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Why do many Nigerian leaders ‘change’ once in office? Will the present generation of Nigerians do any better than its predecessors? Was Occupy Nigeria indeed a failure? Do we need a ‘Nigerian Dream’?
Written with the keenness of youth but earnest and wise beyond its years, Are We the Turning Point Generation? will resonate with young Nigerians while remaining relatable to previous generations.
A vital re-examination of a shared history, published to accompany the landmark BBC Two series.
In Black and British, award-winning historian and broadcaster David Olusoga offers readers a rich and revealing exploration of the extraordinarily long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa. Drawing on new genetic and genealogical research, original records, expert testimony and contemporary interviews, Black and British reaches back to Roman Britain, the medieval imagination and Shakespeare’s Othello.
It reveals that behind the South Sea Bubble was Britain’s global slave-trading empire and that much of the great industrial boom of the nineteenth century was built on American slavery. It shows that Black Britons fought at Trafalgar and in the trenches of the First World War. Black British history can be read in stately homes, street names, statues and memorials across Britain and is woven into the cultural and economic histories of the nation.
Unflinching, confronting taboos and revealing hitherto unknown scandals, Olusoga describes how black and white Britons have been intimately entwined for centuries.
A bracing, revelatory look at the demise of liberal democracies around the world–and a road map for rescuing our own
Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang–in a revolution or military coup–but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one.
Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die–and how ours can be saved.
No American statesman has been as revered or as reviled as Henry Kissinger. Once hailed as “Super K”—the “indispensable man” whose advice has been sought by every president from Kennedy to Obama—he has also been hounded by conspiracy theorists, scouring his every “telcon” for evidence of Machiavellian malfeasance. Yet as Niall Ferguson shows in this 2-volume biography, drawing not only on Kissinger’s hitherto closed private papers but also on documents from more than a hundred archives around the world, the idea of Kissinger as the ruthless arch-realist is based on a profound misunderstanding. The first half of Kissinger’s life is usually skimmed over as a quintessential tale of American ascent: the Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany who made it to the White House. But in this first of two volumes, Ferguson shows that what Kissinger achieved before his appointment as Nixon’s national security adviser was astonishing in its own right. Toiling as a teen in a New York factory, he studied indefatigably at night. He was drafted into the infantry & saw action at the Battle of the Bulge—as well as the liberation of a concentration camp—but ended his army career interrogating Nazis. It was at Harvard that Kissinger found his vocation. Having immersed himself in the philosophy of Kant & the diplomacy of Metternich, he shot to celebrity by arguing for limited nuclear war. Nelson Rockefeller hired him. Kennedy called him to Camelot. Yet Kissinger’s rise was anything but irresistible. Dogged by press gaffes & disappointed by Rocky, Kissinger seemed stuck—until a trip to Vietnam changed everything. The Idealist is the story of one of the most important strategic thinkers America has ever produced. It’s also a political Bildungsroman, explaining how “Dr Strangelove” ended up as consigliere to a politician he’d always abhorred. Like Ferguson’s classic 2-volume history of the House of Rothschild, Kissinger sheds new light on an entire era. The essential account of an extraordinary life, it recasts the Cold War world.
Out Of StockFrom a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.”
Out Of StockFrom a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.”
Out Of Stock
A Story of Heroes and Epics: The History of Football in Nigeria tells the hugely significant story of the rise of football in colonial Nigeria as a unifying cultural force in the country. The origins of the game in Nigeria, the history of organised football, the institutions that produced the early football stars, the first Nigerian players to play abroad, Nigeria’s first international matches, the earliest rivalries and narratives on football’s incursion into the southern and northern regions, are some of the subjects that form the basis of this incredible social history of Nigeria.
Lucid, entertaining and insightful, the writer introduces you to key historical characters ranging from the colonial officers, western missionaries and school principals to the Nigerian political leaders and founding fathers who influenced the rise of football as both a popular pastime and a unifying force for the country.
After undertaking the difficult task of researching Nigeria’s colonial era, conducting dozens of primary interviews, and collating documented history on the roots of football in the country from local and foreign archives, Dr. Wiebe Boer came up with a fabulous book that is destined to become an essential read for understanding Nigeria’s intriguing relationship with football and how the game has played such an important role in the construction of Nigeria’s national identity.
