The Reviews, and Essays

Sol Plaatje and William Shake-the-Sword

Ngugi wa Thiongo on consciousness

Mia Couto on economy and culture

Chinua Achebe on Steve Biko

Mia Couto to George W Bush

Mbulelo Mzamane on HIV/Aids

Calane da Silva on José Craveirinha

Gastronomic rhapsodies
InSalutation to the Gut Nigeria's Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka brings his painstakingly choosy palate, sourced in cultural origin, to bear on his polemical composition on Yoruba food and drink – Salutation to the Gut. Originally published in 1962, it is now published as a small pocket size book. MORE

Lying to tell the truth
Denis Herbstein has created something in White Lies that is no less than epic – he tracks in minute detail the history of South Africa’s apartheid years, and weaves into the tapestry a warm and intimate biography of John Collins, the canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, and his role in the struggle against apartheid. MORE

Trauma in the telling
It is surprising that a short story anthology as innovative, and brave, as Post-Traumatic struggled to make it into print, until Botsotso published the 22 contributions by young South African writers. As the title implies, the anthology deals with life in this country after the death of apartheid, for a multitude of perspectives. MORE

Dreams packaged as reality
Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa has created a magical tale the line between fact and fiction, between history and story, as a gecko narrates the tale of an albino businessman in Luanda who creates personal histories in O Vendedor de Passados (The Genealogy Salesman). MORE

Many languages, no barrier
Gova is a book of poetry written in one of South Africa's unofficial languages, Isicamtho – a polyglot of the 11 official languages and one which has its origins in the so-called tsotsi taal of the Black gehttoes. Ike Mboneni Muila is a master of this language and encourages readers to dive in. Book comes with audio CD. MORE

Arse of a detective
InJaime Bunda: Agente Secreto and Jaime Bunda e a Morte do Americano, Angolan author Pepetela introduces us to a uniquely African detective. His bungling, bureaucratic incompetence is makes this socially committed fiction a pleasure to read. Pepetela does for his country what American author Carl Hiaasen has done for the Florida Everglades. MORE

A feast of morsels
The Men Do Not Eat Wings is a story of Kenya, one which takes giant leaps back through history and places the present in sharp focus through the lives of one family. SW Omamo tells a story of families living in the diaspora, of living in a country where the head of state is known as The Stork, of working one’s whole life for a patronising racist, of living in wealth with poverty knocking at your door, of confronting corruption as bureaucrat and as citizen. MORE

Panning for gold on the Slave Coast
Two narratives compete for the reader’s attention in Anne Bailey’s new book, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame. The legacy of the slave trade and its implications for modern African and American cultures occupy much of the book with African voices and their stories, recorded as oral history, offering a tantalising perspective on contemporary Africa. MORE

The struggle continues
In We are the Poors: Community struggles in post-apartheid South Africa. Desai documents the real stories of those suffering and struggling in the South African townships, the ‘struggle electricians’ who reconnect their neighbours’ power; the grannies and aunties who blockade narrow flights of stairs in their tenement buildings to prevent the police from carrying out evictions; the entire communities that react to the arrival of new water meters by revolting, smashing the meters and chasing away the installers. MORE

Praise the Lord!
In The Convert, Francis Nyamnjoh’s unveils his experience of born again Christians: a hall packed with believers bleating to what the shepherd (Pastor) dictates. From what they should sing, to what they should say and even what they should think. It is a play whose pages seep with overly sharp criticism of the born-agains. MORE

Songs of the earth: poetry in clay
Magdalene Odundo is a poet who uses clay. Hers is a visual poetry of pure form that evokes the essential with minimal means. As with the literary form, where each word must be precise and perfect for its purpose, so for the visual form, where each curve, each stroke, each tone of clay is exact. As well as the joy and inspiration they offer, her works are testimony to the huge wealth of hidden potential in our continent. MORE

In between history and memory
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall maps out Kenya’s recent ‘geography of pain’, and the narrator actually offers a factual listing of the tragedy assailing Kenya from all quarters, from ethnic conflict to Aids, sporadic conflict with neighbouring nations to financial, political and moral corruption. Yet, this is not a pessimistic or despairing depiction of contemporary Africa; rather, it is a story of survival, of sheer love for life, of passion and commitment, of possibility. MORE

