Books published by Malthouse Press

Here is a collection of selected and new short stories by Tanure Ojaide. Three stories from his two previous collections The Debt Collector and The Old Man in a State House are included along with new diverse stories exploring topics and themes not present in his previous works. The stories could be realistic but are fictional, Ojaide writes memoir, poetry and fiction in the forms of short story and novel with common threads connecting his writing irrespective of genre.

Set in Nigeria, Bitter Leafing Woman relates the experiences of Woman as she chews the bitter leaves of patriarchal oppression in a bid to transform them into gender balanced sweetness. Here Woman becomes a symbol of the oppressed; of women and men alike. The style of writing ranges from plain prose as in The Edi Kai Ikong War, magical realism as in World of the Fat/Thin House, the social satire of The Bone Eater, the densely poetic and symbolic Broken Plate and the biblical imbued style of Bitter Leafing Woman who finding herself drowning in the soup of gender oppression for forty years attempts to murder her Deacon fiancé.In this collection we become involved with serious issues of conflicts, which nevertheless we try to treat with sardonic humour and insight.

Law, Environmental Sustainability, Land Use Planning and Protection in Nigeria is a unique new textbook that presents a diverse, comprehensive, and coordinated approach to issues of land use planning and environmental management and protection in Nigeria. It builds on recent advances in environmental law, planning theories and sustainable development to provide students with the foundation they need to understand approaches that can mitigate impacts of land use practices and enhance environmental protection and sustainable development. While providing a base of knowledge in international and national environmental laws, its primary emphasis is on describing and explaining emerging approaches, methods, and techniques for environmental land use planning, and sustainability. The book is an important new text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in environmental planning, land use and natural resource management, and a valuable resource for professionals and others concerned with issues of environmental planning and land use.

Combined together in three volumes are the author's writings on labour and employments relations in Nigeria spanning over three and a half decades. Volume two covers the Nigerian industry-specific employment relations, comparative labour relations and cross-cutting African development issues.

In four hundred and eighty moons ago or thereabout, when Africa was a huge farmland, there lived a king in a place known today as Niamina Dankunku, who was endowed with dignity as a result of his wisdom and unquestionable character and well known within the Senegambia, Guinea and Mali region. He had two wives and six children, his first son Ishaq was to succeed him upon his death, but Sheriff, his second son, and his mother Awa, led Ishaq astray and planned to kill him. Maimuna, the Jinn who loves Ishaq, was afraid to tell him. But Mariama, a friend of Maimuna, also a Jinn, stepped into their relationship and made things more difficult for Maimuna... Athough the play is entirely fictional and any resemblance to any person death or alive is coincidental, it, of course, reflects some of what is typical in human affairs today - jealousies, intrigues, rivalries and compromises.

In this debut collection of poems, Fire in Paradise, Uzoechi Nwagbara explores the human condition through the prism of the Niger Delta where oil exploitation has environmental, political, economic, cultural, and other implications. The poet sings the tale of a people who are marginalized and brutalized for their bounty of oil. At the same time he envisions hope in the people's resistance. There is much experimentation in form and style as the passionate poet deploys irony, repetition, images of a wasteland, and other tropes to register his themes... Doubtless, this is an exciting and strong poetic outing and a welcome addition to contemporary African poetry. - Tanure Ojaide, Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

The lectures in this book were delivered at significant points in Professor Nnolim's career. 'Literature and the Common Welfare' (1988) was his inaugural lecture, his declaration that he had come of age as an academic, as a young Professor of literature. In August 2000, he delivered 'Literature, the Arts and Cultural Development' to announce his induction as a member of the Nigerian Academy of Letters in which he was finally admitted as a Fellow in 2005. In this lecture, Nnolim makes strong claims about the validity of literature in Nigeria's national life. In August, 2007, Professor Nnolim delivered 'The Writer's Responsibility and Literature in National Development'. Here he re-emphasizes the importance of literary studies in Nigeria's national life and goes on to lament the total neglect of Nigeria's artists, writers, and world class intellectuals in national life. The fourth lecture, 'Morning Yet on Criticism Day: the Criticism of African Literature in the Twentieth Century', was given as a laureate of the Nigerian National Merit Award, 2009. It unifies Professor Nnolim's various pleas for the role of literature in national development but particularly re-emphasizing the problem of language in Nigeria's creative writing and urging governmental intervention in the matter.

This is an apt publication for modern times, in which 'Sharia' has become a byword for an unacceptable social system, and is vilified as such; when crime is rife in communities governed by Sharia; and when in the non-Islamic West, the Islamic social and criminal justice systems are subject to intense public scrutiny and criticism, but remain little understood. The author presents a clear and factual account of the Islamic criminal justice system, expounding what he considers to be the real issues of Sharia, often ignored or misrepresented by both Islamic and Western scholars, and explaining its wider Islamic context and ethics, its Arabic roots, classical heritage and terminology, and its relevance to contemporary Muslim societies. Contents: concept of crime; features of Islamic criminal liability; defences to Islamic criminal liability; 'Hudud' crimes; 'Zina' - adultery or fornication; 'Qadhf' - slander or false accusation; 'Hadd' offence of 'al-sariqa' - theft; 'Hadd' offence of 'shurbul khamr' - wine drinking; 'Hiraba' - brigandage or highway armed robbery; 'Riddah' - apostasy; 'Baghye' - rebellion or treason; 'Qisas - retaliation; 'Ta'azir' punishment.

We Have Crossed Many Rivers: New Poetry from Africa is a fascinating anthology of some of the finest contemporary poetic voices from twenty-nine African countries. Inspired by the examples of first generation African poets like Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Dennis Brutus, and Mazisi Kunene, the poets in this anthology display rootedness in, and preoccupation with, the discourses of identity and political freedom. At the same time, they engage the more contemporary themes of human and economic rights, governance, the natural environment, love, family and generational relations representative of the African continent. Poems from Tanure Ojaide, Yewande Omotoso, Reesom Haile and Frank Chipasula are included and in all there are contributions from 68 poets.