The late Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Laureate Wangari Mathaai has been prominently featured in the new Oxford Dictionary of African politics.
The dictionary gives a concise overview of her lifetime work.
Oxford Dictionary of African politics explains a rich set of theoretical terms that emerged out of the research on the continent over the last 70 years.
It makes it possible to understand shrewd ways that people speak truth to power in various countries.
The dictionary was formulated through crowd-sourced suggestions on social media.
It is packed with fascinating terms from multiple languages including Kiswahili, Chibemba, Kikuyu, Wolof, isiZulu and isiXhosa.
An illustrative example is a Kenyan model of “negotiated democracy” – the sharing of political positions between communities in advance of an election to avoid conflict.
Clothing-related expressions have also been cited in Kenya and Ghana to show voting behaviors.
“Three-piece suit voting” refers to supporting the same party for all elected positions while “skirt-and-blouse voting” means to vote for different parties for presidential and legislative elections.
It also includes timelines of African political events and provides useful overviews of the topics that are of most interest to students, journalists and researchers.
The topics range from HIV and Aids to gender quotas, and from the anti-apartheid struggle to the Rwandan genocide.
It was put together by two doctoral candidates and Professor Nic Cheeseman from the University of Birmingham.
