Mandla Langa - The Texture of Shadows: Launch at the Steven Biko Centre

Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945)

Animal Farm is an allegorical novella by George Orwell published in England on 17 August 1945. According to Orwell the book reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917, and then on into the Stalin era in the Soviet Union. Orwell, a democratic socialist, was a critic of Joseph Stalin and hostile to Moscow-directed Stalinism, especially after his experiences with the NKVD and the Spanish Civil War. The Soviet Union he believed, had become a brutal dictatorship, built upon a cult of personality and enforced by a reign of terror. In a letter to Yvonne Davet, Orwell described Animal Farm as his novel "contre Stalin" and in his essay of 1946,Why I Write, he wrote that Animal Farm was the first book in which he had tried, with full consciousness of what he was doing, "to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole."

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.

Power and Pitfalls of Historical Fiction

Mavuso Dingani, Solidarity 

We are All Zimbabweans Now

by James Kilgore

Cape Town, South Africa: Umuzi, 2009,

Swallow Press, 2011, distributed in the United States by Ohio University Press, $22.95 paper.

WHEN JAMES KILGORE’S We are all Zimbabweans now first came out in 2009, the world economy was facing a deep recession. My first impression was that the book’s title referred to the globalizing of Zimbabwe’s 10-year economic crisis. In fact, Kilgore’s novel was referring to Zimbabwe’s attempt at reconciliation between white and black Zimbabweans after a brutal liberation war that killed 30,000 people.

Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, women, veils, and land.

by Ria Faulkner, World Literature Today, 1996

Frantz Fanon uses the image of the unveiling of Algeria in A Dying Colonialism in drawing a connection between the land, the nation, women, and their bodies. Assia Djebar twists that image in her story "Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement" and in the "Postface" to the collection of the same name. Djebar uses the space of the city of Algiers rather than that of the whole nation. Twenty years after Fanon's polemic, Djebar examines the place of women in Algeria under the patriarchal nationalists, finding women's bodies and minds imprisoned by physical walls and mental veils. In a different kind of war, through her discourse, she seeks to contribute to the liberation of Algerian women, their gaze, and the voices which emanate from their material bodies.

Wizard of the Crow

by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Extract from "Wizard of the Crow", Open Democracy

There were many theories about the strange illness of the second Ruler of the Free Republic of Aburiria, but the most frequent on people's lips were five.
The illness, so claimed the first, was born of anger that once welled up inside him; and he was so conscious of the danger it posed to his well-being that he tried all he could to rid himself of it by belching after every meal, sometimes counting from one to ten, and other times chanting ka ke ki ko ku aloud.

Bessie Head: A Question of Power

Elizabeth, Native Intellectual

A Review of Bessie Head's A Question of Power by Temperance David

The following short essay explores the character Elizabeth from Bessie Head's novel A Question of Power as a non-ideal version of the "native intellectual" described by Frantz Fanon in his book The Wretched of the Earth. As Elizabeth's hallucinations of Sello and Dan can be said to be a part of her intellectual work, I am including them in my analysis. Elizabeth's nationality (or lack thereof), her statelessness, her "race," and her philosophy all modify Fanon's definition of the native intellectual, but it is in her prioritizing of the soul over nationality that she differs most.

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Reviewed by Joshua Masinde, African Book Club

In this deeply symbolic book published in 1968, Ayi Kwei Amar vividly captures the seemingly endless spiral of corruption, moral decadence and spiritual death in post-colonial Ghana.

The book tells the story of a nameless man who struggles to reconcile himself with the reality of post-independence Ghana. Referred to throughout the book, as simply, “The Man”, he refuses to take a bribe, something that angers his wife.

The Man keeps a humble job, and despite the constant naggings of his wife, he lives an honest life, even if that condemns him to a life of poverty. He represents the lot of the common man in Ghana – who has no choice but to reside in the poorest slums and live from hand to mouth.

Bloke Modisane: Blame Me on History

A review by Muthal Naidoo

(First published 1963)

 

In the name of slum clearance they had brought the bulldozers and gored into her body, and for a brief moment, looking down Good Street, Sophiatown was like one of its own many victims; a man gored by the knives of Sophiatown lying in the open gutters, a raisin in the smelling drains, dying of multiple stab wounds, gaping wells gushing forth blood; the look of shock and bewilderment, of horror and incredulity, on the face of the dying man.  (5)

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

We rely, in this world, on the visual aspects of humanity as a means of learning who we are. This, Ralph Ellison argues convincingly, is a dangerous habit. A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952, Invisible Man chronicles the travels of its narrator, a young, nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of American intolerance and cultural blindness. Searching for a context in which to know himself, he exists in a very peculiar state. "I am an invisible man," he says in his prologue. "When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me." But this is hard-won self-knowledge, earned over the course of many years. As the book gets started, the narrator is expelled from his Southern Negro college for inadvertently showing a white trustee the reality of black life in the south, including an incestuous farmer and a rural whorehouse. The college director chastises him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting around here?" Mystified, the narrator moves north to New York City, where the truth, at least as he perceives it, is dealt another blow when he learns that his former headmaster's recommendation letters are, in fact, letters of condemnation.

