Africa's first elected woman president shares an uplifting account about her improbable rise to prominence after a childhood marked by abuse and exile in a memoir that also relates her efforts on behalf of humanitarian rights and her hopes for rebuilding civil war-torn Liberia. Read more

An ambitious and shocking exposé of America’s hidden empire in Liberia, run by the storied Firestone corporation, and its long shadowIn the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation’s explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic.Empire of Rubber tells a sweeping story of capitalism, racial exploitation, and environmental devastation, as Firestone transformed Liberia into America’s rubber empire.Historian and filmmaker Gregg Mitman scoured remote archives to unearth a history of promises unfulfilled for the vast numbers of Liberians who toiled on rubber plantations built on taken land. Mitman reveals a history of racial segregation and medical experimentation that reflected Jim Crow America—on African soil. As Firestone reaped fortunes, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few elites, fostering widespread inequalities that fed unrest, rebellions and, eventually, civil war.A riveting narrative of ecology and disease, of commerce and science, and of racial politics and political maneuvering, Empire of Rubber uncovers the hidden story of a corporate empire whose tentacles reach into the present. Read more

Diamonds for Rice tells the unique true story of a businessman, caught up in an African civil war, who bought his way out with a few bags of rice - traded for priceless diamonds. This gripping memoir covers the carnage in Africa, an amazing escape from the Orly bombing and two bone marrow transplants for Eric. This is a vivid account of Liberia's shameful past and the brutal civil war where rice was traded for valuable diamonds to pay for the last remaining air tickets. Ex-president Charles Taylor was sentenced to fifty years for war crimes - and is now serving that sentence in the UK. Diamonds for Rice also describes the worldwide search for a bone marrow donor, who came to the rescue twice and saved Eric Evans from certain death. The ground-breaking medical story and the real-life dramas run side by side, involving the reader from the start. Gripping and honest about the realities about living with blood cancer, Diamonds for Rice will particularly appeal to those who have been affected by it, as well as those considering joining the bone marrow donor register. It will also be enjoyed by those interested in history and memoirs. Anthony Nolan and DKMS, both global organisations, have contributed to Diamonds for Rice. Read more

He wanted a war. And, for his sins, he got one. James Brabazon was an ambitious young war reporter when he entered the chaos of the Liberian Civil War in 2002. Running with the infamous LURD rebels, he survived numerous deadly ambushes and a dramatic two-hundred-mile escape from Government troops through dense equatorial jungle. He even had a bounty put on his head. Surrounded by child soldiers, cannibals and ruthless rebels, Brabazon was accompanied by Nick du Toit, a South African mercenary with a dangerous past. Before long, Nick promised James the scoop of his life: a front seat, beside Simon Mann, in an audacious coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea. And the offer was too good to refuse. Read more

“Exceptionally well written, a true story that seems as much a thriller as the remembrances of an ambitious and brave woman. . . . This timely book. . . is a lesson in courage and perseverance.”  — Washington PostAn inspirational memoir from Africa’s first elected female president about her improbable rise to international prominence, her fight for political freedom, and her unwavering determination to rebuild her nation—Liberia—in the wake of civil warIn January 2006, after the Republic of Liberia had been racked by fourteen years of brutal civil conflict, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf—Africa's "Iron Lady"—was sworn in as president, an event that marked a tremendous turning point in the history of the West African nation.In this stirring memoir, Sirleaf shares the story of her rise to power, including her early childhood; her experiences with abuse, imprisonment, and exile; and her fight for democracy and social justice. She reveals her determination to succeed in multiple worlds, from her studies in the United States to her work as an international bank executive, to campaigning in some of Liberia's most desperate and war-torn villages and neighborhoods. It is the tale of an outspoken political and social reformer who fought the oppression of dictators and championed change. By telling her story, Sirleaf encourages women everywhere to pursue leadership roles at the highest levels of power, and gives us all hope that we can change the world. Read more

