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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.

Surviving against the odds

What is surprising about the floods in 2000 that killed 700 people in Mozambique is not the extent of the devastation, but the speed with which this poor country recovered.

Hope and joy in a land of sorrow

There are some books that are surprising because they are so completely unexpected - not in their appearance, but in their method. O Assobiador (The Whistler) is one such book. As a product of Angola, a country riven by civil war and its after effects for the past 30 years, a novel of such laughter and unmitigated hope comes as a welcome shock.

School's other lessons

In Far and Beyon' you will meet Mara, a Batswana, who has just buried her two oldest sons who were in their early twenties. The white doctors claim her boys died from Aids-related diseases, but Mara knows better - a diviner read in the bones that her best friend Lesedi has bewitched her and her family and now she must find a way to protect them before her granddaughter and her two remaining children die as well.

Dream of a revolution gone awry

Beyond the romantic notion of freedom sweeping through colonial Mozambique, Bahassan Adamodjy tells the tale of a guerrilla whose fall from grace reflects the spread of corruption in post-colonial states.

Apartheid is dead - so who is the enemy?

This novel, which was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker prize, is much concerned with friends and enemies.The novel's narrator, Dr Frank Eloff, is on the run from the emotional wreckage of his life, his wife having gone off with his best friend. He is working in a small and barely functioning hospital in one of South Africa's former homelands.

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.

Of wives, lovers, disease and G-strings

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.

A journey through language

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.

An Afrikaner's view of London's colours

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

Uncovering '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.

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.

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.

A map of slavery across the Atlantic

In Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 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.

Halfway 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.

Moving mountains

Strike a Woman Strike a Rock is a powerful collection of narratives by 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.

Great minds detect alike

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.