Waiting for the Barbarians

“Waiting for the Barbarians”
by J.M. Coetzee
Vintage | September 2004 | ISBN 0099465930 

 

Recommended by Sharif Hamadeh, Open Democracy

“First published in Britain in 1980, J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians was intended as an allegorical attack on Apartheid South Africa. However, by constructing the narration entirely in the present tense, and situating the story in an anonymous frontier settlement of an unnamed ‘Empire’, Coetzee eschews the limitations imposed by specificities of temporal, geographical and historical context and succeeds in attaining a universalism to which all writers aspire, but only the greatest realize.

Sembene Ousmane: God's Bits of Wood

Sembene Ousmane's third novel, God's Bits of Wood, was originally written and published in French as Les Bouts de bois de Dieu. The novel is set in pre-independence Senegal and follows the struggles of the African trainworkers in three cities as they go on strike against their French employers in an effort for equal benefits and compensation. The chapters of the book shift between the cities of Bamako, Thies, and Dakar and track the actions and growth of the men and women whose lives are transformed by the strike. Rather than number the chapters, Ousmane has labeled them by the city in which they take place, and the character who is the focal point of that chapter.

Graceland

by Chris Abani

The sprawling, swampy, cacophonous city of Lagos, Nigeria, provides the backdrop to the story of Elvis, a teenage Elvis impersonator hoping to make his way out of the ghetto. Broke, beset by floods, and beatings by his alcoholic father, and with no job opportunities in sight, Elvis is tempted by a life of crime. Thus begins his odyssey into the dangerous underworld of Lagos, guided by his friend Redemption and accompanied by a restless hybrid of voices including The King of Beggars, Sunday, Innocent and Comfort. Young Elvis, drenched in reggae and jazz, and besotted with American film heroes and images, must find his way to a GraceLand of his own. Nuanced, lyrical, and pitch perfect, Abani has created a remarkable story of a son and his father, and an examination of postcolonial Nigeria where the trappings of American culture reign supreme.

The Fire Next Time

It's shocking how little has changed between the races in this country since 1963, when James Baldwin published this coolly impassioned plea to "end the racial nightmare." The Fire Next Time--even the title is beautiful, resonant, and incendiary. "Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?" Baldwin demands, flicking aside the central race issue of his day and calling instead for full and shared acceptance of the fact that America is and always has been a multiracial society. Without this acceptance, he argues, the nation dooms itself to "sterility and decay" and to eventual destruction at the hands of the oppressed: "The Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power, but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream."

Texaco

Patrick Chamoiseau's novel (1997) is an ambitious narrative history of the Caribbean island of Martinique, tracking the growth of a shanty-town named 'Texaco' after a nearby oil depot. Chamoiseau tells the story of the epic struggle of the Creole underclass to carve out of an uncaring and unfair society their own unique place. The story moves backwards and forwards in time, comprising the narrative of radical activist Marie-Sophie Laborieux, her freed-slave father Esternome and his many loves. Straightforward history - the rise and collapse of the plantation system, the coming of the oil companies, a formal state visit by de Gaulle in the 1960s - is interwoven with fragments of Creole legend and folk wisdom.

Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (London: The Women's Press, 1988; reprinted 1997)

a review by Raj Patel, Voice of the Turtle

Word has spread about Tsitsi Dangarembga's first novel. Its popularity in, and pertinence to, discussions of poscolonial fiction have led to its recent fourth printing. Dangarembga (which, curiously, means 'doghouse' in Shona) in her semi-autobiographical debut novel has fused an adolescent coming-of-age tale with an awakening to the full consequences of colonialism. Nervous conditions follows the first fifteen years in the life of Tambudzai, a young girl who grows up in a village near Umtali (now Mutare), near Zimababwe's Eastern Mozambique border. In its sensitive treatment of sexism, of the pain of hybridity, of the dark comedy of childhood and the bitter violence of colonialism, Nervous Conditions is an exemplary novel.

Fanon: A Novel

Fanon by: John Edgar Wideman
ISBN-13/EAN: ISBN-10: pages Publication Date: 02/07/2008

Description of the book by Houghton Mifflin:

Wideman’s first novel in a decade conjures the author of The Wretched of the Earth and his urgent relevance today

Wideman’s fascinating new novel weaves together fiction, biography, and memoir to evoke the life and message of Frantz Fanon, the influential author of The Wretched of the Earth. A philosopher, psychiatrist, and political activist, Fanon was a fierce, acute critic of racism and oppression. Born of African descent in Martinique in 1927, Fanon fought to defend France during World War II and then later against France in Algeria’s war for independence. The Wretched of the Earth, written in 1961, inspired leaders of liberation movements from Steve Biko in South Africa to Che Guevera to the Black Panthers in the United States.