Powerful, intriguing and essentially non-Western, these stories will be welcome by an audience truly ready for multicultural voices.

    It takes readers beyond headlines and stereotypes to a deeper understanding of the country. This is an absorbing account of the author’s return trip to Ethiopia as an adult, having left the country in exile with her family at age 11. She profiles relatives and friends who have remained in Ethiopia, and she writes movingly about Ethiopia’s recent past and its ancient history. She offers a clear-eyed analysis of the state of the country today, and her keen observations and personal experience will resonate with readers. This is a unique glimpse into a fascinating African country by a talented writer.

    If the Director of Public Health and Hygiene can get rid of them he will have done a great service to the health and economy of the nation - not to mention his own promotion prospects. A plan of military precision is put into action to rid the streets of these verminous scroungers.But the beggars are organized, too.They know that giving alms is a divine obligation and that Allah's good will is vital to worldly promotion. So when the beggars withdraw their charitable service, the pious city civil servants and businessmen start to panic.

    It is an incisive examination of the problems of independence and freedom in post-colonial Africa states, where few believe they have a stake in the future. In the words of one of the characters: "It was better while we waited. Now we have nothing to look forward to. We have killed our past and are busy killing our future." Francis Imbuga is a playwright and actor. He is the recipient of the Kenya National Academy of Sciences Distinguished Professional Award in Play Writing.

    He was swept to international celebrity on a wave of scandal and flamboyance, and when he died of AIDS in 1997, more than a million people attended his funeral. But what was he really like, this man who could as easily arouse violent hostility as he could unswerving loyalty? Carlos Moore's unique biography, based on hours of conversation and told in Fela's first-person vernacular, reveals the icon's complex personality and tumultuous existence. Moore includes interviews with fifteen of his queens (wives); photos; and an updated discography.

    Colin McEvedy tracks the development of modern man, the differentiation and spread of languages, the first crossings of the Sahara, the exploration of the Niger, and the search for the 'fountains of the Nile'. Gold and ivory lure traders from far away; Christendom and Islam compete for African attention. Names from the distant past become nation-states with aspirations appropriate to the modern world. With sixty maps and a clear, concise text, this synthesis is especially useful to African studies and history teachers, but is also a fascinating guide for the general reader.

    She has the look down: beat-up leather jacket, motorcycle boots, cheekbones, and wild hair. But she’s no ordinary guitar heroine. Her guitar is like none her audience has ever seen, part deadly weapon, part creature from some alien lagoon. Is that hair? Are those nipples? Is it flesh? Where does Jenny Slade come from? Where does she go? Geoff Nicholson fans know that wherever that is, the ride will be like no other.

     Intelligent, charming and handsome, Jean-Patrice has Paris at his feet. But when he embarks on a passionate affair with the beautiful wife of a superior, his brilliant career in the Civil Service goes south. Packed off to the equatorial colony of Gabon to avoid a scandal, Jean-Patrice is plunged from the City of Light into the Heart of Darkness. In the company of cannibals, ghosts, witchdoctors and a gorilla named Chloe, he is forced to revise everything he has learned and find the true meaning of courage and love. Told with humor and compassion, this is the story of a young man's coming of age in the last months of the 19th Century. Also by Marius Gabriel: THE MASK OF TIME ‘Keeps you reading while your dinner burns… Great fun.’ Cosmopolitan THE SEVENTH MOON ‘Few thrillers have as strong a sense of atmosphere and adventure as this fascinating tale.’ Chicago Tribune

    The leader of the Burkina Faso revolution recounts how peasants and workers in this West African country began confronting hunger, illiteracy, and economic backwardness prior to the 1987 coup in which Sankara was murdered.

    It is the heyday of apartheid. Although not a word is exchanged, a strong erotic bond develops between the two of them, culminating in what is later seen as a rape and for which the narrator gets the death sentence. In an absolute tour de force the narrator, only ever referred to as Mr Sibiya, waiting to be executed, writes down his story - reconstructing bit by bit not only his own and a brief history of his family, but also his obsession with the white girl, the court proceedings, and his encounters with Dr Dufre, a Swiss criminologist who has been granted permission of compile a dossier of the case. One of the most remarkable things about the novel is the narrator's ability to be objective, to view himself and the series of events almost dispassionately.

    For his first wife, this is a colossal slap in the face. For Matilda, it is an abrupt end to childhood. This tale is set in British West Africa, in the 1940s, during the ten years leading up to Independence.

    Song of Lawino is an African woman's lamentation over the cultural death of her western educated husband - Ocol. In Song of Ocol the husband tries to justify his cultural apostasy. The first was translated from Acholi by the author while the second was written in English.

    But unlike the original, Farber breaks the cycle of violence, reflecting South Africa’s own transformation in the 1990s.

    The book has been translated into numerous languages and was chosen by QBR Black Book Review as one of Africa's 100 best books of the twentieth century. No African woman had ever been so frank, in an autobiography, or written so poignantly, about the intimate details of her life—a distinction that, more than two decades later, still holds true. Abandoned by her mother and sent to live with relatives in Dakar, the author tells of being educated in the French colonial school system, where she comes gradually to feel alienated from her family and Muslim upbringing, growing enamored with the West. Academic success gives her the opportunity to study in Belgium, which she looks upon as a "promised land." There she is objectified as an exotic creature, however, and she descends into promiscuity, alcohol and drug abuse, and, eventually, prostitution. (It was out of concern on her editor's part about her candor that the author used the pseudonym Ken Bugul, the Wolof phrase for "the person no one wants.") Her return to Senegal, which concludes the book, presents her with a past she cannot reenter, a painful but necessary realization as she begins to create a new life there. As Norman Rush wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "One comes away from The Abandoned Baobab reluctant to take leave of a brave, sympathetic, and resilient woman." Despite its unflinching look at our darkest impulses, and at the stark facts of being a colonized African, the book is ultimatelyinspirational, for it exposes us to a remarkable sensibility and a hard-won understanding of one's place in the world.CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French

    Seraki joins the cast of a locally produced musical that exposes the plight of black South Africans. When the play travels to the U.S., Seraki discovers that even in America, the land of opportunity, he cannot escape corruption. An ALA Best Book for Young Adults.