Books in the The Africa List series

In an unnamed African nation, the people are subject to a state of perpetual warfare and an Orwellian abuse of language that strips away meaning and renders life senseless. And in a bare room lit only by moonlight, a young man hides, waiting for the mysterious crocodile-men to come and help him escape from the violent tyranny of the state.

For more than three decades, the author has explored in his work the nature of subjectivity, the possibilities of revolution, the Enlightenment's legacy in Africa, and the nature of time itself. In this book, he explains the key concerns of his art, including the virtues of bastardy, the ethics of provisionality, and the activity of the viewer.

"Everything starts with a song and everything ends with another song," says the narrator of The Divine Song. Paris is an old Sufi cat who keeps watch over his brilliant yet pathetic master, Sammy Kamau-Williams, the Enchanter. In Sammy, we recognize the African American singer-composer, poet, and novelist Gil Scott-Heron who is best known for his song "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." ​The Divine Song takes us from the shores of Africa to Sammy's ancestors' arrival in the Americas in the hold of the slave ships. From there, Abdourahman A. Waberi takes the characters from Tennessee--under the tutelage of Lili Williams, Sammy's beloved African-born grandmother--to New York and the concert halls of Paris and Berlin, wherever blues and jazz find an enchanted audience. African tales, religious practices, segregation, the civil rights movement, addiction, and jail--Sammy's life comes to encompass the whole of the African American experience. At a time when social and racial divisions have yet again come into sharp relief, this lyrical novel by one of African literature's rising stars is necessary reading for anyone who celebrates the resilience of art.

Master storyteller Ngugi wa Thiong'o blends myth and folklore with insight into the human psyche and the patterns of politics in this fable of how humans came to walk upright, set to appeal to both adults and children. Sunandini Banerjee illustrates.

The poems in this new volume by Abdourahman A. Waberi are introspective and inquisitive, reflecting a deep spiritual bond--with words, with the history of Islam and its great poets, with the landscapes those poets walked, among which Waberi grew up. The sage yearns here for the simplicity of each individual moment to somehow become eternal, for the histories and people that are part of him--his mother, his wife, his unborn child, the sacred texts that ground his being--to come together harmoniously within him, and to emerge through his words. Lyrical and personal, but with powerful historical and cultural resonances, these poems are the work of a master at the height of his powers.

Maryse Condé is one of the best-known and most beloved French Caribbean literary voices. The author of more than twenty novels, she was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2015 and has long been recognized as a giant of black feminist literature. While Condé has previously published an autobiography of her childhood, What Is Africa to Me? tells for the first time the story of her early adult years in Africa--years formative not only for her, but also for African colonies appealing for their own independence.What Is Africa to Me? traces the late 1950s to 1968, chronicling Condé's life in Sékou Touré's Guinea to her time in Kwame N'Krumah's Ghana, where she rubbed shoulders with Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Julius Nyerere, and Maya Angelou. Accusations of subversive activity resulted in Condé's deportation from Ghana. Settling down in Sénégal, Condé ended her African years with close friends in Dakar including, filmmakers, activists, and Haitian exiles, before putting down more permanent roots in Paris. Condé's story is more than one of political upheaval, however; it is also the story of a mother raising four children as she battles steep obstacles, of a Guadeloupean seeking her identity in Africa, and of a young woman searching for her freedom and vocation as a writer. What Is Africa to Me? is a searing portrait of a literary genius--it should not be missed.

Jason stops to listen to yet another busker . . . He concludes that it is not for her voice--rather airy and desperate--that her open guitar case is bristling with greenbacks. It is for her strawberry blonde bangs peeping out from under her hat, and her deep blue eyes, and her willowy stature . . . and her bare feet with tan lines drawn by sandals . . . She is trying hard to make her voice sound full-bodied and round, but she was not born for singing. She loses a beat to say "thank you" after Jason deposits a single, and then she tries hard to catch up with the song before it goes out of control. At that moment Jason recognises her. Rachel. Rachel Boucher from Jensen Township . . . Athens County, Ohio, USA. When Rachel Boucher and Jason de Klerk meet again--five years after high school--they immediately renew their friendship. But for Jason their friendship is just a stepping stone to something more--a romantic union that seems to have the blessing of the whole community. That is until Rachel becomes involved with Skye Riley. As Skye and Rachel grow ever closer, Jason's anger at the relationship boils over into violence, violence that turns the community on its head, setting old friends and neighbours against one another. But this is just a taste of things to come as, it turns out, Rachel is pregnant . . .

IN

One of South Africa‿s best-known writers during the apartheid era, Alex La Guma was a lifelong activist and a member of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. Persecuted and imprisoned by the South African regime in the 1950s and 60s, La Guma went into exile in the United Kingdom with his wife and children in 1966, eventually serving as the ANC‿s diplomatic representative for Latin America and the Caribbean in Cuba. Culture and Liberation captures a different dimension of his long writing career by collecting his political journalism, literary criticism, and other short pieces published while he was in exile.   This volume spans La Guma‿s political and literary life in exile through accounts of his travels to Algeria, Lebanon, Vietnam, Soviet Central Asia, and elsewhere, along with his critical assessments of Paul Robeson, Nadine Gordimer, Maxim Gorky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Pablo Neruda, among other writers. The first dedicated collection of La Guma‿s exile writing, Culture and Liberation restores an overlooked dimension of his life and work, while opening a window on a wider world of cultural and political struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. Â

The "Modern Sovereign," a notion indebted both to Hobbes's Leviathan and Marx's conception of capital, refers to the power that governed the African multitudes from the earliest colonial days to the post-colonial era. It is an internalized power, responsible for the multiform violence exerted on bodies and imaginations. Joseph Tonda contends that in Central Africa--and particularly in Gabon and the Congo--the body is at the heart of political, religious, sexual, economic, and ritual power. This, he argues, is confirmed by the strong link between corporeal and political matters, and by the ostentatious display of bodies in African life. The body of power asserts itself as both matter and spirit, and it incorporates the seductive force of money, commodities, sex, and knowledge. Tonda's incisive analysis reveals how this sovereign power is a social relation, historically constituted by the violence of the African cultural Imaginary and the realities of State, Market, and Church. It is to be understood, he asserts, through a generalized theory economic, political, and religious fetishism. By introducing this crucial critical voice from contemporary Africa into the English language, The Modern Sovereign makes a significant contribution to field of anthropology, political science, and African studies.

For nearly four decades, the author, best known for her novels "Segu" and "Windward Heights", has been at the forefront of French Caribbean literature. In this collection of essays and lectures, written over many years and in response to the challenges posed by a changing world, she reflects on the ideas and histories that have moved her.

Djibril, a young Djiboutian voluntarily exiled in Montreal, returns to his native land to prepare a report for an American economic intelligence firm. Meanwhile, a shadowy, threatening figure imprisoned in an island cell seems to know Djibril's every move.

Offers a collection of poetry, which takes you to unexpected spaces-in exile, in the muezzin's call, and where morning dew is "sucked up by the eye of the sun-black often, pink from time to time." These poems strongly condemn the civil wars that have plagued East Africa and advocate tolerance and peace.

Explores the problems and potentials of the fictions the author could not bring himself to write. Drawing from his notebooks, this title records here a range of ideas for stories - unsettled accounts, he calls them, or case studies of failure - and examines where they came from and why they eluded him.