Books On Africa

[Viva Fidel]

I don't feel like there are many threads on books on Africa like Mandela, Ethiopia, Nkhruma, etc. Post up some good books in this thread on African history, where the original man was born!

[Sankara1983]

including revolutionary and mainstream books:

• Thomas Sankara Speaks [Pathfinder]
- There is a short interview in TSS about reading. The books he mentions (this doesn't mean he endorses them) are:
* La gauche la plus bête du monde (Jean Dutourd)
* Das Kapital (Karl Marx)
* Gosudarstvo i revolyutsiya (Vladimir Ilich Lenin) tr.
* The Bible
* Qur'an
* L'Abeille et l'architecte (François Mitterrand)
* L'Aventure ambiguë (Cheikh Hamidou Kane)
* L'Autogestion en Algérie (Ahmed Mahsas)
* L'Amour en vogue (Bernard Pivot)
* Putsch à Ouagadougou (Gérard de Villiers)
* The Devil's Alternative (Frederick Forsyth)

• Long Walk to Freedom (Mandela)
• De moord op Lumumba (Ludo de Witte) tr.
• The Black Jacobins (C.L.R. James)
Haiti's history is inseparable from Africa.
• Our Votes, Our Guns (Meredith)
• books by Ryszard Kapuściński
• Dark Star Safari (Paul Theroux)
• books by Frantz Fanon
• King Leopold's Ghost (Hochschild)
• We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (Gourevitch)
• Remember Ruben (Mongo Beti)
• anything by or about Amílcar Cabral
• books and essays of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
• books by Nuruddin Farah

[Comrade Marcel]

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney

Anything by Amilcar Cabral

anything by Kwame Nkrumah...

Joe Slovo (if you can stand his anti-Stalin and neo-Trot crap theory)

Here is a good place to start:

http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/index.htm

Also, there is a good series from Encyclopedia Britannica (surprisingly) published in four volumes, if you ever see it (maybe at a library or something) I recommend it.

It's called the "Afro-American History Series"

V. I A People Uprooted (1500-1800)

V. II Chains of Slaver (1800-1865)

V. III Seperate and Unequal (1865-1910)

V. VI quest for Equality (1910-Present)

Volume 1 is the most relevant if you want info on Africa itself, but it is absolutely essential to put in context how the slave trade efected Africa.

This series also comes with Filmstrips. A good place to check is a University.

Another excellent film, in cartoon format, which was (oddly enough) created for Duetsch school kids is called "History book" series. It's in English and has a completely Marxists analysis. Since it was designed for kids, even a complete novice to politics could watch this and in the end understand historical materialism, etc. There is one particular section on it which deals a lot with Africa (actually it is almost all throughout here and there as places like Africa and India played a major role in the change in the mode of production to merchantile capitalism, and to the motivation of the colonizers to "explore" and conqour "new" parts of the world".

[Hampton]

I Write What I Like : Selected Writings- Steve Biko

The World and Africa: W.E. DuBois

[Mariam]

What about Chinwa Achebe??
Civil War or Things Fall Apart.

[Mujer Libre]

Originally posted by [email protected] 1 2006, 05:29 PM
I Write What I Like : Selected Writings- Steve Biko

The World and Africa: W.E. DuBois
I'm reading Donald Woods' bio of Steve Biko at the moment (called "Biko"), and it's really interesting. I've also been reading his work in the SASO newsletter archives and stuff (for uni).

I'm sure there are more, but I can't really think of any at the moment...