African Lit Research Project: Browsing Authors/Countries

The tale of a Mafia-like don in Egypt. He lives in a mansion in Cairo, uphill at the end of an alley whose inhabitants he exploits. He is the patriarch of a large family whose wealth comes from dealing in drugs and various protection rackets. While family members jockey for power, the people below live in squalor, dreaming of the revolutionary heroes their poverty produced. An expose of injustice in Egypt by a Nobel Prize winner and author of 30 novels.

A novel that opens with a young man's murder on the day of the tumultuous 2007 election in Kenya, but then goes into the history of his family and of the splintered African nation around them--in scenes stretching back to a shocking political assassination in 1969 and the Mau Mau uprisings against British colonial rule in the 1950s.

Maathai, the winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize and a single mother of three, recounts her life as a political activist, feminist, and environmentalist in Kenya. Born in a rural village in 1940, she was already an iconoclast as a child, determined to get an education even though most girls were uneducated. We see her become the first woman both in East and Central Africa to earn a PhD and to head a university department in Kenya. We witness her numerous run-ins with the brutal Moi government; the establishment, in 1977, of the Green Belt Movement, which spread from Kenya across Africa and which helps restore indigenous forests while assisting rural women by paying them to plant trees in their villages; and how her courage and determination helped transform Kenya's government into the democracy in which she now serves.

After surviving a brutal beating, nine-year-old Raj is sent to the hospital of a prison camp, where he meets David, a Jewish refugee his own age, and when a dangerous storm brings chaos to the island, Raj vows to help David escape, even if it means risking his own life.

An English translation of the French novel based on the real-life experiences of a survivor of the desert concentration camps set up by Morocco's King Hassan II where prisoners were held in six-by-three-foot underground cells.

Tells the stories of three women whose lives are caught between Africa and Europe, Norah a French-born lawyer finds herself in Senegal, summoned by her estranged father to save another of his daughters, Fanta who leads a life as a teacher in Dakar follows her white boyfriend back to France, and Khady, a widow put out by her husband's family with nothing but the name of a distant cousin, Fanta, who she seeks in France.

In 1947-48 the workers on the Dakar-Niger railway staged a strike. In this vivid, timeless novel, Ousmane Sembène envinces the color, passion, and tragedy of those formative years in the history of West Africa.

This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived. Ishmael Beah, now 25 years old, tells how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels 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.

In the aftermath of the war in Sierra Leone, a village comes together to regain the beauty of life as it was in the past.

Tells the story of Duniya, a single mother working at the hospital in Mogadiscio, Somalia's capital city.