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Smouldering Charcoal  (Heinemann, 1992; 183) by Tiyambe Zeleza belongs to the immediate post-colonial African literature, which includes such texts as Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones are not Yet Born , and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat . More specifically, it belongs to those collection of works which exposes the disillusionment of independence and questions the integrity and vision of the post-independence leaders, usually the first presidents, who became harsh, corrupt, and more cruel. However, published in the early 1990s, when the equalisation of the genders had become the song and aim of government policies and therefore major themes of every work, the novel could equally be pushed into the social commentary sub-category of African literature aimed at instigating a social change. Consequently,  Smouldering Charcoal is a socio-political novel. But its deficiency is the subliminal and sometimes conspicuous social commentaries it makes. In a word, it is m...