African Literature...Says Who? The Last 50 Years with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

African Literature...Says Who? The Last 50 Years with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o from Warscapes on Vimeo.

Mandla Langa interviewed by Azania Mosaka

Mandla Langa Interviewed on his new Novel, 'Texture of Shadows'

Nadine Gordimer: Farewell to a great spirit

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, The Mail & Guardian

Nadine and Ngugi arrested in Amherst! No, no, it was not the case, but that’s how my wife, Njeeri, imagined the headlines in Kenya and South Africa in response to the picture of Gordimer and me entering a police car under the shadow of a heavily armed officer.

It was in 1991. Both of us were visiting the prestigious college in Massachusetts, United States, at the same time. The visits had been scheduled long before, but Gordimer’s presence coincided with the news of her winning the Nobel prize in literature. Now she was not just another visiting writer but a Nobel laureate. The crowds were curious. Amherst College arranged a police escort, more for her than me, but at joint events we travelled together.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Humanising History

Achebe The Native Intellectual

by Jeremy  Weate, Chimurenga Chronic

There Was A Country, Chinua Achebe’s autobiographical account of the Nigerian Civil War, has raised a dust storm of reaction in Nigeria and exposed the unprepossessing tectonics of ethnicity. Opinions have been largely divided by differing allegiances either side of the river Niger. What is an outsider to make of it all?

In the celebrated text The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon outlines three phases in the development of the “native intellectual”. In the first phase, Fanon writes that

the native intellectual gives proof that he has assimilated the culture of the occupying power […] His inspiration is European and we can easily link up these works with definite trends in the literature of the mother country. This is the period of unqualified assimilation.

Black, not Noir

Adam Shatz, London Review of Books

'That Smell’ and ‘Notes from Prison’ by Sonallah Ibrahim, translated by Robyn Creswell

New Directions, 110 pp, £11.99, March, ISBN 978 0 8112 2036 1

When we first meet the nameless narrator of Sonallah Ibrahim’s 1966 novella That Smell, he’s just been released from prison, but no one is there to greet him, and he’s in no mood to celebrate. He remains under house arrest, free to wander the streets of Cairo so long as he returns home by dusk, when his police minder has to sign off on his curfew. Things could be worse: he could be back in prison, where he remembers being beaten, ‘shaking with cold and fear’. But when he looks for ‘some feeling that was out of the ordinary, some joy or delight or excitement’, he draws a blank. On the night of his release, the police throw him into a filthy holding pen because he has nowhere to stay:

There were a lot of men there and the door kept opening to let more in. I felt something in my knee. I put my hand down and sensed something wet. I looked at my hand and found a big patch of blood on my fingers and in the next moment saw swarms of bugs on my clothing and I stood up and noticed for the first time big patches of blood smeared on the walls of the cell and one of the men laughed and said to me: Come here.

Chinua Achebe: Without the story we are blind

Chinua Achebe

The ‘father’ of African literature set the template for the darker peoples of the world to tell their own stories, writes Percy Zvomuya. Mail & Guardian

Anthills of the Savannah (1987), the last novel the late Chinua Achebe wrote, has a chapter with the title Impetuous Son. The impetuous son is Ikem Osodi, poet and newspaperman, a character drawn from the skeleton of Achebe’s friend, the poet Christopher Okigbo, a victim of the Biafran War for independence.

An Interview with Alice Walker: “Go to the Places That Scare You”

Alice Walker interviewed by Valerie Schloredt, Toward Freedom

Alice Walker is a poet, essayist, and commentator, but she’s best known for her prodigious accomplishments as a writer of literary fiction. Her novel The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1983 and quickly became a classic of world literature. Set in an African-American community in the rural South during the decades before World War II, the novel is told in letters written by Celie, a woman who survives oppression and abuse with her spirit not only intact, but transcendent. 

Walker’s writing is characterized by an ever-present awareness of injustice and inequality. But whether describing political struggle—as in Meridian, which deals with the civil rights movement—or meditating on the human relationship to nature and animals, as in her latest book, The Chicken Chronicles, her work conveys the possibility of change. In Walker’s vision, grace is available through love and a deep connection to the beauty of the world.

Refuge for the wretched

by Percy Zvomuya, Mail & Guardian

The tiny Caribbean island of Martinique has bequeathed to the world great thinkers and writers. Most prominent, at least in Africa, is Frantz Fanon, one of the most important thinkers of the past century, whose text The Wretched of the Earth is routinely described as the “bible of decolonisation”. Then there is poet and politician Aimé Césaire, who, with the late Senegalese president Léopold Sédar Senghor, is a cornerstone of the black movement Négritude.

Yvonne Vera interviewed by Jane Bryce

Interview with Yvonne Vera, 1st August 2000, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Weaver Press

When I recently met Yvonne Vera, I had read her earlier works, Nehanda and Without A Name, only because the publisher had given them to a mutual friend in London. To date, all her novels have been produced by the highly respected Zimbabwe publishing house, Baobab Books, Harare. It is the fate of African writers who choose to publish their work on the continent to be less well-known internationally than those whose work is taken up by metropolitan publishers. Yet what I had read of Yvonne Vera’s work had left me with a burning desire to find out more about her, and this was a major part of my decision to attend the Zimbabwe International Book Fair, fifteen years after my last visit to the country in 1985.