Coming of age: English in Nigeria

English Today ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor O. Awonusi
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
The Past

A report on the past and present of the major variety in West Africa

The Africa Bureau, London

1964 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 292-294
Author(s):  
Peter Calvocoressi
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
West Africa ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Accurate Information ◽  
Physical Size ◽  
Informal Group ◽  
The Past ◽  
African People ◽  
South West ◽  
South West Africa

It is not easy to describe the objects, still less the activities, of the Africa Bureau in a few words. It is one of those organisations whose ambitions and influence are much greater than its physical size.If you look at the dominating purpose behind the activities of the past 12 years, you will find it in the Bureau's sympathy with and determination to promote African independence. It was established in 1952 to provide accurate information particularly on the aims and hopes of African nationalism, to oppose unfair discrimination, and to encourage development in Africa. The need for such an organisation in Britain had been recognised primarily by Rev. Michael Scott, who on returning from South Africa sought help from people in Britain for the African people of South West Africa. An informal group advising on the intricate political and constitutional issues involved in bringing South West Africa's plight before the United Nations provided the nucleus from which the Africa Bureau grew, and since 1948, Michael Scott, honorary director of the Bureau, has attended the U.N. and given evidence as personal representative of Chief Hosea Kutako of the Hereros.

The Evolution of Free Standing Risers

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Tellier ◽  
Ricky Thethi
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
System Architecture ◽  
Vertical Section ◽  
Single Line ◽  
Free Standing ◽  
Dynamic Motion ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
Complex Evaluation ◽  
Deepwater Riser

Deepwater riser selection is a complex evaluation of technical and commercial project drivers. The free standing hybrid riser (FSHR) has evolved in the last 10 years through major use in West Africa and is now gaining serious consideration in other deepwater provinces. The key benefit of the free standing riser is that the steel riser vertical section is offset from the vessel using flexible jumpers, thereby decoupling the riser from vessel dynamic motion. Early FSHR configuration took the hybrid bundle tower form. The very first free standing riser system, installed in 1988, consisted of the Placid hybrid bundle in the Gulf of Mexico. In the late nineties, a hybrid bundle tower was chosen for the Girassol development in West Africa. Since then, the industry has sanctioned numerous developments using multiple single line freestanding risers. Optimization of the FSHR is continuing with new concepts such as the Grouped SLOR developed to offer the combined benefits of both the bundle and single line multiple arrangements. This paper will describe how the FSHR configuration has evolved to meet increasing industry demands over the past 10 years and will discuss the future of this type of riser system. Increasing applications in ultra deepwater regions, hurricane prone locations and tiebacks to existing payload limited production vessels will be discussed with riser system architecture described including interfaces with the vessel and seabed.

Coming of age in Milano: Ermanno Olmi from sponsored cinema to feature filmmaking

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-428
Author(s):  
Jim Carter
Keyword(s):  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Italian Cinema ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Cinema Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Michelangelo Antonioni ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Bernardo Bertolucci ◽  
Critical Process

This article argues that a full understanding of Ermanno Olmi’s feature films will require a deep engagement with the sponsored cinema he made as director of the Sezione Cinema Edisonvolta. It begins by spelling out some of the stakes and challenges of a ‘sponsored turn’ in Italian cinema studies, which during the past decade has inaugurated the long archival and critical process of revaluing the corporate roots of auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci and, to a certain extent, Ermanno Olmi. It then elaborates on the relation between Olmi’s sponsored cinema (1953–61) and feature filmmaking (1961–2014) by analysing two films that mark the director’s transition from the small to big screen: Michelino 1 a B (1956) and Il posto (1961). The central contention is that these films tell two different versions of the same coming-of-age story: a young boy from the provinces finds work in a downtown office building, where he must come to terms with the fact that he will remain there all his life. The distance between the two films is a measure of Olmi’s own coming-of-age as an intellectual: from a resolved promoter of the guiding role of business in modern life to a sceptical interrogator of white-collar mundanity. After a comparative reading that reveals general similarities of structure and specific scenes of quotation, the article concludes with some remarks about education, a concept through which Olmi’s feature films show themselves to be aware of – even commenting on – sponsored cinema.

Activists in Their Forties

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-70
Author(s):  
Rachel F. Seidman
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Direct Service ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact

The seven women in this section were born between 1966 and 1976, at the height of the burgeoning feminist movement. They discuss not only the impact of feminism on their own lives, but on their mothers as well. Some reflect on whether or not the world is a better place for their daughters than when they were growing up. Coming of age in the 1980s and 90s, these interviewees reached maturity during the rise of Reagan Republicanism and what Susan Faludi termed the “backlash” against feminism. None of these women set out at the beginning of their careers to be professional feminists; it never crossed their minds as a possibility. About half of the women in this chapter have been involved in one way or another with the intersecting worlds of journalism, academia, social media, and business, and half—all of them women of color—have worked in direct-service and non-profit organizations. With long careers and experience in a variety of contexts, these women help us understand how feminism has changed over the past twenty years, where the movement is headed, and some of the reasons why even those who undertake its work do not always embrace it wholeheartedly.

