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Tayeb SALIH

The Wedding of Zein and Other Sudanese Stories

Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies

"These three stories...show what happens when a considerable sophistication and resourcefulness of technique is applied to traditional storytelling material."
-- The Guardian

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Season of Migration to the North

Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies

"An Arabian Nights in reverse; the brilliant student of an earlier generation returns to his Sudanese village; obsessed with the mysterious West and a desire to bite the hand that has half-fed him, has led him to London and the beds of women with similar obsessions about the mysterious East."
-- The Observer

"An arresting work by a major Arab novelist who mines the rich lode of African experience with the Western World."
-- Publishers Weekly

"Season of Migration to the North is among the six finest novels to be written in modern Arabic literature."
-- Edward Said, Professor of English Literature, Columbia University

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Agnes SAM

Jesus Is Indian

Could an Indian woman love an African man? How would Indians have described the crossing from India to Africa? The Indian community in South Africa has been largely ignored by writers and historians. In these stories, Agnes Sam has given vivid and imaginative life to the "hidden history." She explores the Indians' struggle with vastly differing cultures -- African, Indians, and European -- frequently focusing on the experience of women, who also must contend with a male-dominated society. Agnes Sam's South African childhood and her Indian past provide the inspiration for this collection of bright, vibrant, humorous, and compassionate short stories.

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Stanlake SAMKANGE

On Trial for My Country

An imaginative historical novel about the clash between Cecil Rhodes and Lobengula, the Matabele King.

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Ken Saro-Wiwa, 1941-1995

"What Paris is to Balzac, and Dublin is to James Joyce, Dukana is to Ken Saro-Wiwa." Dukana is the all-important semi-mythical town of the Khana people of the Niger Delta, whose governmental administration is called BOLGA (Bori Local Government Area of Rivers State of Nigeria). Ken Saro-Wiwa--born Kenule Benson Tsaro-Wiwa--was born at Bori on 10 October, 1941. Whether a student of the Government College Umuahia (which also produced, in addition to Chinua Achebe and Elechi Amadi, his classmate I.N.C. Aniebo), or at University College Ibadan (which became a full-fledged university only after his second year), he was always proud of his cultural roots, drawing a direct line of descent from ancient Ghana to semi-modern Khana. Although he only emerged as a major writer in his mid-forties with his first three major works--Songs in a Time of War (1985), Sozaboy (1985), and A Forest of Flowers, short stories (1986)--his literary style began to develop over twenty years earlier when he was editor of the Obadan English Department's student magazine The Horizon and the president of its dramatic society.

Though his early goals were for an academic career in drama, his very first publications were in fiction (eg. the short sketch "High Life," which appeared in The Horizon). By the time "High Life" was published (in the the anthology Africa in Prose, editied by O.R. Dathorne and Willfried Feuser), history placed itself in the immediate path of Saro-Wiwa's purely academic pursuits and placed him in the midst of the Biafran War, first as the Federal Administrator for Bonny and then as Civil Commisioner in the Rivers State Government (1968-1973).
Ken Saro-Wiwa then abandoned academia but not his love for the arts. He took part in the Second BBC African Service Competition in October, 1971 and the jury (consisting of Martin Esslin, Lewis Nkosi and Wole Soyinka) awarded him joint fourth place.

Even from the start, language and its use emerged as the heart of Saro-Wiwa's concern. In private accounts, he expressed his censure of some of the best known African novelists and short-story writers. According to him, "their narritive proficiency and their plot construction are rarely matched by an appropriate style." A look at his own prose style reveals the almost total absence of what Femi Osofisan has quite derogatorily called "proverbialization: the excessive larding of the English narritive whith more or less felicitously translated proverbs that reduces the writer's world view to the trado-mythical level and his linguistic universe to the proportions of a museum, if not a prison, thus tying him to the apron strings of his linguistic substratum." Even though other modern African writers (namely Obi Wali, a friend of Saro-Wiwa's) have begun to write in an African language, Saro-Wiwa does not have the resources of a major Nigerian language to fall back upon (apart from a translation of the Bible, there is no other noteworthy literary work written in his native Khana). Therefore, he may tinker with proper name in his own language, for example, "Dukana, " a "market in Khana," but that is as far as his connection to linguistics goes. The rest is an "intense dedication to the medium of English." Ken Saro-Wiwa continues to write, operating on two distinct levels: that of pure English and that of which he calls "rotten English," a local, pidginized Nigerian variety of limited communication.

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Edited by Paul Scanlon

Stories from Central & Southern Africa

"...there is an astonishing unity in this excellent collection."
-- World Literature Today

A teaching anthology that illustrates the art of short fiction with examples from Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi as well as from the longer established South African tradition.

