ImageNations

Brave Music from a Distant Drum by Manu Herbstein is a sequel to Ama - a story of the Atlantic Slave Trade . In my review of the first book, I stated that this is a book that needs to be read by all. It is an introduction to an understanding of what really went on during the slave trade. It takes the story away from statistics and figures - this number of people were taken, that number of people died. It shows you the human dimension of that unpardonable activity. It shows you that slaves were not taken out of Africa; rather people were taken out and made slaves. It is a human story with unrestrained treatment. I expect the sequel to follow similar lines. To continue the story and to peel off the wounds. For instance, one would want to know what happened to Ama after the death of Tomba. And will their son be as rebellious as the two of them were? The following are some reviews of the sequel: [ Glenys Bichan, Cambridge High School Library, New Zealand, May 23, 2012 ]  Today Gha...

The short story is now in vogue and as Africa goes through a Literary Renaissance, it is expected that the short story will play a major role. Consequently, many awards schemes have been put in place to encourage is genre form. There is the Caine Prize for African Writing and the reformed Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize . It is therefore unavoidable that there is going to be several anthologies of such stories. The latest to hit the shelves is The Granta Book of African Short Story edited by Helon Habila, author of Oil on Water . Here is a brief review of the book at Africa Book Club. Follow to read the full review. “But I grope after language to describe the feeling I experience on my evening walks, the light in the air and on the sea. This pleases me: that some things remain beyond my grasp…”  thus muses the jogger in Henrietta Rose-Innes’  Promenade  about a significant encounter between him, a middle-aged unassuming copy writer, and a young ambitious bo...

I have been talking about Nnedi's Who Fears Death for sometime. Though I have not yet read this novel, those who have have reviewed it and praised it. Again it falls within the agenda of ImageNations as a medium of promoting African Literature. I saw these various reviews on Nnedi's official website and I have decided to bring it to you. You can read my blog entry of Nnedi's Who Fears Death here . Publishers Weekly : Well-known for young adult novels ( The Shadow Speaks; Zahrah the Windseeker ), Okorafor sets this emotionally fraught tale in postapocalyptic Saharan Africa. The young sorceress Onyesonwu--whose name means "Who fears death?"--was born Ewu, bearing a mixture of her mother's features and those of the man who raped her mother and left her for dead in the desert. ( Click here to continue reading the review ). New York Journal of Books:   In post-apocalyptic Africa in the Seven Rivers Kingdom, there are two peoples: the Nuru and the Okeke. The Grea...

I have been a little busy in recent times and my reading has largely been affected. I would pick up from where I stopped perhaps tomorrow and slowly chew my way through the novels. However, in remaining true to promoting African literature I hereby link you to a novel, The Memory of Love , written by Aminatta Forna and reviewed by Helon Habila .Though I have not read this novel, if the review is anything to go by it is likely to be a good read.  Excerpts from the review: Aminatta Forna's brilliant new novel takes an oblique look at the Sierra Leonean civil war of the 1990s. Instead of focusing on the gruesome details of killing and looting and the sectarian politics behind it all, the novel examines in clinical and psychological detail how people survive the memory of war. Despite its horrors, war at least provided some certainties; people survived from day to day. Now the future lies before them and they are uncertain, filled with memories of loss and shame, often pushed ...