In her Editor’s Note to the recently published Africa39 anthology, Ellah Allfrey asserts, “There is no danger of ‘a single story’ here.” She is referencing, of course, Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk, in which Adichie argues that a singular narrative about any… Read More ›
Africa in Words is taking a break from our regular content over the festive season, but we’ll be back from next week. In the meantime, it’s that time of year for best-of lists, and the African literature and arts blogosphere… Read More ›
AiW Guest Kristen Roupenian A surprising number of essays in Transition’s special issue on Nelson Mandela share the same basic argument: in the ongoing transformation of Mandela into a global icon, something important is being lost. Therefore, those who wish… Read More ›
For me ‘The Supreme Price’ reflects a conflict many working with questions of gender and politics in history will recognise. How to measure the significance of women who attain power through men (husbands, fathers, sons)? How important is it to distinguish between women as figureheads… Read More ›
AiW Guest Nyana Kakoma When upcoming writers like me hear that Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi started writing Kintu in 2003, we despair. We reach into that part of our brain that always doubts that we will make it at this writing… Read More ›
AiW Guest Catherine Gilbert Matière grise (Grey Matter), 2011. Directed by Kivu Ruhorahoza. 110 min. Kinyarwanda and French with English subtitles. 2014 marks the twentieth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda in which as many as one million people were… Read More ›
AiW Guest Sarah Jilani This year marks the 50th anniversary of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child. When the novel was originally published in 1964 by Heinemann’s African Writers Series, its author James Ngugi was a young Kenyan student at… Read More ›
Mama still reminds me every once in a while that there are penalties in Nigeria for that sort of thing. And of course, she’s right. I’ve read of them in the newspapers and have heard of them on the… Read More ›
AiW Guest Lennon Chido Mhishi By the time the music has started playing, I am excited inside already. For a moment my mind is lost somewhere, and I only realise then that there was a solo on the piano, but… Read More ›
‘AiW Guest Kristen Roupenian’ If it has been a long time since you’ve read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s classic The Secret Garden—and if, in the meantime, your memory has been clouded by a series of overly charming movie adaptations—you may… Read More ›
AiW Guest Emma Shercliff Review of panel discussion with Bibi Bakare-Yusuf of Cassava Republic Press; Valerie Brandes of Jacaranda Books; Verna Wilkins of Tamarind Books and Susan Yearwood, agent and founder of Susan Yearwood Literary Agency. Chaired by Simi Dosekun…. Read More ›
AiW Guest Réhab Abdelghany Last month, the Royal African Society’s annual Africa Writes Festival brought to the UK an audience with the eminent Ghanaian playwright, poet, novelist and academic, Ama Ata Aidoo: a festive event in its own right. Having… Read More ›
Saturday 12th July found me seated in the conference auditorium of the British Library, expectantly awaiting the start of a panel entitled ‘Beyond the Novel: Developing Contemporary African Writing’. Comprising one of the many events scheduled at Africa Writes 2014,… Read More ›
Today, more and more literary events happen online. Readers argue over the plotlines of serialized ‘Facebook fiction.’ Writers tweet entire novels. And a Google Hangout with an author will draw a larger crowd than a signing at a local bookstore…. Read More ›
Peffer and Cameron’s new edited collection brings together disparate accounts of photography in Africa, revising and developing what is, as they point out, still a relatively new field, despite the work of (for example) Paul Jenkins and Paul Landau that… Read More ›
AiW Guest Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed Efemia Chela’s ‘Chicken’ initially felt like two different stories told in three parts. This was until I gave it another read and realised its three separate parts tell an interesting coming-of-age story. Our narrator, Kaba, is at… Read More ›
AiW Guest Anthea Gordon In Binyavanga Wainana’s influential essay ‘How to Write About Africa’, one of his many salient pieces of tongue-in-cheek advice is: ‘be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa… Read More ›
NEWS (no longer quite breaking): A. Gofer (c/o Steph Newell) has won the inaugural International Aubrey Tearle Proofreader’s Derby (fittingly restlessly re-named from the 2014 Restless Derby). The neck-and-neck runners up are Catharine Morris aka Words and Things, and Kai… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Doseline Kiguru As I began to read ‘My Father’s Head’, I thought for a moment that it was going to be yet another Caine Prize story set in church and about cunning priests and their gullible as well as… Read More ›
A story about waste – human waste – in immaculate prose, Diane Awerbuck’s ‘Phosphorescence’ has, for me, a quality of suspension. On the one hand, it’s about the defiant resistance of ‘an old lady’ against loss, of her habitual daily… Read More ›
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