African biographies
•
Available from 9th September, 2024
Nobody can tell your story better than you.
An Adage in Akan says “ wo tanfo sua wo kasa a, Ɔbɔ ne hwene. Na sƐ osua w’asa a, Ɔkyea ne pa”
For this reason, our stories must be told by us.
We must tell our stories whilst we are alive and especially during milestones as 2 decades in a profession.
What the people must know, what has been said wrong, what is printed in the minds and on the hearts of the people; the memory in 2 decades, coming to you in this write up.
This book talks about the relevant stories that occurred in the last 20 years.
The good and the bad, the most difficult challenges, how I survived them, my inspiration, my mentor, the failures and the successes in retrospect.
Just as Joseph’s story was told in the Bible, he was put behind bars for a sin he did not commit.
However, he went from a prisoner to Prime Minister of the whole Egypt, and a global superpower.
The story of Nelson Mandela of South Africa, Ghana’s own Osagyef
•
Over the next two weeks, we will be posting three pieces to mark the publication of Working People Speak – Oral Histories of Neoliberal Africa. Here, the book’s editors introduce the volume, which draws on worker testimonies from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and South Sudan. They argue the value of oral histories in helping document and understand significant change in the everyday working lives of people on the continent, and review the bred range of material covered by the book. Commentaries by Alexander Freund and Kalundi Serumaga will follow next week.
By Jörg Wiegratz, Joseph Mujere, and Joost Fontein
The last few decades have witnessed unprecedented changes in the working lives of people across the African continent. Yet, there has been a surprising dearth of oral histories of work since the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1980s. Compared to scholarship published more than half a century ago, there has been a decline in the use of oral histories to e
•
Dictionary of African Biography
General Editors: Emmanuel K. Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Executive Editor: Steven J. Niven
PROJECT WEBSITE
From the Pharaohs to Frantz Fanon, the Dictionary of African Biography (DAB) provides a comprehensive overview of the lives of Africans who shaped African history. The project is unprecedented in scale, covering the whole of the continent from Tunisia to South Africa, from Sierra Leone to Somalia. It also encompasses the full scope of history from Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt (1490–1468 BCE) and Hannibal, the military commander and strategist of Carthage (243–183 BCE), to Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana (1909–1972), Miriam Makeba (1932–2008), and Nelson Mandela of South Africa (1918–2013). Individuals are drawn from all walks of life, including philosophers, politicians, activists, entertainers, scholars, poets, scientists, religious figures, kings, and everyday people whose lives have contributed to Africa’s history. Oxford University