Best of
African-Literature
1980
So Long a Letter
Mariama Bâ - 1980
It is the winner of the Noma Award.
Devil on the Cross
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o - 1980
This remarkable and symbolic novel centers on Wariinga's tragedy and uses it to tell a story of contemporary Kenya.
Black Sunlight
Dambudzo Marechera - 1980
"Black Sunlight" gives a similar cockroach-eye view of London.“I really tried to put terrorism into a historical perspective, neither applauding their acts nor condemning them. The photographer does not take sides; he just takes the press photographs.” In an unspecified setting the stream-of-consciousness narrative of this cult novel traces the fortunes of a group of anarchists in revolt against a military-fascist-capitalist opposition. The protagonist is photojournalist Chris, whose camera lens becomes the device through which the plot is cleverly unraveled. In Dambudzo Marechera’s second experimental novel, he parodies African nationalist and racial identifications as part of an argument that notions of an ‘essential African identity’ were often invoked to authorize a number of totalitarian regimes across Africa. Such irreverent, avant-garde literature was criticized upon publication in Zimbabwe in 1980, and Black Sunlight was banned on charges of ‘Euromodernism’ and as a challenge to the concept of nation-building in the newly independent country.
The White Man of God
Kenjo Jumbam - 1980
This novel of wisdom and charm tells the story of Tansa, a boy growing up in a Cameroonian village which has been split down the middle by the arrival of a missionary - the white man of God.