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This omnibus edition brings together concise and up-to-date biographies of Chris Hani, Wangari Maathai, Josie Mpama/Palmer, and Ken Saro-Wiwa. The volume complements history, social justice, and political science courses and is a useful collection for general readers interested in learning about Africäs most influential historical figures.

The precipitous rise and controversial fall of a formidable African leader. Samora Machel (1933-1986), the son of small-town farmers, led his people through a war against their Portuguese colonists and became the first president of the People's Republic of Mozambique. Machel's military successes against a colonial regime backed by South Africa, Rhodesia, the United States, and its NATO allies enhanced his reputation as a revolutionary hero to the oppressed people of Southern Africa. In 1986, during the country's civil war, Machel died in a plane crash under circumstances that remain uncertain. Allen and Barbara Isaacman lived through many of these changes in Mozambique and bring personal recollections together with archival research and interviews with others who knew Machel or participated in events of the revolutionary or post-revolutionary years.

This new biography of Kwame Nkrumah (1909-72), Ghana's first president, demonstrates how his accomplishments extend well beyond his role in Ghanaian decolonization, state-building, and the promotion of pan-Africanism to include his broader anticolonialist work toward an independent, unified Africa.

Chris Hani was one of the most highly respected leaders of the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party, and uMkhonto we Sizwe. His assassination in 1993 threatened to upset the transition to democracy but also prompted an intervention by Nelson Mandela, which accelerated the process.

Drawing from distinctly African source materials and methods, Achebe's groundbreaking historical account examines the shared power, influence, and authority that uniquely African, female-gendered entities-people, diviners, and deities-exert across Africa's interconnected physical and spiritual worlds.

The latest in the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series, Josie Mpama/Palmer: Get Up and Get Moving tells the story of Josie Mpama/Palmer's activism and political legacy in South Africa and around the world.

This concise biography tells the story of Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner who devoted her life to campaigning for environmental conservation, sustainable development, democracy, human rights, gender equality, and the eradication of poverty.

San rock paintings, scattered over the range of southern Africa, are considered by many to be the very earliest examples of representational art. There are as many as 15,000 known rock art sites, created over the course of thousands of years up until the nineteenth century. There are possibly just as many still awaiting discovery.Taking

Amilcar Cabral's charismatic and visionary leadership, his pan-Africanist solidarity and internationalist commitment to "every just cause in the world," remain relevant to contemporary struggles for emancipation and self-determination. This concise biography is an ideal introduction to his life and legacy.

Going beyond the headlines, including the group's 2014 abduction of 276 girls in Chibok and the ensuing international outrage, Boko Haram provides readers new to the conflict with a clearly written and comprehensive history of how the group came to be, the Nigerian government's failed efforts to end it, and its impact on ordinary citizens.

In the accessible and concise A Short History of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Terri Ochiagha asks new questions and brings wider attention to unfamiliar but crucial elements of the story, including new insights into questions of canonicity, and into literary, historiographical, and precolonial aesthetic influences.

Patrice Lumumba was a leader of the independence struggle in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as the country's first democratically elected prime minister. After a meteoric rise in the colonial civil service and the African political elite, he became a major figure in the decolonization movement of the 1950s.

Emperor Haile Selassie was an iconic figure of the twentieth century, a progressive monarch who ruled Ethiopia from 1916 to 1974. This book, written by a former state official who served in a number of important positions in Selassie's government, tells both the story of the emperor's life and the story of modern Ethiopia.

Thomas Sankara, often called the African Che Guevara, was president of Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa, until his assassination during the military coup that brought down his government. Although his tenure in office was relatively short, Sankara left an indelible mark on his country's history and development.

This brilliant little book tells the story of the African National Congress (ANC) Youth League from its origins in the 1940s to the present and the controversies over Julius Malema and his influence in contemporary youth politics.

Govan Mbeki (1910-2001) was a core leader of the African National Congress, the Communist Party, and the armed wing of the ANC during the struggle against apartheid. Known as a hard-liner, Mbeki was a prolific writer and combined in a rare way the attributes of intellectual and activist, political theorist and practitioner.

