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Eyes of the Slain Woman (by Benjamin Kwakye)
$20.00
Praised as one of the most accomplished of a new generation of African novelistsżand perhaps the most important Ghanaian writer since Ayi Kwei ArmahżBenjamin Kwakye establishes a powerful connection with the reader in his story of a young African manżs immigrant experience.The protagonist in The Other Crucifix immerses himself in American college life, a new life that alienates him in more ways than one from his native Africa. As the years pass, memories of Ghana fade until his uncleżs death in a coup dżetat triggers a crucial reawakening.
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Anansi Does the Impossible: An Ashanti Tale (by Verna Aardema)
$7.99
Long ago, when the earth was set down and the sky was lifted up, all the folktales were owned by the Sky God. And Anansi, that cunning little spider, was determined to buy them back. The payment? A live python, one real fairy, and forty-seven stinging hornets. Not such a high price to pay for all the folktales on earth. But how will Anansi find these hard to come bgy items? It sounds impossible! There's only one way to find the help he needs -- Anansi must go to his clever wife, Aso. But will she be smart enough to outwit the Sky God and get the stories back? This humorous retelling of an Ashanti tale brings Anansi together with his better half in an ingenious scheme that will delight readers of all ages! Full-color illustrations by Lisa Desimini. (Ages 4-8)
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Death and the King's Horseman (by Wole Soyinka)
$18.25
This Norton Critical Edition of Death and the King's Horseman is the only student edition available in the United States. Based on events that took place in 1946 in the ancient Yoruban city of Oyo, Soyinka's acclaimed and powerful play addresses classic issues of cultural conflict, tragic decision-making, and the psychological mindsets of individuals and groups. The text of the play is accompanied by an introduction and explanatory annotations for the many allusions to traditional Nigerian myth and culture.
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Transit (by Abdourahman A. Waberi)
$17.00
Waiting at the Paris airport, two immigrants from Djibouti reveal parallel stories of war, child soldiers, arms trafficking, drugs, and hunger. Bashir is recently discharged from the army and wounded, finding himself inside the French Embassy. Harbi, whose wife, Alice, has been killed by the police, is there too--arrested earlier as a political suspect. An embassy official mistakes Bashir for Harbi's son, and as Harbi does not deny it, both will be exiled to France, Alice's home country. This brilliantly shrewd and cynical universal chronicle of war and exile, translated into English for the first time, amounts to a lyrical and reflective history of Djibouti and its tortuous politics, crippled economy, and devastated moral landscape.
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Before Forever After: When Conversations About Living Meet Questions About Dying (by Helena Dolny)
$20.00
More talking. Less suffering. More living alive with intention and joy. Helena Dolny imagines a world in which people engage in death-in-life conversations as part of everyday living. She believes we’d live better and suffer less if we were to talk about dying more readily. Archbishop Desmond Tutu told her:‘This taboo about not talking about dying…needs to be challenged.’ Helena interviewed family and friends as well as people across continents in diverse professions including the funeral business, palliative care, spiritual leaders and financial advisors. The outcome: 57 stories on nine themes that will stop you in your tracks and make you think about how you choose to live and how you’d prefer to die. This book’s rich cast of storytellers does not provide answers. The gift Before Forever After offers is the inspiration to craft clearer and sharper questions so that you, the reader, may shape your own unique response to this fierce, fundamental and inevitable force of life.
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Happiness, Like Water (by Chinelo Okparanta)
$14.95
A moving debut story collection centered on Nigerian women at home and transplanted to the United States, building lives out of longing and hope, faith and doubt, the struggle to stay and the mandate to leave, the burden and strength of love. Here are characters faced with dangerous decisions, children slick with oil from the river, a woman in love with another despite the penalties. Here is a world marked by electricity outages, lush landscapes, folktales, buses that break down and never start up again. Here is a portrait of Nigerians that is surprising, shocking, heartrending, loving, and across social strata, dealing in every kind of change. Here are stories filled with language to make your eyes pause and your throat catch. "Happiness, Like Water "introduces a true talent, a young writer with a beautiful heart and a capacious imagination. (Released August 13, 2013)
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Mission to Kala (by Mongo Beti)
$14.95
Mission to Kala (Mission termine) is a powerful comic novel set in late colonial Cameroon. It won the Prix Sainte-Beuve in 1958. It describes the visit of a young Yaounde-educated man to a village in the interior. Jean-Marie Medza, the narrator, has just failed his Baccalaurat exam, and returns home expecting humiliation. Instead, he finds that as a scholar his prestige is immense, and he is charged with the duty of travelling to Kala, a remote village, to secure the return of a young woman who has fled her lazy, demanding husband. In Kala, while awaiting the return of the woman to the village, Medza stays with his uncle, who exploits the young man's celebrity status to have him showered with gifts, most of which his uncle keeps. Medza is the focus of a series of amusing incidents, becomes unexpectedly married, and eventually completes his mission - but then has to return home to deal with the anger of his ambitious father. Mongo Beti (1932-2001) was a key figure in modern West African literature. His major works of fiction include The Poor Christ of Bomba (1956), Mission to Kala (1957) The Miraculous King (1958), and Perpetua and the Habit of Unhappiness (1974). His non-fiction includes The rape of Cameroon, autopsy of a decolonisation (1972) and France against Africa: return to Cameroon (1993). Although he spent 32 years in self-imposed exile, only returning to Cameroon in 1991, he was throughout his career a powerful political and moral voice, always engaged in the affairs of his home country.
