Aidoo, Ama Ata, Changes, A Novel, Sub SaharanPublishers, 1991
Armah, Ayi Kwei, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,Heinemann, 1968
Darko, Amma, Beyond the Horizon, Heinemann, 1995
Darko, Amma, TheHousemaid, Heinemann, 1998
Kwakye, Benjamin , The clothes of nakedness.(Heinemann,1998 ; African writers series), a novel on town life in Ghana
Obeng, R.E. , Eighteen pence 9988550146 163pp. 1998 [publ. 1999] Sub-Saharan Publ."
Written in 1943, this seminal work criticises colonial administration of justice. It is acknowledged as the first novel in English from The Gold Coast. Widely admired and discussed, it is an extended allegory extolling the virtues of a large family, honesty, and the rural life. The author draws attention to the relevance of customs and traditions to life, and to the conflicts and confusion created by the imposition of British colonialism and English law. Ultimately it is a moral fable vindicating the virtue of labour and the reward of an honest life. This new edition is introduced by Kari Dako, who has edited and annotated the original manuscript.
Patten, Margaret D., Ghanaian ImaginativeWriting in English, 1950-1969, Dept. of Library Studies, University of Ghana,1971. (bibliography)
A novel entitled Eighteenpencewritten by R. E. Obeng and published in England in 1943 is generallyconsidered the first full-length novel written by a Ghanaian. However, in 1911, Joseph E. Casely Hayford published Ethiopia Unbound. This was reprinted by Cass in 1969. While this work is now studied primarily as "studies in racial emancipation," it is a work of fiction.
Sekyi, Kobina, The Blinkards, A Comedy (first performed in Cape Coast, 1915) Heinemann 1974 ISBN 0 435 00136 2
MARITA: or the Folly of Love. A Novel by A. Native Newell, Stephanie - Editor, Netherlands. EJ Brill, 9004121862, 2000, paperback
Presentsand contextualises what was probably the first West African novel in English.The anonymous writer's story critiques the Christian, Victorian model of marriage imposed on Africans, and was originally serialised in 40 episodes in a Ghanaian newspaper
ChinuaAchebe, No Longer at Ease (Nigeria)
Mariama Ba, So Long a Letter(Senegal)
Athol Fugard, Master Harold and the Boys (South Africa)
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, A Grain ofWheat (Kenya)
Ngugi waThiong'o, Weep Not, Child (Kenya)
Ben Okri, The Famished Road(Nigeria)
Ferdinand Oyono, Houseboy (Cameroon)
OusmaneSembene, God's Bits of Wood. (Senegal)
WoleSoyinka, Ake: The Years of Childhood (Nigeria)
Chris Conte reviews Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Expanded Edition with notes. African Writers Series Classics in Context. Oxford and Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1996. (paper) ISBN 0435 905 25 Reviewed for H-AfrTeach by Chris Conte, Utah State University. cconte@wpo.hass.usu.edu
Teaching African History through the Novel: A Classic Improved
Instructors presenting Africa's history to American high school and university students face problems particular to their endeavor. They must first convince students that Africa is not one country and, that in terms of physical and cultural geography, it is a very large and diverse place.
There are, consequently, a number of regional and local histories of change and adaptation to internal and external forces.
Students, on the other hand, are faced with history texts not only filled with unfamiliar peoples and place names but which also stress large diffuse processes -- the peopling of the continent, precolonial agricultural and industrial production and exchange, the slave trade, imperialism, colonialism -- rather than discrete events in succession. In short, they can become frustrated by the lack of a strong central narrative often presented in their other history courses.
The incorporation of literature into the African history survey presents the instructor with a useful strategy to bring some of the complexity into focus. For this reason, Heinemann's African Writers' series, now in its 40th year of publication, has been a blessing to both students and teachers of African history. Of the 350 Heinemann titles, the series' first publication, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, remains the most widely read and discussed.
Most subscribers to H-AfrTeach will be familiar with the story of Okonkwo, Achebe's tragic hero from southeastern Nigeria's Igbo region who cannot cope with the late-nineteenth century collapse of his community's cultural institutions in the face of the British invasion of his homeland. Nor will they likely need to be told that Things Fall Apart presents students with a compelling vision of an African community in its cultural context. However, instructors should know that Heinemann has re-released Achebe's classic with 53 pages of introductory material, particularly two valuable essays which make important contributions to teaching the novel.
In the first of these essays, "Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Literature," Sam Gikandi explains the novel's early appeal and the cultural politics surrounding it. Gikandi suggests that Achebe's education in colonialism's Western literary tradition during the 1940s and 50s inspired him to represent the African experience invariably missing in novels about Africa. Thus Achebe sought to write in a way consciously different, both in form and in content, from Europeans like Joyce Cary and Joseph Conrad, who could write about Africans only as outsiders looking in.
Gikani's essay further shows how Achebe forms the novel around the storyteller, in other words, a sympathetic insider who can nonetheless critique Okonkwo's blind commitment to Igbo cultural doctrine. He also examines the wide appeal of Things Fall Apart to Nigerians, who, in 1958, were about to shun British authoritarianism and undertake to rule themselves as a nation-state, a political entity arguably unknown in precolonial African thought.
