Short stories which journey through some critical moments in South African history. The journey begins in Sophiatown of the 1950s, one of the most definitive periods in urban culture. This part of the book is in dialogue and also pays tribute to Can Themba, the short-story writer who was once described as the supreme intellectual tsotsi of them all. 200pp, SOUTH AFRICA. JACANA.

Brings to the fore the issue of leadership in developing countries like Kenya. Citing specific examples, it singles out bad leadership as the cause of stagnation and underdevelopment in Africa. This book advocates for a serious discourse on leadership as the most critical factor in a national quest for good governance and prosperity. Unlike other writers who bemoan the state of affairs in Africa without offering alternatives, the authors propose a leadership model that can ensure good governance. This is based on the premise that good leadership means good governance hence reasonable economic growth and development. Values and principles of good leadership are outlined. 300pp, KENYA. EAST AFRICAN EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHERS.

Bosman's Voorkamer stories first appeared in 1950-1951 as a weekly column and was considered by his colleagues as his best work. This volume contains all the Voorkamer stories in the order in which they originally appeared, unabridged and uncensored. In these stories, the local farmers gather in Jurie Steyn's voorkamer, which doubles as the Drogevlei post office, to share the news of the day, comment on world events and tell stories about pretty girls, ghosts and hypochondriacs. Edited by Craig MacKenzie. 400pp, SOUTH AFRICA. TAFELBERG.

The dramatic sociopolitical crisis which befell Côte d'Ivoire in September 2002 gave birth to an unprece-dented political zeal. Immigration, the other, ethno-nationalism, nationalism, patriotism, civil war, youth at risk - such are the words that describe the Côte d'Ivoire' situation. Attempts to explain the 'crisis' in this country, known in recent past as 'relatively peaceful', mainly happen through media 'sensationalism'. This translates at the same time the almost complete control of the scoop media which renders the understanding of the situation only possible through such outlets. The ability of media professionals to coin words through which social history is reflected upon has the effect of complicating the task of social and human sciences while also appearing as stimulating at the same time. Understanding complex situations is now a crossroad of confusion between the simple and the simplified. The challenge for social and human sciences is, therefore, to resume its rightful place by presenting social and political realities in their complexity. Contributions in this book attempt to rid simple words of their excessive simplification to enable an understanding of social and political ills as well as the sense of history. IN FRENCH, 272pp, SENEGAL. CODESRIA.

In most African countries, banana production has been consigned to subsistence production. However, a few countries, especially in Francophone West Africa, have recognised the commercial importance of banana, and have used their special relationship with France to export bananas. This has led to the dualization of the banana sector, with the traditional system existing side by side with a modern sector geared towards export trade. This book is one of the few comprehensive studies that have incorporated both the agronomic and economic aspects of banana production and marketing in Africa. It looks at all facets of banana production, from an historical perspective to the various traditional and modern technologies involved. 262pp, CAMEROON. LANGAA RPCIG.

For over two decades now, West Africa has remained one of Africa's most conflict-ridden regions. It has been a theatre of some of the most atrocious brutalities in the modern world. It has, nonetheless, witnessed one of the most ambitious internal efforts towards finding regional solutions to conflicts through ECOWAS. The lead role of ECOMOG - the ECOWAS peacekeeping force - in search of peaceful solutions to civil wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau and Cote d'Ivoire has yielded a mix of successes and failures. In this book, the authors take a candid look at the role that ECOWAS has played and show how the sub-regional organisation has stabilised and created new conditions conducive to nation building in a number of cases. Conversely, the book shows that ECOWAS has aggravated, if not created, new tensions in yet other cases. 252pp, SENEGAL. CODESRIA.

A novel which portrays the historical roots of the service delivery revolts that have swept South Africa in recent years. With a precise and at times humorous eye for the details of backroom politics and street level organisation, it centres around an engaging and tragic couple: unemployed ex- shop steward revolutionary Monwabisi Radebe and his wife, Constantia, a former nursery school aide turned local councillor in the fictional Eastern Cape township of Sivuyile. Their relationship is a metaphor for the new democratic order. As the council implements an American-financed project of prepaid meters, water cut-offs are visited upon dozens of households in Sivuyile. The idealistic Monwabisi faces the most difficult of choices: to remain loyal to his wife, the mother of his children who represents an increasingly discredited council or take to the streets with disenchanted residents. 352pp, SOUTH AFRICA. JACANA.

