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Anthills of the Savannah (African Writers Series)
Chris, Ikem and Beatrice are like-minded friends working under the military regime of His Excellency, the Sandhurst-educated President of Kangan. In the pressurized atmosphere of oppression and intimidation they are simply trying to live and love – and remain friends. But in a world where each day brings a new betrayal, hope is hard to cling on to.
Anthills of the Savannah (1987), Achebe’s candid vision of contemporary African politics, is a powerful fusion of angry voices. It continues the journey that Achebe began with his earlier novels, tracing the history of modern Africa through colonialism and beyond, and is a work ultimately filled with hope.
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Edufa – A Play
“Ask the town. They know who Edufa is and what he’s worth. They can count you out my value in the houses that eat because I live. They rise in deference from their chairs when they say my name. And can a man allow himself to lose grip on that?”
Edufa’s obsession with maintaining his position of privilege leads him to barter his wife’s life against loss of prestige.
Efua T. Sutherland did a great deal to encourage the theatre in Ghana. She began the Ghana Experimental Theatre and the Ghana Drama Studio, and wrote many plays for adults and children, including The Marriage of Anansewa.
₵55.00Edufa – A Play
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The Trouble with Nigeria (African Writers Series)
The eminent African novelist and critic, here addresses Nigeria’s problems, aiming to challenge the resignation of Nigerians and inspire them to reject old habits which inhibit Nigeria from becoming a modern and attractive country. In this famous book now reprinted, he professes that the only trouble with Nigeria is the failure of leadership, because with good leaders Nigeria could resolve its inherent problems such as tribalism; lack of patriotism; social injustice and the cult of mediocrity; indiscipline; and corruption.
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The Housemaid (African Writers Series)
A dead baby and bloodstained clothes are discovered near a small village. Everyone is ready to comment on the likely story behind the abandoned infant. The men have one opinion, the women another. As the story rapidly unfolds it becomes clear that seven different women played their part in the drama. All of them are caught in a web of superstition, ignorance, greed and corruption.
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The Clothes of Nakedness (African Writers Series)
Winner of The Commonwealth Writers Prize 1999 and The Commonwealth Writer’s Prize Best First Book Africa 1999.Gabriel Bukari is an out-of-work taxi driver living from hand-to-mouth in a poor suburb of Accra: honest, kind-hearted, and faithful to his wife. When he meets Mystique Mysterious, the ‘big man’ who can get him a job, he is exposed to temptations he has never faced before.In this lively portrait of relations between rich and poor in urban Ghana, Benjamin Kwakye explores the seductive power of corruption and shows how ordinary people can be manipulated to make choices which threaten their community life.₵55.00 -
A Grain of Wheat (African Writers Series, AWS36)
Barack Obama, via Facebook: “A compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships.”The Nobel Prize–nominated Kenyan writer’s best-known novel
Set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya’s independence from Britain, A Grain of Wheat follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952–1960 Emergency. At the center of it all is the reticent Mugo, the village’s chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret. As we learn of the villagers’ tangled histories in a narrative interwoven with myth and peppered with allusions to real-life leaders, including Jomo Kenyatta, a masterly story unfolds in which compromises are forced, friendships are betrayed, and loves are tested.
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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 -
The Prince and the Slave – A Play
This historic, award-winning play is set in Wakumey, a kingdom on the West African Coast in the late 18th century. The drama explores the internal tensions and disruptions that rock a community in an era when dealing in live human cargo was the order of the day. “How can there be a kingdom without slaves?” is the mantra for King Dogali and his council of elders. However, when romance sneaks in through a most inappropriate quarter, the very centre of royal power comes face-to-face with the visceral effects of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.The Prince and the Slave reveals not only the inner workings of the practice but also the psychology of both the slave raider and the enslaved.The Prince and the Slave has been performed at Accra, Cape Coast, Kumasi and a few universities and secondary schools across Ghana.₵50.00 -
The New Tribe (African Writers Series)
When a baby girl is abandoned at birth, Reverend Arlington and his wife Ginny are only too happy to adopt her. The media cover this moving story, and a Nigerian woman living in England takes more than a passing interest in the Arlingtons. She decides that they world provide the right Christian home for her own baby, Chester. Shortly afterwards, Chester is delivered to social services with a letter explaining that the Arlingtons should be his new parents. So young Chester enters the vicarage of the sleepy seaside village of St Simon. He is the only black child for miles around.
