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Ama - a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade  (374; Techmate) by Manu Herbstein won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book in 2002. It explores, boldly, one of the darkest moments of human history when human beings (blacks from Africa) were traded like articles or farm animals. Assessed for defects - muscles, clear eyes, etc. - and for profitability. Thus, in that period, black men and women were no different from livestock - in treatment and in conception.  Manu Herbstein painfully peels off the gangrenes from our necrotic wounds to show us our painful complicity as Africans in our own enslavement and therefore our debasement. To this extent Manu is in league with Ayi Kwei Armah, who in his books -  Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers  - showed how far we went as Africans, how lowly we bowed, how stupidly we grovelled, and how greedily we participated in our own destruction. Armah called the chiefs who stupidly surrendered our sovereignty for p...

No one knows what the elephant ate to make it so big. [40] The Tail of the elephant may be short ... but it can still keep the flies away. [40] [A]t another's hearth, you do not have the same freedom you might have in your mother's kitchen. [71] Chapel. You don't know what chapel is? That is their room where they go to worship their gods. It is in the charge of the chaplain, who is like a fetish priest for them, an Okomfo  you know, except that he does not know how to dance. ... Sometimes the chaplain tells them stories which he says comes out of a special book. That books is one of their main fetishes. Mijn Heer tried to tell me some of the stories when we were married. Some were not bad, but most were rubbish. I told him he should listen rather to our Ananse stories, they are much more entertaining and there is always a lesson to be learned from them. [136] De Bruyn had tried to fit her feet into a pair of his late wife's shoes, but the foot of a fema...

Gradually Bessie Head is becoming my most read author. It all started after the Writers Project of Ghana held its twitter discussion on her book A Question of Power .  I had earlier read the book (and two others: A Woman Alone and Maru ), even before it was chosen and had had it reviewed on this blog. However, the discussion got me thinking about that woman, her beautiful spirit, her audacious writings, and her sense of humour even in the midst of dire adversity. Thus, I picked three of her books, including Tales of Tenderness and Power  and When Rain Clouds Gather . The Cardinals with Meditations and Short Stories  (1993; 141) contains a novella and seven short stories and meditations. It is a story about the effects of racial discrimination and how it breaks down families and flings their members about to the ways of the storms of life. In The Cardinals , set in South Africa, not only are the lives of the natives battered by poverty and destroyed by lack, politi...

You have a beautiful soul that was nurtured on a dung heap. [22] I was thinking a while ago, Johnny, that half the trouble in the world is caused by the difficulty we have in communicating with each other. It's practically impossible to say what you really mean and to be sure that the other person is understanding you. Word communication is dependent on reason and logic but there are many things in life that are not reasonable or logical. A jazz musician can say something to me in his music but it would be quite beyond me to translate into words what he is communicating through music. What he has to say touches the most vital part of my life but I can only acknowledge his message silently. [24] Do you think life will care about you if you do not show that you care about it? [37] They pursued their love with a wild abandon, unprotected against the treachery of the insecure foundation on which it was based and too young to bridge the gap that would suddenly and unexpecte...

The Karamazov Brothers (870; 1880)* is the second book by Fyodor Dostoevsky I have read, in addition to Crime and Punishment .  The book counts towards two reading challenges: the Year of Russian Literature and Top 100 Books to be Read in Five Years . In this book, which happened to be the author's last work, Dostoevsky traversed several grounds and themes and perhaps knowing (or through serendipity) completely and fully invested himself and his knowledge in this book. I am not sure of this, but The Karamazov Brothers  could be a cauldron of a major part of Dostoevsky's ideas. In effect, this author-researcher, this psychologist of a novelist, this student of human nature and thoughts, produced a seminal work, worth studying in different fields of social sciences, in this novel. Thus, to describe The Karamazov Brothers  as a novel is an understatement. It does the book a huge injustice and undermines its quality. This is a compendium of human thoughts, psych...

But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find something that all would believe in and worship; what is essential is that all may be  together  in it. This craving for  community  of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they've slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, 'Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!' And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same. [278] For the secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for. [278] Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is...

It's impossible, I think, for the devils to forget to drag me down to hell with their hooks when I die. Then I wonder - hooks? Where would they get them? What of? Iron hooks? Where do they forge them? Have they a foundry there of some sort? The monks in monastery probably believe that there's a ceiling in hell, for instance. Now I'm ready to believe in hell, but without a ceiling. It makes it more refined, more Lutheran, that is. And, after all, what does it matter whether it has a ceiling or hasn't? But, do you know, there's a damnable question involved in it? If there's no ceiling there can be no hooks, and if there are no hooks it all breaks down, which is unlikely again, for then there would be none to drag me down to hell, and if they don't drag me down what justice is there in the world? Il faudrait les inventer , those hooks, on purpose for me alone, for, if you only knew, Alyosha, what a blackguard I am. [22-3] It is not miracles that dispose re...

Planet Books, Lusaka Zambia One thing I like to take with me from any journey (outside Ghana) is a book. I buy books at airports and at identified bookshops in the countries. In Zambia I buy books at Planet Books located within the Arcades Shopping Mall, Lusaka. I have always been surprised at the wide-range of titles one could get at Planet Books. Though their floor space is incomparable to that of EPP Bookshop at Legon, they have by far more titles including several Man Booker books and other important titles not easily found in Ghana. The downside is that their stock of general African fiction is poor and when available are generally expensive. On the other hand, they have some quintessential African titles. What therefore makes such difference? There seem to be a dearth of excellent titles - literary fiction, poetry anthologies, essays, and others - in Ghana. Sorry, I am drifting from the main issue. The following are the books I have purchased: The Fountainhead by A...

When Rain Clouds Gather  (AWS Classics, 1968; 199) is Bessie Head's first novel published five years after she moved from South Africa to Serowe, Botswana, where most of her stories, including this, are set. The story is largely about the lives of the people as they work to earn a living on the deserts and droughts of that part of Botswana. It is about their fears, their hopelessness, their struggle to improve their lots and their impotence. The men in Golema Mmidi are cattle rearers; the women, crop-growers. They are faced with a unique problem, drought. Makhaya, a political ex-convict, running from the oppression in neighbouring South Africa finds his way into Golema Mmidi. Gilbert, a British had returned to the village with his head full of ideas, on how to turn the lives of the people in the village around and make them practice their agriculture in a way that would be more profitable and sustainable. Paulina had moved from the northern part of Botswana to Golema Mmidi a...