Beneath the surface of the Maputo Corridor
Regionalism and Uneven Development in Southern Africa: The Case of the Maputo Development Corridor digs beneath the surface of what has been widely acclaimed as a success story to expose some of the Maputo Corridor’s shortcomings. In doing so, the book sheds valuable light on how the South African government struggles to unite private capital, local people and its neighbours in southern Africa to bring about development. MORE

Sea (and sex) in Cape Verde
O Mar na Lajinha (The Sea at Lajinha) does for Mindelo, and through it partly also for Cape Verde, what writers such as James Joyce did for Dublin in Ullysses (1922), Alasdair Gray for Glasgow in Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), Paul Auster for New York in The New York Trilogy (1988). Each character and their stories constitute a tiny speck in the broader canvass that is the bay, the town, but also the island-nation. MORE

Life before the dream
In The World That Was Ours, Hilda Bernstein takes her readers behind the public face of South Africa's Rivonia treason trial, which saw Nelson Mandela imprisoned for life, and tells the stories leading up to and surrounding it from the perspective of another banned political activist, also the wife of a trialist – the one who escaped. MORE

If Winnie-the-Pooh were an African...
That famous Motswana detective Mma Ramotswe has been compared with other detectives made famous in English literature, but as the latest instalment in the series set in Botswana, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies shows, Winnie-the-Pooh is a far more accurate comparison. MORE

Tell the truth, laughing
Niq Mhlongo’s character Dingz in Dog Eat Dog is semi (very) autobiographical, and you can imagine him doing exactly what Niq did to get his book published. He took his diaries and transformed them into a novel and then just took a train down to Cape Town to go and get it published. MORE

Putting solutions in context
Agenda Setting and Public Policy in Africa provides an integrated account of the theoretical and practical aspects of public policy challenges in developing societies. It points toward the need to infuse novelty into public policy-making processes to reflect indigenous societal interests. Contributors to the book tackle critical policy issues that have emasculated the growth of policy objectives that are sensitive to African needs. MORE

The after-taste of liberation
Against the background of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Achmat Dangor (in Booker prize shortlisted Bitter Fruit) focuses on the life of one family whose past was defined by the individual evils of a grandiose system, and whose cohesion is unravelling as history clambers beyond the confines of neatly constructed judicial processes. MORE

Getting to know you, Africa Borwa
Funso Afolayan’s book, Culture and Customs of South Africa, is an important contribution to what one could call ‘knowing Africa’. As part of the series ‘Culture and Customs of Africa’ that seeks to provide a quick reference to the cultures and customs of countries in Africa, this book is an invaluable shortened contemporary biography of South Africa. MORE

Laughing out loud in Luanda
The 17 stories that make up João Melo’s The Serial Killer offer a particularly well drawn view of Luanda, a rich blend of old and new practices, of the cloying nostalgia for days gone by and of the permissive, often corrupt ways of the present. Melo's writing has a lightness of touch that at once provokes and seduces us into laughing with him while simultaneously being teased into thinking beyond the more superficial level of the work. MORE

Catching a ride
Launched in 2000 in South Africa, the Taxi Art Series is working towards the twin goals of extending the profile of contemporary South African artists and, at the same time, establishing a teaching resource archive and educational materials. The series covers artists who have produced a substantial body of art but who have had no monograph published on their work. MORE

Moving mountains
Strike a Woman Strike a Rock is a powerful collection of narrativesby South African women: life stories, love stories and death stories, of the women who, often quietly and behind the scenes, actively made a stand against the apartheid state. MORE

Soyinka's life and work – in pictures
On the event of his 70th birthday a group of Nigerians has produced a fitting and personal tribute to Wole Soyinka, the man who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1986. But this coffee-table book is much more than a tribute to a writer. It presents all facets of the creative genius, from traffic warden to pyrate. MORE

A sensitive linguistic journey
In Lindsey Collen's Boy we follow young Krish as he leaves home for the first time, on the verge of manhood, on his accidental road trip across Mauritius. It pitches the reader into the middle of a linguistic exchange, a dialogue that interfaces languages in order to both showcase the linguistic mosaic of Mauritian identity. MORE

