Category: #ReadAfricanWriters

In writer Troy Onyango’s short story “A Song from a Forgotten Place,” a character reflects on Congolese music:

She has always preferred Congolese music; the way it springs from a place is warmth and tenderness like a beanstalk breaking through the soft earth. Then it rises and rises, growing and filling the whole room with the sweet melody that makes the body jelly and the bones rubbery and one finds oneself loving his waist, legs, and arms as if possessed by a gentle, cultured demon (but still a demon all the same), and one can dance and dance and not feel the sweat trickling down the ridge of his back or feel his legs stiffen at the knees because he’s tired. One ignores all that. Lingala flows and erupts within the body.

Put on some Congolese music, quick!

You can read Onyango’s story in the collection Nairobi Noir. You can find out more about him and his writing at his website.

Until two weeks ago, Beyond the Rice Fields — by Naivo — was the only novel by a Malagasy writer to have been translated into English. The translator, Allison Charette, doubled that number this month with her newly released translation of Ravaloson’s Return to the Enchanted Island.

• One character observes how Madagascar is changing: This is a sacred land, but it is adrift, at the mercy of outside interests, foreign dealings that go far beyond us. This land is rich, but we’re leaving it fit for pigs and stray dogs.”
• On the subtle art of persuasion: “I just told him that the next time, I’d rip his head off with my own bare hands. Sometimes you need to make a convincing argument.”
• And, an economist’s favorite euphemism for death: A man “has left for the market of no return.”

• Kate Prengel, Words without Borders: “Beyond the Rice Fields is a spiraling, dense, and prickly work, difficult to access until the foreign reader has agreed to put in some time and effort. But once the effort is put in, it is richly rewarding.”
• Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews: “With quiet surety, the novel pairs an elegantly poetic narrative with an intensifying brutality of events as Madagascar finds itself beset by internal strife, French industrialism, and the zealous efforts of Christian missionaries.”
• Publishers Weekly: “Naivo provides readers with an astonishing amount of information about Madagascar’s culture and past.”
• Ann Morgan, A Year of Reading the World: “Vivid, thought-provoking narration; rich, mind-furnishing imagery; and an insight into a place and time that has hitherto been absent from the English-language literary landscape.”

This is book #50 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019. You can read reviews of all the books here.

Asouf lives alone in the desert. He cares for massive, ancient rock paintings and guides the tourists who venture to see them. He alone knows where to find the sacred waddan, “a kind of wild mountain sheep … the oldest animal in the Sahara.” In The Bleeding of the Stone, the first novel of prolific Libyan novelist Ibrahim al-Koni to be translated into English (by May Jayyusi and Christopher Tingley), Asouf faces dangerous beasts and bloodthirsty hunters. The entire novel reads like a dream or an extended fable, with an unearthly quality to it. It’s strange and beautiful and magical and tragic.

• Kirkus Reviews: “A winning combination of ecological fable, political statement, and lyrical lament for the past… The story’s melodramatic apocalyptic finale seems slightly forced, but in no way dissipates the power of al-Koni’s subtle dramatization of irreconcilable cultural misunderstanding and enmity.”
• Ann Morgan, A Year of Reading the World: “Al-Koni pushes the spiritual aspect of the natural world into the realm of magical realism, introducing a series of strange interludes in which gazelles speak and waddan (the ancient desert sheep that roam the mountain ranges) assume mystical powers… They all work to further the sense of wonder and wistfulness for a shrinking way of life that pervades the text.”

Amadou Hampaté Bâ was a writer well-known in his native country of Mali and beyond. He lived 90 years and wrote both fiction and nonfiction. In 1957, he wrote a biography of and collection of teachings by his spiritual leader, Tierno Bokar. He rewrote the book in 1980, and it was published in English as A Spirit of Tolerance: The Inspiring Life of Tierno Bokar — translated by Fatima Jane Casewit — only in 2008.

• On memory: “In Africa, when an old person dies, it is as if a library has burned down.” (Amadou Hampaté Bâ)
• On saying no: “If you ask a favor of the people of Segou and they want to refuse it, they will do so with so much intelligence and courtesy that you will find yourself obliged to thank them.” (Fily Dabo Sissoko)
• On physical violence: “Material weapons can only destroy matter but not the principle of evil itself, which always rises from the ashes stronger than ever? Evil, he was to teach us, can only be destroyed by Goodness and Love.” (Bâ paraphrasing Bokar)
• On being eighteen: “He was eighteen, the age of torment, the age of many dreams, of many pathways.” (Bâ)
• On self-denial: “It is necessary to deprive the soul of some things that are permitted so that it does not aspire to things that are forbidden to it.” (alGhazali)
• On using religion poorly: “Tierno Bokar was the victim of the ignorance and obscurantism of men who confused clan loyalty with religious commitment and who had forgotten that tolerance is a fundamental principle in Islam.” (Bâ)
• On simplicity of expression: “He had an aversion to those who expressed themselves in anything other than ordinary language.” (Bâ on Bokar)
• On clarity of language: “One of the characteristics of ‘sorcerers’ was to use impenetrable language.” (Bâ)
• On teaching: “Speak to people according to the level of their understanding” (Bâ quoting the Prophet)
• On learning about other religions: “You will gain enormously by knowing about the various forms of religion. Believe me, each one of these forms, however strange it may seem to you, contains that which can strengthen your own faith.” (Bokar)
• On humor: “Always being overly serious is something that cannot be taken seriously!” (Bokar)
• No one has a pure pedigree: “Do not dig too much around the roots of the illustrious trunk of your origins because beyond several layers of earth you risk discovering that the roots originate in a mass of refuse.” (Bokar)
• In other words, “from every royal palace you will find an alleyway that leads to the thatched cottage of a poor person.” (Bokar)
• On detachment: “It is for man to act, using all of his faculties, but then to keep his heart serene concerning the outcome of his actions.” (Bâ)
• On spiritual knowledge: “There are three ways to know a river: First of all, there is the man who has heard the river spoken about and becomes capable by imitation and repetition to describe it without having seen it himself. This is the first degree of knowledge. Then there is the man who has undertaken the journey and who has arrived at the banks of the river. Seated on the banks of the river, he contemplates it with his own eyes and is a witness to its majesty. This is the second degree of knowledge. Finally, there is the man who throws himself into the river and becomes one with it. This is the supreme degree of Knowledge.” (Bokar)
• On the sacred around us: “Islam is not an escape towards the sacred, but rather, a conscious integration of the sacred on all planes of existence.” (Bâ?)
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For a time, K. Limakatso Kendall taught at the National University of Lesotho. While there, she gathered stories by or about the women of Lesotho. (Three quarters are by women; the rest are by men, recounting stories told to them.) In the wonderfully idiosyncratic collection, Basali! Stories by and about women in Lesotho, Kendall presents 16 of these stories, plus a small collection of annotated photos of life in Lesotho.

