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The Source of the Blue Nile
Ethiopia has a rich and fascinating cultural heritage structured around water. The River Nile has been seen by many as the most important river in the world, and the secrets of the sources of the Nile and their mysteries have, from the dawn of civilization, attracted philosophers, emperors and explorers searching for answers. The source of the Blue Nile, Gish Abay, is believed to be the outlet of the biblical river Gihon, flowing directly from Paradise, linking this world with Heaven. The holiness of Abay (the Blue Nile) and its source in particular still has an important role in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. In the Lake Tana region, there are also numerous other myths, traditions and ritua...
How this Happened: Demystifying the Nile
Ethiopians had to wait over a thousand years to be able to use their waters for their own development. Ethiopian emperors and leaders have tried to build a dam on the Nile River as part of their development efforts. Unfortunately, due to varying reasons and circumstances, including external pressure from countries near and far, geo- and hydro-political balance shifts, and internal conflicts, they were not successful in realizing their wishes. Instead of giving up, though, each leader contributed to different extents, by laying the foundation for and addressing challenges faced in making this dream a reality. The masterplan for the dam designed in 1964 has been the seed in waiting ever since,...
Translating Ethiopia
The book represents the first in a series on travel writing, translation, tourism, and advertising. It spans biblical narratives, religious missions, scientific explorations, and the lesser known travels in Ethiopia (Prester John, Queen of Sheba, the Ark of the Covenant, the Blue Nile, Maq’dala, Lalibela and Gondar). In particular, stemming from the cultural turn in translation studies and geography, this work adopts a comparative and diachronic perspective on colonial and postcolonial descriptions of space and place, examining the variation in intertextual citation and re-writing, from early accounts to contemporary travelogues, marking a persistence in stereotyping.
Religion at Work in Globalised Traditions
Why do traditions disappear? How is the disappearance of tradition also a vehicle for social change and re-inventions of practices and new traditions? Using case studies from one Sukuma area along the southern shores of Lake Victoria in Tanzania, global processes of how religions work in practice are analysed by focusing on rainmaking, witchcraft and Christianity. Traditionally, Sukuma society was culturally and cosmologically structured around the chief, the ancestors and rainmaking. Everything was dependent upon the rain. Rainmaking as a ritual practice has disappeared and ancestral propitiations are declining, while, at the same time, Christianity is spreading and witchcraft and witch kil...
Framing African Development
This book discusses and challenges concepts that are widely used in research and policy related to development issues in Africa. The main rationale for such an undertaking is that the concepts that are used to understand and define the world in general and Africa in particular are not merely describing social, economic and political processes and events; they are also largely framing these very same processes. Thus, the concepts by which we structure the world will implicitly or explicitly give premises for policies and practices; limiting or favouring certain types of actions and frameworks of interpretation and understanding in various contexts. It is therefore important to challenge commonly held conceptions about framing African development. Contributors include: Deborah Fahy Bryceson, Rosalind Eyben, Amanda Hammar, Kjell Havnevik, Mats Hårsmar, Terje Oestigaard and Rune Skarstein
African Impressions
Nineteenth-century European representations of Africa are notorious for depicting the continent with a blank interior. But there was a time when British writers filled Africa with landed empires and contiguous trade routes linked together by a network of rivers. This geographical narrative proliferated in fictional and nonfictional texts alike, and it was born not from fanciful speculation but from British interpretations of what Africans said and showed about themselves and their worlds. Investigations of the representation of Africa in British texts have typically concluded that the continent operated in the British imagination as a completely invented space with no meaningful connection t...
Sacred Waters
Describing sacred waters and their associated traditions in over thirty countries and across multiple time periods, this book identifies patterns in panhuman hydrolatry. Supplying life’s most basic daily need, freshwater sources were likely the earliest sacred sites, and the first protected and contested resource. Guarded by taboos, rites and supermundane forces, freshwater sources have also been considered thresholds to otherworlds. Often associated also with venerated stones, trees and healing flora, sacred water sources are sites of biocultural diversity. Addressing themes that will shape future water research, this volume examines cultural perceptions of water’s sacrality that can be employed to foster resilient human–environmental relationships in the growing water crises of the twenty-first century. The work combines perspectives from anthropology, archaeology, classics, folklore, geography, geology, history, literature and religious studies.
The Religious Nile
The Nile is arguably the most famous river in the world. For millennia, the search for its source defeated emperors and explorers. Yet the search for its source also contained a religious quest - a search for the origin of its divine and life-giving waters. Terje Oestigaard reveals how the beliefs associated with the river have played a key role in the cultural development and make-up of the societies and civilizations associated with it. Drawing upon his personal experience and fieldwork in Africa, including details of rites and ceremonies now fast disappearing, the author brings out in rich detail the religious and spiritual meanings attached to the life-giving waters by those whose lives are so bound to the river. Part religious quest, part exploration narrative, the author shows how this mighty river is a powerful source for a greater understanding of human nature, society and religion.
Plotting to Stop the British Slave Trade
This is an innovative biography about an adventurous, game-changing traveller in Africa during the West’s ‘Enlightenment’ period (when the American and French Revolutions occurred). James Bruce was not what he seemed to be. I can now reveal that although he was notorious in his own day for a variety of interesting reasons (including his alleged theft of his assistant’s art-work), he was basically an espionage agent working with a clique of powerful, mostly British, persons whose secret agenda was: to eradicate slaving. Bruce undertook a ‘subversive’ mission to investigate slave trafficking across the Mediterranean and Red Seas as well as the Atlantic in order to support his frien...
Land and Hydropolitics in the Nile River Basin
The Nile River Basin supports the livelihoods of millions of people in Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan and Uganda, principally as water for agriculture and hydropower. The resource is the focus of much contested development, not only between upstream and downstream neighbours, but also from countries outside the region. This book investigates the water, land and energy nexus in the Nile Basin. It explains how the current surge in land and energy investments, both by foreign actors as well as domestic investors, affects already strained transboundary relations in the region and how investments are intertwined within wider contexts of Nile Basin history, politics and economy. Overall, the book presents a range of perspectives, drawing on political science, international relations theory, sociology, history and political ecology.
