Bernard Calas & C.A. Mumma Martinon (eds), Shared water, shared opportunities. Hydropolitics in East Africa, 2010, Dar es Salaam, Nairobi; Mkuki na Nyota, IFRA, Jesuit Hakimani Centre.

On March 20, 2009 in Nairobi, Hekima College collaborated with the Jesuit Hekimani Centre and the French Institute for research in Africa (IFRA) to host the Hekima College Water Day academic Seminar with the theme "Shared Waters, Shared Opportunities". This book is the result of critical research and presentations by internationally renowned scholars, researchers and experts, and students of the Institute of Peace Studies and International Relations - Hekima College.
For most of 2009, Kenya suffered severe problems caused by flooding which took many lives and destroyed homes and important infrastructures. It highlighted the issues of water management and water conflicts, not only in Kenya but in other parts of East Africa, as it was made abundantly clear that not only scarcity of water, but excess water, incorrectly manages, can be disastrous.
This timely, scholarly book presents discussions of the issues which underlie the major water crises in the region. They open the debate into the water problems of Kenya and East Africa in an effort to join the global campaign to find solutions to these difficulties.

Hélène Charton & Daisy Rodriguez (eds), Nairobi Today. The paradox of a fragmented city, 2010, Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Paris; Mkuki na Nyota, IFRA, Karthala.

This book is the result of a collective effort of IFRA associated researchers; anthropologists, sociologists, historians, geographers, political scientist give their views and analysis on public policy and informality, urban identities and the fragmentation of the city of Nairobi. It was first published in French in 2006. It was edited by the historian Hélène Charton-Bigot and the political scientist Deyssi Rodriguez-Torres. Despite being a large city in Africa in terms of size and its regional role, Nairobi is an unrecognized entity. For the majority of its inhabitants, the capital of Kenya is a transit point rather that a dwelling place. This East-African capital city is often associated with slums and crime, and their increase and growth stigmatises the failure of urban policies. Therefore it is at the cracks and fringes of the city that we should seek out identities and dynamics that have shaped the city for a century.

Bernard Calas (eds), From Dar es Salaam to Bongoland. Urban mutations in Tanzania, 2010, Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Paris; Mkuki na Nyota, IFRA, Karthala.

Dar es Salaam : « the haven of peace » or the « welcoming door ». Thus named by the Sultan of Zanzibar 1867 , the town has long benefited from a reputation of tranquility. The tropical laziness—despite the shortages and the socialist under-equipment—allows peace to reign through the tedium. Today, for Tanzanians, Dar has become Bongoland, a place where survival is a cunning business, one that requires intelligence bongo, a Kiswahili word, means ‘brain’)..... (full text below)

Michel Adam (eds), L’Afrique indienne, 2010, Paris, Nairobi; Karthala, IFRA (translation forthcoming)

L'Afrique Indienne edited by Michel Adam and co-published by Editions Karthala and IFRA sheds light on the past and present of communities of Indo-Pakistani origin in East Africa. This publication is the outcome of a research programme aimed at presenting the contemporary situation of minorities of Indian origin, in its demographical, anthropological and social dimensions. The programme was coordinated by Michel Adam, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tours, supported by a team of nine East African and European researchers. The research took place in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Fieldwork ended in December 2007. A documentary under the direction of Michel Adam and Nathalie Gomes, PhD holder in anthropology at EHESS and IFRA associate researcher and an English translation are forthcoming. The programme has already produced some published works.

Valérie Golaz, Demographic pressure and social change in Kenya, 2010, Paris, Nairobi; Karthala, IFRA.

Demographic pressure and social change in Kenya is a book inspired by a PhD thesis in economic demography presented by Valery Golaz in 2002. This book is interested in the densifcation of the kenyan's highlands at the en of the XXth century. It shows how a scoiety is able to adapt itself to the growing scarcity of resources in an eventful historical context. Since 20 years, Kenya has been trough different conflictual events, described as ethnical in the media, which had a lot of consequences on the daily life. This book shows the progressive changes linked to the evolution of the local and regional economic context. The often presented connection between the high population density and violence is demytified, thanks to the precised and global understanding of economic and political stakes at the local level. The situation is highlighted by a biographical research, conducted in the south-west of Kenya, at the southern border of Gucha district.

