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Most Popular South Africa

Blood Knot

Blood Knot is a play about two brothers, who live in a one-room shack in a crumbling section of Port Elizabeth, South Africa. They are different in temperament, but they reaffirm and support each other. Morris is a light-skinned colored man, Zachariah is a black man. They are half-brothers, who have the same mother. They have shared the same one-room shack for about a year. Zachariah works as a gatekeeper at a park. His job is to keep black people from coming into the whites-only park. He has footsores, from having to stand on his feet all day. Morris prepares hot water for Zach to bathe his feet. Morris has been saving the money that Zach earns, so that they can buy a two-man farm. Meanwhile, the lonely Zachariah has struck up a pen-pal relationship with a white girl, and entertains fantasies that she might fall in love with him. The more level-headed Morris tries to disabuse Zachariah of such notions, and warns him that in segregated South Africa, such a relationship can only mean trouble, especially since the girl has indicated in letters that she has a brother who’s a policeman. The girl says in her next letter that she is coming to visit Port Elizabeth, and that she wants to meet Zach. She does not know that he is black. Zach suggests that, since Morris is light-skinned, he should take Zach’s place, and pretend to be a white man. Zach spends their savings on a suit of clothes for Morris, telling him that he should go to see Ethel. In the end the girl decides not to visit. Morris and Zachariah will, apparently, remain together for many unhappy years to come, needing each other, but unable to bridge the gap brought about by their respective skin tones.
Categories
Algeria Most Popular

Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade

In this stunning novel, Assia Djebar intertwines the history of her native Algeria with episodes from the life of a young girl in a story stretching from the French conquest in 1830 to the War of Liberation of the 1950s. The girl, growing up in the old Roman coastal town of Cherchel, sees her life in contrast to that of a neighboring French family, and yearns for more than law and tradition allow her to experience. Headstrong and passionate, she escapes from the cloistered life of her family to join her brother in the maquis’ fight against French domination.Djebar’s exceptional descriptive powers bring to life the experiences of girls and women caught up in the dual struggle for independence – both their own and Algeria’s.
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Buchi Emecheta Most Popular

The Joys Of Motherhood

In this novel, Emecheta reveals and celebrates the pleasures derived from fulfilling responsibilities related to family matters in child bearing, mothering, and nurturing activities among women. However, the author additionally highlights how the ‘joys of motherhood’ also include anxiety, obligation, and pain.
Categories
Ivory Coast Most Popular

Climbié

This book gives glimpses into the life of Climbié, a young boy from the Ivory Coast as he attends colonial French school, and then follows him to Dakar, Senegal where he finishes school and becomes a clerk. Upon his return to the Ivory Coast, he begins to speak out against colonial oppression and is imprisoned. Throughout the novel, the author attempts to show the tension between Africans, Europeans, and the people who are caught between the two worlds.
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Most Popular Mozambique

Karingana ua karingana

The work, in the author’s words, intend to poetically transmit the daily life of Mozambicans, at a time marked by the struggle against colonial occupation Karingana ua karingana is the expression used by rongas when they begin to tell a traditional story. The listeners answer karingana !. Corresponds to the expression «once upon a time» used in Portuguese in the same situation.
Categories
Most Popular Sierra Leone

The last Harmattan Of Alusine Dunbar

In a chimerical world of illusion and truth, fired by a language that challenges the imagination, this book tells the story of a Sierra Leone-like country, from the time of the freed black American slaves who returned to Africa.
Categories
Most Popular South Africa

The Life and Times Of Micheal K

In a South Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience—the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.

Categories
Most Popular South Africa

A Dry White Season

Ben Du Toit is a white schoolteacher in suburban Johannesburg in a dark time of intolerance and state-sanctioned apartheid. A simple, apolitical man, he believes in the essential fairness of the South African government and its policies—until the sudden arrest and subsequent “suicide” of a black janitor from Du Toit’s school. Haunted by new questions and desperate to believe that the man’s death was a tragic accident, Du Toit undertakes an investigation into the terrible affair—a quest for the truth that will have devastating consequences for the teacher and his family, as it draws him into a lethal morass of lies, corruption, and murder.

Categories
Cameroon Most Popular

The Poor Christ Of Bomba

In Bomba girls are being prepared for Christian marriage. Gradually it becomes apparent that the local churchmen have been using the girls for their own purposes.
Categories
Morocco Most Popular

The Sacred Night

In the 1920s, the story of the eighth daughter of a Moroccan family whose sex was hidden from everyone and who was raised in the tradition of males until the age of 21 under the name of Ahmed.
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