One Day I will Write about this Place by Binyavanga Wainaina

I first heard of, and met, Binyavanga Wainaina at the American Corner of the Legon Centre for Foreign Affairs (LECIA) of the University of Ghana. He had come there with another literati, Kojo Laing, whom I was also meeting for the first time. In his white linen trouser and long-sleeved round-neck top and green shoe, I settled to listen to this eccentric author in the company of friends. He informed the audience that what he was going to read would be from the manuscript of an upcoming memoir. Like most authors, he brought out his Apple laptop with care and set it on his lap. Opening it, he set out to read to us paragraphs. All I remember now from the reading is the tiny voice he had used to read to us pictures from his childhood and, most importantly, the loud laughter that followed every line.

The very next day I requested to be his friend on facebook. For those who are still not sure of whom he is, Binyavanga Wainaina is the author of, arguably, the most referred to satirical article on writing 'about Africa' titled How to Write about Africa. He is also the 2002 Caine Prize winner and founding editor and publisher of Kwani?.

I was therefore happy to read about the publication of his memoir One Day I will Write about this Place. According to Granta Magazine:

Binyavanga Wainaina tumbled through his middle-class Kenyan childhood out of kilter with the world around him. This world came to him as a chaos of loud and colourful sounds: the hair dryers at his mother's beauty parlour, black mamba bicycle bells, mechanics in Nairobi, the music of Michael Jackson - all punctuated by the infectious laughter of his brother and sister. He could fall in with their patterns, but it would take him a while to carve out his own. In this vivid and compelling debut, Wainaina takes us through his school days, his failed attempt to study in South Africa, a moving family reunion in Uganda, and his travels around Kenya. The landscape in front of him always claims his main attention, but he also evokes the shifting political scene that unsettles his views on family, tribe, and nationhood. Throughout, reading is his refuge and his solace. And when, in 2002, a writing prize comes through, the door is opened for him to pursue the career that perhaps had been beckoning all along. Resolutely avoiding stereotype and cliche, Wainaina paints every scene in One Day I Will Write About This Place with a highly distinctive and hugely memorable brush.

Similarly, Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Binyavanga Wainaina is a singer and painter in words. He makes you smell, hear, touch, see, above all, feel the drama and vibrations of life below the brilliantly and concretely captured surface of things in Kenya and Africa. The memoir bursts with life and laughter and pathos in every line and paragraph.

The book is available on Amazon.com. Also, be sure that when it becomes available in Ghana, ImageNations would bring you his views on and review of this book. Until then, I would want to say that if you want a different narrative about Africa, read this book.

An Evening with the Greats

Yesterday evening was an evening to remember. It is the dream of every budding writer to meet other writers who have published their works and whose name is common to all. Yet, greater joy comes from not knowing who the person only to be told that he is an award-winning writer. 

Yesterday evening, at the American Corner of the Legon Centre for International Affairs (LECIA), I had the privilege of meeting two great writers of our time: Kojo Laing, whose latest novel, Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters, I reviewed on this blog and the Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina.

Binyavanga Wainaina

Binyavanga Wainaina is a Kenyan author, journalist and a 2002 Caine-Prize winning author of Discovering Home. He is also the founding editor of Kwani?, a literary magazine in Kenya. He is also the Director of the Chinua Achebe Centre in New York.

Binyavanga read from his yet to be published memoir. His reading captivated us all and left us laughing with its humour and character descriptions. Before Binyavanga entered the room we were discussing the issue of identity in writing. Should the author projects his identity in writing or should he allow his creative imagination to wonder wild even if it would lead to some Enid-Blyton-like stuff being produced. Binyavanga summed it all up by saying that it is difficult to appreciate what you have and mostly others see more in your surroundings than you would see yourself. Also, it is good to allow your creative imagination to rule you. Kojo Laing commented by quoting Wole Soyinka: "The tiger does not advertise his tigritude".

