Category: african literature

PALACE OF DESIRE by Nagoub Mahfouz

How charming is this author bio?

Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. A student of philosophy and an avid reader, he has been influenced by many Western writers, including Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Camus, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and, above all, Proust. He has more than thirty novels to his credit, ranging from his earliest historical romances to his most recent experimental novels. In 1988, Mr Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in the Cairo suburb of Agouza with his wife and two daughters.

His most famous work is probably THE CAIRO TRILOGY, three books tracing a single Egyptian family across the twentieth century. I have reviewed the second here, for Africa Book Club.

This is a wonderful series of novels. In fact, I think I’m going to go out on a limb here and declare the TRILOGY the best work of fiction ever produced on the African continent. Sorry, Chinua, Wole, et al.

WHITE MISCHIEF by James Fox

I’ve reviewed WHITE MISCHIEF for Africa Book Club here.

It tells the story of one of Africa’s most notorious unsolved murders, and revolves around the tiny white community in Kenya in the 1930s and 40s, known as the Happy Valley.

I’d heard a lot about the gin-guzzling, wife-swopping, bed-hopping ways of this wealthy and leisured group, and assumed it was mostly myth. From WHITE MISCHIEF I learnt it was not myth. In fact, it was a all good deal grosser than I heard (vaginal juices on corpses: I’ll say no more). Basically, these people needed to get out and find JOBS.

BURNT TOAST ON SUNDAYS by Roland K Hill

BURNT TOAST ON SUNDAYS is a comic novel about the romantic misadventures of a young Zimbabwean farmer named Tom Burnham. Published in 1995, events in Zimbabwe have turned this frothy and fun book into a rather sad glimpse into a lost way of life.

The novel opens with Tom trying to make his own breakfast one Sunday morning. This goes so horribly wrong that he concludes he needs a wife. I know: how romantic. I hope Tom will marry me! What a charmer.

His friend Cliff organises a dance at his house, and Tom tests all the potential girls by having them each fry him an egg. No one makes the grade, and he decides to go on holiday to London. This in itself is an interesting perspective on a Zimbabwe I barely remember – the pre-diaspora country, in which going abroad is an event, rather than a routine, and where the airport is packed with tourists and multiple international airlines. In London he meets an English girl, who he invites to the farm to visit. Much hi-jinks ensue, involving rhinos and scorpions and white-water rafting. All ends happily of course with a wedding on the farm.

In the final scene, the English girl confesses she was unsure about living on the farm at first, but she accepts it, because ‘the farm is you.’ Well, the farm’s probably not going to be him for too much longer, unless he has some very good government connections. Shame. If Tom’s a real person, he’s living in a semi in Slough right now.

While the book certainly has some flaws – some awkward issues of style, and an over-reliance on cliches – it is overall an entertaining read. It is famously very difficult when writing in a country without a strong literary tradition not to simply mimic dominant traditions from elsewhere, and I must applaud Mr Hill on writing a very Zimbabwean little book, and not a pastiche of English or American models. He manages to include rhinos, sunsets, and veldskoens without sounding at all like he is writing an exotic travelogue, an endeavour at which many finer writers have failed spectacularly.

In case you plan to buy this book, I should caution that it’s price is probably out of your reach. I see on the inside front cover that it sold for $15,000. So it’s also in its own way a window into a totally different period in Zim history. $15,000! Ah, hyperinflation. I almost kind of miss it.

KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST by Adam Hochschild

I’ve reviewed KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST here for Africa Book Club. It’s the history of Leopold II’s brief period of control of what is to today the DRC, and makes for grim reading, recounting how the local people were in essence enslaved in order to produce huge amounts of rubber. Here’s a snippet, in case you don’t click through, to one rubber company employee’s account of his day:

It was most interesting, lying in the bush watching the natives quietly at their day’s work. Some women . . . were making banana flour by pounding up dried bananas. Men we could see building huts and engaged in other work, boys and girls running about, singing . . . I opened the game by shooting one chap through the chest. He fell like a stone . . . Immediately a volley was poured into the village.

