Harold Courlander, has written many books on African Legends and Folklore, but this one has to be one of his most important works, especially for the devotees of the Orishas, both here in the Americas as well as the world over. This book should be in the collection of every Aborisha, as it is the sacred Patikis that have been passed down from Elder to Elder from West Africa, unto the Diaspora, and present. These are the Stories as told buy the Santeros and Santeras in the New York barrios, as well as the Babalorisha and Iyalorishas of the Forest of the tropics.

The Stories presented here are as colorful and as intriguing as the mythology of Greek and Rome, with the exception that the Greek Gods have lost their followers. While the Orishas portrayed in this classic book, as still loved and adorned buy Millions upon millions of Worshippers and Followers thought the world.

The stories told in this book are Patikis, the sacred tales as told buy the Elders to teach moral lessons and also are used in Divination with Oracles. This book gives you a good selection of the folklore as passed down from the Yoruba culture. But not just the Yoruba orisa culture. There is a section titled, The Yoruba Culture of Cuba. A section of Yoruba music from Haiti, Cuba and Brazil.

The Patikis are as follow
1) The Decent from the Skies. --- 2) The Orishas acquire their powers. -- 3) Why Eshu (Eleggua) Lives outside. -- 4) Iron is received from Oggun. -- 5) Sonpono's Excile. (Babalu Aye) -- 6) The Scattering from Ife. -- 7) Moremi and the Egungun. -- 8) Oranmiya The Warrior Hero of Ife. -- 9) The Friendship of Eshu (Eleggua) and Orunmila. -- 10) Eshu and Death -- 11) Oshun learns the Art of Divination. -- 12) Orunmila Visits Owo. -- 13) The Division of the Cowries. --14) Shango and the Medicine of Eshu. -- 15) Obatala Visits Shango. --16) The Quarrel Between Oya and Oshun. -- 17) How Shango Departed from Oyo. -- 18) Obatala's Farm at Abeokuta. -- 19) The Women's War. -- 20) The Coming of the Oba River. -- 21) Ogbe Baba, Warrior of Ibode. -- 22) The burning of the Elekute grove. -- 23) The Oba's Food. -- 24) Ogedengbe's Drummers. -- 25) How Twins (Ibeji) Came Among the Yoruba. -- 26) The Stone People of Esie. -- 27) The deer Women of Owo. -- 28) Ologun and Apasha. -- 29) Olosun of Ikere. -- 30) Erinle hunter of Ijebu. -- 31) How Ijaba became a Sacrifice. --32) The Medicine of Olu Igbo.

Plus a whole chapter on Cuban Orisha Paikis. A Must Have For all Orisha devotees, and African History buffs alike.

Far too much history today is mired in ideological or methodological disputation. Here is a book that proves it is still possible to do first class work in spite of it all. Well-written, insightful, and analytical. One hopes for more work like it from this author.

First published in 1963, this work is a classic in African studies. G. I. Jones examines the development of "canoe houses," trading companies that dominated much of life in the ports of Eastern Nigeria. Jones offers insight on the development of trading companies, the organization of the slave trade, and the nature of slavery itself in this region.

This work should prove interesting to those studying African-American history. Many people, especially Ibo (Igbo), came to America through these ports. See Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census; Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina; and the relevant and fascinating essays in David Eltis, et al., Routes to Slavery.

For the development of similar canoe houses in another region of Africa, see Robert W. Harms, River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500-1891. For the nature of slavery in different African societies, see the studies in Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, editors, Slavery in Africa.

John Sherman's War Stories: A Memoir Of Nigeria And Biafra is a personal memoir that began as a journal kept by a member of a Red Cross food/medical team who operated during the Nigerian Civil War during the late 1960s. Sherman's extensive work teaching and with the Red Cross relief efforts, his eye-witness to horror, and his personal experience in striving to help the less fortunate are candidly chronicled in vivid, compelling detail making War Stories an unforgettable and strongly recommended narrative which is enhanced for the reader with author photos of the Nigerian Civil War, as well as maps of Africa, Nigeria, and Biafra.