James Ciment, in his enthralling history Another America, shows that the settlers struggled to balance their high ideals with their prejudices. On the steamy shores of West Africa, they re-created the only social order they knew, that of an antebellum Dixie, with themselves as the master caste, ruling over a native population that outnumbered them twenty to one. They built plantations, held elegant dances, and worked to protect their fragile independence from the predations of foreign powers. Meanwhile, they fought, abused, and even helped to enslave the native Liberians. The persecuted became the persecutors - until a lowly native sergeant murdered their president in 1980, ending 133 years of Americo-Liberian rule and inaugurating a quarter century of civil war. Riven by caste, committed to commerce, practicing democratic and Christian ideals haphazardly, the Americo-Liberians created a history that is, to a surprising degree, the mirror image of our own. Read more

Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this important new account of decolonization reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world.Adom Getachew shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal, political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and creating the New International Economic Order.Using archival sources from Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, Worldmaking after Empire recasts the history of decolonization, reconsiders the failure of anticolonial nationalism, and offers a new perspective on debates about today’s international order. Read more

WINNER OF THE 2011 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE I n a time of death and terror, Leymah Gbowee brought Liberia's women together- and together they led a nation to peace. As a young woman, Leymah Gbowee was broken by the Liberian civil war, a brutal conflict that tore apart her life and claimed the lives of countless relatives and friends. Years of fighting destroyed her country- and shattered Gbowee's girlhood hopes and dreams. As a young mother trapped in a nightmare of domestic abuse, she found the courage to turn her bitterness into action, propelled by her realization that it is women who suffer most during conflicts- and that the power of women working together can create an unstoppable force. In 2003, the passionate and charismatic Gbowee helped organize and then led the Liberian Mass Action for Peace, a coalition of Christian and Muslim women who sat in public protest, confronting Liberia's ruthless president and rebel warlords, and even held a sex strike. With an army of women, Gbowee helped lead her nation to peace- in the process emerging as an international leader who changed history. Mighty Be Our Powers is the gripping chronicle of a journey from hopelessness to empowerment that will touch all who dream of a better world. Read more

In A Short History of the United States, National Book Award winner Robert V. Remini offers a much-needed, concise history of our country. This accessible and lively volume contains the essential facts about the discovery, settlement, growth, and development of the American nation and its institutions, including the arrival and migration of Native Americans, the founding of a republic under the Constitution, the emergence of the United States as a world power, the outbreak of terrorism here and abroad, the Obama presidency, and everything in between. Read more

Campaigner, insurgent, fugitive, rebel commander, commodity kingpin, elected president, exile and finally prisoner, Charles Taylor sought to lead his country to change but instead ignited a conflict which destroyed Liberia in over a decade of violence, greed and personal ambition. Taylor's takeover threw much of the neigbouring region into turmoil, until he was finally brought to face justice in The Hague for his role in Sierra Leone's civil war.In this remarkable and eye-opening book, Colin Waugh draws on a variety of sources, testimonies and original interviews - including with Taylor himself - to recount the story of what really happened during these turbulent years. In doing so, he examines both the life of Charles Taylor, as well as the often self-interested efforts of the international community to first save Liberia from disaster, then, having failed to do so, to bring to justice the man it deems most to blame for its disintegration. Read more

“A well-rendered and -documented tale of exploitation in the developing world” (Kirkus Reviews) with deep resonance in the present dayIn a book Paul Farmer called “a gem of a social history linking two countries stuck in uncomfortable embrace for well over a century,” award-winning author and filmmaker Gregg Mitman tells a sweeping story of capitalism, racial exploitation, and environmental devastation, as Firestone transformed Liberia into America’s rubber empire.Scouring remote archives to unearth a story of promises unfulfilled for the vast numbers of Liberians who toiled on rubber plantations built on taken land, Mitman “peppers this history with a wealth of fascinating details and interesting characters” (Foreign Affairs), revealing a system of racial segregation and medical experimentation that reflected Jim Crow America—on African soil.Called “a brilliant, compelling read” by Princeton scholar Rob Nixon, Empire of Rubber, now available in paperback, provides a riveting narrative of ecology and disease, of commerce and science, and of racial politics and political maneuvering—the hidden story of a corporate empire whose tentacles reach into the present. Read more