The mind boggles. So appalling was the treatment of the people of the area that an outcry was raised in Europe. Leopold tries to silence this by sending a hand-picked Commission to ‘investigate.’ In a darkly comic turn of events, so horrified are Leopold’s toadies by what the local people tell them, that they actually return, to Leopold’s shock, an honest report!

People often lazily group missionaries and businessmen together as all part and parcel of one monolithic colonial machine. This book most interestingly debunks this myth, highlighting the huge role the missionaries played in trying to protect local people from the business interests of Europe. The above, terribly sad picture, is taken by a mission lady on her verandah. I’m sorry to have to say that this gentleman is looking at the hand of his five year old daughter. Hands were cut off because soldiers needed to prove that they had not ‘wasted’ ammunition, and needed to prove they had actually killed one person for every bullet used.

Much more, obviously, in my full review here.

HOW TO WIN THE CAINE PRIZE

We had an interesting conversation in the comments on my post about the Caine Prize:

1) Why do so many successful African writers live outside Africa? (are they African writers or ‘African’ writers?)
2) Does the Caine, and the literary world generally, favour stories from Africa about poverty?

I’ve nothing further on 1), but I did a little research on 2), and found that every winning story for the last three years was about poor people, and in particular about poor children. 2011’s winning text is linked to in my previous post, but here’s 2010’s, Stickfighting by Olufemi Terry, and 2009’s, Waiting by EC Osondu

I’ve struggled to get much detail about what the stories from previous years were about, but I think this is certainly an interesting tendency for at least the last three.

I should be very clear here that I don’t mean to bash on the Caine prize. I’m really grateful and glad it exists as a platform for African writers. I’m just wondering what this tendency mean – if stories of the poor are perceived as being the ‘real’ Africa; or if it’s simply chance; or if perhaps the majority of stories submitted were in fact about poverty anyway (which would interesting in itself) . . . .

Zimbabwean Wins The Caine Prize

As a Zimbabwean literary blog, it is appalling that we have missed out on a major piece of Zimbabwean literary news . . . a Zimbabwean has won the Caine!

The Caine is often described as Africa’s Booker, and is awarded annually to the best short story from the continent. It was last won by a Zimbabwean in 2004 (Brian Chikwava, who went on to write HARARE NORTH.) This makes two Zimbabwean wins in eight years, not bad for a country holding just 10 million of African’s 1 billion people. In short: ha! We may not have an economy but we still have writers! Who needs a stupid economy anyway.

Full text of the story is here.

As a side point, I see NoViolet Bulowayo has lived in the US since 1999, but says she longs to be writing back in Africa. I think it is interesting how many writers defined as African live in the US and UK. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is another one. I suspect this is primarily a question of economics, but I do wonder what effect – if any – this is having on the literature of the continent . . .

OUT OF AFRICA by Karen Blixen

I have reviewed this for Africa Book Club – here it is! I will only say, it is not at all like the movie.

If you aren’t going to click through, let me leave you with this interesting little extract:

The Elite Of Bournemouth

I had as neighbour a settler who had been a doctor at home. Once, when the wife of one of my houseboys was about to die in childbirth, and I could not get into Nairobi, because the long ruins had ruined the roads, I wrote to my neighbour and asked him to do me the great service of coming over and helping her. He very kindly came, in the midst of a terrible thunderstorm and torrents of tropical rain, and, a the last moment, by his skill, he saved the life of the woman and the child.

Afterwards he wrote me a letter to say that although he had once, on my appeal, treated a Native, I must understand that he could not let that sort of thing occur again. I myself would fully realize the fact, he felt convinced, when he informed me that he had before now, practised to the elite of Bournemouth.

THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I really enjoyed Adichie’s novel HALF OF A YELLOW SUN, which seemed to me a fresh and interesting picture of a small corner of 20th century Africa. I was therefore excited to read her latest release, THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK, a collection of short stories.