The demographic pression have lead the population to two different ways out: complex migratory movements and local development. One can see how the economy can be disturbed by intercommunity conflicts, but also how the human densification can be the dynamic of new economic practices, espacially in the informal sector, adding to the better known agricultural dynamics.

Jean-Luc Paul, Anthropologie historique des Hautes Terres de Tanzanie orentale, 2003, Paris, Nairobi; Karthala, IFRA.

This book deals with the social organisation and dynamics of Luguru society, a matrilineal Bantu society of Eastern Tanzania, and its transformation from the precolonial times until today. The first chapters describe and provide insight into the various waves of migration to the Uluguru mountains since the 18th century and social strategies attached to these migrations. The rest of the book explores how this society organized itself socially and politically, as well as used its natural envrionment. The place and role of women, rain rituals, farming practices and their relation to social organization are finely analyzed.

Hervé Maupeu, Patrick Mutahi, Wahome Mutahi’s World, 2005, Nairobi, Transafrica Press.

This remarkable and thought-provoking study of the legendary chronicler of Kenya’ Second Liberation is now available in all good bookshops.
Wahome Mutahi, himself detained and a personal victim of the brutal sadism of the notorious Nyayo House torturers, taught us how to win the war against political repression, greed and corruption with the irresistible weapon of gales of mocking laughter, supplemented by deadly bombardments of stinging satire. Every week he went on steadily puncturing the regime’s balloons of pretentious pomposity until there were none left to deflate.

Steeped in the lore and ritual of the Catholic Church, this former altar boy brilliantly constructed his own magical atmosphere of jokes and merriment on ‘the slopes’ of Mount Kenya.

With himself as Whispers, he had peopled his world of comedy with Whispers’ extraordinary family, comprising Appep (Whispers’ Mother), Thatcher (Whispers’ wife), the Investment (eldest daughter), the Pajero (second daughter) and Whispers Junior (known to some as the domestic thug), plus an eccentric supporting cast. Every Sunday, more and more Kenyans would eagerly participate, usually convulsed in their laughter, in the fantastic adventures of the fictional family in their bouts with bureaucracy and their tiffs with the paper tyrants who rode roughshod over them.

Read this book and the careful analysis of his life and work by six leading scholars, and you will learn more about this amazing man, who turned languages upside down and recreated for our country through his novel and plays (and in the World of Whispers) the spirit of resistance to tyranny and disctatorship.

Bernard Calas (eds), De Dar es Salaam à Bongoland. Mutations urbaines en Tanzanie, 2006, Paris, Nairobi; Karthala, IFRA.

Dar es Salaam : « the haven of peace » or the « welcoming door ». Thus named by the Sultan of Zanzibar 1867 , the town has long benefited from a reputation of tranquility. The tropical laziness—despite the shortages and the socialist under-equipment—allows peace to reign through the tedium. Today, for Tanzanians, Dar has become Bongoland, a place where survival is a cunning business, one that requires intelligence bongo, a Kiswahili word, means ‘brain’). Far from being an anecdote, this toponymic drift registers the transformations that affect the links that Tanzanians have with the principal town in the country and the manner in which they represent themselves.

This book takes these transformations into account through the hypothesis that they raise in the territorialisation process. What are the processes—envisioned as practices for spatial investment—which while producing exclusivsity, demarcations and exclusion, fragment urban space and it social fabric? Do urban practices and discourse create limited spaces, appropriated, identified and managed by communities or territories? Isn’t Dar es Salaam, often described as a relatively homogeneous and integrative diversified town, rather more divided?

As territorialisation can only occur through attendance, management and local investment, it is thus through certain areas—housing and location, schools, dala-dala stations, public drinking fountains or port quays—that the town has been studied. This led to approach the question from a geographical sense of urban policies carried out since German colonization to date. At the same time, the analysis of these facilities allows for an evaluation of the role of the urban crisis and of the solutions brought to it.