Category: Books/Magazines

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Summer reading list

Chinua Achebe Things Fall ApartThe great (for winter anyway) weather in New York has gotten me thinking about spring and summer. I know it might be a little early for some of you but here’s a great list to help you prepare for your summer reading. The list of Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century was put together by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. While the list is a bit old (published in 2002) it’s a good place to start to become familiar with Africa’s literary geniuses. Here’s their list thanks to The Funky Ghetto Hijabi. Can you recommend any newer books?

Creative Writing

  1. Abnudi, Abd al-Rahman (Egypt) al-Mawtala al-asfalt (Death on the Asphalt)

  2. Achebe, Chinua (Nigeria) Arrow of God

  3. Achebe, Chinua (Nigeria) Things Fall Apart

  4. Aidoo, Ama Ata (Ghana) Anowa

  5. Almeida, Germano (Cape Verde) O testamento do Sr. Napumoceno da Silva Araújo

  6. Armah, Ayi Kwei (Ghana) The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

  7. Bâ, Amadou Hampâté (Mali ) L’étrange destin de Wangrin

  8. Bâ, Mariama (Senegal) Une si longue lettre

  9. Ben Jelloun, Tahar (Morocco) La nuit sacrée

  10. Beti, Mongo (Cameroon) Le pauvre Christ de Bomba

  11. Brink, André (South Africa) A Dry White Season

  12. Bugul, Ken (Senegal) Riwan, ou le chemin de sable

  13. Cheney-Choker, Syl (Sierra Leone) The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar

  14. Chraibi, Driss (Morocco) Le passé simple

  15. Coetzee, J.M. (South Africa) Life and Times ofMichael K

  16. Couto, Mia (Mozambique) Terra sonâmbula

  17. Craveirinha, José (Mozambique) Karingana ua Karingana

  18. Dadié, Bernard (Côte d’Ivoire) Climbié

  19. Dangarembga, Tsitsi (Zimbabwe) Nervous Conditions

  20. Dib, Mohammed (Algeria) La grande maison, L’incendie, Le métier à tisser

  21. Diop, Birago (Senegal) Les contes d’Amadou Koumba

  22. Diop, Boubacar Boris (Senegal) Murambi ou le livre des ossements

  23. Djebar, Assia (Algeria) L’amour, la fantasia

  24. Emecheta, Buchi (Nigeria) The Joys of Motherhood

  25. Fagunwa, Daniel O. (Nigeria) Ogboju ode ninu igbo irunmale

  26. Farah, Nuruddin (Somalia) Maps

  27. Fugard, Athol (South Africa) The Blood Knot

  28. Ghitani, Jamal al- (Egypt) Zayni Barakat

  29. Gordimer, Nadine (South Africa) Burgher’s Daughter

  30. Head, Bessie (South Africa) A Question of Power

  31. Honwana, Bernardo (Mozambique) Nos matamos o cão tinhoso

  32. Hove, Chenjerai (Zimbabwe) Bones

  33. Isegawa, Moses (Uganda) Abessijnse Kronieken

  34. Jordan, Archibald Campbell (South Africa) Ingqumbo yeminyanya

  35. Joubert, Elsa (South Africa) Die Swerdjare van Poppie Nongena

  36. Kane, Cheikh Hamidou (Senegal) L’aventure ambiguë

  37. Khosa, Ungulani Ba Ka (Mozambique) Ualalapi

  38. Kourouma, Ahmadou (Côte d’Ivoire) Les soleils des indépendances

  39. Laye, Camara (Guinea) L’enfant noir

  40. Magona, Sindiwe (South Africa) Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night

  41. Mahfouz, Naguib (Egypt) The Cairo Trilogy

  42. Marechera, Dambudzo (Zimbabwe) House of Hunger

  43. Mofolo, Thomas (Lesotho) Chaka

  44. Monenembo, Tierno (Guinea) Un attieké pour Elgass

  45. Mutwa, Vusamazulu Credo (South Africa) Indaba, My Children

  46. Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Kenya) Caitaani Mutharaba-ini