History in motion
In African Film, Josef Gugler recovers/re-imagines and re-represents the historical experiences of Africans before, during and after colonialism through a perspective that celebrates the peculiarities and diversity of the continent. MORE

Hijacking the limelight
People Who Have Stolen From Me is a litany of the crimes conducted against one shop in Johannesburg, but it is not so much an analysis of the inventiveness or violence of crime as much as it is a trip through South Africa’s development from bastion of white supremacy and privilege to black-ruled and economically successful African state. MORE

Bad critics, good drinks and young women
The ever prolific Aryan Kaganof’s latest publications, Citizen Kohen, The Freedom Fighters and Stones Again (as apart from an array of new films) are, as ever, self-reflective diaries; narratives formulated from ceaseless notetaking, filtered through carnal nets of young girls, alcohol and cinema and guided through the maelstrom by the philosophers Hegel, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. MORE

Grasping a virus
The Aids Handbook gives a broad overview of the physiological, biomedical, social and political issues surrounding Aids. This generalist approach makes the handbook an ideal starting point for anyone who wants an introduction to Aids. MORE

Painting life and philosophy
What a joy to open this book and feel the rich uniqueness of the spirit of Mozambican aritist Malangatana flow over you – the vibrant energy, the colour, the movement, the people and creatures that are undeniably African. MORE

Waiting and watching
The Cry of Winnie Mandela, by Njabulo Ndebele, is a soupçon of praise poem, meditation, soliloquy and dialogue, four fictional biographies combine to discuss the notion of waiting, as suffered by thousands of South African women whose partners were away in exile, in jail, in mines, for years, sometimes entire lifetimes. MORE

Socialism or Barbarism for a new world order
The US and its version of parasitic capitalism requires the country to exert its will over the rest of the world, argues Samir Amin in Obsolescent Capitalism. Two possibilities emerge from this economic crisis facing capitalism, and it can’t be solved by what Amin calls the "militarisation of globalisation". The solution lies in what Rosa Luxemburg espoused as 'socialism or barbarism'. MORE

Half way to paradise
Dan Sleigh’s novel Islands, originally written in Afrikaans, explores the colonising of the Cape and the setting up of a small trading station that eventually became the lifeblood of the European traders heading out on the spice route. In this way he describes the start of a process that got somewhat out of control, a historical curve-ball that transformed the bay on the edge of Africa forever. MORE

A map of slavery across the Atlantic
In Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade (2001), Manu Herbstein sets himself the challenging task of fictionalising the kind of experiences of one slave from her capture in Africa, through the Middle Passage, to her life of captivity in Brazil. Herbstein brings to his work the passionate curiosity of the outsider and the objective bias of someone who never fails to move, MORE

Family life in shades of purple
Purple Hibiscus, shortlisted for the Orange prize for women's fiction, is a powerful and unsettling novel, at times emotionally demanding. It is populated by a number of strong characters, most of whom we retain in our minds well after turning the last page. An ambitious work of imagination, it leads readers into making sense of some complex and difficult issues, not least ethical considerations. MORE

Racist colonialism - warts and all
Albert Memmi’s classic examination of the political psychology of colonialism, The Colonizer and the Colonized, one of Africa's 100 Best Books, first published in 1957, has been republished. It includes initial and new introductions to this book by Jean-Paul Sartre and Nadine Gordimer. MORE

Diamonds are no friend to the Bushmen
In Bushmen and Daimonds: (Un)Civil Society in Botswana Kenneth Good examines the removal fof the Basarwa from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve at the same time as the government awards ever more expansive exploration contracts to diamond mining companies. He also takes a close look at the country's commitment to liberal democracy and the failings and unaccountability of this commitment. MORE

Challenges and difficulties of community health
Ted Lankester's second edition of Setting up Community Health Programmes outlines the components of setting up a successful health programme. The broad style lends itself to a detailed checklist for field workers who need a reference manual. Lankester also troubleshoots by gently drawing the reader's attention to the challenges and difficulties in community participation which is inherent to community health. MORE

Understanding some unfinished business
Zimbabwe's Unfinished Business, edited by Amanda Hammar, Brian Raftopoulos & Stig Jensen, analytically examines the country's crisis through its complexities and contradictions while also trying to suggest solutions to it. The book neither reproduces the narrowly nationalist rhetoric of Zanu PF nor adopts uncritically the liberalist counter-position. MORE

