What is the meaning of Africa and of being African? What is and what is not African philosophy? Is philosophy part of Africanism ? These are the kind of fundamental questions which this book addresses. North America: Indiana U Press

The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge

Encountering development: the making and unmaking of the Third World

For thirty years Ben Kiernan has been deeply involved in the study of genocide and crimes against humanity. He has played a key role in unearthing confidential documentation of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. His writings have transformed our understanding not only of twentieth-century Cambodia but also of the historical phenomenon of genocide. This new book--the first global history of genocide and extermination from ancient times--is among his most important achievements. Kiernan examines outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies including the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin's mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. He identifies connections, patterns, and features that in nearly every case gave early warning of the catastrophe to come: racism or religious prejudice, territorial expansionism, and cults of antiquity and agrarianism. The ideologies that have motivated perpetrators of mass killings in the past persist in our new century, says Kiernan. He urges that we heed the rich historical evidence with its telltale signs for predicting and preventing future genocides.

Ben Kiernan, “Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur”

Late Victorian holocausts: El Nino famines and the making of the third world.

The author is a very sophisticated sociologist. He recognizes that no society--and certainly no complex society-is governed by a single determining force and that no complex society can be characterized in terms of any one feature of social structure. South Africa is at one and the same time a highly industrialized and a backward and impoverished rural society (a combination of characteristics which it shares with Italy, for example); like some other societies it is rigidly stratified along the lines of colour but it is also a class structured

South Africa, a Study in Conflict.

The paper attempts to inform Africans and the world at large of the triple evils of colonial capitalism, state terrorism, and racism and of different forms of African resistance in order to search for new ways of implementing universal human rights laws and the rights of indigenous people. Most indigenous Africans are immensely underdeveloped and have suffered for more than five centuries because of these triple evils that have been imposed on them by European colonial powers, successive global powers, and their African collaborators. The European colonial powers, namely Spain, Portugal, England, Holland, France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy and their African collaborators terrorized, exterminated, abused, and misused indigenous Africans from the 16th to the first half of the 19th centuries, and consequently they have underdeveloped and impoverished the surviving African populations. The homelands and economic and natural resources of Africans were expropriated and transferred to European colonial settlers, their descendants and their African collaborators that have no interest to protect the political, economic, civil, and social rights of these people. Since most of these indigenous peoples are still not represented in government, academic, economic and media institutions of neo-colonial African states, their voices are muzzled and hidden and most people of the world are misinformed and know nothing or little about them. By degrading and erasing the cultures, histories, and humanity of indigenous Africans, the descendants of the settlers and their African collaborators have convinced themselves that they can continue to terrorize and dispossess the resources of these people without moral/ethical and political responsibilities with the help of powerful states of the West and that of China (Quan 2013) as well as global financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

	 

	Key words: Colonial capitalism, terrorism, racism, underdevelopment, indigenous Africans, human rights, self- determination, democracy, and social injustice.

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Jalata Asafa

Papers

The triple causes of African underdevelopment: Colonial capitalism, state terrorism and racism