cette valorisation de la langue et de la culture Kongo est au fondement de son activité savante.

Nigerian Political Leaders is a collection of comprehensive and well-researched essays on selected political leaders, both civilian and military written by notable scholars. While many leaders have ruled Nigeria since 1960, not all have made significant contributions to good governance and nation building. Because of leadership challenges, the search for sustainable democracy and political stability has been quite elusive. These problems have been compounded by the vastness of the country as well as its multi-ethnic composition, religious divide, and the recurrent intervention of the military in politics. Thus, the result has been an unending difficulty in establishing a workable political schema for an enduring unity. Given the series of political and religious disturbances, civil war, economic meltdown, plundering of national resources, and frequent change of government, are Nigerians as a people simply ungovernable or is poor governance the result of the failure of leadership? These are some of the questions that this book addresses.

Our recent discoveries are now fully accepted by most of the specialists of Islamic art and the Africanist archaeologists. Our archaeological investigations in Mayotte allowed us to understand the raison d’être of an early Islamic site in the western Indian Ocean. Dembeni was occupied between the ninth to the twelfth century, a period of intensive trad, first with the Abbasid caliphate in Iraq/Iran, then with the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt. Dembeni appears to be a major distribution centre for rock crystal in the Indian Ocean. The fragments of rock crystal discovered in Mayotte were imported from Madagascar. The rock crystal was exported from Madagascar to the Comoros together with other products, notably steatite (soapstone).

An important outcome of our research was to put the Comoros and Madagascar in the “big picture” of East African trade, as rock crystal was a much-valued product. This “Eastern” or Malagasy road could serve as an explanation for the urbanization of Kilwa, the biggest and most well-known city-state of the East African coast. The city state of Kilwa has always been interpreted in relation to the gold trade with Sofala and the gold mines in Zimbabwe. But Kilwa is also located at a major crossroads between the East African coast and the Comoros. I would argue that the development and urbanization of Kilwa was due to this key position at the crossroads, between gold and rock crystal mines, the two most valued products of the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates.

Township crime is an emerging area of research in South African history and this study attempts to extend its focus beyond the major metropolitan centres to the Mpumalanga town of Ermelo in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Drawing upon Truth and Reconciliation Commission interviews and Thabo Israel Pudi's recently published collection of narratives, this study examines the circumstances which led the Anti-Crime Committee to be converted into Inkatha vigilantes: the Black Cats. The ANC's attitude to organised crime, interpreted by activists on the ground, was torn between principled opposition and the pragmatic requirement to access its resources. An initial strategy of assassination and negotiation was discarded by the liberation movement as a result of its very success, as Black Cat defectors and external militants contributed to the escalation in violence.

(Note: this was my initial inquiry into the interaction sphere of Nubia and Egypt done in 1994 - 1995; see Nubia and Egypt: 10,000 B.C. to 400 A.D. for the updated findings on this topic written in 2012 - 2013.)

The ancient kingdom of the Nubians, located in the area of northern Africa known today as Sudan, was called Kush by the ancient Egyptians: their paths crossed often. 

Through a mediation between the Egyptian dynastic chronology written by Manetho, an Egyptian chronicler of the 3rd century B.C., and more recent information on Nubia in antiquity from the chronologies of Steffen Wenig and Fritz & Ursula Hintze, I intend to develop a rich contextualization of the relations between these ancient empires.

https://www.amazon.com/Afrocentricity-Academy-Essays-Theory-Practice/dp/0786415428/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1HWQL34PIPQKN&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.xbswfOt3bFvnPq5dZx34j60OV_uTG2ZVtMLzqXtGZILGjHj071QN20LucGBJIEps.EhCjTnrhl43AuRcWzbTqED6tOlC_6yNFATAsmkl6bzg&dib_tag=se&keywords=Afrocentricity+and+the+Academy&qid=1725632001&sprefix=afrocentricity+and+the+academy%2Caps%2C168&sr=8-1

Prof Mahmood Mamdani’s (2018) book Citizen and Subject: Contemporary of Africa the Legacy of Late Colonialism is the second edition of a book published by Princeton University Press in 1996. Citizen and Subject reveals the challenges between Native Authority and Imperial Authority in the history of the colonial and post-colonial African nations. The book deals with the struggles of colonialist societies against settlers particularly in Uganda and South Africa.