Presently, whilst writing this blog, I just realised that I have shared with my friends on facebook Binyavanga's essay 'How to Write About Africa'. This piece is one of the most interesting piece I have ever read and it portrays the stereotypic mentality of people concerning Africa.

Kojo Laing

At the end of the reading questions were asked by the audience and it was through this Q&A that I got to know the reasoning behind Kojo Laing's Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters. I know if I had met him earlier and heard his responses my reactions to the review would definitely have ben different.

All in all it was a great evening. However, a copy of Kojo Laing's book could be obtained at Amazon.

The Writers Project of Ghana's Book Discussion with Mawuli Adzei (with Pictures)

The Writers Project of Ghana has a book club it prefers to call The Book and Discussion Club which meets once every month to discuss the selected text for the month. The Book and Discussion Club has selected and read several books since its formation in 2011. Last month's (March) book was Mawuli Adzei's collection of poems Testament of the Seasons. When information reached Dr Adzei - author of Taboo - that we were going to read and discuss his book, he volunteered to be present.

It was always going to be tricky discussing and interrogating the work of a writer in his or her presence. In his absence you could always say whatever you like and this was the first time it was happening. The Book Club has played host to some authors before, though their works were not under discussion at the time of the meeting. We have had Binyavanga Wainaina and Kojo Laing visiting us and reading to us their works. (Note that this discussion is different from the monthly Book Reading WPG organises in collaboration with the Goethe Institute). However, Dr Adzei's presence did not prevent the interrogation of his works. He believes in the reader developing his or her own reaction to his works and interpreting it in any way he or she deems applicable. As usual, it was fun. The evening began with the author reading some of his poems from all the sections in the book. This was followed by the discussion.

Dr Mawuli Adzei reading from Testament of the Seasons

Novisi asking Dr Adzei a question

Novisi getting his book autographed

Nancy and Amma

In between Dr Adzei and Nancy 

Sheilla or Charlotte (? - this twins!) and Agnes were there

Our book for the month of April is 1984 by George Orwell. This is a classic book about current events. It is universally important. It is the book that gave birth to Newspeak, Doublespeak, and Big Brother. We will meet on April 29, 2014 (we meet on the last Tuesday of every month) to discuss this book. If you want to participate, kindly contact me.

NoViolet Bulawayo wins 12th Caine Prize for African Writing

I had always known that the announcement of the Caine Prize for African Writing would fall on my birthday. However, in joyful and thoughtful moods that birthdays always bestow upon its adult celebrants, I entirely forgot to follow the announcement on twitter. Thanks, however, to the internet I have been able to retrieve the announcement of the winner.

Press Release

Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo has won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing, described as Africa’s leading literary award, for her short story entitled ‘Hitting Budapest’, from The Boston Review, Vol 35, no. 6 – Nov/Dec 2010.

The Chair of Judges, award-winning author Hisham Matar, announced NoViolet Bulawayo as the winner of the £10,000 prize at a dinner held this evening (Monday 11 July) at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Hisham Matar said:

The language of ‘Hitting Budapest’ crackles. Here we encounter Darling, Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Stina and Sbho, a gang reminiscent of Clockwork Orange. But these are children, poor and violated and hungry. This is a story with moral power and weight, it has the artistry to refrain from moral commentary. NoViolet Bulawayo is a writer who takes delight in language.

NoViolet Bulawayo was born and raised in Zimbabwe. She recently completed her MFA at Cornell University, in the US, where she is now a Truman Capote Fellow and Lecturer of English. Another of her stories, ‘Snapshots’, was shortlisted for the 2009 SA PEN/Studzinski Literary Award. NoViolet has recently completed a novel manuscript tentatively titled We Need New Names, and has begun work on a memoir project.

