Ziad Shihab

Showing all posts tagged "Africa"

Summary of The Ear the Eye and the arm by Nancy Farmer

Certainly! "The Ear, the Eye, and The Arm" by Nancy Farmer is a captivating science fiction novel set in the year 2194 in Zimbabwe. Let me provide you with a detailed summary: 1. Setting and Characters: The story unfolds in Harare, the dense and crime-ridden capital of Zimbabwe. Three siblings—Rita, Kuda, and Tendai—are the protagonists. They are held captive by the ruthless General Matsika, who seeks to eradicate crime from the country. 2. Escape and Mutant Detectives: The childr...

Banel and Adama – cinema as fairytale

Banel (Khady Mane) and Adama (Mamadou Diallo) are a beautiful couple, introduced on the arid plains of Senegal, clad in yellow and red respectively. They float through their day’s work of cow-herding in a harmonious, almost dreamlike state. Banel closes her eyes against the blistering sun, hiding from reality by finding meaning in the flashing lights, or phosphenes, left behind in her vision. In this opening sequence, the pair exist in a montage of almost stock videos, in primary colours and ...

Dahomey

Near Matches Ignore ExactFull Text Everything2 Dahomey (place) See all of Dahomey, no other writeups in this node. (place) by Gritchka Sat Feb 24 2001 at 17:09:38 A kingdom in West Africa, founded in the early 1600s and reaching its height in the mid 1800s. It was defeated by the French in the 1890s and annexed. It became an independent republic in 1960, and the name was changed to Benin in 1975: see there for the modern country. There are several legends of foundation, one of...

How Amazon's 'Nanny' fixes the problem of "exotic" horror tropes

For almost as long as the genre has existed on-screen, horror movies have used real cultural mythologies to frighten us. Exorcisms, spirits, and vampires are all familiar tropes that have international origins — even more niche subgenres like folk horror owe themselves entirely to pagan and foreign religions. While plenty of these films find nuance by balancing terror with genuine reverence, many American-made horror movies can’t help but feel exploitative — presenting certain spiritual bel...

How Stories Create Individual and Collective Pasts, Presents, and Futures

My cousin Galaxy’s baby fell out of a two-story window and survived. They called the baby a miracle child like they called my brother a miracle child when he was thrown from a motorcycle only to live. Some Fulani clans insist the universe was created from a single drop of milk, out of which came blindness, sleep, pride, worry, and death: all the natural nemeses of men. Gizo, a trickster spider, employs clever deceptions in pursuit of prey or easy profit. If you hear a noise late one nig...

Surviving the Zam Zam

Last week I gave a talk at California State University Monterey Bay’s chapter of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. The talk is titled "Surviving the Zamzam." It’s a story about my Aunt Jamie and Uncle Fred Henderson and their getting captured by the German Navy while on their way to Africa to be medical missionaries. They were taken prisoner on April 17, 1941 and their ship, the Zam Zam, was sunk. I pieced it together based on 6 books on various aspects of the Zam Zam, some reminiscen...

Abyssinia: The Only African Country to Avoid Colonialism

Ethiopians attend a parade to mark the 123rd anniversary of the battle of Adwa that marked the end of the first Italian invasion in 1896, photo taken 2020.   On October 23rd, 1896, Italy and Ethiopia signed the Treaty of Addis Ababa. The defeated Italians have no other option than to confirm Ethiopian independence and renounce their colonial projects in the region. Abyssinia, a thousand-year-old African nation, had resisted a drastically more developed modern army and became the ...

Investigating German colonialism in the British Library’s collections

Content warning: This blog reproduces an image from a historical publication which is now considered racistLast week, the Zanzibari writer Abdulrazak Gurnah became the first black African author in 35 years to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Judges from the Swedish Academy highlighted his ‘uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism’ as a key reason for the distinction.Much of Gurnah’s writing is set in East Africa, and his latest novel, Afterlives, explores ...

Africas Lost Kingdoms

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