This author has yet to write their bio.Meanwhile lets just say that we are proud Gilbert2017 contributed a whooping 40 entries.
In his new book, The Postcolonial Animal, Evan Mwangi studies the role of animals in contemporary postcolonial African literature. His aim is not to explore the way in which animals are used to represent human society, but rather more to show ‘how the animal shapes texts’ (vii), leading to a reframing of the human category. Mwangi does […]
C’est le mardi 8 Septembre 2020, un après-midi nuageux dans le quartier Matongé de Bruxelles que nous avons le plaisir de parler avec Celestina Jorge Vindes, propriétaire de Pépite Blues. Pépite Blues, qui se trouve à la rue Anoul 30, est une librairie et un espace culturel où les afro-littératures sont mises à l’honneur. Celestina Jorge Vindes nous accueille et nous répond généreusement et profondément quand on l’interroge […]
In the driest region east of the Okavango, the Amakanko live a quiet life with their cattle, their gods and their ancestors. That is until Khama’s father, the bravest hunter between the Zambesi and the Cape, is killed by an elephant. According to custom, Khama’s uncle marries his widowed mother and takes over the household. […]
Ameera Patel’s Outside the Lines, situated in contemporary Johannesburg, South Africa is a raw depiction of the intermeshed nature of political and personal realities and the human connections, dreams, aspirations of choice and self-alienation that exist in their gaps and fissures. The author dexterously manages a seamless storytelling experience despite the ever-shifting narrative voices that flit between the […]
Two strangers from Mthatha (South Africa) cross paths in London when they become embroiled in a well-to-do family’s argument about an antique violin (a 300-year old family heirloom). Consequently, when the violin is stolen, both South Africans travel to Nsawam (Ghana) – one returning to an ancestral home, the other hoping for a sublime musical […]
A good writer can always imagine stories about a place she has never been to. However, for certain stories to get to the heart of the matter, the writer must know her setting and characters enough to understand their motives, to sympathetically portray their impulses, and to accurately capture their “raison d’être”. When such writers […]
Although typified in some blurbs as crime fiction, Mukuka Chipanta’s second novel is so much more than that: it is also a well-crafted historical novel. Detective Maxwell Chanda, head of the Special Crimes Investigation Unit, is tasked with the investigation of the brutal murders of Laura and Henry Hinckley, a white British couple living on […]
Ancient Egyptian Literature (2019), Miriam Lichtheim (Ed.), University of California Press, 872p., ISBN: 9780520305847 Who was the imagined readership of the pyramid and coffin texts? Did ancient Egyptians carve their autobiographies in the tombs for the living or the dead? What does their papyri poetry tell us about their society, can their sarcophagi stories compare […]
The Markas is the first anthology on the Boko Haram insurgency, which has blighted northern Nigeria for the past 10 years, causing the death and dislocation of millions. Responding to the perceived world’s apathy, its “loud silence” (pp.16-17), and the absence of memorabilia, the four editors, three of whom are posted at the University of […]
Comment un littérateur engagé peut-il rendre hommage aux manifestants de la Place Tahrir? Comment peut-il figer dans le temps le moment fugitif et formidable des événements qui s’y sont déroulés en janvier 2011? Dans son dernier roman ‘J’ai couru vers le Nil’, l’auteur cairote Alaa el Aswany nous explique comment, inspiré par la ‘révolution de […]