Reviews for My Own Fun : Creative Learning Activities for Home and School

The average rating for My Own Fun : Creative Learning Activities for Home and School based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-01-17 00:00:00 Jace Ahboah Until now (1960, date of the first edition), the history of Black Africa has always been written with dates as dry as laundry lists and no one has almost ever tried to find the key that unlocks the door to the intelligence the understanding of African society Failing which no researcher has ever succeeded in revivifying the African past in bringing it back to life in our minds before our eyes so to speak while remaining strictly within the realm of science Yet the documents at our disposal allow us to do that practically without any break in continuity for a period of two thousand years, at least insofar as West Africa is concerned Therefore it had become indispensable to unfreeze in a manner of speaking to defossilize that African history which was there at hand, lifeless, imprisoned in the documents However this work is not properly speaking a book of history but it is an auxiliary tool indispensable to the historian It indeed affords him a scientific understanding of all the historical facts hitherto unexplained In that sense it is a study in African historical sociology It permits us no longer to be surprised at the stagnation or rather the relatively stable equilibrium of precolonial African societies: the analysis of their socio-political structures presented in it allowing us to gauge the stabilizing factors in African society One thereby understands the technical and other lags to be the result of a different kind of development based upon absolutely objective fundamental causes Thus there is no longer any reason for embarrassment Once the awareness achieved we can immediately and fully in almost every slightest detail relive all the aspects of Africans national life the administrative, judicial, economic, and military organizations, that of labor, the technical level, the migrations and formations of people and nationalities thus their ethnic genesis and consequently almost linguistic genesis etc Upon absorbing any such human experience we sense deep within ourselves a true reinforcement of our feeling of cultural oneness

Review # 2 was written on 2013-11-13 00:00:00 Max Prez I was quite lost while reading the first thirty or so pages of this history. I was expecting a more chronologically linear history of Africa, but in the preface Cheikh Anta Diop writes: 'This book is not properly speaking a book of history; but it is an auxiliary tool indispensable to the historian. It indeed affords him a scientific understanding of all the historical facts hitherto unexplained. In that sense, it is a study in African historical sociology.' I did come to really enjoy this book. It's a patchwork of information on pre-colonial Africa, the history and societal structures. Diop directs the reader's attention throughout the book mainly to cultures and old empires of West Africa chiefly Songhai, Ghana, Mali, and Cayor. He compares the lives of the masses of African people and the nobility with that of those in Europe at similar time periods. West Africa after the coming of Islam is talked about extensively and how the religion often blended in well with local beliefs. He ends the book discussing the origins and similarities of names in West Africa to many found in the Nile Basin going back to pharaonic times. Much of the information that Diop presents comes from earlier sources such as the Tarikh es Sudan, a chronicle written in Arabic in the 17th century. Comparing this book to others I've started reading in the last couple of years about African history, I'd say once past about page 36 Pre-colonial Black Africa is another very good introductory book for those starting to learn about Africa south of the Sahara.