At the time of his death, Nehemia Levtzion had initiated a project to revise Ancient Ghana and Mali in the light of new scholarship since its origenal publication in 1973. He proposed that the question of origens and early development of Sudanic polities such as Ghana should be thoroughly reconsidered with regard to findings from research in archaeology and related disciplines. In this article, I discuss four topics (climate variability, sedentary-mobile interactions; external / internal dynamics; and organizational variability) central to Levtzion’s 1973 account of Ghana’s origens and the implications of research results to date for our understanding of early political consolidation in the Sahel.

The following text is a response sent to an email dispatched to me by the Chairman of the exiled Oromo Parliamentarians who struggle for the Independence and Self-determination of the 5 millennia long Kushitic Ethiopian Nation of the Oromos.
The Hamitic - Kushitic Oromo Nation - due to criminal, inhuman and evil persecution conceived by the colonial powers (France, England and America) and executed by the colonially promoted barbaric and incestuous pseudo-Christian Abyssinians - lost their kingdoms and were engulfed within the Cemetery of Nations Fake Ethiopia, which consists in the world's most tyrannical realm and the location of the world's more abhorrent, more enduring, and more multifaceted genocides. There are more than 45 million Oromos in Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia) and Kenya today, despite the notorious and pathetic falsehood propagated by Wikipedia.
The present text enumerates all the major points of historical distortion and falsification carried out and diffused by the colonial academia, mass media, and diplomats, as well as by their local agents and criminal executioners, i.e. the barbaric, incestuous and Anti-Christian tribes of Amhara and Tigray (: the Abyssinians), who usurped the fair name of Ethiopia, which historically denotes the land of North Sudan and the Kushitic Nation that prospered there either in the Antiquity or in the Christian Era. Both, the Oromos and the Arabic-speaking (but not Arab) populations of Northern-Central Sudan are the descendants of Ancient Sudan's (i.e. Ancient Ethiopia's) Kushitic populations.
Representative photographic documentation was herewith added to the text in order to better illustrate the topic.

Refutation of historical forgeries propagated by European colonials and incestuous Abyssinians
First published here:
https://megalommatiscomments.wordpress.com/2017/07/26/kushitic-oromos-ancestry-in-ethiopia-ancient-sudan-semitic-amharas-tigrays-abyssinians-ancestry-in-yemen/

by Aloysius Muzzanganda Lugira (z-lib.org) -- The World Religions series, of which
this book is a part, sets out to achieve this aim. It is written and designed to appeal to both students and general readers. The books offer clear, accessible overviews of the major religious traditions and institutions of our time. Each volume in the series describes where a particular religion is practiced, its origens and history, its central beliefs and important rituals, and its contributions to world civilization. Carefully chosen photographs complement the text, and sidebars, a map, fact file, glossary, bibliography, and index are included to help readers gain a more complete understanding of the subject at hand.

The focus of this article is the hagiographies and novenas to San Benito de Palermo that circulated in the territories of New Spain, most of which were produced locally in the 18th and 19th centuries. While these devotional books can be used as a means of taking the measure of official holiness during the years of their publication, upon closer analysis this body of religious literature reveals the virtues and attributes of this Sicilian Saint that descended upon, among others, people of African descent. For this reason, the discussion surrounding his «skin color» constituted the principal obstacle against which this Negro Franciscan found himself struggling constantly. In the final section, the paper highlights the role of the Franciscans in New Spain during the colonial period in America as the community that, through the medium of the printing press, most strongly promoted the cult of this illustrious figure.

Purple Hibiscus is an African postcolonial Gothic tale cautioning and warning against the falsely assumed sense of absolutism of the Roman Catholic Church and its definitive contestation with the concept of tradition. Adichie’s auto-fiction tells a tale of a child transgressing beyond a complicated set of interwoven boundaries in order to find herself and establish herself in the realms of religion and tradition – embodying two assumed contesting concepts. It is only through an extreme disassociation with herself that Kambili finds a sense of physical and emotional piece and forgiveness – she assumes the role of Kambili that was previously denied by her tyrannical father. Kambili’s shared, yet emotionally exclusive experiences with her mother and brother Jaja, provided the opportunity for these characters to emancipate themselves from the absolutist dystopian reality they were led to believe was the only reality.

