LITERATURE - The African Mirror

Aug

17

2024

Women in translation month: a moving Algerian novel tracks the economic struggles of writers and publishers

LITERATURE

JOSEPH FORD FRENCH-ALGERIAN publisher Edmond Charlot is the subject of the Algerian writer Kaouther Adimi’s third novel, and her first to be translated into English. It was published in 2020 under the US title Our Riches and retitled A Bookshop in Algiers for the UK audience. Before he reached the heights of fame, the French Algerian author Albert Camus was part of a group of talented thinkers and writers including André Gide, Kateb Yacine and Mohammed Dib. This group’s early works were first printed and sold by the young Charlot. Adimi’s novel was translated into English by Chris Andrews. It…

Aug

01

2024

By HENNING MELBER

German colonialism in Africa has a chilling history – new book explores how it lives on

LITERATURE

GERMANY was a significant – and often brutal – colonial power in Africa. But this colonial history is not told as often as that of other imperialist nations. A new book called The Long Shadow of German Colonialism: Amnesia, Denialism and Revisionism aims to bring the past into the light. It explores not just the history of German colonialism, but also how its legacy has played out in German society, politics and the media. We asked Henning Melber about his book. What is the history of German colonialism in Africa? Imperial Germany was a latecomer in the scramble for Africa.…

Jul

03

2024

By CHIGOZIE OBIOMA

The Road to the Country: novelist Chigozie Obioma on Nigeria’s brutal civil war, love and redemption

LITERATURE

CHIGOZIE Obioma is the Nigerian author of the novels The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for their unique, folkloric tales of Nigerian life in decades past. Like them, his 2024 novel The Road to the Country is “tinged with fable and prophecy”. It’s set in the brutal Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1960, fought between Nigeria and the Republic of Biafra, a secessionist state which had declared its independence. This epic story of “a young man seeking redemption in a country on fire” is about a shy Lagos student whose brother disappears…

May

26

2024

By ESTHER MUSEMBI, BIRD STORY AGENCY

From IT specialist to poet extraordinaire: The story of Njeri Wangari

LITERATURE, ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

WHEN Njeri Wangari walked into the spotlight at an event in Nairobi in May, it was clear she had command of the stage. The DJ cut the house music right on time and Wangari launched into her lines of poetry at the open mic event. With her brightly patterned kitenge kimono and commanding voice, Wangari wowed the Mother's Day crowd, with the audience snapping their fingers - considered clapping in spoken poetry circles - in all the right places. She finished her performance with another spoken word piece celebrating women and mothers, to which she received a standing ovation from…

May

11

2024

By NEDINE MOONSAMY

African sci-fi: body hopping, artificial wombs and angry ghosts in a future Botswana

LITERATURE

TLOTLO Tsamaase has already proved her talent for African science fiction. Her masterly short stories, one previously shortlisted for the Caine Prize, are helping put Botswana on the literary map. Her debut novel, Womb City, interweaves the mythological and digital expanses of Batswana culture in a dystopian fashion. We encounter a distant future world in which women remain charged with ensuring their own survival in the face of attempts to erase and control them. As a scholar of African science fiction and speculative fiction, I explore how authors like Tsamaase are employing these global genres to ask questions about race,…

Apr

29

2024

By The African Mirror

Margaret Busby: how a pioneering Ghanaian publisher put African women’s writing on the map

LITERATURE

PUBLISHED in 1992, Daughters of Africa is a groundbreaking volume of writing by women of African descent. It was followed by an expanded second edition, New Daughters of Africa, in 2019. The mind behind the books is pioneering Ghanaian-born publisher, writer and editor Margaret Busby. She became the first Black female publisher in the UK at 20 when she co-founded Allison and Busby in 1967. The company was first to publish a number of significant writers during her two-decade tenure. Busby has continued to nurture new generations of writers, academics, editors, publishers and critics. In May she was in South…

Apr

25

2024

By BRONWYN LAW-VILJOEN

Johannesburg in a time of darkness: Ivan Vladislavić’s new memoir reminds us of the city’s fragility

LITERATURE

IVAN Vladislavic is Johannesburg’s literary linkman. He tells us, in the first pages of his new book, The Near North, that before cities were lit, first by gaslight and later electricity, people of means paid torchbearers to escort them through dark and perilous streets. “In Paris,” he observes, “these linkmen were often police spies or informers, while in London they were more likely to be in league with criminals”. For his part, Vladislavic believes that the real linkmen are Johannesburg’s car guards. They emerge from the darkness not so much to guard cars as to give middle-class drivers the illusion…

Apr

13

2024

By STEVEN FRIEDMAN

Good Jew, Bad Jew: new book explores why the West views brutality against Ukrainians and Palestinians differently

LITERATURE

IN a recently published book Steven Friedman, who has written extensively on the political and social aspects of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, explores the racist underpinnings of the West’s responses to Israel’s war in Gaza. This is an extract from the book, Good Jew, Bad Jew. Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani sees a link between the violence of the coloniser and the slaughter of Jews and Slavs by the Nazis. The racial theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and others who claimed the Aryan race was superior meant that Jews and Slavs, who were both regarded as not Aryan, could be…

Mar

07

2024

By HALEY MCEWEN

US Christian right has taken aim at LGBTIQ+ rights, sex education and abortion in Africa – new book

LITERATURE, LGBTQIA+

A new book – The US Christian Right and Pro-Family Politics in 21st Century Africa – reveals the role played by some right-wing US Christian groups in trying to spread their social and moral influence in African countries. Sociologist Haley McEwen, who specialises in the subject, answers five questions about her book. HALEY MCEWEN, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Gothenburg What do you want readers to take away? I hope that readers can better understand the reasons why lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ+) rights, abortion and sexuality education have become so highly politicised in African countries (and other…

Feb

21

2024

By THOKO SIPUNGU

Women in South Africa’s armed struggle: new book records history at first hand

LITERATURE

SOUTH Africa’s young democracy was a culmination of years of sweat, blood and revolution against the apartheid regime. In the early 1960s, after decades of “non-violence” as a policy of resistance, the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) formed military wings to take the fight to the apartheid regime. THOKO SIPUNGU, Lecturer in Sociology, Rhodes University Based on the living record and popular discourse, it would be easy to assume that the struggle against apartheid was almost entirely the domain of men. But women played a crucial role – one which is only really coming to light…