Steven Wondu left school at a young age and strayed into the Anyanya Army for a short stint before he was released to wander in the bushes of Eastern follows Wondu's trails from the bushes of South Sudan and attempts to synthesize the historical precedents leading to the long war in the Sudan. Written at the dawn of a new nation for the South Sudanese the author conveys the depressing impact of war on individual and family life. He captures the intricate reality where distrust and fear of Muslims and Arabs found root in the minds of the South Sudanese. 272pp, KENYA. EAST AFRICAN EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHERS.

The age-old project of restructuring the domestic economy, the market society as it has developed in the West, whence it has set out to conquer the whole wide world places at the very centre of the current capitalist expansion the challenge of imperatively reshaping gender identity, inter alia, in market relations. The global perspectives adopted in this volume by the authors, from different academic disciplines and social experiences, ought not to be locked in sterile linearity which within process of globalisation would fail to perceive, the irreversible opening up of the worlds of the south. 212pp, SENEGAL. CODESRIA.

When Epher returns to Nazareth, he meets his childhood sweetheart, Bellewa Miriam, who reveals she has been promised for marriage to the woodwork merchant, old man Joseph, and has been visited by an angel, who informed her that she would conceive that night. Many years later, when the son of Bellewa Miriam had come and gone, Epher writes a letter to his patron and friend, Theophilus, telling him what happened on the night he met Bellewa Miriam, recounting the consequences suffered as a result of this meeting, which he hopes will be included in the bible. Written as a re-imagining of the Nativity Story, this offers an imaginative alternative to the story.144pp, SOUTH AFRICA. JACANA.

A collection of 52 poems which bring to life a story of struggle and hope, the struggle of ordinary Cameroonians who daily entertain hardship, and of English-speaking Cameroonians born into a minority population. Disgruntlement leads to protests; but what happens when the protests fail to yield? 108pp, UK. CODESRIA.

Since independence in 1963, Kenya has survived nearly five decades as a functioning nation-state, with regular elections, its borders intact and without experiencing war or military rule. However, Kenya's independence has always been circumscribed by its failure to transcend its colonial past; its govern-ments have failed to achieve adequate living conditions for most of its citizens; and its politics have been fraught with controversy - illustrated most recently by the post-election protests and violence in 2007. The decisions of the early years of independence, and the acts of its leaders in the decades since - from Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga to Daniel arap Moi and Mwai Kibaki - have changed the country's path in unpredictable ways, but key themes of conflicts remain: over land, ethnicity - including the simmering Kikuyu-Luo-Kalenjin tensions - money, power, national autonomy and the distribution of resources. The political elite's endless struggle for access to state resources has damaged Kenya's economy and the political exploitation of ethnicity still threatens the country's stability. In this definitive new history, Charles Hornsby demonstrates how independent Kenya's politics have been dominated by a struggle to deliver security, impartiality, efficiency and growth, but how the legacies of the past have continued to undermine their achievement, making the long-term future of Kenya far from certain. 736pp, UK. I B TAURIS.

New edition. Illustrated personal account of an odyssey to the ice-bound summit of the world's tallest free-standing mountain. At 5895 meters (19,340 feet) high, Kilimanjaro towers above the Great Rift Valley and lies 3 degrees south of the equator, on the northern border of Tanzania, close to southeast Kenya. Kilimanjaro is an accessible mountain that one can climb without the help of any technical equipment. The ascent starts from the cultivated lower slopes with dry blistering heat, through a lush, wet rainforest jungle, into heath and moorland zones, all the way up to the desolate alpine desert landscape and the steep, exposed arctic summit area, where one will experience breathtaking views of the legendary snows. 160pp, UK. THE ARMCHAIR TRAVELLER.

In resource-scarce East Africa, minority groups face major challenges over the control of and access to land and natural resources. Minorities find themselves competing with other communities, with the state, and with corporate interests for control of resources upon which they depend for their livelihood, culture and future development. This report describes the situation of selected minorities and their neighbouring groups in Kenya, Uganda and South Sudan's Jonglei State. 44pp, UK. Minority Rights Group.