A military adventure in search of facts
In Operation Barras: The SAS Mission, Sierra Leone 2000 William Fowler tells the story of the rescue of British solidiers held hostage by a group of rebels in the wake of that country's civil war. However, if it were on a football team, Operation Barras would have been booked for unfair play. MORE

Murder mystery, myths and Mugabe
Herbert Chitepo, a senior office bearer in the Zimbabwe African National Union, was killed in a car bomb. Despite numerous confessions it is still not known who planted the bomb. In The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo we have history served up as murder mystery. Thriller transformed into a study of nationalism. MORE

'Different samenesses' of women's lives
Elieshi Lema’s novel, Parched Earth (2001) is subtitled ‘A Love Story’, and to a great extent what we read is indeed an interesting take on the romance narrative. But the fact that the story has a single female protagonist and a number of male suitors suggests already a more radical view of the world, one in which a woman’s search for love is an active rather than a passive experience. MORE and an earlier review: A View of Patriarchy

Tragedy played out behind poverty's veil
Stanley Gazemba, a Kenyan gardener who has published many short stories, has created, in The Stone Hills of Maragoli, a work which reflects this expertise in shorter fiction. It tells an ordinary tale of love, celebration, betrayal and revenge, but places all this in a context that is at once familiar for its emotional impact and unfamiliar for its cultural environment. MORE

Living on the edge of the world
In The Last Flight of The Flamingo Mia Couto addresses a matter that is close to his heart, an issue that is not peculiar to Mozambique but he uses the peculiarities of Mozambique to tell a tale of environmental tragedy. Community and environment are intertwined and so the tragedy of the one is tragedy of the other. And this symbiotic tragedy requires all tenses present. MORE

Escape as political statement
Inside Out is story of this daring escape from the heart of apartheid’s machinery – a daring escape by three white political prisoners from Pretoria Prison in 1979, at the height of racial oppression in South Africa – an escape that was the result of two long years of careful planning and meticulous preparation. MORE

An oral history of the battle against hunger
Drive out Hunger is the story of JJ Machobane, the Lesotho-based agriculturist who pioneered, perfected and professed the revolutionary Machobane Farming System of agricultural intercropping. From humble beginnings in South Africa, and later in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho, Machobane discovered that being hungry is a state of being that no human should ever have to experience. MORE

A complex historical interaction
Eurafricans in Western Africa provides a bird’s eye view of the changing roles of coastal brokers in a highly varied and variable spatial and social setting. To his credit George E. Brooks registers the many nuances of complex networks that linked dispersed communities and reshaped cross-cultural relations in West Africa over a period of three centuries. MORE

An Afrikaner in London
Trips tells of a South African newly arrived in London – the culture shock, the heartache, the acclimatisation and falling in love, albeit acrossthe colour line. But does Manie de Waal accomplish more than telling a story of a foreigner in a strange city? MORE

Cultural biography of a German-born Yoruba
Omoluwabi: Ulli Beier, Yoruba Society and Culture – a book that straddles the genres of life narrative and literary history. Perhaps, this accounts for the author’s recommended generic classification of the book as a "cultural biography". MORE

The many shadows of war
As Duas Sombras do Rio (The Two Shadows of the River) is a short novel, though an ambitious one. The play on light and shadow, self and other, the Zambezi river, combined with the work’s African setting resonate with Conrad’s more famous examination of ‘the human condition’. Written in a plain but beguiling style, As Duas Sombras do Rio makes no distinction between the real and the supernatural, inviting also the obvious comparisons with the magical realist narratives.MORE

A journey through langauge
John Miles writes in Afrikaans, and of South Africa, but in Die Buiteveld (Foreign Fields) he takes readers on a journey through Portugal, through the nature of language, as well as the nature of reconciliation. MORE

A confounding of expectations
Rayda Jacobs taps so deeply into the South African psyche in Confessions of a Gambler, and tackles so many of the taboos inherent within southern African society, that it leaves one almost breathless. MORE