Among his many books, perhaps none have sparked more outrage than The Missionary Position, Christopher Hitchens’s meticulous study of the life and deeds of Mother Teresa.
A Nobel Peace Prize recipient beatified by the Catholic Church in 2003, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was celebrated by heads of state and adored by millions for her work on behalf of the poor. In his measured critique, Hitchens asks only that Mother Teresa’s reputation be judged by her actions-not the other way around.
With characteristic elan and rhetorical dexterity, Hitchens eviscerates the fawning cult of Teresa, recasting the Albanian missionary as a spurious, despotic, and megalomaniacal operative of the wealthy who long opposed measures to end poverty, and fraternized, for financial gain, with tyrants and white-collar criminals throughout the world.
From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart—a long-awaited memoir of coming of age in a fragile new nation, and its destruction in a tragic civil war
For more than forty years, Chinua Achebe maintained a considered silence on the events of the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Decades in the making, There Was a Country is a towering account of one of modern Africa’s most disastrous events, from a writer whose words and courage left an enduring stamp on world literature. A marriage of history and memoir, vivid firsthand observation and decades of research and reflection, There Was a Country is a work whose wisdom and compassion remind us of Chinua Achebe’s place as one of the great literary and moral voices of our age.
“[A] critical analysis of how various Nigerian social and political institutions have created and sustained opportunities for illegal gain. The book offers fascinating details of political corruption, and a useful distillation of the mechanics of criminal enterprises, but its primary contribution to Nigerian historiography lies in mapping links between the breakdown of longstanding African institutions during the colonial period, the emergence of new arrangements to fill the gaps, and current illegal activity by official and conventional criminals.” — The International Journal of African Historical Studies
“This is quite simply a dynamite book, striking first of all for the sheer depth of research that has gone into it. It is remarkable, too, in the way that it is able to fit this material into a bigger picture, created not only by a thorough familiarity with Nigerian history and politics, but also by an awareness especially of the spiritual dimensions of Nigerian life, and the ways in which these feed through into crime as well as virtually every other aspect of Nigerian affairs.” — Christopher Clapham, University of Cambridge
“Lucid, starkly realistic, and beautifully written, this book calls into sharp focus the nature of corruption in Nigeria. Ellis provides an insightful explanation for why reform programmes almost always end in disappointment. This book is a significant contribution to our understanding of the nature of the state in this most important African country. The richness and clarity of the empirical detail and the overall analysis validates Ellis' position as one of the most consistently imaginative and creative thinkers of our time on the central issues of politics in Africa. More than any other book, this sober analysis of the deep historical social roots of corruption is sure to be
When We Ruled is by far the best general work on the ancient and medieval history of Black people there has ever been.
This landmark publication, which is superbly illustrated with high quality photographs, maps and drawings, provides an extraordinary and cutting-edge synthesis of the archaeological data, the documentary evidence, and the historical linguistic research. It recounts the fascinating story of the origin and development of indigenous civilisations across the vast panorama of the African continent.
In particular, the author answers the key question in Black history: How much documented history is there beyond the Slave Trade, Mary Seacole, and Malcolm X? In 713 pages that question is answered again and again with a vast array of evidence that explodes the widely held view that Africans were without historical distinctions. In particular, there are ancient and medieval monuments that are still standing all over Africa. In addition, there are Black families and institutions that still possess their medieval manuscripts.
The history of Black people cannot be divorced from the history of peoples on other continents particularly Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Topic areas that have traditionally been ignored, such as Black Women’s history, early African science and technology, and the two-way influences between Africa and Europe, are also discussed.
What is remarkable about this work is that for the first time it dares to connect Egypt, and its cultural affinities, with Africa and its chronological timeline within the vast chronology (nearly 90,000 years) of African achievement. It is now untenable for Egyptologists to consider themselves to be experts on Egypt without understanding the African cultural signature embedded within Ancient Egypt and its long history.
Faculty, students and parents interested in a comprehensive, critical and balanced overview of African or Black history will find no better book.