It was, I’m sorry to say, a rather disappointing experience. I did appreciate the unselfconscious way in which Adichie writes about contemporary Nigeria, and in particular the Nigerian diaspora, and some of the stories were quite sweet, and affecting. I especially admired ‘Imitation,’ a story in which a Nigerian wife, unhappy in the US, eventually gets up the courage to insist her family move back to Lagos.

However, I found many of the stories to have an unpleasantly and obviously didactic edge. Now, I don’t mind if an author has an agenda, and feels a need to educate, but I’d appreciate it if they could try and be a little subtle about it. Here’s an example, a girl thinking about her sister while hiding from a riot outside:

She imagines the cocoa brown of Nnedi’s eyes lighting up, her lips moving quickly, explaining that riots do not happen in a vacuum, that religion and ethnicity are often politicized because the ruler is safe if the hungry ruled are killing one another

This is a very unsubtle elucidation of a very obvious point. Indeed, many of the ‘lessons’ seem rather second-hand and obvious, the sort of stuff that is taught in first year Politics classes at liberal American universities. There is even a really embarrassing section ‘educating’ us about how the British stole African artifacts during colonialism. I think I may have found it particularly toe-curling because I’ve just read THINGS FALL APART, in which a truly great Nigerian writer handles such issues with immense delicacy and insight.

As an avowedly African writer, I was also disappointed to see how very limited Adichie’s understanding of Africa is. The book deals almost exclusively with middle class black Nigerians, and where it steps out of this world tends to fall into caricature; there’s a particularly crude caricature of a Jewish American, and a portrait of a white South African that I found almost poisonous.

In an novel, this limited imaginative world may work quite well: we can accept why there is a single atmosphere, and a single sensibility. Short stories are a very different, and a very difficult medium, and for me, in THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK, Adiche’s limits became apparent.

THINGS FALL APART by Chinua Achebe

I’m reviewing occasionally for AFRICA BOOK CLUB at the moment, a very worthwhile venture, giving African literature a higher profile on the web. My review for them, which is much more formal and well behaved than is usual for this blog is here.

Let me just give you a charming little story from the book, that tells us pre-colonial Ibo had the same problems as us . . . .

Mosquito had asked Ear to marry him, whereupon Ear fell on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. “How much longer do you think you will live?” she asked. “You are already a skeleton.” Mosquito went away humiliated, and any time he passed her way he told Ear that he was still alive.

HAIRDRESSER OF HARARE by Tendai Huchu

This is a really charming little tale of contemporary Zimbabwe.

We’ve recently discussed in this blog (here) how much Zimbabwean literature is about either a) the war or b) ticking the boxes of international interest. THE HAIRDRESSER OF HARARE triumphantly does neither.

The story focuses on Vimbai, a top hairdresser at Mrs Khumalo’s salon. Her life changes when their first ever male hairdresser, Dumi, begins work at the salon, and proves to be serious competition. He is however a pleasant and retiring man, and eventually becomes her lodger. He invites her to a family wedding, and she is surprised by the great wealth of his family (from whom he is mysteriously estranged), and also by the fact that he refers to her as his girlfriend.

She begins to come round to this idea, and he becomes a big part of her life. She does indeed eventually become his girlfriend – in all ways except the pesky physical.

I think you can guess that this well-dressed hairdresser, with little interest in Vimbai, is as G-A-Y as you like. She is horrified, and when she discovers that he has a high profile lover in the government, lets his wife know. Dumi is duly beaten to a pulp by the CIO, and Vimbai is filled with remorse. In at not very believable turn of events, he forgives her, and then somewhat more believably, flees the country.

So, an interesting tale, well told. Lots of very sharp comic writing, with a warm heart behind it. Most impressive though is its lively and unselfconscious evocation of contemporary Harare. The kombis, the sugar queues, the Churchill boys; they are all handled with a lightly comic touch, and given a warm reality. The lack of ‘explanation’ (for some imagined international audience) is sort of remarkable. THE HAIRDRESSER OF HARARE is not perhaps a perfect book, but it is one with a genuine and unaffected contemporary Zimbabwean voice, and I haven’t come across too damn many of those. So many congratulations to Mr Huchu.