The New Tribe tells the story of Chester’s long search for his true identity, and the challenges he faces as a black child in a white family.
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A Cowrie of Hope (African Writers Series)
“These were the nineties,” reflects the narrator of A Cowrie of Hope, and for the young widow Nasula they are years of relentless economic hardship and privation. She dreams of a better life for her beautiful daughter, Sula, free from poverty and independent of marriage. But when Nasula finds herself unable to pay for Sula’s education, her hopes seem to have been extinguished – until a friend advised her to go to Lusaka and sell her last sack of highly sought-after Mbala beans. Nasula makes the journey, but in the city she finds herself exposed to new, and predatory, dangers.
In A Cowrie of Hope Binwell Sinyangwe captures the rhythms of a people whose poverty has not diminished their dignity, where hope can only be accompanied by small acts of courage, and where friendship has not lost its value.
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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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Equiano’s Travels (African Writers Series, AWS10)
Olaudah Equiano was born in 1745 in a village east of the Niger River in what is now Nigeria. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African was published in London in 1789. This is his own account of a remarkable life.
At the age of ten he was captured by slave traders and taken to the southern states of America. He was sold to a planter in the West Indies and worked there and abroad slave ships sailing between the Caribbean and England. At the age of twenty-one he had saved enough money to buy his freedom. He visited the Mediterranean, took part in Phipps’ expedition to the Arctic in 1773 and crossed the Atlantic several times. He was an ardent member of the Movement for the Abolition of Slavery and was appointed Commissary for Stores when the freed slaves were settled in Sierra Leone.
This abridged edition has a new introduction by Professor Ogude of the University of Benin, together with explanatory notes on the text.
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A Squatter’s Tale (African Writers Series)
Young financier Obi enjoys life in the fast lane in 1990’s Lagos. He walks tall in designer suits with his girlfriend at his side enjoying the envy of those with empty purses.
When his finance company collapses Obi’s decadent lifestyle comes to an abrupt end and he is forced to flee to the United States. There he has to live on the margins of society. Obi wants money, he wants a woman, and he wants to live the good life.
This face-paced novel, by turns comic and moving, reveals what success and failure mean for the young Nigerian at home and in exile. Ike Oguine explores the alienation experienced by today’s economic refugees under the cover of light-hearted comedy.
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Arrows of Rain (African Writers Series)
This debut novel from the author of the powerful, universally acclaimed Foreign Gods, Inc. looks at a woman’s drowning and the ensuing investigation in an emerging African nation.In the country of Madia (based in part on Ndibe’s native Nigeria) a young prostitute runs into the sea and drowns. The last man who spoke to her, the “madman” Bukuru, is asked to account for her last moments. When his testimony implicates the Madian armed forces, Bukuru is arrested and charged with her death. At the first day of trial, Bukuru, acting as his own attorney, counters these charges with allegations of his own, speaking not only of government complicity in a series of violent assaults and killings, but telling the court that the president of Madia himself is guilty of rape and murder. The incident is hushed up, and Bukuru is sent back to prison, where he will likely meet his end. But a young journalist manages to visit him, and together they journey through decades of history that illuminate Bukuru’s life, and that of the entire nation.
A brave and powerful work of fiction, Arrows of Rain is a brilliant dramatization of the complex factors behind the near-collapse of a nation from one of the most exciting novelists writing today.₵55.00 -
Houseboy (African Writers Series, AWS29)
Toundi Ondoua, the rural African protagonist of Houseboy, encounters a world of prisms that cast beautiful but unobtainable glimmers, especially for a black youth in colonial Cameroon.Houseboy, written in the form of Toundi’s captivating diary and translated from the original French, discloses his awe of the white world and a web of unpredictable experiences. Early on, he escapes his father’s angry blows by seeking asylum with his benefactor, the local European priest who meets an untimely death. Toundi then becomes “the Chief European’s ‘boy’–the dog of the King.” Toundi’s attempt to fulfill a dream of advancement and improvement opens his eyes to troubling realities. Gradually, preconceptions of the Europeans come crashing down on him as he struggles with his identity, his place in society, and the changing culture.₵55.00