A short satirical book by this writer from the Côte d’Ivoire, longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023
Tag Archives: africa
Travelling while Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move by Nanjala Nyabola (Kenya)
Billed by the author as “not a travel memoir”, this is also a polemic about the injustices of migration policy and racism
Book review: Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenya)
The UK’s Observer described Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s 2014 novel Dust as “the most important novel to come out of Africa since Half of a Yellow Sun“, but I struggled with it. The book opens in Nairobi, Kenya in 2007, where a young man, Odidi, is gunned down, leaving his family devastated by grief. …
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Film review: District 9 (South Africa)
Critically acclaimed South African sci fi
Book review: Between Two Worlds by Miriam Tlali (South Africa)
Ground-breaking critique of apartheid by a black woman writer
Music review: South African late 20th century classics
Miriam Makeba by Miriam Makeba (1960) I couldn’t spend a month ‘in’ South Africa without listening to some South African music, and this album by Miriam Makeba (who to this point I only knew for ‘Pata Pata’) features in the 1001 albums list, which describes it thus: “traditional Xhosa wedding songs swing into airy African …
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Book review: Down Second Avenue by Es’kia Mphahlele (1919-2008, South Africa)
Down Second Avenue is a work of non-fiction, sometimes sub-titled “Growing Up in a South African Ghetto”, that documents the formative years of Es’kia (Ezekiel) Mphahlele, dubbed the “father of black South African writing”. The book was first published in the UK in 1959, and in the USA in 1971, and I read the Penguin …
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Book review – Dreaming the Karoo: A People Called the /Xam by Julia Blackburn
A mixture of memoir and historical study, reflecting on what is lost – and what remains
Book review: The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut (South Africa)
Moral uncertainties abound in this excellent novel by Booker-winning South African author Damon Galgut
Book review: Summertime by J. M. Coetzee (South Africa)
Highly entertaining, often quite funny, and neatly erudite reflection on issues of authorship, identity and memory by the South African Nobel laureate