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Housegirl (by Michael Donkor)
$16.00
A moving and unexpectedly funny exploration of friendship and family, shame and forgiveness, Michael Donkor's debut novel follows three adolescent girls grappling with a shared experience: the joys and sorrows of growing up.
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Double Yoke (by Buchi Emecheta)
$13.50
Set on the campus of a Nigerian university, Double Yoke tells the story of two undergraduates who must confront the conflicting demands of tradition and modernity. While Nko pursues an education despite the resistance of those who feel a woman's identity is assumed in traditional marriage, Ete Kamba's love for her is severely tested as he is himself locked into the rigid attitudes from which Nko is attempting to break free. Nko must further contend with unscrupulous professors who would take advantage of her tenuous role as a woman in a male-dominated environment. As the author candidly portrays the status of women in emerging African nations, the choices facing Ete Kamba and Nko are neither clearcut nor perfect. In Double Yoke, Buchi Emecheta faces them head on.
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Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (by Dambisa Moyo)
$14.00
countries to developing African nations has helped to reduce poverty and increase growth. In fact, poverty levels continue to escalate and growth rates have steadily declined—and millions continue to suffer. Debunking the current model of international aid promoted by both Hollywood celebrities and policy makers, Dambisa Moyo offers a bold new road map for financing development of the world’s poorest countries. Much debated in the United States and the United Kingdom on publication, Dead Aid is an unsettling yet optimistic work, a powerful challenge to the assumptions and arguments that support a profoundly misguided development policy in Africa. And it is a clarion call to a new, more hopeful vision of how to address the desperate poverty that plagues millions.
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So Long a Letter (by Mariama Bâ)
$14.00
Written by Mariama ba and translated from the French by Modupe Bode-Thomas, So Long a Letter won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, and was recognized as one of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century in an initiative organised by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. This edition includes an introduction by Professor Kenneth W. Harrow of Michigan State University.
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The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa (by Dayo Olopade)
$26.00
The path to progress in Africa lies in the surprising and innovative solutions Africans are finding for themselves Africa is a continent on the move. It's often hard to notice, though--the western focus on governance and foreign aid obscures the individual dynamism and informal social adaptation driving the last decade of African development. Dayo Olopade set out across sub-Saharan Africa to find out how ordinary people are dealing with the challenges they face every day. She found an unexpected Africa: resilient, joyful, and innovative, a continent of DIY changemakers and impassioned community leaders."" Everywhere Olopade went, she witnessed the specific creativity born from African difficulty--a trait she began calling "kanju." It's embodied by bootstrapping innovators like Kenneth Nnebue, who turned his low-budget, straight-to-VHS movies into a multi-million dollar film industry known as Nollywood. Or Soyapi Mumba, who helped transform cast-off American computers into touchscreen databases that allow hospitals across Malawi to process patients in seconds. Or Ushahidi, the Kenyan technology collective that crowdsources citizen activism and disaster relief." The Bright Continent" calls for a necessary shift in our thinking about Africa. Olopade shows us that the increasingly globalized challenges Africa faces can and must be addressed with the tools Africans are already using to solve these problems themselves. Africa's ability to do more with less--to transform bad aid and bad government into an opportunity to innovate--is a clear ray of hope amidst the dire headlines and a powerful model for the rest of the world.
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Every Day is for the Thief (by Teju Cole)
$23.00
For readers of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Michael Ondaatje, Every Day Is for the Thief is a wholly original work of fiction by Teju Cole, whose critically acclaimed debut, Open City, was the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by more than twenty publications. Fifteen years is a long time to be away from home. It feels longer still because I left under a cloud. A young Nigerian living in New York City goes home to Lagos for a short visit, finding a city both familiar and strange. In a city dense with story, the unnamed narrator moves through a mosaic of life, hoping to find inspiration for his own. He witnesses the “yahoo yahoo” diligently perpetrating email frauds from an Internet café, longs after a mysterious woman reading on a public bus who disembarks and disappears into a bookless crowd, and recalls the tragic fate of an eleven-year-old boy accused of stealing at a local market. Along the way, the man reconnects with old friends, a former girlfriend, and extended family, taps into the energies of Lagos life—creative, malevolent, ambiguous—and slowly begins to reconcile the profound changes that have taken place in his country and the truth about himself. In spare, precise prose that sees humanity everywhere, interwoven with original photos by the author, Every Day Is for the Thief—originally published in Nigeria in 2007—is a wholly original work of fiction. This revised and updated edition is the first version of this unique book to be made available outside Africa. You’ve never read a book like Every Day Is for the Thief because no one writes like Teju Cole.
