Best of
African-Literature

2010

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives


Lola Shoneyin - 2010
    The struggles, rivalries, intricate family politics, and the interplay of personalities and relationships within the complex private world of a polygamous union come to life in The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives—Big Love and The 19th Wife set against a contemporary African background.

Beneath the Lion's Gaze


Maaza Mengiste - 2010
    This memorable, heartbreaking story opens in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of a revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother’s prayer room, pleading to his god for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country. His father, Hailu, a prominent doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die. And Dawit, Hailu’s youngest son, has joined an underground resistance movement—a choice that will lead to more upheaval and bloodshed across a ravaged Ethiopia. Beneath the Lion’s Gaze tells a gripping story of family, of the bonds of love and friendship set in a time and place that has rarely been explored in fiction. It is a story about the lengths human beings will go in pursuit of freedom and the human price of a national revolution. Emotionally gripping, poetic, and indelibly tragic, Beneath The Lion’s Gaze is a transcendent and powerful debut. .

The Memory of Love


Aminatta Forna - 2010
    In the capital hospital, a gifted young surgeon is plagued by demons that are beginning to threaten his livelihood. Elsewhere in the hospital lies a dying man who was young during the country’s turbulent postcolonial years and has stories to tell that are far from heroic. As past and present intersect in the buzzing city, these men are drawn unwittingly closer by a British psychologist with good intentions, and into the path of one woman at the center of their stories. A work of breathtaking writing and rare wisdom, The Memory of Love seamlessly weaves together two generations of African life to create a story of loss, absolution, and the indelible effects of the past—and, in the end, the very nature of love.

In My Dreams I Dance


Anna Wafula Strike - 2010
    But Anne Wafula achieved many remarkable things in her life. This is her incredible story.Struck down with polio at the age of two and a half, Anne overcame the prejudice rife in her native village in Kenya, where neighbours believed she was cursed and called her a snake because of her disability, which left her paralysed below the waist.Losing her mother at a tender age, and sent to a school far away from home, she achieved fantastic academic results, amidst the challenges of a military coup. She went to university and qualified as a teacher, and fell in love with a British man who truly valued her defiant spirit.She moved from a world with no running water to make a life for herself in modern Britain. Where, against all odds, she bore a child, and went on to be the first East African to compete in her sport internationally. Anne is currently in further training, and will be representing Great Britain at the 2012 Paralympics, where she has been tipped as one of our top hundred hopefuls.Meet Anne Wafula, a woman whose determination knows no bounds.

African Women Writing Resistance: An Anthology of Contemporary Voices


Jennifer Browdy - 2010
    Thematically organized, it presents women’s writing on such issues as intertribal and interethnic conflicts, the degradation of the environment, polygamy, domestic abuse, the controversial traditional practice of female genital cutting, Sharia law, intergenerational tensions, and emigration and exile.    Contributors include internationally recognized authors and activists such as Wangari Maathai and Nawal El Saadawi, as well as a host of vibrant new voices from all over the African continent and from the African diaspora. Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection provides an excellent introduction to contemporary African women’s literature and highlights social issues that are particular to Africa but are also of worldwide concern.  It is an essential reference for students of African studies, world literature, anthropology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and women’s studies.  A Choice Outstanding Academic BookOutstanding Book, selected by the Public Library AssociationBest Books for High Schools, Best Books for Special Interests, and Best Books for Professional Use, selected by the American Association of School Libraries

The Sacrifice of Africa: A Political Theology for Africa


Emmanuel M. Katongole - 2010
    Looking at this region, ravaged by war, corruption, terror, genocide, and disease, Katongole wonders at length what difference Christianity makes — or could make — in numerous African nation-states. The Sacrifice of Africa argues that in the face of Africa’s social, political, and economic turmoil, a new future truly is possible, and displays how such a new future, inspired by Christian faith, looks.

The Book of the Dead


Kgebetli Moele - 2010
    He studies hard, despite many distractions, and goes to the University of the North where he meets Pretty. Although she is scarred by her past relationships with men, the two fall in love and get married. Soon after, their son, Thapelo, is born. But there is no happily ever after here.Even with her successful career, surrounded by beautiful things in her big house, Pretty is lonely. Their son seems to favour his father and Thapelo and Khutso seem to have their own secret club that she is not a part of. So Pretty has an affair. She contracts HIV and, filled with grief and despair, she commits suicide, leaving her husband infected with the disease...