Amos Tutuola is one of the handful of master stylists in English of the 20th century. ``Witch-herbalist of the Remote Town'' is a mature work. Comparing it with his first published work (``Palm-wine Drinkard'') demonstrates that Tutuola is, in fact, a stylist and not, as it once seemed possible, a naive product of an unusual and scanty education in English in Nigeria. The compelling factor in his style is rhythm, presumably related to his mother tongue of Yoruba. It has something of the cyclical nature of extended drumming -- it is hard to stop reading it. Plot and characterization are not important in Tutuola's writing. ``Witch-herbalist'' is a simple story of a father's love for his child.

THis book is a wonderful inside view to the culture in Nigeria in the 20th century. I thought this was a wonderful book. I recomend this book to all.

Mortimore, a British geographer with 28 years of residence in northern Nigeria and several books to his name, is an adept and rigorous practitioner of local-level cultural ecology. Bill Adams began his career examining the fate of Northern Nigeria's large irrigation schemes, and has since written extensively on conservation and sustainability questions. Working the Sahel emerged from a five year British-funded investigation into patterns of agricultural intensification and labor use in four sub-locations located on a transect of varying population density between Kano and the Nigeria-Niger border. This book subsumes some of Mortimore's long term datasets and archival material, permitting longitudinal evaluations.

Working the Sahel is a tightly focused research monograph. The key question it poses is how individual skills are exercised in "strategic and tactical" ways by households in Northern Nigeria, and how resource endowments are managed under varying population densities. The starting point is that constraints on farming activities can be distilled into four categories; rainfall, bioproductivity of plants and soil, labor, and the availability of capital. Labor constraints in Nigeria and elsewhere have been generally been relaxed as population densities rise, permitting some combination of intensification of agricultural production in-situ, economic diversification out of agriculture, and circular migration. Adaptation - a term much critiqued by anthropologists - is used quite sensibly here to describe the reflexive, longer term restructuring of Sahelian rural systems in the response to these four constraints. Both flexibility and adaptability are demanded of Sahelian farmers.

The core of the book concerns the day to day management of labor. In the four villages, high frequency time-budget observations by local researchers took place over four years, initially with the men, women and children of around 45 households. The study found that some labor inefficiencies are inevitable in dryland farming systems. Short cropping seasons in the drier villages concentrate labor demand; but since crop growth is dependent on rainfall, drought years can actually provoke labor surpluses. To maintain flexibility, therefore, labor is matched to resource endowments, and by switching between livelihood activities. Women and children make significant contributions to agricultural labor, that are greater in the drier and more extensive farming systems where Islamic seclusion is more relaxed.

A picture emerges of biodiversity maintained by cultivation practices, and only localized episodes of degradation, largely driven by precipitation fluctuations. In their view, "Nothing could be further from the scenario of reckless resource degradation which has been put about by some academics and development agencies" (p193). The book also argues farmers have already developed pathways to "indigenous intensification" (p97) in the drylands, where denied access to fertilizer.

Adaptive responses in the four villages include significant non-farm activities, since as Mortimore and Adams are at pains to stress, risk is spread through diversification. Impelled by economic factors, such as the instabilities generated by Nigeria's commodity booms and busts, and the recognition that animals offer investment opportunities, a pattern has emerged of "the more crops produced, the more livestock kept" (p132), in mixed farming systems. Private accumulation through petty trading in rural periodic markets is just part of a widely developed trading system, and markets also provide a wide range of social functions. Long distance migration, described much too briefly in the book, articulates with broader economic opportunity in regional hinterlands, and nationally.

The authors personalize some of these labor tradeoffs and decision-making processes by profiling six farmers, by means of activity charts and brief personal histories. These profiles highlight how and when households deploy their labor. The book concludes by stressing that agricultural development initiatives in the Sahel fail when they are reductionist, and ignore diversity and variability. There is a dig here at farming systems research, which has underpinned agronomic development programs in the Sahel, for its focus on efficiency criteria. Dryland farmers are not profit or efficiency maximizers, since "..'efficiency' would leave no room for flexible maneuver" (p192). The message for future development interventions is a simple one; big schemes won't work, and "the most impressive stories of development are those where a need for multiple choices, to suit a range of smallholder families, has been met, implicitly or explicitly, in the type of interventions and opportunities affecting rural households." (p191).