Also shortlisted were:

• Lauri Kubuitsile (Botswana) ‘In the spirit of McPhineas Lata’ from The Bed Book of Short Stories published by Modjaji Books, SA, 2010
• Tim Keegan (South Africa) ‘What Molly Knew’ from Bad Company published by Pan Macmillan SA, 2008
• David Medalie (South Africa) ‘The Mistress’s Dog’, from The Mistress’s Dog: Short stories, 1996-2010 published by Picador Africa, 2010
• Beatrice Lamwaka (Uganda) ‘Butterfly dreams’ from Butterfly Dreams and Other New Short Stories from Uganda published by Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, Nottingham, 2010

The panel of judges is chaired by award-winning Libyan novelist Hisham Matar, whose first novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, was published by Viking this March.

He is joined on the panel by Granta deputy editor Ellah Allfrey, publisher, film and travel writer Vicky Unwin, Georgetown University Professor and poet David Gewanter, and the award-winning author Aminatta Forna.

Once again, the winner of the £10,000 Caine Prize will be given the opportunity to take up a month’s residence at Georgetown University, Washington DC as a ‘Caine Prize/Georgetown University Writer-in-Residence’. The award will cover all travel and living expenses.

Last year the Caine Prize was won by Sierra Leonean writer Olufemi Terry. As the then Chair of judges, Fiammetta Rocco, said at the time, the story was 

ambitious, brave and hugely imaginative. Olufemi Terry’s ‘Stickfighting Days’ presents a heroic culture that is Homeric in its scale and conception. The execution of this story is so tight and the presentation so cinematic, it confirms Olufemi Terry as a talent with an enormous future.

Previous winners include Sudan’s Leila Aboulela, winner of the first Caine Prize in 2000, whose new novel Lyrics Alley was published in January 2010 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, as well as Binyavanga Wainaina, from Kenya, who founded the well-known literary magazine, Kwani?, dedicated to promoting the work of new Kenyan writers and whose memoir One Day I Will Write About this Place will be published by Granta Books in November 2011.

You can read the winning story here.

[Courtesy: Wealth of Ideas]

Throw Your Bookshelves Away, Here Comes the E-book

At the mention of a book, the first thing we think of is the cover page, the feel of the book in our hands, the smell of the book, the colour of the cover, the font size and then the contents. I loved books for these things. Anytime I purchase a book, I stroke the spine like I would do for a pet, though I have none and had I not married I could easily say that the most important thing in my life is a book, any book for that matter. I love books for what they are and I do not care whether it falls within my study area or not. In my bookshelf, I have books on history, literature, economics, accounting, agriculture and many others. The best present anyone could ever give me is a book and when I celebrated my twenty-ninth birthday and a friend of mine gave me a copy of 'Half of a Yellow Sun', a book a reader of ImageNations had recommended for me, the feeling was different and it is a feeling I would never forget.

However, these personal relationship one has with books are about to change with the emergence of e-readers and its increasing popularity. Amazon's Kindle, Apple's IPad, Sony's Reader Touch, Barns and Noble's Nook and many others, have all changed the face and phase of reading. Now, one can carry the whole of his library with him and at the press of a button retrieve, purchase and store countless books. This revolution however has its costs. But is this cost a cost to readers or to manufacturers. Amazon recently announced that the sales of its e-books have outstripped sales for its hard copies and the sales of its Kindle has not decreased but increased. Judging from this information and also from the current war of words and sues brewing between the traditional hard copy publishers and publishing agents such as Alex Wiley and authors themselves, where copyright issues concerning the e-books are being redefined, the e-books have come to really stay. It has been predicted that e-books would surpass the traditional hard copy books in five years and the industry is growing to become a multi-billion dollar industry. Many authors such as Binyavanga Wainaina of Kenya have warned African publishing houses to beware of this trend and follow suit. This phenomenon is not new. It is well established in the music industry where one can easily log on to sites such as ITunes and purchase mp3 copies of the songs one hears. In the music industry, it has shown to be a success and it is this same success that authors are waiting for.

