Jean-Michel Mabeko Tali

Inspired by the author's childhood experience in the deep countryside of his native country, the Republic of the Congo, Tales from the Great Marsh represents a collection of short stories which illustrate a complex picture of life in a contemporary African society still rooted in its traditional beliefs and practices.Through short fictional stories, the author explores the complexity of social, cultural as well as religious, and spiritual experiences of a Bantu rural society when confronted with the challenges posed by specific existential situations such as death and modern politics, as well as the challenges posed by the encounter with the otherness.These fictional stories which marry myth and reality, are deployed towards producing knowledge that takes into account the surviving cultural aspects of old African societies formerly considered minor in studies of the continent's past and present.

Exploring the development and structuring of African nationalist sentiment, the intellectual and sociological foundations of African nationalism, and the origins and social and cultural identities of the participants who helped form the anticolonial movements in the Portuguese colonial empire, Origins of African Nationalism captures the revolutionary energy of a generation. Named one of Africa's hundred best books of the twentieth century, this innovative study traces the emergence of African nationalism starting at the end of the nineteenth century and illuminates how nationalists from across the Portuguese empire were brought together in subsequent decades in a unified struggle that would lead to the overthrow of colonial rule after the Second World War. Mário Pinto de Andrade's insights are now available to English readers for the first time.