• Vengeance as motivation for education: “I promised my aunt that I would live to retaliate. The old woman needs to see me going up the ladder while she is swimming in the mud of poverty.” (Monica Nthabeleng Ramarothole, “The African Goddess”)
• Illegal immigration for education: “There was no place to hide. The alternative was to lie down flat in the veld and hope that our city clothes blended in well with the bush… We had heard that schools in the former protectorates were a lot better by comparison.” (Nomakhosi Mntuyedwa, “Escape to Manzini”)
• The outward signs of communism: “Ntate Mokhehle is a Communist… When he speaks, poisonous flames come out of his mouth.” (Hilda ‘M’amapele Chakela, “How I Became an Activist”)
• On not reading African writers in a Lesotho school: “We were not reading African writers; we were not even told that Africans were capable of writing novels or plays.” (Hilda ‘M’amapele Chakela, “How I Became an Activist”)

Alain Mabanckou was born in the Republic of the Congo — not the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the other one, sometimes referred to as Congo-Brazzaville. In his early 20s, he left to study in Paris. Later he moved to the teach in the United States. Then, after more than two decades away, he returned to his hometown, Pointe-Noire, for a visit. In his memoir of the visit — The Lights of Pointe-Noire (translated into English by Helen Stevenson), he artfully alternates between stories from his past and his experience of re-encountering family members, friends, mentors, and others. I’ve read many memoirs of growing up in Africa, some of them very good, but Mabanckou offers a lyricism that is mesmerizing and exceptional. I could have spent much longer with him on this visit.

• On shoes: “You know, Uncle, if you don’t have new sandals, you can’t get to school on time, you have to spend two hours in the street mending them and when you tell the teacher he won’t listen, he just says ‘little liar’, but it’s not true, I’m not a liar!”
• On writing: “I don’t have that tapeworm in my gut that writers have, that eats away at their insides every day.”
• On fertility in wartime: “Between you and me, babies still get born even when there’s oil and war in a country. The worst of it was, people went on making love even when people were falling like flies in the war. I expect you’ll be wondering: why didn’t they wait for the end of the war, to make love? Oh no, if you waited for the end of the war, people would forget how to make love, by the time the whole dirty war ended we’d be making love with animals!”
• On American English: “We told the Americans they could do what they liked with our oil, we weren’t going to learn their weird English, where you talk through your nose, like you’ve got flu.”
• On self-publishing: “I also packed the self-published books which had been given me by various local authors. I promised myself I would read them in Europe or America. There is always something enriching in the suffering of a creator who hopes his bottle thrown into the sea will one day reach its destination.”

Over the course of my project this year to read a book by an author from each of Africa’s 54 countries, I’m struck by how many countries have just one novel available in translation. The Ultimate Tragedy, by Abdulai Silá from Guinea-Bissau, is one example. As Efemia Chela writes, that’s “a lot of weight to bear.” The novel also has an extended history—written in 1984, published in 1995, and published in English — translated by Jethro Soutar — only in 2017.

• Efemia Chela, Johannesburg Review of Books: “The Ultimate Tragedyleaves a lot to be desired. The book overall is unmemorable, despite its interesting wordplay; the characters are not constructed with much depth; the plot feels familiar, its story fairly typical of many African works of fiction, but less inventive than the continent’s great novels.”
• Jessie Stoolman, Asymptote: “The novel reads like an uninterrupted conversation about what the future holds for this nation, seemingly on the verge of liberation… The Ultimate Tragedy serves in many ways as a sort of literary privilege-check, introducing histories as well as literary/linguistic styles rarely given space on an international platform.”
• Ann Morgan, A Year of Reading the World: “Translator Southar has done deft work to encourage the learning process that this text demands. By choosing to leave numerous words in their original language and trusting to the context to elucidate them, he encourages readers to let go of the guide rope of the narrative and become comfortable with the unfamiliar.”

This is book #43 in my effort to read a book by an author from every African country in 2019.