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Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country (by Gillian Slovo)
from $16.95
A passionate witness to the colossal upheaval that has transformed her native South Africa, Gillian Slovo has written a memoir that is far more than a story of her own life. For she is the daughter of Joe Slovo and Ruth First, South Africa's pioneering anti-apartheid white activists, a daughter who always had to come second to political commitment. While recalling the extraordinary events which surrounded her family's persecution and exile, and reconstructing the truth of her parents' relationship and her own turbulent childhood, leading her at one point to a chilling interview with one of the men responsible for her mother's death, Gillian Slovo has reated an astonishing portrait of a courageous, beautiful mother and a father of integrity and stoicism.
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In the Name of the Mother: Reflections on Writers and Empire
$24.95
Renowned worldwide, as novelist and dramatist, Ngugi wa Thiongo's contributions to the body of critical writing on African literature, politics and society have been highly significant. His best known critical work is Decolonising the Mind, which since publication in 1986 has profoundly influenced other writers, critics, scholars and students. These latest essays reflect Ngugi's continuing interests and enthusiasms. His choice of writers is original. He makes us look again at their novels to address his lifelong concerns with the ways to independence, the meanings of colonialism and the takeover by neo-colonialism, and the functions of literature in political as well as literary terms. They will appeal not only to his international band of supporters. They will also introduce his views to young people discovering African and Caribbean literature.
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Black Star Nairobi (by Mukoma Wa Ngugi)
$15.95
When a bomb explodes in a downtown Nairobi hotel, private detectives Ishmael and Odhiambo quickly make the connection to a murder case they’re investigating. It’s the first big break for their new detective agency, Black Star, formed after they were teamed together as policemen and they tracked down a Rwandan war criminal through the violent Kenyan underworld. But then the CIA and the local police claim the bombing was the work of Al Qaeda, though it’s clear to Ishmael and O. that something else is going on. They’re under pressure to back off from the investigation, until a startling act of violence tips the scales—and the detectives take off on a round-the-globe pursuit of the shadowy forces that appear to be behind it all. With Kenya riven by ethnic violence, following the disputed elections of 2007, and Obama on the campaign trail in the United States, Ishmael, an American cop who’d made a new life for himself in Africa, confronts a changed world, where everything he thought he knew gets thrown into doubt—and the only way to find the answers is to go to extremes. A thrilling, hard-hitting sequel to Nairobi Heat, from a major new crime talent.
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King Peggy: An American Secretary, Her Royal Destiny, and the Inspiring Story of How She Changed an African Village (by Peggielene Bartels and Eleanor Herman)
from $15.00
The charming real-life fairy tale of an American secretary who discovers she has been chosen king of an impoverished fishing village on the west coast of Africa. "King Peggy" chronicles the astonishing journey of American secretary, Peggielene Bartels, who suddenly finds herself king to a town of 7,000 people on Ghana's central coast, half a world away. Upon arriving for her crowning ceremony in beautiful Otuam, she discovers the dire reality: there's no running water, no doctor, no high school, and many of the village elders are stealing the town's funds. To make matters worse, her uncle (the late king) sits in a morgue awaiting a proper funeral in the royal palace, which is in ruins. Peggy's first two years as king of Otuam unfold in a way that is stranger than fiction. In the end, a deeply traditional African town is uplifted by the ambitions of its decidedly modern female king, and Peggy is herself transformed, from an ordinary secretary to the heart and hope of her community.
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The Ghosts of Happy Valley (by Juliet Barnes)
$29.95
'Happy Valley' was the name given to the region of Kenya's Central Highlands where a community of affluent, hedonistic white expatriates settled between the wars. Including the writer Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), the pioneering aviator Beryl Markham and the troubled socialite Idina Sackville whose life was told in Frances Osborne's bestselling The Bolter, the Happy Valley set's notoriety was sealed in 1931 with the sensational - and still unsolved - murder of the Earl of Errol, the investigation of which laid bare the extent of the set's decadence and irresponsibility, and made for another bestselling book in James Fox's White Mischief. But what is left now? Juliet Barnes, who has lived in Kenya for many years, has set out to explore Happy Valley in a remarkable and indefatigable archaeological quest to find the homes and haunts of this extraordinary and vanished set of people - grand residences like Clouds up in the hills that once hosted opulent and scandalous parties. With the help of African guides, and guided by the memories of elderly expats she tracks down to the Muthiaga old enough to have first-hand memories of the likes of Idina and Lord Errol and the lives they led, what she finds - ruins reclaimed by luxuriant bush, tumbledown dwellings in which an African family ekes a subsistence living, or even a modest school - is a revelation of the state of modern Africa that makes the gilded era of the Happy Valley set seem even more fantastic. A book to set alongside such singular evocations of Africa and its strange colonial history as The Africa House, "The Ghosts of Happy Valley: The Biography" is a mesmerising blend of travel narrative, social history and personal quest.