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Africa Every Day presents an exuberant, thoughtful, and necessary counterpoint to the prevailing emphasis in introductory African studies classes on war, poverty, corruption, disease, and human rights violations on the continent. These challenges are real and deserve sustained attention, but this volume shows that adverse conditions do not prevent people from making music, falling in love, playing sports, participating in festivals, writing blogs, telling jokes, making videos, playing games, eating delicious food, and finding pleasure in their daily lives. Across seven sections—Celebrations and Rites of Passage; Socializing and Friendship; Love, Sex, and Marriage; Sports and Recreation; Performance, Language, and Creativity; Technology and Media; and Labor and Livelihoods—the accessible, multidisciplinary essays in Africa Every Day address these creative and dynamic elements of daily life, without romanticizing them. Ultimately, the book shows that forms of leisure and popular culture in Africa are best discussed in terms of indigenization, adaptation, and appropriation rather than the static binary of European/foreign/global and African. Most of all, it invites readers to reflect on the crucial similarities, rather than the differences, between their lives and those of their African counterparts. Contributors: Hadeer Aboelnagah, Issahaku Adam, Joseph Osuolale Ayodokun, Victoria Abiola Ayodokun, Omotoyosi Babalola, Martha Bannikov, Mokaya Bosire, Emily Callaci, Deborah Durham, Birgit Englert, Laura Fair, John Fenn, Lara Rosenoff Gauvin, Michael Gennaro, Lisa Gilman, Charlotte Grabli, Joshua Grace, Dorothy L. Hodgson, Akwasi Kumi-Kyereme, Prince F. M. Lamba, Cheikh Tidiane Lo, Bill McCoy, Nginjai Paul Moreto, Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué, James Nindi, Erin Nourse, Eric Debrah Otchere, Alex Perullo, Daniel Jordan Smith, Maya Smith, Steven Van Wolputte, and Scott M. Youngstedt.

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AIDS is now the leading cause of death in Africa, where twenty-eight million people are HIV-positive, and where some twelve million children have lost one or both parents to AIDS. In Zimbabwe, 45 percent of children under the age of five are HIV-positive, and the epidemic has shortened life expectancy by twenty-two years. A fifteen-year-old in Botswana or South Africa has a one-in-two chance of dying of AIDS. AIDS deaths are so widespread in sub-Saharan Africa that small children now play a new game called “Funerals.” The Children of Africa Confront AIDS depicts the reality of how African children deal with the AIDS epidemic, and how the discourse of their vulnerability affects acts of coping and courage. A project of the Institute for the African Child at Ohio University, The Children of Africa Confront AIDS cuts across disciplines and issues to focus on the world's most marginalized population group, the children of Africa. Editors Arvind Singhal and Stephen Howard join conversations between humanitarian and political activists and academics, asking, “What shall we do?” Such discourse occurs in African contexts ranging from a social science classroom in Botswana to youth groups in Kenya and Ghana. The authors describe HIV/AIDS in its macro contexts of vulnerable children and the continent's democratization movements and also in its national contexts of civil conflict, rural poverty, youth organizations, and agencies working on the ground. Singhal, Howard, and other contributors draw on compelling personal experience in descriptions of HIV/AIDS interventions for children in difficult circumstances and present thoughtful insights into data gathered from surveys and observations concerning this terrible epidemic.

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The Sacred Door and Other Stories: Cameroon Folktales of the Beba offers readers a selection of folktales infused with riddles, proverbs, songs, myths, and legends, using various narrative techniques that capture the vibrancy of Beba oral traditions. Makuchi retells the stories that she heard at home when she was growing up in her native Cameroon. The collection of thirty-four folktales of the Beba showcases a wide variety of stories that capture the richness and complexities of an agrarian society’s oral literature and traditions. Revenge, greed, and deception are among the themes that frame the story lines in both new and familiar ways. In the title story, a poor man finds himself elevated to king. The condition for his continued success is that he not open the sacred door. This tale of temptation, similar to the story of Pandora’s box, concludes with the question, “What would you have done?” Makuchi relates the stories her mother told her so that readers can make connections between African and North American oral narrative traditions. These tales reinforce the commonalities of our human experiences without discounting our differences.

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Women's writing in Cameroon has so far been dominated by Francophone writers. The short stories in this collection represent the yearnings and vision of an Anglophone woman, who writes both as a Cameroonian and as a woman whose life has been shaped by the minority status her people occupy within the nation-state. The stories in Your Madness, Not Mine are about postcolonial Cameroon, but especially about Cameroonian women, who probe their day-to-day experiences of survival and empowerment as they deal with gender oppression: from patriarchal expectations to the malaise of maldevelopment, unemployment, and the attraction of the West for young Cameroonians. Makuchi has given us powerful portraits of the people of postcolonial Africa in the so-called global village who too often go unseen and unheard.