Politics receives too little discussion in the book, and is missing from the conceptual model used: it is only discussed as a starting point for the analysis of local farmer responses. Social and political conflict is downplayed, and not much is said about struggle and open resistance - and why such struggles (often gendered, or to do with resource access issues) might be necessary.
Nonetheless the insistence on rigorous comparative fieldwork in Working the Sahel is salutary. The authors remind us that smallholder agriculture is potentially productive, and environmentally benign, in parts of the world where the presence of globalized agricultural knowledge, pervasive development discourses, and far-reaching commodity markets is still fragmentary. To do this, the authors afford equal analytical weight to natural environments and to human activities. The book shows the real contribution that committed geographers can make to African agrarian and development studies.

Having seen the book recently, I must say this is a must for
serious collectors of Nigerian beadwork.

The explanations of the pieces are greatly detailed compared to
other books I've seen done on the subject.

This examination of Yoruba art covers a lot of ground, temporally and geographically. It covers the Yoruba kingdom by kingdom, looking at historical objects within each area. Accessible even to those without any knowledge of African art, it also has lots to interest the specialist--some controversial views on women's roles in Ife art, assignment of Esie carvings to the Yoruba and some previously unassigned bronzes to Ijebu, identification of particular artists' work and more. Written by three experts who specialize in different Yoruba areas, the writing is seamless and well-edited, neither talking down to the reader nor unduly academic in tone. The accompanying illustrations are superb, and many are contextual images. This book introduces Yoruba philosophy, religion, oral literature, and political organization interwoven with art, providing an excellent cultural overview. I use it as a university text, but it would serve as a beautiful addition to the library of anyone interested in Africa, particularly those who want to know more about this creative ethnic group which has left such an impact on the cultures of the Americas.

The entertaining prowess of Professor Achebe makes me wonder how he gets his inspiration.
This well-written, well-edited "Arrow of God" is by every means fantastic. It is a masterpiece whose only functional gear is forward. The novel is so interesting that you will never put it down once you've started reading it.
Having read most of Professor Achebe's works, I acknowledge that his Nobel Prize (in literature) is long overdue.

Being Igbo, and having read almost all that Chinua Achebe has written, I can say that this is one of the best literary works I have ever come across. I read Arrow of God for the firs time when I was about fourteen and even at that age, it made a great impression on me. I have read it repeatedly over the years, and with each read, the raw reality of this book thinly veiled by what another reviewer reffered to as "polite prose" completely immersed me in Ezeulu's society, generation and struggle. This was a wonderful story written by one of the greatest story-tellers ever. I recommend this book and all of Chinua Achebe's work to any and everyone.

In response to our young friend who was so insidiously "forced" to read Mr. Achebe's works in a 10th-grade English class, I can say this: Since most products of American high schools are so terribly unaccustomed to thought, I'm afraid you really don't know (yet) what you're missing. My first experience with Mr. Achebe was "Things Fall Apart." My response, at age 15, was not much different than yours. However, the characters somehow stayed with me. Don't ask me why--perhaps I always wanted to know what happened to Okonkwo (I never finished it the first time). Ten years later, when I found the book in a Burlington, VT second-hand bookstore, I decided to try it again. Within weeks, I had read and re-read the simple, "polite" prose with great curiosity and awareness. Achebe doesn't fill his stories up with muck like so much MTV-style Hollywood mung. He asks something of his audience; writing about the bitter, yet ultimately unavoidable end to a cultural identity with which most anybody can sympathize. All the while, he refrains from employing flowery rhetoric and ambiguity, instead choosing honesty and simplicity. The message of his writings about the Ibo is, if anything, that nothing lasts forever. Thankfully, this means the MTV generation won't always need to be lead by the hand with flashy prose and speed-of-light transitions. Here's to the thinkers!!