African Writers

The BBC has recently had many programmes on TV and the radio about the history of African writing .... books written by Africans, not by white writers writing about Africa.   I am at present listening to one of Chinua Achebe's books on Radio 4.

I originally encountered books written by Africans in 1968, and this is the first one I bought:

The orange paperbacks, published by Heinemann Educational Books, were to become a familiar sight in Kenyan bookshops.   Priced in the UK at 5s.6d, (or 7 Kenya shillings) I suppose they were out of reach of the average African student, but they soon appeared in most school libraries. 

I quickly got 'hooked' and every trip to town I bought another, and eventually had quite a number !  I found some written by James Ngugi, a Kenyan writer, who later renamed himself Ngugi wa Thiongo.   Some of these books I found quite disturbing, as they showed me how Africans viewed Europeans,  and didn't always make pleasant reading, but then books written by Europeans about Africans must have been equally disturbing to African readers, when they dealt with topics like Mau Mau, and the independence struggles in most ex colonial countries.   

Now, there are modern African writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writing about their own countries troubled past .... such as her book 'Half of a Yellow Sun', which is a novel about the Biafran war in the 1960's, and 'Purple Hibiscus' with its background of a military coup in Nigeria.    She has won many literary prizes ....

.... and like Maaza Mengiste of Ethiopia and Tsitsi Dangarembga of Zimbabwe, both long-listed for the Booker this year, its time Adichie was also seen on the Booker lists.