J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace


Andrew Van der Vlies - 2010
    One of the most widely read novels by a South African-born writer or 'about' South Africa, Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee's (second) Booker Prize-winning novel, "Disgrace" (1999), is a firm favourite with reading groups and a fixture on many university-level courses on postcolonial or international literatures in English. Sometimes regarded as offering a bleak picture of post-apartheid South Africa, "Disgrace" has also been read as an ultimately hopeful novel about renunciation and redemption. This introduction offers an indispensable guide to the historical contexts and critical ideas necessary for an informed and rewarding engagement with one of the most significant novels of the last quarter century. Offering an overview of the author's career, informed discussion of the novel's setting and references, this guide considers such issues as the representation of race, gender, the land, and animals, and its concern with language, power, music, confession, and allegory. It provides a discussion of the novel's critical and popular reception, a comprehensive guide to further reading, and questions for discussion.

Definition of a Miracle


Farida N. Bedwei - 2010
    A precocious child with Cerebral Palsy, she finds herself thrust into a society where her disability is not understood and is attributed to a spiritual cause. As a result, she's taken to various charismatic crusades and other spiritual prayer houses in search of a seemingly elusive healing. Her Christian mother and Muslim father who'd lived harmoniously in the past, start squabbling incessantly, to the extent that Zaara and her siblings fear their family is disintegrating. Going through culture shock, she searches for her place in a society where she's often stared at and talked about, as she discovers her inner strength and comes to terms with her disabilities.

Africa's Best Stories


StoryAfrica - 2010
    It is a selection of the best of African literature from Africa's finest writers. In this first volume, we feature heartwarming stories by some of Africa's most renowned writers such as Noble-Prize laureate Wole Soyinka, Orange Prize winner, Chimamanda Adichie, Caine Prize finalists Sefi Atta, EC Osondu, Chika Unigwe, Muthoni Garland, and Jude Dibia among other equally awesome writers. These are storytellers from the gods, telling a diverse range of stories, under varying circumstances. Just for your delight! Their stories will make you laugh, cry, grin, wish, reflect, reminisce and curse (not). Let these stories keep you company while lying in the comfort of your bed, on the subway on your way to work or when having a cup of tea.

What Is Slavery to Me?: Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-apartheid South Africa


Pumla Dineo Gqola - 2010
    “Memory” features prominently in the country’s reckoning with its pasts. While there has been an outpouring of academic essays, anthologies and other full-length texts which study this transition, most have focused on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).What is Slavery to Me? is the first full-length study of slave memory in the South African context, and examines the relevance and effects of slave memory for contemporary negotiations of South African gendered and racialized identities. It draws from feminist, postcolonial and memory studies and is therefore interdisciplinary in approach. It reads memory as one way of processing this past, and interprets a variety of cultural, literary and filmic texts to ascertain the particular experiences in relation to slave pasts being fashioned, processed and disseminated.Much of the material surveyed across disciplines attributes to memory, or “popular history making,” a dialogue between past and present whilst ascribing sense to both the eras and their relationship. In this sense then, memory is active, entailing a personal relationship with the past which acts as mediator of reality on a day to day basis. The projects studies various negotiations of raced and gendered identities in creative and other public spaces in contemporary South Africa, by being particularly attentive to the encoding of consciousness about the country’s slave past.This book extends memory studies in South Africa, provokes new lines of inquiry, and develops new frameworks through which to think about slavery and memory in South Africa.

Abe in Arms


Pegi Deitz Shea - 2010
    A senior in high school, with a loving and wealthy adoptive family, Abe is on track for a big scholarship and an open future. Suddenly, horrific flashbacks rip him back to war-torn Africa, where five years previously he lost his mother, sister, friends, and almost his own life to torturous violence. During therapy, he uncovers even darker moments from his past that make him question how he survived. This action-filled thriller will open the eyes and hearts of teenagers to the lives of young people who have been exposed to profound violence around the world.