These poems from one of Africa's most highly acclaimed poets and the winner of the 1991 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, are an ironic celebration of collective aspirations, failures, guilts and hopes. They call for change in a society wracked with problems. The poet sets out to produce a collection that captures the significant happenings of the time in a tune that is simple, accessible, topical, relevant, and artistically pleasing and, as he puts it: 'to remind kings about the corpses which line their way to the throne, to show the rich the slums which fester behind their castles, to praise virtue, denounce vice, to mirror the triumphs and travails of the downtrodden, to celebrate the green glory of the rainy season and the brown accent of the dry, to distil poetry from the dust and clay of the vast, prodigious land - songs plucked from the lips of my land in its manifold laughters and sorrows.'

Songs of the Season (Heinemann Frontline Series)

Literature & Fiction

Osundare, N

Poetry

Fourth Dimension Publishing Company

The aim of this book is to provide an accurate account, combining academic critical analysis and polemical writing, of a chapter of Cameroonian history; and to place individual contributions and discussion into a framework which elucidates French/African connections. The essays sketch France's colonial impact in Africa and the complex post-colonial relationship between France and Africa as a direct consequence of Gaullist rule in France. Characterisations of the regime of Ahmadu Ahijo show how it fits into a particular pattern of French neo-colonial polity, and illustrate Cameroon's adopted solution to operating such a system. The editor extrapolates to comment on the social consequences of dictatorial rule in Africa, and the importance of the Gaullist strategy in explaining the pattern of political power in ex-French Africa. He includes writings from the exiled Cameroonian novelist, Mongo Beti, for their relevance to debates about intellectual freedom and expression, and the tendency of the establishment to distort the truth about Ahidjo's Cameroon. There are notes on the central role of military tribunals, brutalities and torture, and prisons and concentration camps; issues which were casualties of the belief that they were inevitable concomitants of political integration and nation building.

Gaulist Africa. Cameroon under Ahidjo

History

Joseph, R.

Africa

Nwosu investigates how successive regimes in Nigeria have sought to create and develop legitimate political authority and structures, and how these structures have shaped and developed the civil service and its capacity to plan and induce economic development. He addresses the fear that the civil service does not have enough authority to fulfil its centralised functions and gain support and credibility, instead relying on mechanisms from ethnic appeal to coalition making. He identifies the alternative and plural clusters of power, and discusses how they arose, and how they have shaped the processes, which have turned Nigeria into an unbalanced federation, further constrained by corruption, and a lack of skilled manpower and infrastructure.

Political Authority (Igbo Life and Culture Series, 3, 3)

Politics & Social Sciences

Nwosu, Humphrey N

Politics & Government

Diary of a Homeless Prodigal is a collection of short essays first written for the newspaper Renaissance (Lagos), and brings together the authors ideas and impressions during his years abroad and at home. The final extended piece is an extract from the diary he kept whilst in Brixton prison. In it he reflects upon poverty and prostitution, and the position of blacks throughout the world. He considers the social contradictions of European/American civilisation, many of which lie along racial lines, where philosophies and religions declaim universal brotherhood and sufferage, whilst an economic structure divides mankind into exploiters and expoited.

Diary of a Homeless Prodigal

Egbuna, Obi

Biographies & Memoirs

There can be no better time to revive the major strands of social and political thought about Africa in the nineteeth and twentieth centuries than now; given the consensus of opinion that over the last two decades African societies, and policies relating to the continent have largely failed. This book, illustrates that failures in Africa are not for a lack of ideas and arguments, or intellectual life. At the very least, it is a document of the rich history of ideas about the continent, by some of its most influential thinkers. The collection includes pieces on major African leaders/thinkers - Sekou Toure, Blydeen Awolowo and Nkrumah; and contributions by leaders themselves e.g. Nyerere on the process of liberation, and relative concepts of freedom. The other essays are by major intellectuals on currents and periods in social thought and intellectual history, such as Mazui on questions of (pan) - African indentities, on Africanness and colonialism, and African socialism.

Themes in African Social and Political Thought

Anthropology

Precedence in Nigerian Courts

Umoh, P. U

Foreign & International Law

Christian colonisers enter into conflict with the Igbo Juju priest, custodians of African values, in a fictional account of the destructive influence of Western religion on African spiritual and moral life, spanning the arrival of the first missionaries in Nigeria to political independence. Ogali, a long-time prolific and successful writer of popular literature in Nigeria, came to be associated with the Onitsha Market Literature pamphleteers. This work also includes a full introduction which provides some background to the author's work and a snapshot of the history and development of the Onitsha Market Literature movement.

The Juju Priest

Ogali, A

Contemporary

A collection of essays concerned with the unity and purpose of human knowledge and culture in an African setting. The volume contains Chinua Achebe's essay 'Commitment and the African Writer' in which he discusses the development in African literature through the poetry of Equiano, Senghor and David Diop; and compares attitudes of African and European writers to committed literature and commitment as disenchantment and self-criticism in the post-colonial period. There are other notable essays on philosophy and languages. 'Towards an African Philosophy' addresses individual and cultural, and European and African approaches to philosophy; and attitudes towards moral questions in an African culture; and another contributor examines the role and status of African languages in intellectual activity and scientific discourse. Other subjects broached by individual writers are archaeology and the reconstruction of African heritage; music and dance; and the contribution of education and information to development and urbanisation.

Readings; African Humanities

Business & Money

Kalu, Ogbu Uke

Economics

<p>The Ibibio people of Nigeria have an intense belief in the supernatural - in ancestral and non-ancestral spirits and witches who cause disorders in society and have to be appeased or neutralised to maintain social and cosmological equilibrium. Professor Daniel Offiong provides a detailed description of myth among the Ibibio and its relevance in explaining misfortunes and social order. He describes how social dynamics, failures and nautural disasters are explained in the relationship between animate and inanimate spiritual forces. He explains Mbiam, a magically potent object used for divination possessing supernatural ability to detect innocence and guilt, and its potency in inflicting punishment. A full account is given of the anti-witchcraft crusade in 1978 and its consequences.</p>

Witchcraft, Sorcery, Magic & Social Order Amoung the Ibibio of Nigeria

Offiong, Daniel A.

Between 1952 and 1981 there were no less than thirty-one coups or military takeovers in Africa, thirty of which took place between 1963 and 1981. Babatope's historical narrative describes inter alia, the coups in Nigeria, Ghana, Zaire, Upper Volta, Sierra Leone, Togo, Benin, Central African Republic, Mali, Congo Brazzaville, Uganda, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Liberia and Niger. Drawing parallels between the various examples he explores their causes, rooted predominantly in history and foreign influence, tribal wrangling for power and corruption, and the exploitation of illiteracy. He shows that eighteen of the coups were against civilian power, and thirteen against soldiers in power, of which only three could rightly be considered revolutionary - Egypt, Libya and Ethiopia. He argues that every military regime has been an unmitigated disaster, and that only democracy, modelled on the kind of African socialism developed by Nyerere can bring about real improvement. Obafemi Awolowo has written the foreword to the book.

Coup: Africa and the Barrack Revolts

Babatope, Ebenezer

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