"Revealing the real George Weah." Front Page Africa Newspaper, Liberia."The long-anticipated and befitting book on former FIFA World Best Player of the Year and Ballon d'Or winner is here." Complete Sports, Nigeria No.1 Sports Daily.George Weah: The Dream, The Legend, The Rise to Power chronicles the life of George Oppong Manneh Weah from birth to his path leading to the presidency of the Republic of Liberia. This first of its kind biographical account of the life of George Weah takes the reader on a journey with George as he grows up in the slums of Gibraltar, and throughout his football and political careers. Mostly based on interviews with Weah's family members, classmates, close friends, coaches, journalists, political associates, and women with whom he has had intimate relationships, it gives the reader an in-depth knowledge of the life of George Weah. George Weah: The Dream, The Legend, The Rise to Power, reveals Mr. Weah up and close. As the book clearly demonstrates, often, knowing about a person from a distance is far different from knowing the person in detail.With more than 180 people interviewed, the book takes the reader on an exhilarating expedition with George Weah through the Ghetto of Gibraltar as he tries to find himself as a lost youth, and as he deals with everyday life's events within his Clara Town Community. George Weah: The Dream, The Legend, The Rise to Power reveals how George overcame the pains of rejections, and the negative stereotype of people born and raised in the ghetto. Weah used his football talents as a vehicle to get out of poverty. With fame and money, he morphed into someone different - a philanthropist, a man with a hunter and gatherer-mindset, a flawed man, and women's magnet. The reader will encounter Mr. Weah's many personality traits. They include, dealing with politicians, friends, women, and managing his personal finance. In George Weah: The Dream, The Legend, The Rise to Power, the reader will meet George Weah within his element as he creates friendship and burns bridges with friends, allies, and supporters. It will take the reader down many rabbit holes, and into many alleyways on George Weah's journey into politics. It unveils his many successes as a football player, and his weaknesses as an imperfect man and the leader of a youthful generation. While George Weah's story is still being written, the book captures a good significant number of events in the life of Weah as a person and as an elected president of Liberia. Read more

SPECIAL COMMENDATION in Africa's 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century. The series is illustrated throughout with maps and black and white photographs. Volume 7 examines the period of partition, conquest and occupation from the beginnings of the 'European Scramble for Africa' to the Italian fascist invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Throughout the volume the focus is on the responsesof Africans themselves to the challenge of colonialism. A general overview is followed by more detailed regional analyses. Chapters 13 to 21 concern the impact of economic and social aspects of colonial systems in Africa from1919 to 1935; the operation of colonial economies; the emergence of new social structures and demographic patterns; and the role of religion and the arts in Africa during the colonial period. The final section traces the growth of anti-colonial movements, the strengthening of African political nationalism and the interaction between black Africa and blacks of the New World. Liberia and Ethiopia are discussed in special chapters. The seriesis co-published in Africa with seven publishers, in the United States and Canada by the University of California Press, and in association with the UNESCO Press. Read more

In 1932, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon spoke to a crowd of black Chicagoans at the old Jack Johnson boxing ring, rallying their support for emigration to West Africa. In 1937, Celia Jane Allen traveled to Jim Crow Mississippi to organize rural black workers around black nationalist causes. In the late 1940s, from her home in Kingston, Jamaica, Amy Jacques Garvey launched an extensive letter-writing campaign to defend the Greater Liberia Bill, which would relocate 13 million black Americans to West Africa. Gordon, Allen, and Jacques Garvey—as well as Maymie De Mena, Ethel Collins, Amy Ashwood, and Ethel Waddell—are part of an overlooked and understudied group of black women who take center stage in Set the World on Fire, the first book to examine how black nationalist women engaged in national and global politics from the early twentieth century to the 1960s. Historians of the era generally portray the period between the Garvey movement of the 1920s and the Black Power movement of the 1960s as one of declining black nationalist activism, but Keisha N. Blain reframes the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War as significant eras of black nationalist—and particularly, black nationalist women's—ferment. In Chicago, Harlem, and the Mississippi Delta, from Britain to Jamaica, these women built alliances with people of color around the globe, agitating for the rights and liberation of black people in the United States and across the African diaspora. As pragmatic activists, they employed multiple protest strategies and tactics, combined numerous religious and political ideologies, and forged unlikely alliances in their struggles for freedom. Drawing on a variety of previously untapped sources, including newspapers, government records, songs, and poetry, Set the World on Fire highlights the flexibility, adaptability, and experimentation of black women leaders who demanded equal recognition and participation in global civil society. Read more