For some, Zimbabwe's President Mugabe is a liberation hero who confronted white rule and oversaw the radical redistribution of land. For others, he is a murderous dictator who drove his country to poverty. This concise biography, in a highly successful series, reveals the complexity of the man who led Zimbabwe for its first decades of independence.

The African National Congress (ANC) is Africa's most famous liberation movement. It has recently celebrated its centenary, a milestone that has prompted partisans to detail a century of unparalleled achievement in the struggle against colonialism and racial discrimination.

Nelson Mandela brought the poetry of Ingrid Jonker to the attention of South Africa and the wider world when he read her poem "Die kind" (The Child) at the opening of South Africa's first democratic parliament on May 24, 1994.

Focusing on five devastating diseases between 1713 and today - smallpox, bubonic plague, "Spanish influenza," polio, and HIV/AIDS, this book probes their origins, their catastrophic courses, and their consequences in both the short and long terms.

In this concise biography, ideally suited for the classroom, Adekeye Adebajo seeks to illuminate former South African president Thabo Mbeki's contradictions and situate him in a pan-African pantheon.

With vision, hard-nosed judgment, and biting humor, Julius Nyerere confronted the challenges of nation building in modern Africa. Constructing Tanzania out of a controversial Cold War union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar, Nyerere emerged as one of independent Africa's most influential leaders.

A penetrating, accessible portrait of the activist whose execution galvanized the world.

Umkhonto weSizwe, Spear of the Nation, was arguably the last of the great liberation armies of the twentieth century-but it never got to "march triumphant into Pretoria." MK-as it was known-was the armed wing of the African National Congress, South Africa's liberation movement, that challenged the South African apartheid government.

Steve Biko inspired a generation of black South Africans to claim their true identity and refuse to be a part of their own oppression. Through his example, he demonstrated fearlessness and self-esteem, and he led a black student movement countrywide that challenged and thwarted the culture of fear perpetuated by the apartheid regime.

The human rights movement in South Africa's transition to a postapartheid democracy has been widely celebrated as a triumph for global human rights. It was a key aspect of the political transition, often referred to as a miracle, which brought majority rule and democracy to South Africa.

Africa's newest nation has a long history. Often considered remote and isolated from the rest of Africa, and usually associated with the violence of slavery and civil war, South Sudan has been an arena for a complex mixing of peoples, languages, and beliefs. The nation's diversity is both its strength and a challenge as its people attempt to overcome the legacy of decades of war to build a new economic, political, and national future.Most recent studies of South Sudan's history have a foreshortened sense of the past, focusing on current political issues, the recently ended civil war, or the ongoing conflicts within the country and along its border with Sudan. This brief but substantial overview of South Sudan's longue duree, by one of the world's foremost experts on the region, answers the need for a current, accessible book on this important country.Drawing on recent advances in the archaeology of the Nile Valley, new fieldwork as well as classic ethnography, and local and foreign archives, Johnson recovers South Sudan's place in African history and challenges the stereotypes imposed on its peoples.

In this timely addition to the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series, Pamela Scully takes us from the 1938 birth of Nobel Peace Prize winner and two-time Liberian president Ellen Johnson through the Ebola epidemic of 2014-15. Charting her childhood and adolescence, the book covers Sirleaf's relationship with her indigenous grandmother and urban parents, her early marriage, her years studying in the United States, and her career in international development and finance, where she developed her skill as a technocrat. The later chapters cover her years in and out of formal Liberian politics, her support for women's rights, and the Ebola outbreak.Sirleaf's story speaks to many of the key themes of the twenty-first century. Among these are the growing power of women in the arenas of international politics and human rights; the ravaging civil wars in which sexual violence is used as a weapon; and the challenges of transitional justice in building postconflict societies. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is an astute examination of the life of a pioneering feminist politician.

Psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon is one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century. He presented powerful critiques of racism, colonialism, and nationalism in his classic books, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). This biography reintroduces Fanon for a new generation of readers, revisiting these enduring themes while also arguing for those less appreciated-namely, his anti-Manichean sensibility and his personal ethic of radical empathy, both of which underpinned his utopian vision of a new humanism. Written with clarity and passion, Christopher J. Lee's account ultimately argues for the pragmatic idealism of Frantz Fanon and his continued importance today.

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