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The dark years of European fascism left their indelible mark on Africa. As late as the 1970s, Angola was still ruled by white autocrats, whose dictatorship was eventually overthrown by black nationalists who had never experienced either the rule of law or participatory democracy. Empire in Africa takes the long view of history and asks whether the colonizing ventures of the Portuguese can bear comparison with those of the Mediterranean Ottomans or those experienced by Angola's neighbors in the Belgian Congo, French Equatorial Africa, or the Dutch colonies at the Cape of Good Hope and in the Transvaal. David Birmingham takes the reader through Angola's troubled past, which included endemic warfare for the first twenty-five years of independence, and examines the fact that in the absence of a viable neocolonial referee such as Britain or France, the warring parties turned to Cold War superpowers for a supply of guns. For a decade Angola replaced Vietnam as a field in which an international war by proxy was conducted. Empire in Africa explains how this African nation went from colony to independence, how in the 1990s the Cold War legacy turned to civil war, and how peace finally dawned in 2002.

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Decades after independence for most African states, the struggle for decolonization is still incomplete, as demonstrated by the fact that Africa remains associated in many Western minds with chaos, illness, and disorder. African and non-African scholars alike still struggle to establish the idea of African humanity, in all its diversity, and to move Africa beyond its historical role as the foil to the West. As this book shows, Africa’s decolonization is an ongoing process across a range of fronts, and intellectuals—both African and non-African—have significant roles to play in that process. The essays collected here examine issues such as representation and retrospection; the roles of intellectuals in the public sphere; and the fundamental question of how to decolonize African knowledges. African Intellectuals and Decolonization outlines ways in which intellectual practice can serve to de-link Africa from its global representation as a debased, subordinated, deviant, and inferior entity. Contributors Lesley Cowling, University of the Witwatersrand Nicholas M. Creary, University at Albany Marlene De La Cruz, Ohio University Carolyn Hamilton, University of Cape Town George Hartley, Ohio University Janet Hess, Sonoma State University T. Spreelin McDonald, Ohio University Ebenezer Adebisi Olawuyi, University of Ibadan Steve Odero Ouma, University of Nairobi Oyeronke Oyewumi, State University of New York at Stony Brook Tsenay Serequeberhan, Morgan State University

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In the early and mid-1940s, during the period of British wartime occupation, community and religious leaders in the former Italian colony of Eritrea engaged in a course of intellectual and political debate that marked the beginnings of a genuine national consciousness across the region. During the late 1940s and 1950s, the scope of these concerns slowly expanded as the nascent nationalist movement brought together Muslim activists with the increasingly disaffected community of Eritrean Christians. The Eritrean Muslim League emerged as the first genuine proindependence organization in the country to challenge both the Ethiopian government’s calls for annexation and international plans to partition Eritrea between Sudan and Ethiopia. The league and its supporters also contributed to the expansion of Eritrea’s civil society, formulating the first substantial arguments about what made Eritrea an inherently separate national entity. These concepts were essential to the later transition from peaceful political protest to armed rebellion against Ethiopian occupation. Paths toward the Nation is the first study to focus exclusively on Eritrea’s nationalist movement before the start of the armed struggle in 1961.

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Why do female genital cutting practices persist? How does circumcision affect the rights of girls in a culture where initiation forms the lynchpin of the ritual cycle at the core of defining gender, identity, and social and political status? In Making the Mark, Miroslava Prazak follows the practice of female circumcision through the lives and activities of community members in a rural Kenyan farming society as they decide whether or not to participate in the tradition. In an ethnography twenty years in the making, Prazak weaves multiple Kuria perspectives—those of girls, boys, family members, circumcisers, political and religious leaders—into a riveting account. Though many books have been published on the topic of genital cutting, this is one of the few ethnographies to give voice to evolving perspectives of practitioners, especially through a period of intense anticutting campaigning on the part of international NGOs, local activists, and donor organizations. Prazak also examines the cultural challenges that complicate the human-rights anti-FGM stance. Set in the rolling hills of southwestern Kenya, Making the Mark examines the influences that shape and change female genital cutting over time, presenting a rich mosaic of the voices contributing to the debate over this life-altering ritual.

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The concept of Colouredness—being neither white nor black—has been pivotal to the brand of racial thinking particular to South African society. The nature of Coloured identity and its heritage of oppression has always been a matter of intense political and ideological contestation. Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community is the first systematic study of Coloured identity, its history, and its relevance to South African national life. Mohamed Adhikari engages with the debates and controversies thrown up by the identity’s troubled existence and challenges much of the conventional wisdom associated with it. A combination of wide-ranging thematic analyses and detailed case studies illustrates how Colouredness functioned as a social identity from the time of its emergence in the late nineteenth century through its adaptation to the postapartheid environment. Adhikari demonstrates how the interplay of marginality, racial hierarchy, assimilationist aspirations, negative racial stereotyping, class divisions, and ideological conflicts helped mold people’s sense of Colouredness over the past century. Knowledge of this history, and of the social and political dynamic that informed the articulation of a separate Coloured identity, is vital to an understanding of present-day complexities in South Africa.

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