Malawi is linguistically heterogeneous, with 13 Malawian languages and their numerous dialects spoken within the country. As in most other African countries the language situation in Malawi is characterised by the asymmetrical coexistence of English, the official language; Cicewa, the national language; and 12 other indigenous languages and their varieties. The country consists of three geo-linguistic but interre-lated regions: Northern, Central and Southern. The Northern part is arguably the most linguistically heterogeneous, with the Citumbuka language as the main regional lingua franca. Malawi language policy decisions at different times have been ambivalent on the role of Citumbuka and from colonial times to-date, many changes in the status of Citumbuka have been observed. The introduction of Cicewa as a national language since 1968, and the ban on Citumbuka in the national radio and schools successfully curtailed the use of the language at the national level, but it continued to be used in the peopleís everyday lives. The 1998 population census report indicates that 88 per cent of Tumbuka speakers still use Citumbuka for in-group communication. This is a report on a study carried out to explore factors behind the survival of Citumbuka in Dowa district of Central Malawi. 150pp, ETHIOPIA. OSSREA.

As a former prime minister of Libya in the 1950s, Mustafa Ben Halim experienced at first hand the stormy political life of the newly independent monarchy. While working tirelessly to guard his country against the intrigues of Britain and France (their plotting confirmed in secret official documents from the day contained in extensive appendixes), Mr Ben Halim sought to build ties with neighbouring states. He established a close rapport with President Abdel Nasser of Egypt and tried to mediate between Cairo and London in the build-up to the Suez crisis. With Libya back in the headlines, this frank autobiography provides a rare personal glimpse into a formative period of the country. IN ARABIC WITH ENGLISH & FRENCH APPENDIXES. 768pp, CYPRUS. RIMAL BOOKS.

Noo Saro-Wiwa was brought up in England, but every summer she was dragged back to Nigeria - a country she viewed as an annoying parallel universe where she had to relinquish all her creature comforts and sense of individuality. Then her father, activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, was murdered there, and she didn't return for 10 years. Recently, she decided to rediscover and come to terms with the country her father loved. She travelled from the exuberant chaos of Lagos to the calm beauty of the eastern mountains; from the eccentricity of a Nigerian dog show to the empty Transwonderland Amusement Park - Nigeria's decrepit and deserted answer to Disneyland. She explored Nigerian christianity, delved into its history of slavery, examined the corrupting effect of oil, investigated Nollywood. She found the country as exasperating as ever, and frequently despaired at the corruption and inefficiency she encountered. But she also discovered that it was far more beautiful and varied than she had ever imagined, and was seduced by its thick tropical rainforest and ancient palaces and monuments. Most engagingly of all she introduces us to the people she meets, and gives us hilarious insights into the Nigerian character, its passion, wit and ingenuity. 272pp, UK. GRANTA.

Further memoirs of the Senagalese student leader, covering the crucial period of advent of formal independence in former French colonies to the dissolution of the transnational Fédération des étudiants d'Afrique noire en France (FEANF). 212pp, SENEGAL. CODESRIA.

Focuses on the work of Africa's first post-independence generation of novelists, explaining why male writers came to be seen as the voice of Africa's new nation-states, and why African women writers' commentary on national politics was overlooked. Since Africa's early female novelists tended to write about the family, while male authors often explicitly addressed national politics, it was assumed that the women writers were uninterested in the nation and the public sphere. Challenging that notion, Andrade argues that the female authors engaged national politics through allegory. In their work, the family stands for the nation; it is the nation writ small. Interpreting fiction by women, as well as several feminist male authors, she analyses novels by Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria); novellas by Ousmane Sembene, Mariama Ba, and Aminata Sow Fall (Senegal); and Bildungsromans by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), Nuruddin Farah (Somalia), and Assia Djebar (Algeria). Andrade reveals Africa's early women novelists' influence on later generations of female authors, and she highlights the moment when African women began to write about macro-politics explicitly rather than allegorically. 272pp, USA. DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku, the second best runner in Year 7, races through his new life in England with his personalised trainers - the Adidas stripes drawn on with marker pen - blissfully unaware of the very real threat around him. Newly-arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister Lydia, Harri absorbs the many strange elements of city life, from the bewildering array of Haribo sweets, to the frightening, fascinating gang of older boys from his school. But his life is changed forever when one of his friends is murdered. As the victim's nearly new football boots hang in tribute on railings behind fluorescent tape and a police appeal draws only silence, Harri decides to act, unwittingly endangering the fragile web his mother has spun around her family to keep them safe. 288pp, UK. BLOOMSBURY.