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Servilien SEBASONI

Les Origines du Rwanda

Pour comprendre le Rwanda actuel, Il est bon de retourner a ses origines. On y rencontre deja les bons anges tutelaires et deja les mauvais demons. Les racines du present plongent aussi bien dans la saga des origines que dans la colonisation civile et religieuse. De la rencontre des deux est n*e une certaine identite du Rwandais. Anterieur s la rencontre de l'Occident, le Rwandais (un melange subtil de Hutu, de Twa et de Tutsi), retrouva son "independance" dans la tourmente des ann*es soixante ; son existence meme se trouva menacee dans le genocide de 1994 ; il cherche aujourd'hui a reforger son identite au milieu de l'urgence d'enjeux nouveaux, avec un sens aigu de sa fragilite. L'auteur ne nous raconte que les "racines des choses" : les origines du Rwanda actuel. Servilien-M Sebasoni est ne au Rwanda. Il vit en Belgique ou il a etudie les " Lettres classiques " et la sociologie. Il a enseigne au Congo (Zaire), aux iles Comores, en Belgique et en Chine.

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Benjamin SEHENE

Le Piege Ethnique

Rwandais contraint a l'exil depuis sa petite enfance parce que Tutsi, Benjamin Sehene revient dans son pays exactement trente ans plus tard en 1994. Ce retour a lieu a l'occasion d'un evenement particulierement tragique : le genocide qui a vu mourir un million de personnes en quelques semaines, sauvagement massacrees en raison de leur origine ethnique tutsi. L'auteur alterne analyses politiques et experiences personnelles dans un Rwanda se remettant difficilement de l'horreur et qu'il parcourt a la recherche de ses racines familiales. Beaucoup a ete publie sur le Rwanda mais peu de livres ont ete ecrits par des Rwandais. A l'heure ou la France commence a prendre conscience de sa responsabilite dans le drame qui a frappe le "Pays des Mille Collines", c'est un temoignage d'autant plus capital qu'il cherche a depasser la profonde haine dressant l'une contre l'autre les deux communautes rwandaises.

The Ethnic Trap

First chapter of an excellent book written by rwandan author Benjamin Sehene about the 1994 genocide of Rwanda's Tutsis...

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Francis SELORMEY

The Narrow Path

A Ghanaian David Copperfield: the upbringing of a boy in a strict mission household and his conflict with his father.

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Josias SEMUJANGA

Recits fondateurs du drame rwandais... (Paris, L'Harmattan, 1998).

Josias Semujanga a ete professeur a l'Universite nationale du Rwanda (1996-1997) et a l'Universite de Western Ontario (1997-1999). Depuis juin 1999, il est professeur a l'Universite de Montreal ou il enseigne la litterature francophone de l'Afrique.

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Leopold Sedar Senghor

The Collected Poetry

Leopold Sedar Senghor, Translated by Melvin Dixon 639 pages, 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 Ç Paper $19.95 ISBN 0-8139-1832-4

Leopold Sedar Senghor was not only president of the Republic of Senegal from 1960 to 1981, he is also Africa's most famous poet. A cofounder of the Negritude cultural movement, he is recognized as one of the most significant figures in African literature. This bilingual edition of Senghor's complete poems made his work available for the first time to English-speaking audiences. His poetry, alive with sensual imagery, contrasts the lushness and wonder of Africa's past with the alienation and loss associated with assimilation into European culture Translator Melvin Dixon places Senghor's writing in historical persepctive by relating it to both his political involvement and his intellectual development.

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Sipho SEPAMLA

A Ride on the Whirlwind

A Ride on the Whirlwind, is set during the 1976 June riots in Soweto, and provides a powerful and moving account of the tensions and turbulence, intrigue and confusion which enveloped the township and rocked the nation.

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Mongane SEROTE

To Every Birth its Blood

Mongane Serote forces the reader to feel, see, hear, and understand the South African situation in this remarkable novel set in Alexandria Township on the outskirts of Johannesburg.

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Gaele Sobott-Mogwe

Gaele Sobott-Mogwe is the author of several children's books and has lived in Botswana since 1978. She is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Botswana.

Colour Me Blue coverColour Me Blue

In this haunting collection of short stories, fantasy and reality blend as African history and tradition meld with the grittiness of everyday life. Gaele Sobott-Mogwe's stories tell of everyday life in Southern Africa. She captures the casual or determined oppression of men and women, the delightful tenderness of human affection, the powerful rhythm of African myth. The politics of personal relationship are explored against a background of social injustice and material hardship. Yet we never lose sight of the individual human experience, the moment of insight, the sensation of pain or pleasure.

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Wole SOYINKA

The Interpreters

Introduction and Notes by Eldred Durosimi Jones

Jock Campbell/New Statesman Prize 1969

"A really brilliant novel in which Soyinka's talents as a poet, playwright and an extraordinarily sensitive writer of prose, are all fused."
-- Eldred Jones

The Nobel Laureate's first novel spotlights a small circle of young Nigerian intellectuals living in Lagos.

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