Africa: A Guide for Teachers and Families is a carefully organized resource for teaching children and adolescents about African culture. This book is divided into geographical regions so each can be highlighted and contrasted. The songs, fairy tales, mythologies, biographies, art, and recipes are highlighted with practical activities for each grade including kindergarten. This is an invaluable book for teachers in elementary and high school as well as for home school parents. Based on this extensive, well-researched book, Waldorf teachers have created a full unit on Africa. Teachers and parents will welcome this updated and expanded 2022 edition of the successful book, Hear the Voice of the Griot!.This new and exciting edition makes the music, history, animals, and people of Africa come alive – as well as offering things you can make and do. Check out the interactive connections to YouTube videos, bringing Africa into your home and classroom. Read more

Since 1983 journalist Bill Berkeley has traveled through Africa's most troubled lands-Rwanda, Liberia, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, and Zaire-seeking out the tyrants and military leaders who orchestrate seemingly intractable wars. Shattering the myth that ancient tribal hatred lies at the heart of the continent's troubles, Berkeley instead holds accountable the "Big Men" who came to power during this period, describing the very rational methods behind their apparent madness. A New Republic Book Read more

More Auspicious Shores chronicles the migration of Afro-Barbadians to Liberia. In 1865, 346 Afro-Barbadians fled a failed post-emancipation Caribbean for the independent black republic of Liberia. They saw Liberia as a means of achieving their post-emancipation goals and promoting a pan-Africanist agenda while simultaneously fulfilling their 'civilizing' and 'Christianizing' duties. Through a close examination of the Afro-Barbadians, Caree A. Banton provides a transatlantic approach to understanding the political and sociocultural consequences of their migration and settlement in Africa. Banton reveals how, as former British subjects, Afro-Barbadians navigated an inherent tension between ideas of pan-Africanism and colonial superiority. Upon their arrival in Liberia, an English imperial identity distinguished the Barbadians from African Americans and secured them privileges in the Republic's hierarchy above the other group. By fracturing assumptions of a homogeneous black identity, Banton ultimately demonstrates how Afro-Barbadian settlement in Liberia influenced ideas of blackness in the Atlantic World. Read more

Between 1991-2002 Sierra Leone endured a brutal civil war that became synonymous with amputations, blood diamonds, child soldiers, cannibalism, kidnappings, rape and sexual slavery. The question of how a peace-loving country descended into such a violent civil war in which multiple factions committed the most macabre war crimes and crimes against humanity is what its Truth and Reconciliation Commission set out to investigate at the end of the conflict and it is a question that underlies this narrative.Many Sierra Leoneans, especially those born after the war, do not understand how their country became so engulfed in a protracted civil war that in the end ruined countless lives and property. This book does not set out to offer definitive answers - it merely provides a path to understanding the cumulative effects of entrenched corruption, human rights violations, and bad governance that made war inevitable.It is a comprehensive history of the Sierra Leonean civil war that is intended as a starting point for those who are interested in delving deeper into the labyrinth of diplomacy, violence, treachery, and claims to supernatural powers that rendered the Sierra Leonean civil war complex and nearly impossible to end. Read more

Drawing on rich oral histories from over two hundred in-depth interviews in West Africa, Europe, and North America, Robtel Neajai Pailey examines socio-economic change in Liberia, Africa's first black republic, through the prism of citizenship. Marking how historical policy changes on citizenship and contemporary public discourse on dual citizenship have impacted development policy and practice, she reveals that as Liberia transformed from a country of immigration to one of emigration, so too did the nature of citizenship, thus influencing claims for and against dual citizenship. In this engaging contribution to scholarly and policy debates about citizenship as a continuum of inclusion and exclusion, and development as a process of both amelioration and degeneration, Pailey develops a new model for conceptualising citizenship within the context of crisis-affected states. In doing so, she offers a postcolonial critique of the neoliberal framing of diasporas and donors as the panacea to post-war reconstruction. Read more