Regenerating Africa


Book Description

It has been long overdue to address the principal problems that Africa continues to have. How to bring real African solutions to these problems remains unresolved. Palaeontologists have discovered that Africa is the origin of humanity. Africa has also experienced the commodification of its humanity through slavery, colonialism and apartheid. The African continent has been influenced by a melange of races, cultures, religions, ethnic nationalities making the project of how the differences can be managed to forestall conflict and promote the unity of the current 54 states to turn the cacophony of noises into a single voice that can protect Africa a di? cult challenge. This book on Regenerating Africa: Bringing African Solutions to African Problems addresses why Africans must come together and try to address their own problems. They must look back to the spiritual, struggle and knowledge heritage to re-imagine and innovate a new Africa with leadership, governance, systems and institutions that can address the security and well-being, the employment, social inclusion, poverty eradication and the equality of the people. In fact the key problem to find a solution is how to Africanise those that originated from Africa and those that became settlers with different racial, cultural, religious, linguistic and ethnic variations. How to manage inter-African relations? How the settlers from the colonial legacy, the apartheid legacy, the Arabs in Africa and the varied tribes within Africans can all share being Africanised above all else is a real challenge to bring lasting solutions to Africa's enduring problems. This book is one of the few books that addresses the real problems Africa continues to face by suggesting solutions which policy makers and all Africans must learn and never ignore but use to advance a free, united, renascent, proud and dignified independent Africa in this unpredictable time the world is going through. The contributors address in the book how African solutions to African problems in the current global context to create a sustainable African future can be thought, designed and engineered to advance the well-being of people and nature for all. The African Unity for Renaissance series of conferences that over 10 partners contributed to run is the true source for generating the quality papers that have been peer reviewed to constitute the contributions in the book to make African solutions to African problems in reality and not just in talk.




Affective Circuits


Book Description

The influx of African migrants into Europe in recent years has raised important issues about changing labor economies, new technologies of border control, and the effects of armed conflict. But attention to such broad questions often obscures a fundamental fact of migration: its effects on ordinary life. Affective Circuits brings together essays by an international group of well-known anthropologists to place the migrant family front and center. Moving between Africa and Europe, the book explores the many ways migrants sustain and rework family ties and intimate relationships at home and abroad. It demonstrates how their quotidian efforts—on such a mass scale—contribute to a broader process of social regeneration. The contributors point to the intersecting streams of goods, people, ideas, and money as they circulate between African migrants and their kin who remain back home. They also show the complex ways that emotions become entangled in these exchanges. Examining how these circuits operate in domains of social life ranging from child fosterage to binational marriages, from coming-of-age to healing and religious rituals, the book also registers the tremendous impact of state officials, laws, and policies on migrant experience. Together these essays paint an especially vivid portrait of new forms of kinship at a time of both intense mobility and ever-tightening borders.




The African National Congress and the Regeneration of Political Power


Book Description

The ANC is a party-movement that draws on its liberation credentials yet is conflicted by a multitude of weaknesses, factions and internal succession battles. Booysen constructs her analysis around the ANC?s four faces of political power? organisation, people, political parties and elections, and policy and government? and explores how, since 1994, it has acted to continuously regenerate its power.




Christian Citizens and the Moral Regeneration of the African State


Book Description

In recent years the rapid growth of Christian charismatic movements throughout sub-Saharan Africa has drastically reconfigured the region’s religious landscape. As a result, charismatic factions play an increasingly public role throughout Africa, far beyond the religious sphere. This book uses a multi-disciplinary approach to consider the complex relationship between Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity and the socio-political transformation taking place throughout this region. Each of this text’s three main sections helps in understanding how discourses of moral regeneration emanating from these diverse Christian communities, largely charismatic, extend beyond religious bounds. Part 1 covers politics, political elites and elections, Part 2 explores society, economies and the public sphere, and Part 3 discusses values, public beliefs and morality. These sections also highlight how these discourses contribute to the transformation of three specific social milieus to reinforce visions of the Christian citizen. Examining contemporary examples with high quality scholarly insight, this book is vital reading for academics and students with an interest in the relationship between religion, politics and development in Africa.




Evolving Public Space in South Africa


Book Description

Evolving Public Space in South Africa discusses the transformation of public space highlighted in the country. Drawing on examples from major cities, the author demonstrates that these spaces are not only becoming wasted space, but are also adapting and evolving to accommodate new users and uses in various parts of the city. This process of evolution tends to challenge the more traditional visions and general global views of declining public space in cities and argues that it rather resembles the resilience of these spaces and the potential for regeneration through continuously emerging and mutating forms, functions and meanings. Including over 20 black-and-white images, this book would be beneficial to academics and students of urban planning and design and those interested in the regeneration of cities.