Debut fiction. The story narrated by Leungo, a nine-year old with a very interesting outlook on life; he views his parents as good-for-nothing savages, who care only for themselves; who drink themselves silly with friends who come round every day, leaving any concern for his education by the wayside. However, when Leungo's father, goaded by a piece of advice from a particularly inebriated friend, takes him into the bundus to meet and spend time with his grandparents who haven't seen him since he was an infant, Leungo experiences a profound culture shock, and he begins to realize that what you have is better that what you can only dream about. 168pp, SOUTH AFRICA. JACANA.

One of the weaknesses of research in Africa is the little consideration that is given to questions of epistemology and methodology. What we see is the trivialization of research protocols which, conse-quently, are reduced to fantasy prescriptions that detach social studies from universal debates over the validity of science rather than an interrogation of research procedures induced by the complexity of social dynamics. As a result, social sciences have become an imitative discourse and a recital of exotic anecdotes without perspectives. Knowledge production therefore loses any heuristic bearing. It is on the basis of this reality that attempts to correct this tendency have been made in this book by discussing the methodological foundation of social science knowledge. This volume is a collection of papers presented during methodological workshops organized by CODESRIA. Its objective is to revitalize theory and methodology in field work in Africa while contributing to the creation of a critical space hinged upon the mastery of epistemological bases which are indispensable to any scientific imagination. 308pp, SENEGAL. CODESRIA.

The theme adopted for the OSSREA's 9th Congress, Africa in the 21st Century: Setting of New Social Science Research Agendas, recognized the daunting challenges that Africa continues to grapple with, while remaining resilient and seeking new ways of engaging in order to contend with developmental imperatives. The papers which are included in this volume raise a good range of socio-economic issues which are current to the African agenda: governance, foreign direct investment, Sino-African economic relations, globalization and economic partnership agreements, gender in business, a well as the continuing scourge of HIV/AIDS. 211pp, ETHIOPIA. CODESRIA.

Kobus Van Rooyen was the Chairman of the Publications Appeal Board from 1980-90. Under his leadership phenomenal steps were taken towards freeing South Africa from the clutches of apartheid censorship of books, films and public entertainment. Previously banned books such as Andre Brink's 'Looking on Darkness' (André Brink), 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' and 'Portnoy's Complaint' were all unbanned. The approach of cutting films to pieces was replaced by age-restricted films where adults were trusted to see the original work, so that films such as 'A Clockwork Orange' and 'Jesus Christ Superstar' were passed. for release. Ultimately the paradigm was shifted completely in films and publications regulation in the 1980s: from no to yes, from distrust to trust, from fundamentalism to realism, from despotism to democracy. 140pp, SOUTH AFRICA. PROTEA BOOK HOUSE.

This short introduction to issues of tax justice sets out the meaning and causes of tax injustice and offers options for a more just future. In Africa, as elsewhere, tax revenues are essential for establishing independent states of free citizens but many commodity exports from Africa are exempt from taxation. Taxes in Africa are often regressive, and tax and customs administration ineffective. 94pp, UK. PAMBAZUKA.

The story of a seven-year old boy who is trying to understand the people and the world around him. He is young and sensitive, and afraid of darkness and violence. He is perplexed by mysteries beyond his grasp. He is not only afraid of the unknown, he avoids it in every possible manner. He begins by hiding from things and people that frighten him. When he meets Akufo, a 'mild-mannered' mad woman from a nearby village, his young life is changed forever. Col illus, 44pp, NIGERIA. AFRICAN HERITAGE PRESS.

Venter's choice of military events is eclectic. He has four chapters on Afghanistan, three on Somalia, several on how Lisbon fought its desperate rearguard colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea as well as several on the Rhodesian War. These include a tribute to his old friend Ron Reid-Dale, founder-commander of the Selous Scouts, a vivid profile of the RLI 'Incredibles' in a cross-border strike on enemy positions in Mozambique as well as a chapter by Colonel Brian Robinson, longest serving commander of the Rhodesian SAS. Venter also draws heavily on his experiences as a military correspondent for Britain's Jane's Information Group in the Middle East: he accompanied the IDF when it went into Beirut in 1982. Over 100 photos, 430pp, SOUTH AFRICA. PROTEA BOOK HOUSE.