  47. Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Kenya) A Grain of Wheat

  48. Niane, Djibril Tamsir (Senegal) Soundjata ou l’épopée mandingue

  49. Nyembezi, Sibusiso (South Africa) Inkinnsela yaseMgungundlovu

  50. Okigbo, Christopher (Nigeria) Labyrinths

  51. Okri, Ben (Nigeria) The Famished Road

  52. Oyono, Ferdinand (Cameroon) Le vieux nègre et la médaille

  53. P’Bitek, Okot (Uganda) Song of Lawino

  54. Pepetela (Angola) A geração da utopia

  55. Saadawi, Nawal El (Egypt) Woman at Point Zero

  56. Salih El Tayyib (Sudan) Season of Migration to the North

  57. Sassine, Williams (Guinea) Le jeune homme de sable

  58. Sembene, Ousmane (Senegal) Les bouts de bois de Dieu

  59. Senghor, Léopold Sédar (Senegal) Ouevre poétique

  60. Serote, Mongane (South Africa) Third World Express

  61. Shabaan,Robert Bin (Tanzania) Utenzi wa vita vya uhuru

  62. Sony Labou Tansi (Congo) La vie et demie

  63. Sow Fall, Aminata (Senegal) La grève des battus

  64. Soyinka, Wole (Nigeria) Death and the King’s Horsemen

  65. Tchicaya U Tam’si (Congo) Le mauvais sang – feu de brousse – à trisse-coeur

  66. Tutuola, Amos (Nigeria) The Palm-wine Drinkard

  67. Vera, Yvonne (Zimbabwe) Butterfly Burning

  68. Vieira, José Luandino (Angola) Nós os do Makulusu

  69. Vilakazi, B.W. (South Africa) Amal’eZulu

  70. Yacine, Kateb (Algeria) Nedjma

Scholarship/non-fiction

  1. Amin, Samir (Egypt) Accumulation on a World Scale

  2. Amadiume, Ifi (Nigeria) Male Daughters, Female Husbands

  3. Andrade,Mario de (Angola) Os nacionalismos africanos

  4. Appiah, Anthony (Ghana) In My Father’s House

  5. Cabral, Amilcar (Guinea-Bissau) Unity and Struggle

  6. Chimera, Rocha (Kenya) Kiswahili, past, present and future horizons

  7. Diop, Cheikh Anta (Senegal) Antériorité des civilisations nègres

  8. Doorkenoo, Efua (Ghana) Cutting the Rose

  9. Hayford, J.E. Casely (Ghana) Ethiopia Unbound

  10. Hountondji, Paulin (Benin) Sur la philosophie africaine

  11. Johnson, Samuel (Nigeria) The History of the Yorubas

  12. Kenyatta, Jomo (Kenya) Facing Mount Kenya

  13. Ki-Zerbo, Joseph (Burkina Faso) Histoire de l’Afrique noire

  14. Krog, Antjie (South Africa) Country of My Skull

  15. Mama, Amina (Nigeria) Beyond the Mask, Race, Gender and Identity

  16. Mamdani, Mahmood (Uganda) Citizen and Subject

  17. Mandela, Nelson (South Africa) Long Walk to Freedom

  18. Marais, Eugene (South Africa) Die Siel van die Mier

  19. Memmi, Albert (Tunisia) Portrait du colonisé suivi de portrait du colonisateur

  20. Mondlane, Eduardo (Mozambique) The Struggle for Mozambique

  21. Mphahlele, Ezekiel (South Africa) Down Second Avenue

  22. Mudimbe, V.Y. (Dem. Rep. of Congo) The Invention of Africa

  23. Nkrumah, Kwame (Ghana) Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah

  24. Plaatje, Sol (South Africa) Native Life in South Africa

  25. Soyinka, Wole (Nigeria) Ake: The Years of Childhood

  26. Van Onselen, Charles (South Africa) The Seed is Mine

Literature for Children

  1. Asare, Meshack (Ghana) Sosu’s Call

  2. Al-Homi, Hayam Abbas (Egypt) Adventures of a Breath

  3. Mungoshi, Charles (Zimbabwe) Stories from a Shona Childhood

  4. Tadjo, Veronique (Côte d’Ivoire) Mamy Wata et le monstre

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This week in African Style 2/10 – 2/16/07

• Cell phones fight AIDS in Africa

• Sophis Okonedo plays in Skin

• Africans challenge global corruption in ‘Bamako’ courtroom

• Africa: 48 African countries expected in Cannes

• Warner Music announces strategic initiatives in North Africa

• Global Film Community invited to Oscars

• Africa/America—a beauty that could be

• Joburg Fashion Week’s Disco Masais and African City Girls

• Are mud floors cool?

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Refugee entrepreneurs

Somali Bantu Women entrepreneursFortune Magazine has a great feature on African refugees who have fled their homeland and have started businesses in America. This feature highlights one of the undeniable strengths of the USA. While the country has enough problems to put it on many people’s hate lists, I doubt anyone can deny that this country is at the top of the list for business opportunity. While there is no level playing field for people of color, there are more than enough opportunities to make a living and chase your dreams. America is one of the few places that determination is rewarded, however strange the reward may be (queue “Star Spangled Banner”). Especially in todays world adopting a long tail mentality is the way to go.