So please reduce the size of your bookshelf, close down the library or better still throw the bookshelves out of the window... Get bigger memory external hard disks to store your books and create room space for yourself. But would this phenomenon be good for readers and bibliophiles in developing countries? Those to whom access to even hard copy books still remain a problem? There still are only about two bookshops with more than four shelves dedicated to literary books in Accra and book prices at one of these are way above normal, sometimes even higher than the dollar equivalent quoted at the back of the book. Would books still be considered an elite commodity? Or would the e-pub industry destroy this myth?

Advantages of the E-book

The advantage of e-books is that, they are easy to circulate and their cost is low. Their ease of circulation and low production cost mean that authors get a greater percentage from royalties (between 50 percent and 70 percent compared to the average 25 percent from traditional publishing houses). Again, with a high-memory e-reader one could store a lot of books into the reader creating spaces for other essential items when one is going to work or vacation. As already stated, bookshelves would become smaller and smaller and with time disappear altogether. Lovely e-books. But are these advantages greater than the disadvantages?

I believe that the e-readers and e-books would widen the gap between students and bibliophiles in the urban areas and rural areas.

Electricity

E-readers require electricity to power them just as mobile phones do. Is every village in Africa connected to the national electrification grid? Most villages in Ghana, as I know them, are not connected to the national grid. In Nigeria lights go off and on like the way we flutter our eyes. We can read traditional books with candles and lanterns but what if you have exams and the lights have been off for say a day or two and your e-reader has rundown? Far-fetched? There has been numerous power scheduling in Ghana and students have to end up learning with candles. How would the e-book fare in this area? Some may argue that though mobile phones also require electricity to charge them, this has not prevented them from being used in rural areas. However, whereas people could leave their phones off or charge their phones in people's houses or with batteries, would these same people (perhaps students) be ready to leave their e-readers at these places when they need to read them? Solar chargers? May be!

Cost

The cost of reading a traditional book is the cost of only the book and perhaps your time, a common variable in every reading activity. However, to read an e-book one needs the e-reader and that e-book. Another point is that the e-book should be in a format that is compatible with the e-reader, else it cannot open. Sony's e-reader cost between US$ 250 and US$ 300, versions of IPad's e-reader sell for over US$ 700 and there is no e-reader that sells for less than US$ 100, used or brand new. Besides unlike the hard copies book (if you kept them from high and low PH liquids--water is okay as you can dry them after they fall in it,--fire and perhaps children--even if they tear it up you can mend it with a transparent tape), the e-reader can have all the problems associated with mobile phones: battery problems, screen loss and definitely it must not fall down. If you drop your IPad from a storey, know that you cannot read your story till you replace it.

Downloads

E-books are easily be available from numerous outlets such as Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, if one has ACCESS to the internet and a CREDIT CARD. Getting access to the internet is the first major problem. I, for instance, get access to the internet mostly when I am at work. When I go back home, where I was born and brought up and also where I stay, I barely get access to the net; whenever I travel to my working areas in the villages, internet access become a wish item. What then happens to the rural folks, if all our books became e-books?

Though I have internet access at work, I cannot purchase anything on the net as my bankers only provide me with a debit card. Sometimes those who provide credit cards do not provide the service overseas and in certain countries. Thus, with a Kindle, an internet access and a 'no-service' bank I still cannot use the e-book.

However, every article that I have read on the e-reader and on or about e-books point to the fact that it is the future. That the future of the book industry about to change drastically. What should we as Africans do in order to benefit from this change? Should there be a direct government interest and action or it should be left with private entrepreneurs?

This is only my thoughts and I would want us to keep this discussion going.

Readers' Top Ten - Manu Herbstein, Author (With a Slideshow)

Manu Herbstein is a civil and structural engineer by profession. He was born in Muizenberg, near Cape Town, in 1936 and educated at the University of Cape Town. Manu is the author of Ama - a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for First Book, and Brave Music of a Distant Drum, a sequel. Manu Herbstein has lived and worked in England, Nigeria, India, Zambia, and Scotland, and now lives in Ghana.