Indigeneity of Past Landscape Transformations of the Tropics

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Balée
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Historical Ecology ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Species Turnover ◽  
Continuous Process ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
Swidden Cultivation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Landscape Transformation ◽  
Landscape Transformations

Indigeneity is the living heritage of traditional peoples. It includes not only their languages and cultures but their transformational etchings on landscapes—not just alterations in the form of inanimate structural changes of the substrate, as in the construction of earthworks and edifices, but sometimes changing the composition of the living flora and fauna. Archaeology is crucial to the identification of indigeneity in the past and in the analysis of landscapes and seascapes associated with it. Landscape transformations, from the perspective of historical ecology, refer to the turnover in species of given locales because of human-mediated disturbance. Primary landscape transformation denotes complete species turnover, whereas secondary landscape transformation denotes partial species turnover. In both cases, substrate alterations occur, but in primary landscape transformation these are qualitatively more profound. In order to understand landscape transformations, we might begin with consideration of geographer Carl Sauer’s comment (1963 [1925]: 333) that ‘We cannot form an idea of landscape except in terms of its time relations as well as of its space relations. It is in continuous process of development or of dissolution and replacement.’ Indigeneity is one of the factors involved in dissolution and replacement, which I refer to as ‘transformation’. Landscapes created in the past through mechanisms rooted in indigeneity are often called the ‘built environment’ by archaeologists. In many tropical forests, including those of Greater Amazonia, the Atlantic Coastal Forest, West Africa, Central Africa, Malesia, and Micronesia, both primary and secondary landscape transformations have noticeably affected the distribution of plant and animal species. In some cases, with specific reference to primary landscape transformation, entire forests came into existence, such as in the Llanos de Mojos, Bolivia and in Guinea, West Africa (see Fairhead, Chapter 16 this volume for more detailed discussion of anthropogenic forests in West Africa). Secondary landscape transformation occurred in the context of ancient settlements, the alteration of ridge tops, swidden cultivation, and resource management, such as in Pre-Amazonian forests of Eastern Brazil, Central African forests, and various forests of Malesia.

Reordering the Royal Dead

2021 ◽  
pp. 291-307
Author(s):  
John Parker
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Private Citizen ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
Dead Bodies ◽  
The Dead

This chapter narrates Agyeman Prempeh's return to Asante in 1924 from exile in the Seychelles. It unfolds how he had changed in the course of his 28 years in detention and repatriated as a private citizen, Mr Edward Prempeh. Two years later, having cemented a reputation among British officials as a progressive figure, he was appointed 'Kumasihene', head of the reconstituted Kumasi division of colonial Ashanti. That said, in his own mind and in those of his people, Agyeman Prempeh remained Asantehene. Despite his embrace of Anglicanism and colonial modernity, Prempeh was acutely conscious of this historical role and worked assiduously until his death to heal the wounds of the past and to ensure a reinvigorated future by attending to the dignity of the royal dead. The chapter examines his project, which took the form of three interconnected campaigns: to reorder the dominion of the dead in Kumasi; to rebuild the destroyed mausoleum at Bantama; and to repatriate the remains of those who died in the Seychelles and elsewhere. Together, they constitute a key episode in the political life of dead bodies in colonial West Africa.

Untimely Developments: Genre Drag and Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land

MELUS ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Wendy Allison Lee
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Intergenerational Conflict ◽  
Family Values ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
American Subject ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Historical Past

Abstract Through a reinterpretation of Gish Jen’s novel Mona in the Promised Land (1996), this essay makes the case for the queer possibilities immanent to the most conservative “family values” Asian American genre—the bildungsroman organized around intergenerational conflict. In a decade obsessed with the question of what shifting racial and ethnic demographics meant for the national future, Mona’s content tempted 1990s readers to interpret its vision of the 1960s as a timely meditation on the present. Read in such a way, the novel resolves anxieties about demographic change by reproducing the “timeless” values of family and nation. However, Mona’s form tells a different story. Rather than using the historical past as a mere backdrop to tell a timely story about national progress, Mona is reflexive in its preoccupation with its relationship to the past. Jen’s novel shows us what a coming-of-age story looks like when it does not assimilate its subject into national time. Instead, Mona draws “untimely comparisons” between past US imperial formations that are the present’s condition of possibility. I examine how the novel disrupts the bildungroman’s formal and ideological relationship to national futurity by evoking the past as a drag on progress and the novel as enacting a formal corollary to queer drag performance. I read Mona as a novel of untimely development that reinvents the coming-of-age narrative so that the Asian American subject becomes not a figure that exemplifies a certain future subject or nation but instead one that generatively obstructs national fantasies of progress.

scholarly journals Drivers of ecosystem and climate change in tropical West Africa over the past ∼540 000 years

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (7) ◽  
pp. 671-677 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte S. Miller ◽  
William D. Gosling ◽  
David B. Kemp ◽  
Angela L. Coe ◽  
Iain Gilmour
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
West Africa ◽  
The Past

Performing Gender and Political Recognition: Israeli Reform Jewish Life-cycle Rituals

2020 ◽  
pp. 089124162096826
Author(s):  
Elazar Ben-Lulu
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Political Performance ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Reform Jewish ◽  
Cultural Constructions ◽  
Jewish Religion

Anthropologists see life-cycle rituals as a significant way to understand gender roles and identities in religious communities. While in the past, these compulsory rituals involved a significant change in a person’s social status, today many of their traditional features have been transformed. This ethnographic inquiry examines Bat Mitzvah ceremonies (coming of age rituals for girls) in Israeli Reform Jewish congregations. By including new blessings, appropriating masculine religious symbols, and creating new bodily gestures, the feminine life-cycle ritual challenges the traditional Jewish laws and contemporary socio-cultural constructions of the Israeli Jewish community. The exclusion of the Israeli Reform community from mainstream Jewish religion turns this ritual into a subversive act that battles local Jewish Orthodoxy authority. The ceremony is a political performance, which positions the Reform congregations as an activist religious agent for gender equality in the Israeli public space.

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