A dream gone sour
Reclaiming Zimbabwe posits that it is possible to break with the analysis of implicating individuals and to link murder, mayhem and masculinity to the European ideation system inherited by the post-colonial state. Like the racist white minority regime of Ian Smith, Mugabe heads a 'patriarchal state' based on brutal force that is carrying forward the militarist, andocentric and coercive traditions of Cecil Rhodes. MORE

Taking centre stage in history
March of Ages is the story of a single community in Nigeria on whose fringes the development of European mercantilism is being determined. It is a story of tradition, of the ‘things’ before they fell apart, it is about evolution in a literal sense, of small almost insignificant changes in individuals that allow a community to adapt to a new environment. MORE

Of love poems and vicious angels
‘Love Poems’ won the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing and Helon Habila, a Nigerian, has turned this winning story in a novel, of sorts. Knowing the first chapter of the book gives an expectation of brilliance, of understated anguish and liberation that mark the time of Lomba, the central character of the story, in prison. In this we are not disappointed, yet all other expectations are confounded. MORE

Of wives, lovers and officialdom
The Official Wife tells of one woman's story with candour and unashamed directness that is hilarious. It is about her, her thoughts on Africa’s troubles, its diseases, the uselessness of double beds in unloving marriages, the myriad ways of seducing men, the role of woman as lover versus mother, the importance of education, and the all-too-frequent inefficiency of house girls and house boys. MORE

Afro-optimists have a long way to go
The underlying question that stubbornly refuses to go away in this collection about capital markets in Africa, African Emerging Markets: Contemparary Issues, is of what value stock or share exchanges really are in a region whose profound levels of underdevelopment are so well known that they no longer warrant restatement. MORE

Who is the enemy now?
Cape Town band Bright Blue used to sing a song in the 1980s called "Who is the enemy?" Damon Galgut's novel, The Good Doctor, which was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker prize, is much concerned with friends and enemies. This is an exceptional book in its exploration of a terrain both intensely personal and political in its broadest sense. MORE

A war fought over control of pronouns
Nuruddin Farah in Links, his latest novel only available in South Africa so far, takes readers on a journey through the rule-bound statlessness of Mogadiscio, where taboos, and the narrative of family are rediscovered by a New York intellectual who is returning to his homeland. MORE

JM Coetzee, Elizabeth and that prize
As Nobel Laureate of Literature for 2003 the acclaimed South African novelist and academic JM Coetzee is placed firmly in the upper echelons of the literary establishment alongside his fellow South African Nadine Gordimer, as well as Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, VS Naipaul and Tony Morrison - all previous winners of the Prize. MORE

Fighting to tell the truth: Carlos Cardoso
Mozambican journalist Carlos Cardoso was assassinated in November 2000 for his work in uncovering corruption and fraud in one of his country's biggest banks. His contribution to journalism in independent Mozambique began with its independence in 1975 and this book recalls that legacy and is a fitting tribute to his heritage. MORE

MORE REVIEWS
The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut: South Africa

The Stone Virgins by Yvonne Vera: Zimbabwe

Letting them Die'. Why HIV/Aids prevention programmes fail

Silence is not an option: Writing Still -Short Stories from Zimbabwe

Victims of Violence: Domestic violence in South Africa

Idealist turned president: Mwai Kibaki: Kenya

Botswana's most famous detective/agony aunt: The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency

Dream of a revolution gone awry: Milandos de um Sonho: Mozambique

A woman's tale of polygamy: Niketche by Paulina Chiziane: Mozambique

Other lessons from the classroom: Far and Beyon': Botswana

History of the Congo through one man's myth: The Fire of Origins

Zimbabwe's turmoil through the essays of Chenjerai Hove: Palaver Finish

A collection truly out of Africa: Discovering Home

Hidden history of a nation: The Long Silence of Mario Salviati

A memory of Africa, but not of Africans: Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Hope and joy in Angola: The Whistler by Ondjaki

A glimpse of Francophone Africa through its short stories

Mugabe - the making of a despot

A grand metaphor of Mozambique - Mia Couto's latest novel

Life can be hectic in Sleepy Town - Aryan Kaganof's works

Stories of home, and exile - Chinua Achebe

Nationalism and art in the Maghreb

The master of darkness writes back: JM Coetzee and Youth

The great floods of 2000: why Mozambique survived