Today Manu shares with us his Top Ten+ African Books. I have linked some of them to reviews and other information within the blog and outside of it. Note that reviews, where they are, are my personal opinion and do not reflect Manu's.
_____________________________

Dear God,

Since You have a reputation for omniscience, You will surely know that I’ve been an atheist since my teens and expect and intend to remain one until my dying day.

My dying day.

I need to talk to You about that. At 77 I’ve already received a 10% bonus on the three score years and ten promised in Your Holy Book. So I must expect to die quite soon. If not this year, then next year; and if not next year then surely within the next decade.

I don’t expect You to answer when I speak to You. However, as of course You know, I’m a writer, a story teller. I create characters, not in the flesh as Your followers claim You did with Adam and Eve, but in the imagination. And I put words into their mouths. So I can, if need be, put words into Your mouth (as, indeed, the so-called Men of God do.)

So “What is it you want to talk to Me about,” I hear You ask.

Books. My bookshelves are full of books, I reply, so full that there’s a serious overflow, onto the headboard of my bed and even piled up on my desk and on the floor.

In preparation for my departure from this earth I’ve been sorting them out, packing those I’ve read and have no wish to read again into cardboard cartons. Still, ranks of unread books stand shoulder to shoulder on the shelves, revealing only their tattooed naked spines, each one challenging me to read it first. So I want to ask You a favour: let me stay alive until I’ve read them all.

 “Nothing doing,” I hear You say (in the words I’ve put into Your mouth). “That would create a precedent.”

That’s just the answer I expected. You may be omnipotent but I don’t see much sign of Your generosity of spirit in this world. (Just think: “Syria” or “Lampedusa” or “Philippines”.)

Let me then make another proposition. When my time comes, let me take my unread books with me. I would promise to lend them to my fellow-dead as soon as I’ve finished reading them; or I might even give them away. Same answer? It’s clear that You are dead-set against establishing precedents. I guess You’re worried about overloading the clouds which support Your heavenly domain.

Dear God, won’t You let me take a hundred, just a hundred? A hundred wouldn’t last me for all eternity, but they would keep me occupied for a while.

I’ve given instructions that my dead body should be cremated. My selected hundred books could be put into my coffin and burned with me. (I’m totally opposed in principle to the burning of books, but this would be a special case.)

If human beings have souls which survive their death, I guess it might be the same with books. My soul could then read the souls of those cremated books.

You reject that too?

“It’s beyond My powers,” I hear You say.

Oh well, I thought You were omnipotent as well as omniscient, but it seems I was wrong.

Ten? Just ten? Let me be more specific: my ten favourite books by African authors. I haven’t packed them away yet because I’d like to read them again. Just ten. No one would notice. And I promise not to create a precedent by revealing Your generosity.

Your answer? Louder, please. I’m getting a little deaf as I grow older.

You agree? Did I really hear You say that You agree? Of course I did. I’m a writer. I put those words into Your mouth.

But there’s a condition? Oh, oh. I might have guessed it. Tell me, what condition? You want me to submit their titles to You in advance, my ten all-time favourite African books? I guess You’ll want to censor them. No blasphemy, right?

Well, as You know, I’m totally opposed to censorship. But what choice do I have? I’ll do as You ask right now before You change Your mind. But be patient, I beg You. It’s not easy to choose just ten books from over seventy years of reading.

