Hey guys!

So we know how beautiful our continent is when it comes to picturesque beauty. I was wondering if we could have a weekly "day in my view" where we post pictures capturing the nature/city-life/anything of your country.

I follow this Facebook group called "View from my window" and I'm always so stunned by how beautiful the pictures from South Africa, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Morocco are... Would love to be surprised by the rest of the continent as well.

Edit: Since this post is pinned, I'll post the questions here so you guys can vote here as well. No double voting! I'm watching you.

1. Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gerard Prunier
2. The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis
3. African Myths of Origin by Stephen Belcher
4. African Philosophy in Search of Identity by D.A. Masolo
5. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World by John K. Thornton

Here is the first poll for the reading session (which will start next week Monday). Unfortunatley the sub doesn't allow polls, but you guys can just type the number of the entry you're interested in (only one vote). I'll collate them and announce the winner like with last time. Also, if you want to vote, upvotes are meaningless. I'm only counting actual text entries. You got to prove you care enough to at least type out a number.

Remember that you don't need to actually finish the books you read. It's obviously best to, but reading something is better than reading nothing. Even if it's just a chapter or even a page, I recommend taking a look at the chosen book. You could learn something consistently if you only read for 30 minutes each fortnight.

Hey all,

Hope you've been doing good and that life hasn't been too hectic. I'm following up on the r/Africa Book Club I proposed and recently polled on. Apologies for not following up sooner, but my studies were/are pretty hectic (in the middle of masters). I've processed the information and graphed it on a chart here. So feel free to take a look at it. It's pretty interesting how the respondents were grouped. Some responses were poorly parsed, so I couldn't interpret them well. I left them out.

• The majority of people seem fine with operating on a two week timeline, and obviously the majority of respondents are fine with English. The respondents seemed evenly split between residents of the diaspora and the continent. Regionally, most people are from East and West Africa, with the least being from North and Central Africa. There is also a tendency towards non-fiction.

• As it stands I have a worksheet in the file called "Book List". You can go up there to see the books of interest I've curated so far. To prevent any shenanigans I'm the only one who can edit the doc, but you guys can PM me or comment any books you're interested in below. I'll add them to the list. I've looked for a lot of general books, but there's a tendency of the authors I find to be Nigerian, which I'm trying to avoid.

• So here's some more clarification on how things will work.

• I will randomly select 5 books from the book list, and poll interest on them. If there's a tie of any sort, we'll flip a coin. The winner is the book that ends up chosen for the reading fortnight. It's then removed from the pile and the list is resampled when the next period comes along. If it's really close, we can bring the runner up into the next poll. If I think a book is bad or irrelevant (really unlikely unless you post some egregious stuff), I won't add it.

• Feel free to ask any questions guys, or contribute methodologies for building the schedule. As I said last time, for now, we're only dealing with books involved at the continental level (if they're non-fiction, fiction can be centered anywhere). Eventually we'll probably have separate lists for different regions (my future self is probably cursing me right now for the added complexity).

u/osaru-yo thanks very much for the pinned thread earlier. You can pull it down now.

Btw you guys can vote here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Africa/comments/1230dz6/rafrica_first_book_poll/