Gods and Soldiers
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E. C. Osondu worked in advertising in Lagos before receiving his MFA in fiction from Syracuse University in 2007. He teaches at Providence College in Rhode Island and is completing a story collection and novel.
Nawal El Saadawi is an Egyptian writer and psychiatrist. The author of more than two dozen award-winning novels, plays, and memoirs, she has been at the forefront of Arabic women’s rights. Her work has been banned, and she was sent into exile (for five years), arrested by the Anwar Sadat government, and included on various assassination lists of terrorist organizations. She has also served as Secretary General of the Egyptian Medical Association, and ran for president in 2004. Saadawi lives in Cairo.
Never one to cast a blind eye at government corruption, the prolific Kenyan writer Ngūgī wa Thiong’o’s 1977 play I Will Marry When I Want earned him a prison cell, in which he penned an entire novel, Devil on the Cross, on toilet paper, and also stopped writing in English, switching to the Niger-Congo language Kikuyu, or Gīkūyū. As much a novelist and an intellectual as a social activist, Thiong’o is also a playwright, journalist, editor, and academic. The recipient of seven honorary doctorates, Thiong’o is currently the Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California-Irvine.
Zimbabwean Yvonne Vera was part of the vanguard of writers addressing the varied and complex roles of women in contemporary African society. From former Southern Rhodesia, she received a PhD from York University in Toronto before moving back to her hometown to become the director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo. The author of the short story collection Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals and five novels, including Butterfly Burning, Vera sadly succumbed to AIDS in 2005 at the age of forty. “I am against silence. The books I write try to undo the silent posture African women have endured over so many decades.”
The South African novelist and short story writer Ivan Vladislavic’’s most recent book is Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked, a series of 138 nonfiction portraits of his hometown, a widely praised portrait that won the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for Nonfiction. Vladislavic’ works as an editor and writer in Johannesburg.
Abdourahman A. Waberi has written nine works of fiction, two of which—The Land Without Shadows and The United States of Africa—have been translated into English. From Djibouti, which gained its independence from France in 1977, Waberi came to France when he was twenty-one, and now teaches English in the French city of Caen.
Binyavanga Wainaina is the firebrand editor of Kwani, a young Nairobi-based literary magazine at the heart of the burgeoning Kenyan literary scene. He won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2002, and his memoir, Discovering Home, is due out from Graywolf Press in late 2009. Wainaina’s stingingly smart satire “How to Write About Africa,” originally published in Granta, has become a touchstone for young African writers.
1 It is important to note that the word “Bamileké” does not exist in any of the languages of the groups who are designated by it, and thus it is not a designation intrinsic to the groups thus identified.
2 L. S. Senghor, “Comme les lamantins vont boire à la source,” in Poèmes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974), pp. 165-66.
3 R. Ellison, The Collected Essays (New York: John Callahan, 1995), p. 185.
4 M. Beti, “Conseils à un jeune écrivain francophone ou les quarter premiers paradoxes de la francophonie ordinaire,” dans Africains, si vous parliez. Homnispheres, 2005, 0.112.
5 Trans. A rank of professor in the French university system.
6 W. Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 135.
7 Ibid.
8 On the relationship between “negritudé” and “ivoirité” see U. Amoa, “Libre opinion—Lettre ouverte aux ivoiriens: Vive le changement . . . attention aux changements!” in L’Inter, Abidjan, January 3, 2000.
9 L. Borne, cited in V. Zmegac, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Koenigstein: Athenaeum Vg., 1984), p. 283.
10 A. Ricard, La Formule Bardey. Voyages africains (Bordeaux: Confluences, 2005), p. 196.
11 M. Beti, “Conseils à un jeune écrivain francophone,” op cit., p. 112.
12 L. S. Senghor, “L’Absente,” in Poèmes, op cit., p. 108.
13 Ngūgī wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind (London: J. Currey; Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, 1986), p. vii.
14 “La France accusée de genocide,” in Mutations, Yaoundé, June 6, 2006 [www.quotidienmutations.net/mutations/32.php?subaction=showfull&id=1149568971&archive=&start_from=&ucat+32&].
15 A. Mbembe, “La France et l’Afrique: décoloniser sans s’auto-décoloniser,” in Le Messager, September 27, 2005 [www.lemessager.net/details_articles.php?code=109&code_art=8290].
16 “Cameroun: Lutte d’indépendance: les vétérans camerounais exigent des réparations,” in Le Messager, Douala, June 2, 2006 [http://fr.allafrica.com/stories/200606020628.html].
17 Trans. “Resistance movement,” here specifically that of ’56-70.
18 A. Mbembe, La Naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun, 1920-1960 (Paris: Karthala, 1996), p. 438.
19 Trans. “Nobody’s colony.” Slogan of the UPC before 1960. Note that many Cameroonians continue to write the name of the country with “K,” as in the German “Kamerun,” to mark this moment of rupture.
20 In English in the original—Translator’s note.
21 In English in the original—Translator’s note.
22 A Season in Paradise, trans. Rike Vaughan (New York: Persea Books, 1980), p. 156.
23 The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985), p. 280.
24 Return to Paradise (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), pp. 31, 201, 214, 215. The book appeared in Dutch before it appeared in English. The Dutch text is considerably longer. Passages cut include reminiscences of bohemian life in the Cape Town of the 1950s and of Breytenbach’s travels in Africa.
25 Ibid., pp. 158, 160, 196.
26 Ibid., p. 123.
27 Ibid., p. 75.
28 Ibid., pp. 4, 27.
29 Ibid., p. 74.
30 Dog Heart: A Memoir (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), p. 180.
31 Ibid., p. 136.
32 Ibid., p. 145.
33 Ibid., p.60.
34 Ibid., p. 175.
35 Ibid., p. 1.
36 Ibid., p. 84.
37 The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution (London: Faber, 1996), p. 105.