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Jamela’s Dress
Age Range: 4 – 7 years
Mama is very pleased with the dress material she has bought for Thelma’s wedding. Jamela can’t resist wrapping the material around her and dancing down the road, proud as a peacock, to show Thelma her beautiful dress! When things go wrong, Mama is very sad indeed, but there’s a happy ending just in time for Thelma’s wedding day – and guess who has the biggest smile…Kwela Jamela, African Queen, that’s who!₵30.00Jamela’s Dress
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Yebo, Jamela!
Age Range: 4 – 7 years
The second book by Niki Daly about this spunky little heroine.
Christmas is drawing near and Jamela’s mother decides to go and buy a chicken from Mrs Zibi. If they feed it well, it will be nice and fat by Christmas time. Jamela accompanies her mother on the chicken-buying expedition and suggests calling the chicken Christmas. But by the time Christmas-day comes, Jamela has made a pet of Christmas. And as the ladies at the hairdressers where Jamela and her mother and Mrs Zibi fetch up after the “wild-chicken chase” all agree: one does not eat one’s friends!
₵30.00Yebo, Jamela!
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Fly, Eagle Fly!
Age Range: 7 – 12 years
Fly, Eagle, Fly! is a charming and innovative adaptation of a Ghanaian tale attributed to Dr. James Kwegyir Aggrey – also known as Aggrey of Africa. With a foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
After a stormy night, a farmer searching for his lost calf finds a baby eagle that has been blown out of its nest. He takes it home and raises it with his chickens. But when his friend comes to visit one day, he tells the farmer that an eagle should be flying high in the sky, not scrabbling on the ground for grain. A powerful and uplifting African tale of fulfilment and freedom brought to life by stunning illustrations.₵38.00Fly, Eagle Fly!
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The Herd Boy
Malusi is a herd boy who tends to his grandfather’s sheep and goats among the mountains of the Transkei. High above, eagles fly while on the ground below, beetles crawl, termites scurry and dust flies as Malusi plays games of stick-fighting with his friend. But there’s danger too…
Can Malusi save his lambs from the hungry baboon who’s stalking the flock?
And who is the old man in the shiny car who stops to chat, and encourages the herd boy in his dream of being President?
This beautiful picture book is about a boy who dares to dream of a big future. It is a story of empowerment, self-belief and leadership, and is inspired by the life of former president Nelson Mandela.
₵38.00The Herd Boy
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The Gonjon Pin and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2014
The Caine Prize for African Writing 2014 brings together the five shortlisted authors’ stories along with 12 other stories from the best new writers. Insightful, arresting and entertaining – this collection reflects the richness and range of current African writing.Caine Prize 2014 Shortlisted Stories:
Phosphorescence Diane Awerbuck (South Africa)
Chicken Efemia Chela (Ghana/Zambia)
The Intervention Tendai Huchu (Zimbabwe)
The Gorilla’s Apprentice Billy Kahora (Kenya)
My Father’s Head Okwiri Oduor (Nigeria)The Caine Prize African Writers’ Workshop Stories 2014:
The Lifebloom Gift Abdul Adan (Somalia/Kenya)
The Gonjon Pin Martin Egblewogbe (Ghana)
As A Wolf Sweating Your Mother’s Body Clifton Gachagua (Kenya)
Pam Pam Lawrence Hoba (Zimbabwe)
Lily in the Moonlight Abubakar Adam Ibrahim (Nigeria)
Running Elnathan John (Nigeria)
The Murder of Ernestine Masilo Violet Masilo (Zimbabwe)
All the Parts of Mi Isabella Matambanadzo (Zimbabwe)
Blood Work Barbara Mhangami-Ruwende (Zimbabwe)
The Sonneteer Philani A Nyoni (Zimbabwe)
Eko Hotel Chinelo Okparanta (Nigeria)
Music from a Farther Room Bryony Rheam (Zimbabwe)₵40.00₵45.00 -
Mine Boy (African Writers Series, AWS6)
When Xuma move to Johannesburg he is a naive country boy, but the impact of harsh city life awakens him to the new ways and values of radically different world. His vision of a ‘man without colour’, a raceless society, is shattered by the realities of his underprivileged existence.First published in 1946, this novel was one of the first books to expose universally the condition of black South Africans under a white regime. Abrahams’ forceful but restrained images of discrimination in the gold mines, the appalling housing and Xuma’s simple, humanitarian act of defiance, struck a chord around the world. Mine Boy has remained a central influence on South African fiction for over fifty years.
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The Enemy Within (African Writers Series)
Set in South Africa in the early 1990s, against a backdrop of de Klerk’s rise to power, Steve Jacobs tells the story of Jeremy Spielman, a Jewish junior barrister, and his defense of a Xhosa man accused of murder.
The murder trial, an Afrikaner girlfriend, and a mother who has tried to keep him from gentiles his whole life, all force Jeremy to confront his own love-hate relationship with the anti-apartheid struggle, South Africa’s almost unconscious racism, anti-Semitism, and his faith in an unjust legal system.
Steve Jacobs trained as a lawyer but left his legal career to concentrate on writing. He is an active campaigner against cruelty to animals and has worked with squatters at Crossroads and in a local group opposing a nuclear power station.
