AFRICANS IN BONDAGE BONDAGE


Book Description

BOOK ONE: AFRICANS STILL IN FETTERS Patrice Emery Lumumba, Congo’s First Prime Minister and President said at All-African Conference in 1960, “The Colonialists care for nothing for Africa for her own sake. They are attracted by African riches and their actions are guided by the desire to preserve their interests in Africa against the wishes of the African people. For colonialists allmeans are good if they help them to possess these riches.” An African adage says; “if you close your eyes to facts, you will learn through accidents.” The above and so many other quotes which are used as emphases on the results of research works into the claims of some notable African leaders indicate that Western Nations are not as friendly as they seemright from the time of slave trade. The playwright attempts to present the results of his research works on why African nations are never free from conflicts, economic, social and political servitude through the use of different academic papers that are treated in educational dramas with the titles “Grand Conspiracies Against Africa”, “The Speeches Of Discord”, “The Conspiracy Theory Of History”, “The Brain Development Of A Child”, “The Problem With Technology”, “The Handover Of Legacy”, “The Warmongering Nations”, “The Slave Masters In Africa” and “Mothers: The DeterminantsOf Destinies” in book one. BOOK TWO: SPIRITUAL BONDAGE With studied cases that are peculiar to Africa, the author attempts to explain some mysteries relating to cultism; witchcraft; black magic and others. These dramas titled: “The Threats Of Cult Members On Campus”, The Choice Of Death”, “Lagidi: The Spirit Husband”, “The Mirage Of A Marriage”, “Truth Is The Weapon Of Freedom”, “The Enemies Of Marriage”, “The Wrath Of An Accuser” and “House Of God In A Mess” are mostly based on real life experiences. They paint vivid pictures of how thespirit realm can influence the physical world.




People in Bondage


Book Description

A history of the slave trade from ancient and medieval times to its abolition after the Civil War.




Up from Bondage


Book Description

The first systematic comparison of the emergence of cultural nationalism among Russian and African-American intellectuals in the post-emancipation era.




Black Bondage in the North


Book Description

This history of the Northern slave system examines its operation from its colonial beginnings to its dissolution. In the early 19th century the author sees that economic displacement allows an emancipation of blacks that is at least as beneficial to the masters as to the blacks.




Ernest Cole: House of Bondage


Book Description

One of the frankest books ever done on South Africa. -Robert Cromie, Chicago Tribune First published in the US in 1967 and in Britain in 1968, House of Bondage presented images from South Africa that shocked the world. The young African photographer Ernest Cole had left his country at 26 to find an audience for his stunning exposure of the system of racial dominance known as apartheid. In 185 photographs, Cole's book showed from the vantage point of the oppressed how the system closely regulated and controlled the lives of the black majority. He saw every aspect of this oppression with a searching eye and a passionate heart. House of Bondage is a milestone in the history of documentary photography, even though it was immediately banned in South Africa. In a Chicago Tribune review, Robert Cromie described it as "one of the frankest books ever done on South Africa--with photographs by a native of that country who would be most unwise to attempt to return for some years." Cole died in exile in 1990 as the regime was collapsing, never knowing when his portrait of his homeland would finally find its way home. Not until the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg mounted enlarged pages of the book on its walls in 2001 were his people able to view these pictures, which are as powerful and provocative today as they were 50 years ago. Ernest Cole was born near Pretoria, South Africa, in 1940. Leaving school at 17 to become a photographer, he secured staff jobs and freelance assignments for newspapers and magazines for black people--honing his skills with a correspondence course from the New York Institute of Photography. Inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson's book The People of Moscow, in 1960 Cole embarked on a project to document the lives of his people, which resulted in House of Bondage.




Voices Beyond Bondage


Book Description

Slaves in chains, toiling on master’s plantation. Beatings, bloodied whips. This is what many of us envision when we think of 19th century African Americans; source materials penned by those who suffered in bondage validate this picture. Yet slavery was not the only identity of 19th century African Americans. Whether they were freeborn, self-liberated, or born in the years after the Emancipation, African Americans had a rich cultural heritage all their own, a heritage largely subsumed in popular history and collective memory by the atrocity of slavery. The early 19th century birthed the nation’s first black-owned periodicals, the first media spaces to provide primary outlets for the empowerment of African American voices. For many, poetry became this empowerment. Almost every black-owned periodical featured an open call for poetry, and African Americans, both free and enslaved, responded by submitting droves of poems for publication. Yet until now, these poems -- and an entire literary movement -- have been lost to modern readers. The poems in Voices Beyond Bondage address the horrific and the mundane, the humorous and the ordinary and the extraordinary. Authors wrote about slavery, but also about love, morality, politics, perseverance, nature, and God. These poems evidence authors who were passionate, dedicated, vocal, and above all resolute in a bravery which was both weapon and shield against a world of prejudice and inequity. These authors wrote to be heard; more than 150 years later it is at last time for us to listen.




Blacks in Bondage


Book Description

A collection of letters written by American Slaves




Something Akin to Freedom


Book Description

2010 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Why would someone choose bondage over individual freedom? What type of freedom can be found in choosing conditions of enslavement? In Something Akin to Freedom, winner of the 2008 SUNY Press Dissertation/First Book Prize in African American Studies, Stephanie Li explores literary texts where African American women decide to remain in or enter into conditions of bondage, sacrificing individual autonomy to achieve other goals. In fresh readings of stories by Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, Gayl Jones, Louisa Picquet, and Toni Morrison, Li argues that amid shifting positions of power and through acts of creative agency, the women in these narratives make seemingly anti-intuitive choices that are simultaneously limiting and liberating. She explores how the appeal of the freedom of the North is constrained by the potential for isolation and destabilization for women rooted in strong social networks in the South. By introducing reproduction, mother-child relationships, and community into discourses concerning resistance, Li expands our understanding of individual liberation to include the courage to express personal desire and the freedom to love.




Medical Bondage


Book Description

The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as “medical superbodies” highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.




Genius in Bondage


Book Description

Until fairly recently, critical studies and anthologies of African American literature generally began with the 1830s and 1840s. Yet there was an active and lively transatlantic black literary tradition as early as the 1760s. Genius in Bondage situates this literature in its own historical terms, rather than treating it as a sort of prologue to later African American writings. The contributors address the shifting meanings of race and gender during this period, explore how black identity was cultivated within a capitalist economy, discuss the impact of Christian religion and the Enlightenment on definitions of freedom and liberty, and identify ways in which black literature both engaged with and rebelled against Anglo-American culture.