Africa's best books and more...
If titles sold books, this 2009 offering would be a bestseller. Thando Mgqolozana, a nursing graduate, writes about the scourge of circumcisions gone wrong with the authority of someone close to the action. The Eastern Cape, his birthplace, is notorious for this practice, year after bleeding year.
Butterflies of the Nile is a collection of poetry, short stories and plays written by Jane Musoke-Nteyafas, a Ugandan writer living in Canada. The tone is sharply feminine, with passionate descriptions of the beauty of an African woman.
Readers of “Ear to the Ground”, Charles Onyango-Obbo’s long running weekly column, which first appeared in The Monitor newspaper in 1994, will love Uganda’s Poorly Kept Secrets. Carrot on the stick!
Set around Mount Elgon in eastern Uganda, Upon This Mountain by Timothy Wangusa was published in 1989 by Heinemann International. It portrays African life in the post colonial era, a time when communities were drawn together through special religious and cultural occasions like baptism and circumcision.
VS Naipaul is often blinkered but he still sees things in Africa that others miss, says Aminatta Forna
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