His mind crowded with vivid images of Africa, Graham Greene set off in 1935 to discover Liberia, a remote and unfamiliar republic founded for released slaves. Now with a new introduction by Paul Theroux, Journey Without Maps is the spellbinding record of Greene’s journey. Crossing the red-clay terrain from Sierra Leone to the coast of Grand Bassa with a chain of porters, he came to know one of the few areas of Africa untouched by colonization. Western civilization had not yet impinged on either the human psyche or the social structure, and neither poverty, disease, nor hunger seemed able to quell the native spirit. BACKCOVER: “One of the best travel books [of the twentieth] century.” —Norman Sherry “Journey Without Maps and The Lawless Roads reveal Greene’s ravening spiritual hunger, a desperate need to touch rock bottom within the self and in the humanly created world.” —The Times Higher Education Supplement

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Cabral is among the great figures of our time — these texts provide the evidence.

Hawthorne reevaluates long-held notions about the Atlantic slave trade's impact on a number of "stateless" - or decentralized - societies in Africa's Guinea-Bissau region. He shows that decentralized societies were by no means passive victims of the slave trade, as commonly depicted in the literature, but vigorously defended themselves from the incursions of the raiders.

This innovative work seeks to reverse the perspective and reasoning of anthropology and to develop an alternative mode of conceiving culture that would not automatically privilege the colonizing West. That necessarily involves a critique of the “ethnological reason” that extracts elements from their context, aestheticizes them, and then uses their supposed differences to classify types of political, economic, or religious ensembles. Such “reason” yields classical oppositions like the State versus segmentary societies, market versus subsistence economies, and Islam or Christianity versus paganism.As an alternative, the author opposes to exclusionary categories a “mestizo logic” that sees social phenomena as situated on a continuum and accentuates indistinction and the originary syncretism in all cultures and other ways of categorizing human life. The book’s rich source material is drawn from the author’s fifteen years of fieldwork and research in West Africa.The opening chapters first treat the notion of ethnological reason—its history and ideological practices—then oppose to it the reality of cultural tension, the fact that conflicts and negotiations bring about transformations in the identity of collectivities. The following two chapters illustrate a real system of transformation, and question some basic concepts of political anthropology. The discussion continues in a more illustrative manner over the next two chapters, which present case studies of two West African societies that challenge typologies of political anthropology and ethnographic classification.The last three chapters—on white paganism, cultural identities and cultural models, and understanding and acting—situate the debate within a wider historical framework of political and cultural confrontations. Who defines “ethnicities,” “identities,” “differences”? Where can one find them as pure essences witnessing to their own originary beings?

A candid memoir of an African American's journey to a continent which bears the scars of centuries of oppression, this volume looks at Africa head-on, full of honesty and devoid of romanticism.

In September 1958, Guinea claimed its independence, rejecting a constitution that would have relegated it to junior partnership in the French Community. In all the French empire, Guinea was the only territory to vote “No.” Orchestrating the “No” vote was the Guinean branch of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), an alliance of political parties with affiliates in French West and Equatorial Africa and the United Nations trusts of Togo and Cameroon. Although Guinea’s stance vis-à-vis the 1958 constitution has been recognized as unique, until now the historical roots of this phenomenon have not been adequately explained. Clearly written and free of jargon, Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea argues that Guinea’s vote for independence was the culmination of a decade-long struggle between local militants and political leaders for control of the political agenda. Since 1950, when RDA representatives in the French parliament severed their ties to the French Communist Party, conservative elements had dominated the RDA. In Guinea, local cadres had opposed the break. Victimized by the administration and sidelined by their own leaders, they quietly rebuilt the party from the base. Leftist militants, their voices muted throughout most of the decade, gained preeminence in 1958, when trade unionists, students, the party’s women’s and youth wings, and other grassroots actors pushed the Guinean RDA to endorse a “No” vote. Thus, Guinea’s rejection of the proposed constitution in favor of immediate independence was not an isolated aberration. Rather, it was the outcome of years of political mobilization by activists who, despite Cold War repression, ultimately pushed the Guinean RDA to the left. The significance of this highly original book, based on previously unexamined archival records and oral interviews with grassroots activists, extends far beyond its primary subject. In illuminating the Guinean case, Elizabeth Schmidt helps us understand the dynamics of decolonization and its legacy for postindependence nation-building in many parts of the developing world. Examining Guinean history from the bottom up, Schmidt considers local politics within the larger context of the Cold War, making her book suitable for courses in African history and politics, diplomatic history, and Cold War history.