I start with a long list of 17, 1 from Brazil, 2 from USA, 1 from DR Congo, 2 from Ghana, 3 from Nigeria, 1 from Senegal, 6 from South Africa, 1 from Uganda; 16 in English (1 translated from Portuguese), 1 in Afrikaans; 11 by men, 6 by women; 11 fiction, 6 non-fiction, of which 2 are history and 2 are memoirs. The Brazilian (Antonio Olinto's The Water House/A Casa de Agua) and the two Americans (Judith Gleason's Agotime, Her Legend and Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother, A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route) are disqualified since their authors are not Africans. That leaves 14. I drop Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Sefi Atta's Everything Good Will Come on the grounds that they will surely appear on other lists. Next to go is Consuelo Roland's The Good Cemetery Guide, set in Kalk Bay just a few kilometres from Muizenberg where I grew up. Just one more to cut. That is just too much to ask. Give me another 10% bonus please: my eleven best African books.

I grew up in segregated South Africa, privileged by a 'white' skin, a middle class family, bookshelves full of books and parents who read. I had access to an excellent Carnegie Public Library. There wasn't much African in my early reading: Jock of the Bushveld, Rider Haggard and, in Afrikaans, the short stories of CJ Langenhoven, of which I recall 'Die Tolk' which described a hilarious case of serial mis-translation by a court interpreter.

My upbringing gave me none of the social and political skills required to stretch a hand across the barbed wire fence that divided South Africans. My first excursions across the colour line were through books.

Time Longer than Rope. The first of these was a chance encounter with Eddie Roux's Time Longer than Rope, first published by Gollancz in 1946. In it I discovered a completely different story from the brainwashing that passed for history in South African schools. "Ideas are difficult to suppress," Roux wrote. "The Liberatory movement has been long at work: its message has penetrated deep into the minds of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people. While racial discrimination remains the movement cannot die. There can be no going back to the old system of slavery and rural serfdom."

Down Second Avenue. The first volume of Ezekiel Mphahlele's authobiography, Down Second Avenue, was published just before I left South Africa in 1959. He had finished writing it after arriving in Nigeria as an exile in September 1957. It had an enormous influence on me and I was thrilled to meet Zeke in person when I arrived there three years later, just before Independence. Our correspondence at the time was recently published in the Chimurenga Chronic Books section under the title '50 years ago: Zeke in Nigeria.' Zeke was joint editor (with Ulli Beier) of Black Orpheus, which introduced me to the work of many young African writers including Kofi Awoonor, Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, Mongo Beti, and my countryman Alex la Guma, whose writing was banned back home. I would meet Zeke again many years later when we both worked in Lusaka; and for the last time, shortly before he died, in South Africa. 

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart was the first book published in the African Writers Series. That was in 1962. I read many of the AWS books as they appeared: Cyprian Ekwensi, Peter Abrahams, Ngugi, Mongo Beti, Francis Selormey, Ferdinand Oyono, Ayi Kwei Armah. In those days it was not too difficult to keep up with new African writing. Today, it's impossible. I haven't found room for any of their much-loved books in my shortlist of 11.

Frontiers. Noel Mostert's Frontiers, 1335 pages, was first published in 1992. The title refers to the shifting frontier between the whites and the amaXhosa in what the South African school history books of my youth referred to as Kaffer Wars of 1781 - 1878, nine of them in all. This is a brilliant telling of a tragic story, deeply researched and sensitive to the mutually incomprehensible differences across the cultural divide. Google tells me that Mostert is a Canadian, but he was born in South Africa and so, by my lights, he qualifies.

Die Swerfjare van Poppie Nongema. I read Die Swerfjare van Poppie Nongema in the original Afrikaans. In it author Elsa Joubert transcends the barriers enforced by apartheid to tell the epic story of the life struggle of a black woman who happened to be her employee. It is told with deep womanly empathy, with neither condescension nor romanticising, giving a voice to a courageous woman, effectively her co-author, who might well otherwise have passed this world unnoticed. It also served to undermine the self-confidence of South Africa's Christian Afrikaner rulers, who had persuaded themselves of the moral rectitude of apartheid.

