Success, and difficulties, of 100 Best list
If there were to be any measure of the success of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century, it would have to be the price now be asked for a single second-hand copy of the English translation of Aminata Sow Fall's La Grève des Báttu. Published in 1987 by Longman, and with a retail price of about £7, the book is now only available for a minimum of US$250 ( £120). One second hand bookshop is selling The Beggar's Strike through Amazon.com for more than US$500 – and will probably earn more from a single copy of this book than Sow Fall earned in royalties from sales of many hundreds of copies.
The irony of this demand far outstripping supply is that a reprint in unlikely because the market, and by implication therefore demand, for this title is so small. There is good and bad resulting from this situation. The good is that the list of the 100 best books, an initiative of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair, has created an interest in writing from Africa. The obvious downside is that there is no willingness or foresight, to meet the demand which this interest has created. At the same time it puts African titles out of reach of all readers, not just African readers, except the ultra-rich in the case of The Beggars' Strike [Read an extract here]. (It would be cheaper to learn French and read it in the original – which is still in print).
Other authors whose works were selected for the 100 best books list are having new works published, and in the case of Germano Almeida his book has been released in English translation, from the Portuguese original. It is also encouraging that previously out of print titles are being reissued. This includes Sundiata [Read an extract here] from Mali and Zayni Barakat [Read an extract here] from Egypt.
The Last Will and Testament of Señor da Silva [Read an extract here]was published in the first half of 2004 by US publisher New Directions, and is available in the UK as well. The translation of the title from the Portuguese has incurred a transformation from the original into Spanish (senhor to señor), presumably to please the US market and appeal to its Hispanic readers.
New Directions' website describes the book by "Cape Verde's greatest living writer" as a work which creates a "deliciously blurry line between farce and tragedy" in which "a self-important buffoon becomes a fully human, even tragic, figure in the arc of this hilarious and touching novel".
Also in Portuguese come new works by Pepetela and Mia Couto. Angolan writer Pepetela's recent novel, Jaime Bunda, Agente Secreto (Jaime Bunda, Secret Agent) has just been published in German. A Geração da Utopia, by Pepetela was selected as one of Africa's 100 best. From Mozambique, Mia Couto has just released A Chuva Pasmada (Perplexed Rain), a children's book with illustrations by Danuta Wojciechowska. Terra Sonâmbula (A Sleepwalking Land) [Read an extract here], which was selected for the 100 best list, has entered its eighth edition in Portugal, with no sign yet of an English translation being made available.
Elsewhere from the continent, and available in English are Snakepit, by Moses Isegawa of Uganda, and Links by Nuruddin Farah of Somalia. While both of these books were released originally some time ago they are only now being released in the UK market. Snakepit, first published in Dutch in 1999 and released in English in the United States in March 2004, was released in November 2004 in the UK by Panmacmillan. Links was first published in South Africa by Kwela Books in 2002 and will be available in February 2005 in the UK. It has been available in the US since early in 2004.
Also from Isegawa comes his latest novel, released in 2004 by De Bezige Bij. Voorbedachte daden (Anticipated eventualities) is only available in Dutch, but as Isegawa usually writes in English and is then translated into Dutch, it should not be too long before his third novel is available to the English reading market.
Panmacmillan gives this synopsis of Snakepit:
After graduating from Cambridge University, and determined to make a success of his life, Bat has returned to his native Uganda. There, in a country that has become greedy under Marshall Amin's regime, he is convinced he will be able to acquire the wealth, power and prestige that he craves. But life is never as simple as it seems, and employed as a bureaucrat by General Bazooka, Bat soon finds himself a pawn in a wider battle for control: a battle in which he is unsure of the rules – or the other players. Snakepit is a chilling account of one man's experience of Amin's Uganda – the politics and power-struggles, the behind-the-scenes back-stabbing and casual brutality.
Unlike his previous two novels, Voorbedachte daden, is set in Isegawa's adopted home of the Netherlands, rather than his homeland of Uganda.
Also in the 100 Best Books list and back in print are Zayni Barakat by Gamal Al-Ghitani of Egypt and Sundiata: an epic of old Mali by Djibril Tamsir Niane. Zayni Barakat is published by Cairo University Press and Sundiata has been reprinted by its original publisher Longman.