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Trace: 10 years and Iman’s “I Am African” campaign

Kelis on Trace MagazineI recently picked up the 10-year anniversary issue for one of the most consistently inspiring magazines, Trace Magazine. For as long as I can remember, the editors at Trace have been putting out quality , insightful product, while reporting on unconventional people and places. One of Trace’s strongest points is in it’s ability to highlight style as it exists in different parts of the world. The magazine was one of the first publications which I found that represented Africa in a modern, stylish manner. It might have to do with the founder/editor Claude Grunitzky’s Togolese background or his understanding of what he calls “transculturalism”. He says, “Modern transculturalists are people who can move and learn and function by discovering and influencing cultures that are not their own”, and that has been the focus which has enamored the magazine to progressive people all over the world. They’ve been able to stay relevant for 10 years now and still keep their edge. In the publishing industry, that’s an enormous feat. The 10-year anniversary issue includes an interview with supermodel/entrepreneur Iman where she expands on her feelings about the “I Am African” campaign controversey. Congratulations guys on another inspiring issue.

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Do immigrants work harder than native borns?

The Wall street Journal’s Sara Schaefer-Munoz points to a recent Financial Times column on immigration which mentions a private wealth manager who says that foreign-born recruits to his company are more motivated than his own children. This raises another point to the notion of illegal immigration raised by fashion designer Antonio Miro’s recent runway show. The columnist talks about how immigrants do their best to assimilate into their adopted country and work diligently to make a life for their children, all while maintaining their cultural identity. I’ve copied and pasted the article below for convenience. A very good read.

The new model Americans
By Chrystia Freeland, January 20 2007
When I was 10 years old, a group of actors came to our school and posed as would-be immigrants. We children were given the role of immigration officers, with a quota of immigrants we could admit and a list of desirable characteristics in new Canadians. We had to decide who could come to our country – and who couldn’t.

The idea, I guess, was to teach us to identify with would-be immigrants. It worked. Indeed, the actors’ stories were so moving that we children were spurred to political protest. Immigration quotas were wrong, we declared, and we intended to admit the entire group.

In the decade and a half I spent working in a Europe struggling with the basic concept of integrating people from somewhere else, I liked to think of my childhood indoctrination as a symbol of North America’s different attitude to huddled masses, yearning to be free. Now that I’m back, I realise it is not quite so clear-cut. I am reminded of the New World’s own ambivalence whenever I cross the US border, as I did last Saturday at Newark Airport, where I was fingerprinted, photographed, questioned and, at last, reluctantly admitted, by an official who seemed anything but immigrant-friendly.

The same is probably true of the marketing managers at Toys R Us, whose classic new year promotion got fouled up by the country’s confused attitudes towards new Americans. Yuki Lin, born in New York at the stroke of midnight, was initially declared the winner of the $25,000 savings bond the toy chain promised to the US’s first child of the year. You might think that Ms Lin, who like six out of 10 New York infants was born to immigrant parents, made a particularly apt victor. But then someone discovered that her mother was not a legal resident. Toys R Us decided that the little girl was disqualified.

A Chinese-language newspaper reported the story on its website and a Chinese-American corporate lawyer took up Yuki Lin’s cause. By January 7 Toys R Us had relented.

The drama ignited the blogosphere. One popular line of argument was captured by a self-described grandmother of five: “Most Americans realise we all were immigrants at one time in our history, some legal, some illegal.” This is the central fact about the New World and one I have been reminded of as I read Mayflower, the new history bestseller. The Mayflower voyagers are quintessential immigrants: “We think of the Pilgrims as resilient adventurers upheld by unwavering religious faith but they were also human beings in the midst of what was, and continues to be, one of the most difficult emotional challenges a person can face: immigration and exile.” Nathaniel Philbrick, the author, says that roughly 10 per cent of today’s Americans can trace their descent to the Mayflower. But, as his account suggests, it is Yuki Lin’s parents with whom those hardy early settlers might actually have more in common.

Indeed, at least in the view of some Americans, the country’s truest citizens are those who have just arrived. One of the Toys R Us bloggers wrote that over the past five years his “red-neck white trash” neighbours had been replaced. ” . . . 14 houses on my street, not a one of them occupied by native-born Americans”. The result, he said, was that a street that had once been visited by police every day had become peaceful.

“Rowdyruffian’s” anecdotal account is at odds with popular fears about the connection between immigration and crime. But a study of crime in Chicago between 1995 and 2002 by Harvard’s Robert Sampson found that violence among Mexican-Americans was significantly lower than among both non-Hispanic whites and blacks.

