This book By Christa Wichterich, Jochen Toepfer & Theo Mutter is the first study on the construction of a civil society environmental agenda in East Europe and in the South. It is based on a cross-sectional study of projects and programs run by project partners and regional offices of the Heinrich Boell Foundation in the period of 1996-2000. It is a strategic review of practical and political interventions of partner organizations in Latin America, Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe in the area of ecology and sustainability.

There is no shortage of books on human rights, but most of them view the subject uncritically. Sellars, by contrast, has set out to expose the hypocrisy of a movement that seeks, to use one of the author's many powerful phrases, 'to occupy the moral high ground by day and sleep the sleep of the just by night'. Her book will make uncomfortable reading for modern day high priests and practitioners of the secular religion of human rights. And her book will be grist to the mill of those who are prepared to question whether the human rights approach can genuinely promote human rights.

Earthscan has a range of books that cover many subjects relating to the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), including social, economic and environmental issues.

South Africa's population could level out at between 30 million and 40 million people in about 20 years' time, South African environmental journalist James Clarke has said in his latest book, Coming Back to Earth.

This issue contains:
* The Viability of Somaliland: Internal Constraints and Regional Geopolitics p. 157
Asteris Huliaras
* The End of an Era: The Ghanaian Elections of December 200 p. 183
Klaas van Walraven
* A Basic Human Rights Approach to Democracy in Uganda p. 203
Susan Dicklitch
* When the Bakassi Boys Came: Eastern Nigeria Confronts Vigilantism p. 223
Bruce Baker
* "The Time When Politics Came": Ghana's Decolonisation From the Perspective of a Rural Periphery p. 245
Carola Lentz
* Understanding Telecom Sector Reforms in South Africa: A Political Economy Perspective p. 275
Melvin Ayogu, James Hodge

This site contains many useful links to a wide variety of topics that may interest African development workers. Take a look.

This book aims to reassert a radical tradition in African studies by examining the transformative impact of recent social movements on the African continent. It approaches these movements by critically engaging with the experience of Marxism in Africa and offering a contemporary Marxist analysis of the continent. The media increasingly fall back on racist notions of a 'heart of darkness' in Africa, at the same time as the academic left dismisses Marxism as Eurocentric. This book attempts to address these problems by uniting the continent under a class analysis. In so doing, it seeks to counter recent policies of austerity and globalization, and to launch a renaissance of radical thinking in Africa.

This special issue of International Affairs (Vol 38 No 3, July 2002)
includes:
* Patrick Chabal - The quest for good government and development in
Africa: is NEPAD the answer?
* Alex de Waal - What's new in NEPAD?
* Simon Maxwell and Karin Christiansen - Negotiation as simultaneous equation:
building a new partnership with Africa.
* Mahmood Mamdani - African states, citizenship and war: a case-study.
* Larry Swatuk - The new water architecture in southern Africa: reflections on current trends in the light of Rio+10.
* Nana Poku - Poverty, debt and Africa's HIV/AIDS crisis.
* Ian Taylor and Paul Williams - The limits of engagement: British foreign policy and the crisis in Zimbabwe.
* Firoze Manji and Carl O'Coill - The missionary position: NGOs and development in Africa.

We Are the Poors follows the growth of the most unexpected of community movements, beginning in one township of Durban, linking up with community and labor struggles in other parts of the country, and coming together in massive anti-government protests at the time of the UN World Conference Against Racism in 2001. It describes from the inside how the downtrodden regain their dignity and create hope for a better future in the face of a neoliberal onslaught, and shows the human faces of the struggle against the corporate model of globalization in a Third World country.

As this book shows, the People of the Congo have suffered throughout the past century from a particularly brutal experience of colonial rule, and a series of post-independence political conflicts. But as this insightful political history of the Congolese democratic movement of the 20th century decisively makes clear, its people have not taken these multiple oppressions lying down. Instead, they have struggled both to establish democratic institutions at home and to free themselves from exploitations abroad.

Compiled by Shelagh Willet & Stella Monageng et.al at the University of Botswana which houses a unique collection of contemporary published and unpublished written material on the indigenous minority of Southern Africa, The aim was to make this literature available in one collection, and thus promote research on, with, and by, this minority. The volume lists over a thousand bibliographic entries covering the social sciences, languages and history, as well as publications from national and regional San organisations. Short abstracts of each entry are linked to a list of keywords and authors.

For those attending the World Summit on Sustainable Development or planning any sort of visit to Johannesburg, South Africa, this book will make interesting reading. Johannesburg has become the imagined spectre of our urban future - catastrophic urban explosion, social fracture, environmental degradation, escalating crime and violence, and rampant consumerism alongside grinding poverty.

A green pock-faced monster with red eyes and fangs is depicted as the HIV virus in a new children's book that seeks to explain the science of AIDS to South African children.

VITAL SIGNS 2002-2003 provides up-to-the-minute information on global warming, population growth, transgenic crops, HIV/AIDS, international trade, internet use and a whole range of other environmental, developmental, social, political and economic issues.

It began two years ago: a project to pay tribute to the “jewels” of African literature. In February in Accra, Ghana, the list of “Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century” was announced, and this month the project reaches its culmination with ceremonies, conferences and exhibitions in Cape Town and Harare, the latter as part of the annual Zimbabwe International Book Fair (ZIBF). The focus of these conferences, using the “100 Best Books” theme, will be The Impact of African Writing on World Literature. It will be interesting to see what emerges.

At a time when Zimbabwe is going through acts of reverse racism, The Curse of the Ripe Tomato is a brilliant book that mocks fundamentalism, racism and pseudo-intellectuality. It also questions how reconciliation can take place among Zimbabwe's divided people.

AIDS has ravaged Africa. South of the Sahara, the epidemic is catastrophic. Every day seventeen hundred South Africans contract HIV, and in Botswana over a third of adults are infected. With the death toll ever increasing, this book explores how governments, charities and families are responding to the next wave of the crisis: millions of orphaned children.

The Uganda Artists Asociation organizes weekly art meetings every Thursday from 4-8pm: it's a forum for artists and art lovers, making connections, and supporting networks.

No terrorist attack, no war, has ever threatened the lives of more than 40 million people worldwide. AIDS does. African countries, and particularly those in Southern Africa, currently bear the heaviest burden of the AIDS epidemic - its effects permeate societies and include children, women, men, rich and poor alike. This book is one of the few on AIDS written from within Africa. Helen Jackson is the author of two previous versions of the highly acclaimed and popular resource book "AIDS Action Now", which has now been extensively expanded and improved into the current book AIDS Africa.

At once clear-eyed and compassionate, this incisive, often revelatory account of life in contemporary South Africa by Peace Corps volunteer and first-time author Jason Carter opens a rare window on a world racked with turmoil, yet full of hope.