African Literature

As a leader of the South African Coloured People's Organisation and a communist, Alex La Guma was charged with treason, banned, lived under house arrest, and ultimately forced into    More >

This anthology presents the voices of a new generation of African poets, drawn from across the continent and representing a wide range of themes, styles, and ideologies. These contemporary    More >

Oyono’s third novel is the bittersweet, first-person story of Aki Barnabas, a young Cameroonian scholar who seeks to become “someone” by using the rules of the colonial    More >

Peters searches for themes about African self-identity by exploring images of the mask in the poetry of Senghor, the fiction of Achebe, and the drama of Soyinka. His focus is not on the mask    More >

Salih's shocking and beautiful novel reveals much about the people on each side of a cultural divide. A brilliant Sudanese student takes his mix of anger and obsession with the West to    More >

One of the most important literary voices to emerge from The Gambia for several decades, Sallah writes nostalgically about his African roots. This, his third collection, includes elegant,    More >

As a young widow with two boys to raise, Horia El-Gharib struggled to reconcile tradition and change. She dared to take on a man's role in commerce and trade to protect the future of her    More >

Poet, storyteller, scholar, teacher, and statesman, Léon Gontran Damas, born in French Guiana, was a founding father of the negritude movement. This collection offers a wide range of    More >

Though Sahelian culture likely dates back more than five thousand years—encompassing Africa's greatest empires—the Sahel remains little known in the English-speaking world.    More >

From the appearance of Bound to Violence in the late 1960s, Yambo Ouologuem has been one of Africa's most controversial writers. For some critics, the young Malian signaled an entire new    More >

African Lives, a pioneering anthology of memoirs and autobiographical writings, lets the people of Africa speak for themselves—telling stories of struggle and achievement that have the    More >

This unique investigation provides the first major account of the explosion of literary talent that began in Nigeria in 1948 and ended as the civil war was intensifying in 1966. The book is    More >

The son of a Tunisian Jewish family, Yetiv attempts to preserve some of the wisdom contained in a tradition that may be dying out. Each proverb is presented in transliterated Arabic, with    More >

European colonialists assumed the prerogative to interpret the experiences of their “charges” and to decide the legitimacy of creative expression among Africans. Yoder examines    More >