In the second introductory essay, "Igbo Culture and History," Don C. Ohadike explains the diversity and cultural complexity of pre-twentieth century southeastern Nigeria. This section will be especially welcome to history students because it argues for the antiquity of Igbo settlement on the verdant landscape between the Niger and Cross rivers without implying stasis. Ohadike highlights Igbo society's close association of religion, iron working and agricultural productivity.
Furthermore, Ohadike explains the historical centrality of family, lineage and town rather than the ethnic group or "tribe" so often invoked in journalistic descriptions of Africa. With this knowledge, students can understand how, over a relatively small region, subtle differences can exist in language, social political organization, and religion. Moreover, they will see that Igbo allegiances are not primordial but shifting. In this vein, Ohadike elucidates the cross cutting regional ties of marriage change and culture.
Perhaps Heinemann's introduction of its Classics in Context series with this new, expanded edition of Things Fall Apart, and its continued publication of other classics, will only enhance the English speaking students' understanding of the contradictions, tragedies, triumphs, ironies and paradoxes of Africa's history. It is a most welcome addition both to the corpus of African literature and the teacher's arsenal.
Copyright (c) 1998 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact .H-Net@h-net.msu.edu
YOUR MADNESS, NOT MINE by MAKUCHI. OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1999. With an Introduction by Eloise Briere. ISBN 0-89680-206-X.
FROM PUBLISHER'S BLURB:
Women's writing in Cameroon has so far been dominated by Francophone writers. The short stories in this collection represent the yearnings and vision of an Anglophone woman who writes both as a Cameroonian and as a woman whose life has been shaped by the minority status her people occupy within the nation-state. The stories in Your Madness, Not Mine are about postcolonial Cameroon, but especially about Cameroonian women, who probe their day-to-day experiences of survival and empowerment as they deal with gender oppression: from patriarchal expectations to the malaise of maldevelopment, unemployment, and the attraction of the West for young Cameroonians. Makuchi has given us powerful portraits of the people of postcolonial Africa in the so-called global village who too often go unseen and unheard.
FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY ELOISE BRIERE:
The characters Makuchi creates are survivors; they are scrappy and they are strong, especially the women. As we enter their world and see the neocolonial forces of gargantuan proportions that shape their daily living, Makuchi's pen guides us into a new literary space. She wields her pen like a pioneer's axe in the forest, clearing new spaces . . . that invite us to consider the realities we would otherwise never know.
MAKUCHI was educated at the University of Yaounde (Cameroon) and McGill University (Montreal) and is now Associate professor of English at The University of Southern Mississippi.
A Womans Voice Edited by Mary Karooro Okurut et.al. 9970901036 100pp. 1998 Femrite
The first short story anthology by Ugandan women includes twelve stories. They vividly illuminate the courage and endurance of Ugandan women in the face of hardships and social injustice. The book is published by the publishing arm of the Association of Uganda Women Writers, as part of their remit of documenting womens feelings, thoughts and experiences, and creating awareness about the role of women in society.
Butterfly Burning, Yvonne Vera, 1779090161 135pp. 1998 Baobab Books.
The author is one of Zimbabwe's best known writers, winner of the Africa Region 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize, the 1995 and 1997 Zimbabwe Publishers Literary Awards, and one of Africa's best known women writers outside the continent. This new novel is set in township life in the 1940s, its joys and sorrows, freedoms and restrictions, ebullience and disenchantments. It tells of a young woman mysteriously orphaned but with a hidden sense of her own freedom and independence. Her struggle is manifested in her happiness with an older man on the one hand, and her draw to other experiences. But the closely woven fabric of township life has a tight mesh, and reality is hard.
The Invisible Weevil, Mary Karooro Okurut, 9970901028 206pp. 1998 Femrite
The author is a celebrated columnist, a former literature lecturer, and founder of the Association of Ugandan Women Writers. She is also a playwright and has published children s literature. This novel is a fictionalised record of Uganda s past tragic national experience. Spanning the decades of successive regimes, it covers the story of Africa s post-colonial political actors typified by the thinly disguised Presidents, Opolo, Duduma, Polle and Kazi. Weaving together strands of political and gender concerns, and employing humour too, the central image of the novel is the weevil.
Memoirs of a Mother, Ayeta Anne Wangusa, 997090101X 73pp. 1998 Femrite
Written in the first person, this fictional biography tells the deeply moving story of a Ugandan woman forced to trade the romantic idealism of her youth for a mundane marriage, based on outmoded rules and obligations. Her quest to balance the need for social respectability with the dictates of her heart, lead to painful discoveries, which finally force her to assert her individuality against oppressive social norms. Described as highly economical and poetic, the novel illuminates remote corners of family life in modern Uganda.
Lopes, Henri, (tr. Gerald Moore) The Laughing Cry, an African Cock and Bull Story, Readers International, 1987