Hardcover
₦11,500.00
Blood And Bronze
The famous Benin Bronzes are among the most prized possessions of the British Museum. Celebrated for their great beauty, they embody the history, myth and artistry of the ancient Kingdom of Benin, once the most powerful in West Africa and now part of Nigeria. But despite their renown, little
has been written about the brutal act of imperial violence through which the Bronzes were plundered.
This incisive new history tells that neglected story: the 1897 British invasion of Benin. Diving into the archives, Blood and Bronze sets the assault on Benin in its late Victorian context. As Britain faced new commercial and strategic pressures on its power elsewhere, it ruthlessly expanded its rule in West Africa. Revealing both the extent of African resistance and previously concealed British outrages, this is a definitive account of the conquest and destruction of Benin. By laying bare the Empire’s true motives and its violent means, Paddy Docherty demolishes any moral claim for Britain retaining the Bronzes, and makes a passionate case for their immediate repatriation to Nigeria.
Related products
The Quiet Americans
₦6,500.00At the end of World War II, the United States dominated the world militarily, economically, and in moral standing – seen as the victor over tyranny and a champion of freedom. But it was clear – to some – that the Soviet Union was already executing a plan to expand and foment revolution around the world. The American government’s strategy in response relied on the secret efforts of a newly-formed CIA.
The Quiet Americans chronicles the exploits of four spies – Michael Burke, a charming former football star fallen on hard times, Frank Wisner, the scion of a wealthy Southern family, Peter Sichel, a sophisticated German Jew who escaped the Nazis, and Edward Lansdale, a brilliant ad executive. The four ran covert operations across the globe, trying to outwit the ruthless KGB in Berlin, parachuting commandos into Eastern Europe, plotting coups, and directing wars against Communist insurgents in Asia.
But time and again their efforts went awry, thwarted by a combination of stupidity and ideological rigidity at the highest levels of the government – and more profoundly, the decision to abandon American ideals. By the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union had a stranglehold on Eastern Europe, the US had begun its disastrous intervention in Vietnam, and America, the beacon of democracy, was overthrowing democratically elected governments and earning the hatred of much of the world. All of this culminated in an act of betrayal and cowardice that would lock the Cold War into place for decades to come.
Anderson brings to the telling of this story all the narrative brio, deep research, sceptical eye, and lively prose that made Lawrence in Arabia a major international bestseller. The intertwined lives of these men began in a common purpose of defending freedom, but the ravages of the Cold War led them to different fates. Two would quit the CIA in despair, stricken by the moral compromises they had to make; one became the archetype of the duplicitous and destructive American spy; and one would be so heartbroken he would take his own life.
Scott Anderson’s The Quiet Americans is the story of these four men. It is also the story of how the United States, at the very pinnacle of its power, managed to permanently damage its moral standing in the world.
What Britain Did To Nigeria
₦9,000.00Most accounts of Nigeria’s colonisation were written by British officials, presenting it as a noble civilising mission to rid Africans of barbaric superstition and corrupt tribal leadership. Thanks to this skewed writing of history, many Nigerians today still have Empire nostalgia and view the
colonial period through rose-tinted glasses.
Max Siollun offers a bold rethink: an unromanticised history, arguing compellingly that colonialism had few benevolent intentions, but many unjust outcomes. It may have ended slavery and human sacrifice, but it was accompanied by extreme violence; ethnic and religious identity were cynically exploited to maintain control, while the forceful remoulding of longstanding legal and social practices permanently altered the culture and internal politics of indigenous communities. The aftershocks of this colonial meddling are still being felt decades after independence. Popular narratives often suggest that the economic and political turmoil are homegrown, but the reality is that Britain created many of Nigeria’s crises, and has left them behind for Nigerians to resolve.
This is a definitive, head-on confrontation with Nigeria’s experience under British rule, showing how it forever changed the country–perhaps cataclysmically.
Forged In Crisis
₦6,000.00An enthralling historical narrative filled with critical leadership insights, Forged in Crisis, by celebrated Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn, spotlights five masters of crisis: polar explorer Ernest Shackleton; President Abraham Lincoln; legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass; Nazi-resisting clergyman Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and environmental crusader Rachel Carson.
What do such disparate figures have in common? Why do their extraordinary stories continue to amaze and inspire? In delivering the answers to those questions, Nancy Koehn offers a remarkable template by which to judge those in our own time to whom the public has given its trust.
She begins each of the book’s five sections by showing her protagonist on the precipice of a great crisis: Shackleton marooned on an Antarctic ice floe; Lincoln on the verge of seeing the Union collapse; escaped slave Douglass facing possible capture; Bonhoeffer agonizing over how to counter absolute evil with faith; Carson racing against the cancer ravaging her in a bid to save the planet. The narrative then reaches back to each person’s childhood and shows the individual growing—step by step—into the person he or she will ultimately become. Significantly, as we follow each leader’s against-all-odds journey, we begin to glean an essential truth: leaders are not born but made. In a book dense with epiphanies, the most galvanizing one may be that the power to lead courageously resides in each of us.
Whether it’s read as a repository of great insight or as exceptionally rendered human drama, Forged in Crisis stands as a towering achievement.
Epic African Myths & Tales
₦8,000.00Africa south of the Sahara is a land of wide-ranging traditions and varying cultures. Despite the diversity and the lack of early written records, the continent possesses a rich body of folk tales and legends that have been passed down through the strong custom of storytelling and which often share similar elements, characters and ideas between peoples. So this collection offers a hefty selection of legends and tales – stories of the gods, creation and origins, trickster exploits, animal fables and stories which entertain and edify – from ‘Obatala Creates Mankind’, from the Yoruba people of west Africa, to ‘The Girl Of The Early Race, Who Made Stars’, from the San people of southern Africa, all collected in a gorgeous gold-foiled and embossed hardback to treasure.
The Ogoni of the Eastern Niger Delta
₦8,000.00The Ogoni of the Eastern Niger Delta are an ancient African community in Southern Nigeria, whose history dates back to BC times. Their history is rich in customs, traditions, economics, politics and culture, which date back to Herodotus, the Greek historian, who wrote about the Silent Trade in West Africa”, in the 4th century BC, a story also reported by the Ogoni in their oral tradition.
Scholars frequently relate the history of West Africa to the coming of the white man into the region. The Ogoni of the Eastern Niger Delta shows that the colonialists later came to see a lot of innovations by the Ogoni; such as trade, money, industry, agriculture, leadership training, government, law, music, sea travel, war and more.
This book is a giant attempt to record and preserve these cultures for future study and development. There is a seperate volume containing fieldwork data on almost every subject for researchers to consult.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.