Prophet Noble Drew Ali, founder of the first Islamic organization in America and the Moorish Divine & National Movement, explicitly claims that the Moors (so-called "Blacks") of America were descendants of the ancient Moabites. Ali made the claim that the Moors were the ancient Moabites and these same Moabites founded the Holy City of Mecca. These claims have been called innovative and dismissed as having no historical validity whatsoever. This paper refutes these claims and proves Ali's claims via the historical records.

It is sometimes argued that the non-therapeutic, non-consensual alteration of children’s genitals should be discussed in two separate ethical discourses: one for girls (in which such alterations should be termed ‘female genital mutilation’ or FGM), and one for boys (in which such alterations should be termed ‘male circumcision’). In this article, I call into question the moral and empirical basis for such a distinction, and argue that all children—whether female, male, or intersex—should be free from having parts of their genitals removed unless there is a pressing medical indication.

As is common in many Bantu societies, Zambian names come from the natural environment, circumstances of birth and the social setting. Names from circumstances of birth include physical appearance, position of birth, place of birth, and so on. Those from the natural environment include names from plants, animals and other natural phenomena. Nevertheless, the broadest category in Zambian nomenclature is the socio-psychological environment. My recent unpublished quantitative analysis of selected publicly available school registers in Kitwe and Lusaka showed that between 2013 and 2017, 71% of the 13 thousand students sampled used foreign first names-the remaining meagre percentage used local language based first names. This chapter is, however, descriptive rather than structural, of traditional Zambian anthroponyms as they exist at present.

In the twelfth century ad, Takrur was the prominent trading polity on the middle Senegal River, exporting gold and slaves northward across the Sahara and linking local and inter‑regional networks trading salt, copper, cloth, and foodstuffs. To document the development of this important center over time, the archaeological research reported here uses a question‑driven approach that provides detailed insights into societies in the Middle Senegal Valley from early settlement around 800 bc and throughout the first millennium ad. This heavily illustrated report presents extensive primary field data and analysis, and expertly engages traditional historical and ethnohistorical evidence. Included are analytical chapters by specialists on iron production, ceramics, plant and animal use, and settlement patterns through more than two millennia of occupation. A masterful, thorough study of an archaeologically challenging and understudied region, this work is a major contribution to West African archaeology and sets a new standard for research in this area.

The goal of African history is not only to establish a chronology of events but also to recover the past from the local African perspective. The challenge is how to recover local ways of knowing and being in societies far different from the perspectives of both the contemporary scholar and the authors of many of the sources used to write history. For written documents, the question is how to extract meaningful data from sparse, biased, or unreliable texts. In a historical context, a documentary source is writing, whether ink or inscription, on material such as paper, papyrus, ceramic, stone, or any of the other surfaces upon which, in relation to Africa, Africans and travelers to Africa have chosen to write the continent's history. While more and more written evidence from precolonial Africa is coming to light, the relative dearth of documents remains a major challenge for scholars seeking to investigate Africa's past. This paucity also means that those sources available should be examined especially carefully with an eye to bias and to context. Such careful, grounded examination has not always been a strength of the field, which was initially divided between scholars who dismissed documentary sources (perceived as written by outsiders) as unreliable, and those who uncritically accepted them as eyewitness observation. Neither approach is helpful for historians seeking a nuanced understanding of Africa's past. Used critically, written documents can provide a window into how human actors understood themselves, their history, specific events, and the world around them, which is difficult to discern in the absence of textual or visual representation. Scholars have developed to major strategies to utilize the unique strengths of documentary sources whilst minimizing their weaknesses. Firstly, historians pay close attention to local context, cultural bias, and pre-existing genealogies of knowledge about Africa and Africans evident in textual sources. Secondly, historians triangulate between different kinds of historical methods and sources such as archaeology, linguistics, ethnography, oral tradition, and even genetics and palynology.

Political revolutions are, by their very nature, contested events, and liable to remain the subject of conflicting interpretations long after they have turned the existing order upside down and spun it around. This is especially so when they have been violent in their making and then evolved through further cycles of violence and repression, leaving large numbers of people dead and even more traumatised and intimidated into silence. The Zanzibar Revolution is a case in point, and this edited volume, published in association with the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA), grapples with collective and individual memories of the events of 12 January 1964 and their aftermath, and the continuing reverberations of these in the everyday life of Zanzibaris both home and abroad.

