This book provides a complete grammar of the Mani language spoken in the Samu (alternate French spelling Samou ) region of Sierra Leone andGuinea. The data come from a short pilot study conducted during July and August of 2000, and a larger study taking place over two years (the Mani Documentation Project or MDP, 2004-06, and two brief returns in April 2009 and February 2010). That the Mani language will soon disappear is certain; just as certain is that this grammar will be the only one ever written."

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

Africa and the African Diaspora is the outcome of a symposium held at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon (February 2002), entitled "Symposium on Freedom in Black History," designed to celebrate Black History Month. The major themes of the conference were how Africans both at home on the continent and dispersed abroad, often by forces beyond their control, reacted to oppression and subjugation in seeking freedom from slavery, colonialism, and discrimination. The volume documents the many forms that oppression has taken, the many forms that resistance has taken, and the cultural developments that have allowed Africans to adapt to the new and changing economic, social and environmental conditions to win back their freedom. Oppressive strategies as divide-and-rule could be based on any one of a number of features, such as skin color, place of origin, culture, or social or economic status. People drawn into the vortex of the Atlantic trade and funneled into the sugar fields, the swampy rice lands or the cotton, coffee or tobacco plantations of the new world and elsewhere, had no alternative but to risk their lives for freedom. The plantation provided the context for the dehumanization of disadvantaged groups subjected to exhausting work, frequent punishment and personal injustice of every kind, This book demonstrates that the history and interpretation of these struggles of the oppressed peoples to free themselves have not received proportionate attention and analysis, as have other aspects of that history. For example, although Maroon societies or "runaways," formed colonies of core communities that fought won and preserved freedom in the New World and became the symbol of a special type of nationalism they have never been fully depicted as such in that role in World History and culture. In the discussion of freedom and the activities accompanying it in historical times, we often overlook the minor currents that accompany its attainment either at its initi