Unconfessed. In Unconfessed, Yvette Christiansë uses fragments of documents from the archives to build a convincing portrait of an enslaved woman, known as Sila van den Kaap. Kidnapped in Mozambique in her youth and sold into slavery in South Africa, Sila is repeatedly sold and cheated. She kills her young son Baro to save him from life as a slave. Charged with infanticide, she refuses to defend her action, giving the book its title. She narrowly escapes execution and is sent to Robben Island, where she conducts a continuous conversation with the spirit of her dead son. For me, this is perhaps the finest of all South African novels written in English. My short summary fails to give it the credit it deserves. 

Search Sweet Country. Comparisons are odious, the English proverb tells us. In his introduction to Kojo Laing's Search Sweet Country, Binyavanga Wainaina rates it 'the finest novel written in English to come out of the continent.' I loved it and still love it and its marvellous characters: Beni Baidoo, Kofi Loww, Adwoa Adde, Professor Sackey, Dr Boadi, Osofo and others. First published in 1986 it is a rollicking, hilarious and affectionate portrait of Accra in the 70s and 80s. I'm sad that it's the only work by a Ghanaian in my list.

A Mouth Sweeter than Salt. It's difficult to avoid the use of exaggerated language in a short description of a favourite book. Just check Toyin Falola's academic output at Wikipedia. And the list of his books there is incomplete: missing is the 800-page Ghana in Africa and the World, Essays in Honor of Adu Boahen, which he edited. A Mouth Sweeter than Salt is a treasure. I would rate it the finest autobiographical memoir I have read. The obvious comparison is with Wole Soyinka's Ake. Forgive the odiousness of the comparison. Ake is good. A Mouth Sweeter than Salt is far, far better.

Sozaboy. Another odious comparison. I found Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun much inferior to her first novel Purple Hibiscus. One problem is that she was writing an historical novel set in a period that was not within her own memory but was within the memory of living people of my generation. She's good on the middle class, not so good on the less privileged. In Sozaboy, Saro-Wiwa, inventing what he calls rotten English, convincingly evokes the character of an ordinary young man whose wartime experiences are not of his own making. In doing so he gives a powerful, memorable, voice to one of the multitude of otherwise voiceless who were the real losers in the Biafran War. And so, as with all best stories, the local acquires a universal significance. Give me Sozaboy over Yellow Sun any day.

God's Bits of Wood. I've been a socialist since I was a teenager. It's a long time since I read Sembene Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood but it has remained in my memory as a great West African working class novel written by a man who had himself been a fisherman, plumber, bricklayer, apprentice fitter, soldier, docker and trade union leader before he became a writer and film-maker. It's time to read it again, perhaps.

Song of Lawino. At the recent conference celebrating 50 years of Institute of African Studies at Legon, I started chatting to a visiting academic. In response to my question he told me that he hailed from Uganda and that he was a political scientist. When I told him I was just then finishing re-reading a great work of Ugandan political science he gave me a curious look. I pulled out of my brief-case my well-thumbed copy of Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino. Himself an Acoli man like Okot, my new friend gave me a broad smile. Written entirely in verse, translated from Okot's own Acoli original, it's a great piece of African feminist satire written by a man and in many ways as true today as it was nearly fifty years ago when it was first published. And so funny, even if I sometimes felt that I was Lawino's target as much as Ocol.

Silences in African History. The young Nigerian literary scholar Arthur Anyaduba wrote and published an MA thesis in which he did me the honour of setting my novel Ama by the side of Zakes Mda's Heart of Redness (which, incidentally revisits some of the territory covered by Noel Mostert in Frontiers.) He sent me the chapter about Ama and in it introduced me to Jacques Depelchin's Silences in African History, published in Tanzania. I ordered a copy and read it at a sitting. I've been dipping into it ever since. Depelchin takes a hard, highly critical look at the African history written by Africanist scholars of the West, including some Africans. I'm biased in his favour perhaps, because he makes a strong case for including the work of historical novelists in the study of African history.

That's my lot. Eleven favourite books. A pity to burn them.