You could call this perception that newcomers behave better than the locals “immigrant envy”, and you can find it in fancier circles, too. At a dinner party I recently attended a Manhattan private wealth manager complained that his children lacked the drive and the work ethic he saw in the young, foreign-born recruits to his bank.

Even as they struggle outwardly to assimilate, some immigrants themselves worry about maintaining their outsiders’ edge. That is the fear of Yelena Petrovna, the Russian immigrant mother in Gary Shteyngart’s novel The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, who excoriates her under-performing son for failing to best the “stupid native born”. I suspect my foreign-born parents have had moments of similar concern. As my two daughters – now two generations beyond the immigrant experience – start school, I start to worry, too.

My PTA has invited me to a lecture on how we are “Crazy Busy – Overstretched, Overbooked”. I was tempted to go. But then I came across this quotation, in Mayflower, from the Pilgrim travellers: “We are well weaned from the delicate milk of our mother country and inured to the difficulties of a strange and hard land.” They sounded a lot like my own immigrant grandparents, who were far Crazy Busier than I am but didn’t spend much time complaining about it. Nor, I am prepared to bet, do Yuki Lin’s parents. I might be one of the “stupid native born” but my new year resolution is to try to act as if I’ve just come off the boat.

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Peter Beard limited edition book

Peter Beard limied edition rare bookSome years ago, I was walking through SoHo and came across an exhibit at a nondescript art gallery. I was struck by the large image of a man resting calmly in the gaping mouth of a crocodile. The man was laying on his stomach writing in a journal with his legs extending into the creature’s mouth. Being the ever inquisitive art student, I walked into the gallery and into my first experience with photographer/artist/writer Peter Beard‘s work. When you first happen upon Beard’s work as I did so many years ago, you are at first shocked. There’s blood, old photos, animal skin, and all sorts of other materials. Beard’s work is organized chaos at it’s best and an organic one at that. Beard first started traveling to Africa in 1955 and since then he’s been obsessed with Africa’s land, people, and animals. Beard is one of those artists who lives and breathes his work. He is easily compared to Warhol, in his art and celebrity, but his knowledge of and adoration for Africa sets him apart. Beard recently released a 500-page limited edition book of his work through Taschen books. Follow Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s lead and get yourself a copy. If you can’t afford it get a pair of Peter Beard sandals.

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Buying water for charity

Scott Harrison's charity: waterLuxist points to another interesting African charity initiative, the charity: water organization, launched by NYC club guru-turned-aid worker and photojournalist, Scott Harrison. The organization was launched after Harrison travelled the length and breadth of the African continent onboard the mercy ship Anastasis, which brought basic medical care to thousands of people. Through the proceeds from the sale of bottled spring water priced at $20 each, each labeled with a custom logo to mark their purpose, the charity will bring clean, sustainable water sources to people in Africa. For every 100 bottles of water sold, one well will be built. And they will keep building wells as long as the water is being sold and there is money to do so.

Flavorpill is doing it’s part by co-sponsoring the building of a new well in Ethiopia with charity: water, by donating $2,000 and asking their readers to help them raise the other half, for a total of $4,000. charity: water says 100% of the funds will go toward freshwater well projects in Africa.

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Starbucks spotlights child soldiers

Starbucks books Beah Africa child soldierStarbucks is making a second book selection this February. On Feb. 15, Starbucks will be selling “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier,” by first-time writer and Sierra Leone native Ishmael Beah. Amazon says:

“In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now in his mid-twenties, tells how, at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels in his homeland of Sierra Leone and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.”

Beah, now 26, fled Sierra Leone in 1997 and a year later emigrated to the United States. He graduated from Oberlin College in 2004 and now lives in New York. “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier,” will be published in mid-February by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and will be backed by an author tour at Starbucks stores in 10 cities. Starbucks will donate $2 to UNICEF from each sale of the $22 book, with a minimum donation of $100,000.

Starbucks selection and efforts should help to offset some of the criticism it’s been getting about it’s treatment of Ethiopian coffee bean farmers.

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Botswana Bushmen win land after DiCaprio appeal

Botswana Bushmen await ancestral land decisionEarlier this week the NY Daily News rang the bell on the newest blood diamond match this time between Russell Simmons and Blood Diamond director Ed Zwick. The director’s critisism comes as the latest part of the fallout from Simmons’ fact-finding African diamonds mission. Since last week’s press conference, Russell has been fending off all kinds of hits about what many perceive as his being a puppet for DeBeers. Everyone from the hip-hop press to Rush Limbaugh have an opinion on diamonds now. I think Russell hurt his business more than ever. As Zwick and Simmons continue their match, the winners of the week seem to be Botswana’s Kalahari Bushmen who just won their diamond filled land back from Botswana’s government. It seems they have Leonardo DiCaprio to thank.