San Antonio College Library

"With A Fistful of Shells, Toby Green transforms our view of West and West-Central Africa by reconstructing the world of these kingdoms, which revolved around trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, and the production of art. Green shows how the slave trade led to economic disparities that caused African kingdoms to lose relative political and economic power. The concentration of money in the hands of Atlantic elites in and outside these kingdoms...

"Composed by a premier scholar of African literature, this volume is a comprehensive guide to the literary traditions of Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, and Nigeria, five distinct countries bound by their experience with colonialism. Oyekan Owomoyela begins with an overview of the authors, texts, and historical events that have shaped the development of postwar Anglophone literatures in this region, exploring shifts in theme and the role of...

"This study analyzes concepts in African traditional religion by isolating key elements in the Yoruba, Dagara, and Ibo cultures. Principal elements isolated include sacrifice, salvation, revelation and divination, as well as African resilience in the face of invasions, colonization and various outside religious assaults. The study also considers the influence of Christianity and Islam"--Provided by publisher.

In this collection of 41 stories from West Africa, each country is presented by several stories, a map, and country statistics on size, population, ethnic groups, and languages. An introduction explores the roots of the storytelling tradition in the history and culture of West Africa. To compile these tales, Offodile, a professor at Kent State University, drew from his own childhood experiences growing up in West Africa and interviewed village elders...

Presents a portrait of an early nineteenth-century missionary couple who worked to overturn slavery in Liberia, where conflicts between settlers and natives forced them to return to a war-stricken U.S. and make a tragic decision. "In early November 1834, an aristocratic young couple from Savannah and South Carolina sailed from New York and began a strange seventeen year odyssey in West Africa. Leighton and Jane Wilson sailed along what was for them...

Between 1730 and 1750, Domingos Alvares traversed the colonial Atlantic world like few Africans of his time--from Africa to South America to Europe. By tracing the steps of this powerful African healer and vodun priest, James Sweet finds dramatic means for unfolding a history of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which healing, religion, kinship, and political subversion were intimately connected. Alvares treated many people across the Atlantic,...