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Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (African Writers Series)
This anthology introduces the African literature of incarceration to the general reader, the scholar, the activist and the student. The visions and prison cries of the few African nationalists imprisoned by colonialists, who later became leaders of their independent dictatorships and in turn imprisoned their own writers and other radicals, are brought into sharper focus, thereby critically exposing the ironies of varied generations of the efforts of freedom fighters.
Extracts of prose, poetry and plays are grouped into themes such as arrest, interrogation, torture, survival, release and truth and reconciliation.
Contributors include: Kunle Ajibade, Obafemi Awolowo, Steve Biko, Breyten Breytenbach, Dennis Brutus, Nawal El Saadawi, M J Kariuki, Kenneth Kaunda, Caesarina Kona Makhoere, Nelson Mandela, Emma Mashinini, Felix Mnthali, Augustino Nato, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kwame Nkrumah, Abe Sachs, Ken Saro Wiwa, Wole Soyinka, and Koigi wa Wamwere.
Although an often harrowing indictment of the history, culture and politics of the African continent and the societies from which this literature comes, the anthology presents excellent prose, poetry and drama, which stands up in its own right as serious literature to be cherished, read and studied.
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A Question of Power (African Writers Series, AWS149)
“Your mother was insane. If you’re not careful you’ll get insane just like your mother. Your mother was a white woman. They had to lock her up, as she was having a child by the stable boy who was a native.”
It is never clear to Elizabeth whether the mission school principal’s cruel revelation of her origins is at the bottom of her mental breakdown. She has left South Africa with her son and is living in the village of Motabeng, the place of sand, in Botswana where there are no street lights at night. In the darkness of this country where people turn and look at her with vague curiosity as an outsider she establishes an entirely abnormal relationship with two men. A mind-bending book which takes the reader in and out of sanity.
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When Rain Clouds Gather (African Writers Series, AWS247)
In the heart of rural Botswana, the poverty stricken village of Golema Mmidi is a haven to exiles from far and wide. A South African political refugee and an Englishman join forces to revolutionise the villagers traditional farming methods, but their task is fraught with hazards as the pressures of tradition, opposition from the local chief and the unrelenting climate threaten to divide and devastate the fragile community.₵55.00 -
Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series & the Launch of African Literature
June 17, 2008, is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart by Heinemann. This publication provided the impetus for the foundation of the African Writers Series in 1962 with Chinua Achebe as the editorial adviser. This narrative, drawing liberally on the correspondence with the authors, concentrates on the adventurous first twenty-five years.
Africa Writes Back: The African Writer’s Series & the Launch of African Literature captures the energy of literary publishing in a new and undefined field. Portraits of the leading characters and the many consultants and readers providing reports and advice to new and established writers make Africa Writes Back a stand-out book. James Currey’s voice and insights are an added bonus.
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The Lovers (African Writers Series)
The Lovers collects Head’s short fiction of the 1960s and 70s, written mainly in Serowe, Botswana, and depicting the lives and loves of African village people pre- and post-independence.
An earlier selection called Tales of Tenderness and Power was published in the Heinemann African Writers Series in 1990, but this expanded and updated volume adds many previously unavailable stories collected here for the first time. Anthology favourites like her breakthrough The Woman from America and The Prisoner who Wore Glasses are included, leading up to the first complete text of her much translated title story.
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Angel of Death (Pacesetters)
Zak Biko is a tall good-looking black South African, born in the township of Soweto, who has become internationally famous for his prowess as an ace detective with the FBI in New York City. His involvement with the ‘Angel of Death’ begins late one stormy night when his Mercedes stalls outside a darkened, lonely house and the silence is broken by the terrified scream of a young girl.
₵75.00Angel of Death (Pacesetters)
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The Camera Never Lies (Pacesetters)
Kevin Moyo, a professional photographer, and Charlotte Kandavika are deeply in love, but fate in the guise of the evil Wellington Mhlanya seems destined to part them forever. When Kevin meets with a terrible accident, Charlotte has only one choice.
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We Won’t Budge
Part autobiographical, part social commentary, this is a powerful and insightful look at the situation of border intellectuals at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
In this searing memoir, Manthia Diawara revisits his early years as an emigrant in love with Swedish girls and Western rock and roll music, taking us from the nightclubs of his hometown Bamako to the cafes of Boulevard Montparnasse and the black neighbourhoods of 1970s Washington DC, USA.
This book is about the developed world – that is the former colonisers of the African continent now busy slamming shut its doors to African and Arab immigrants.
It is also about human rights violations and racism against people of colour. Diawara writes that he wanted to give a human face to African immigration in today’s global world. He describes the reasons why many Africans leave the continent – such as poverty, persecution and lack of opportunities – and writes sometimes angrily and sometimes very movingly, about their predicament in Europe and the US, where they are caught between their traditions and the West’s vacuous modernity.
“With humour and the intimacy of a conversatonal tone, Diawara writes of the ‘global’ African as a nomad at the mercy of whirlwinds of economic and political dislocation at home and racism and intolerance abroad. He is not at home in his country; he is not at home abroad. But the nomad refuses to bow down to those whirlwinds, to let evil turn him around, and against all the odds becomes an active contributor to the multiculture of the globe. This is the story of a diasporic soul that finds home in its own resilience and in so may ways it is all our story.” – Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Author of A Grain of Wheat et al)
“We Won’t Budge is destined to become a classic – it is one of the most insightful, layered and moving accounts of the modern African Diaspora.” – Patricia Williams (Author of The Alchemy of Race & Rights et al)
₵85.00We Won’t Budge
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