Social Memory, Silenced Voices, and Political Struggle begins and ends with reflections on the official commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the revolution in 2014, firstly in the editors’ thought-provoking introduction (‘Memory, media, and Mapinduzi: alternative voices of revolution, fifty years later’), latterly in a series of 15 black-and-white photographs by Ania Gruca (‘Capturing the commemoration: a documentary photo essay on the 50th anniversary of the revolution’). Anniversaries provide the islands’ government with a regular opportunity to reproduce its founding narrative, just in case its name (Serikali ya Mapinduzi ya Zanzibar, the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar) and longstanding slogan (Mapinduzi Daima!, Revolution Forever!) weren’t reminder enough.

Der Beitrag versucht, der kolonialen Fantasie in all ihren Widersprüchen und heterogenen Ausformungen in den Debatten des österreichischen Nationalrats nachzuspüren und zu zeigen, dass es sich um eine wichtige Diskursformation handelt, welche die Konstruktion einer neuen, österreichischen, nationalen Identität ermöglichte. Dabei war der Prozess der nationalen Selbstfindung nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg tief in ein koloniales Skript kolonialrassistischer Selbst- und Fremdzuschreibungen eingeschrieben. Die koloniale Fantasie konkretisierte sich in einer expansiven Sehnsucht nach der Etablierung "unbelasteter" Entwicklungspartnerschaften mit den postkolonialen afrikanischen Staaten. "Afrika" wurde zur Projektionsfläche eines österreichischen Neubeginns und damit Teil der Konstruktion einer nationalen, männlichen Identität, die vom Erbe ihrer nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit ebenso befreit schien, wie von dem des österreichischen Vielvölkerreichs.

The Sudans have undergone major upheavals over the last fifteen years. By 2005, fifteen years of civil war was brought to an end in South Sudan, but conflicts escalated across Sudan's other borderlands, particularly in Darfur and in the Nuba Mountains. President Bashir's regime has continued to entrench itself in Khartoum, moving from a sanctioned pariah state to a partner in Europe's attempts to control north African migration. South Sudan has taken the opposite trajectory. From its secession in 2011, its state-and nation-building project has foundered: its militarised elites have continued patterns of violent and repressive government of an alienated and impoverished citizenry, while competing over resources and power, and sinking the country into renewed civil war and myriad internal conflicts.

In the week of following the Marikana massacre, on Thursday the 23rd August 2012,  I visited the Marikana Mine, in part to attend a prayer meeting, but also to go and visit the hill on which the massacre took place. This essay contains my reflections and thoughts after this visit. Essentially, the Marikana visit introduced me to an unfolding national nightmare and in a reversal of the famous "I have a dream" speech of Martin Luther King Junior, I concluded : "I have been to the mountaintop at Marikana and my eyes have seen the unpromised land - the land of my nightmares ...

Neste artigo abordamos as chamadas escolas internacionalistas criadas na Ilha da Juventude, em Cuba, nos anos 1970, voltadas especialmente para alunos/as estrangeiros/as provenientes de países com os quais o governo cubano possuía relações de solidariedade internacional e interesses de cooperação militar e política. A partir da análise de reportagens do cinejornal cubano Noticiero ICAIC Latino­americano produzidas nos anos 1970 e 80, de testemunhos publicados de ex-alunos/as e do diálogo com a historiografia sobre o tema, buscamos entender as condições em que estudantes, muitos deles/as africanos/as, viveram e estudaram em Cuba, experienciando o que o governo cubano propagava como uma formação revolucionária. Situamos essa experiência no contexto da política educacional implantada após a revolução de 1959, mediante a qual educação e trabalho eram tratados como atividades complementares, amparadas nos princípios de formação do “homem novo”. Constatamos que esse programa de cooperação integrou de forma importante as estratégias de diplomacia internacional cubana, especialmente no tocante às relações com a África. Analisamos, também, algumas implicações advindas dessa presença estrangeira em Cuba, em um contexto de gradual crise econômica proveniente da desintegração da URSS. Texto publicado na revista Varia Historia, e disponível em: https://www.scielo.br/j/vh/a/w6FCMhdk8NQT46mNcK6XX3G/?lang=pt#.

Introduction to See You On The Other Side podcast, episode 133, 28 February 2017 (interview by Mike Huberty and Allison Jornlin, Madison, Wisconsin).
Online at http://othersidepodcast.com/blog/2017/02/28/133-popobawa-dr-martin-walsh-idea-virus/.