Knitting Out of Africa


Book Description

Beautiful and historic African carpets, baskets, and other textiles provide the design inspiration for these 16 sophisticated knitted cardigans, pullovers, and sweater vests. Intended for seasoned knitters, these projects use domino, double knitting, entrelac, intarsia, and stranded two-color techniques worked in fingering-weight yarns. The Shoowa Vest, the African Domino Pullover, and the Arrowheads Cropped Pullover show off fancy stitching, while other designs feature colors borrowed from the mud-dried fabrics of Mali, the block patterns of Ghana, or motifs from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Zaire, and Zimbabwe. African animals decorate the Giraffe Vest and Zebra Cardigan, and elsewhere leaping antelope and birds in flight are used in repeating patterns. Full instructions and charted patterns for at least two adult sizes are provided for each design and high-quality photographs of the finished pieces showcase these classic additions to any wardrobe.




Handbook of Research on the Conservation and Restoration of Tropical Dry Forests


Book Description

Tropical dry forests are the most exploited and endangered ecosystems in the world. A combination of climatic and human factors often reduce these forests to patches of dry scrubs or savannas. Because these ecosystems experience a more arduous and less anticipated environment, they are more prone to environmental stress as plant communities are developed. Therefore, urgent research is necessary to understand both the detrimental issues and problem-solving approaches to conserving these important forests. The Handbook of Research on the Conservation and Restoration of Tropical Dry Forests is a pivotal reference source that combines theory and practice on the current trends and issues in this important ecological subject and discusses future challenges towards conservation strategies of these tropical dry forests. While highlighting topics such as forest management, natural regeneration, and silviculture, this publication examines the anthropogenic impacts on tropical dry forests and the necessity to rebuild their ecosystems. This book is ideally designed for state forest agency professionals, resource managers, non-governmental organization agents, ecologists, botanists, environmentalists, students, and researchers seeking current research on the threats to these forests.




Regeneration


Book Description

A radically new understanding of and practical approach to climate change by noted environmentalist Paul Hawken, creator of the New York Times bestseller Drawdown Regeneration offers a visionary new approach to climate change, one that weaves justice, climate, biodiversity, equity, and human dignity into a seamless tapestry of action, policy, and transformation that can end the climate crisis in one generation. It is the first book to describe and define the burgeoning regeneration movement spreading rapidly throughout the world. Regeneration describes how an inclusive movement can engage the majority of humanity to save the world from the threat of global warming, with climate solutions that directly serve our children, the poor, and the excluded. This means we must address current human needs, not future existential threats, real as they are, with initiatives that include but go well beyond solar, electric vehicles, and tree planting to include such solutions as the fifteen-minute city, bioregions, azolla fern, food localization, fire ecology, decommodification, forests as farms, and the number one solution for the world: electrifying everything. Paul Hawken and the nonprofit Regeneration Organization are launching a series of initiatives to accompany the book, including a streaming video series, curriculum, podcasts, teaching videos, and climate action software. Regeneration is the inspiring and necessary guide to inform the rapidly spreading climate movement.




Reflections on African Cities in Transition


Book Description

This volume describes African cities in transition, and the economic, socio-political, and environmental challenges resulting from rapid post-colonial urbanization. As the African continent continues to transition from urban configurations inherited from colonial influences and history, it faces issues such as urban slum expansion, increased demands for energy and clean water, lack of adequate public transportation, high levels of inequality among different socio-economic population strata, and inadequate urban governance, planning, and policies. African cities in transition need to reconsider current policies and developmental trajectories to facilitate and sustain economic growth and Africa’s strategic repositioning in the world. Written by an international team of scholars and practitioners, this volume uses case studies to focus on key issues and developmental challenges in selected African cities. Topics include but are not limited to, smart cities, changing notions of democracy, the city’s role in attaining the SDGs, local governance, alternative models for governance and management, corruption, urbanisation and future cities.




Medical Imperialism in French North Africa


Book Description

French-colonial Tunisia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed shifting concepts of identity, including varying theories of ethnic essentialism, a drive toward “modernization,” and imperialist interpretations of science and medicine. As French colonizers worked to realize ideas of a “modern” city and empire, they undertook a program to significantly alter the physical and social realities by which the people of Tunisia lived, often in ways that continue to influence life today. Medical Imperialism in French North Africa demonstrates the ways in which diverse members of the Jewish community of Tunis received, rejected, or reworked myriad imperial projects devised to foster the social, corporeal, and moral “regeneration” of their community. Buttressed by the authority of science and medicine, regenerationist schemes such as urban renewal projects and public health reforms were deployed to destroy and recast the cultural, social, and political lives of Jewish colonial subjects. Richard C. Parks expands on earlier scholarship to examine how notions of race, class, modernity, and otherness shaped these efforts. Looking at such issues as the plasticity of identity, the collaboration and contention between French and Tunisian Jewish communities, Jewish women’s negotiation of social power relationships in Tunis, and the razing of the city’s Jewish quarter, Parks fills the gap in current literature by focusing on the broader transnational context of French actions in colonial Tunisia.