Alert! BOOK SA is not entirely convinced of the genuineness of the call, but Granta magazine is apparently looking for help compiling the top African short stories of the past 50 years. The following notice has been found poking out of various online literary thickets:
The Granta Book of The African Short Story
Edited by Helon Habila and Binyavanga Wainaina
This anthology will bring together the best of the best African short stories published in the last 50 years. You are invited to recommend any great short story you have read in a collection, a magazine, online, or heard on the radio, but it has to be by an African author.
The story could be in English, French, Portuguese, Arabic, or any major African language, but the final language of publication will be English. Send story title, author’s name, and any publication information you have to help us track your recommended story. Send before April 30, 2010, to: africastories2010@gmail.com
Is it real? BOOK SA will be calling Granta later on to find out. Even if not, however, the exercise of considering Africa’s top shorts might be worthwhile. From South Africa, off the top of my head, I’d recommend Siphiwo Mahala’s “The Suit Continued” and Ivan Vladislavic’s “The WHITES ONLY Bench” as strong contenders.
Alert! The Silverbird Galleria on Victoria Island, Lagos – a place more commonly associated with extravaganzas like Mr Nigeria World 2010 and Man of the Year 2009 – played host to a new literary series that kicked off in late February called The BookJam @ Silverbird.
The first BookJam attracted over 50 guests, who gathered to hear three Nigerian authors – including Jude Dibia, who is known in these parts – plus special guest Michela Wrong, read from and discuss their work:
Jude Dibia read from his second novel, ‘Unbridled’ at the BookJam, while Imasuen read excerpts from his debut novel, ‘To Saint Patrick’. Kafayat Quadri, a regular at literary meetings, provided a musical interlude.
Wrong read excerpts from her acclaimed book about Kenyan corruption, ‘It’s Our Turn to Eat’. As for the last reader, Kaine Agary, she said her book ‘Yellow Yellow’ (which won the 2008 NLNG Literature Prize) is a coming of age story about a young woman growing up in the Niger Delta.
The fact that some had to stand somehow paled into insignificance as the writers satisfied the curiosity of audience members who posed questions about their works. Ms Wrong seemed to hit the right note when she declared that, “Nigerian writers take refuge in fiction.” She drew parallels between the exile of Kenyan anti-corruption campaigner John Githongo, who she focuses on in her book, and the self-imposed exile of Nigeria’s corruption czar, Nuhu Ribadu.
In 2005 a friend showed up at Michela Wrong’s door with an incredible tale. It contained everything needed for a exposé: drama, corruption, greed, threats and deceit. The friend was John Githongo, the anti-corruption activist hired as Permanent Secretary for Governance and Ethics in Kenya.
When John turned up, I was actually writing another book. I was annoyed because it interrupted my concentration, but after awhile, I realized that this was a very interesting personal story, which could tell a bigger story about Kenya, corruption, and the experiences I had had covering Kenya through two elections. Originally, I thought John would write his own book and that’s why I didn’t offer for a long time. Eventually, he concluded that he was too close to it, that he needed an outsider to do it, and he gave this project his blessing.
FPD: Why was John Githongo considered to be the right person for this job?
I don’t think the people who appointed him really thought it through. Their reaction was very instinctive, redolent of Kenya in many ways and the whole system. His father was the accountant for many leading Kikuyus and was part of the old boy network. John was someone they had known as a child, he had gone to school with their sons. He came from the right ethnic community. They thought, “Here’s this bright young man who we’ve known all our lives, he’s got all the right credentials, he’s squeaky clean, and he presents a great face to the outside world. We know he’s one of us.” The Kikuyu elite, some of whom had been energetic anticorruption campaigners, had come to associate corruption so strongly with former President Moi and Kalenjin business interests. The appointment was probably made in good faith, but I don’t think it occurred to them that this was bound to become a tricky issue for them as well. They didn’t sit down when they were in opposition and imagine what it would be like if they had state resources at their command, how they would behave themselves, and control those urges when they came to power. It’s a lack of imagination, really.
Alert! Billy Kahora, one of the major forces behind Kenya’s Kwani? lit-o-sphere, has caught the attention of the editors at Granta magazine – who’ve chosen him for their new writer showcase, or more properly their New Voices showcase, which brings the web fresh fiction six times a year.
Kahora’s short story is called “The Gorilla’s Apprentice”. Read it in full:
That last Sunday of 2007, just a few days before Jimmy Gikonyo’s eighteenth birthday – when he would become ineligible to use his Nairobi Orphanage family pass – he went to see his old friend, Sebastian the gorilla. Jimmy sat silently on the bench next to the primate’s pit waiting for Sebastian to recognize him. After a few minutes, Sebastian turned his gaze on Jimmy and walked towards the fence. The gorilla’s eyes were rheumy, his movements slow and careful. Their interaction was now defined by that strange sense of inevitable nostalgia that death brings, even when the present has not yet slipped into the past.
Jimmy removed the tattered pass from his pocket and read the fine print on the back: This lifetime family pass is only for couples and children under eighteen years of age.
There was a sign on the side of Sebastian’s cage: ‘Oldest Gorilla in the World. Captured and Saved from the Near Extinction of His Species After the Genocide in Rwanda. Sebastian, 56. Genus: Gorilla.’
Alert! The Penguin African Writers Series has just debuted in the UK – featuring five of the six books that appeared under the series’ aegis in South Africa (BOOK SA can’t determine which one was left out; any help on this score is much appreciated) – but the event has left Guardian books critic Akin Ajayi underwhelmed.
The books give the series a backward-looking feel, Ajayi writes. Rather than showcasing what’s new on the continent – with material from the generation driving the likes of Kwani?, Chimurenga or Saraba, for instance – he feels the new AWS editors have opted for works that convey the dusty, if freshly-liberated, Africa of the 20th century:
Perhaps I’m hard to please, but I can’t help feeling a little underwhelmed by Penguin’s new African Writers Series, launched last month and published by its Modern Classics imprint. It’s not that I think the series is a bad thing, far from it, but by modelling itself upon the iconic Heinemann imprint of the same name, the impulse to compare the two is irresistible. And, to judge from the first five books published, I fear that Penguin won’t come out of this looking very good.
First, a bit of context. The original AWS was inaugurated by Heinemann in 1962, the brainchild of publishing executive Alan Hill. Hill, whom Chinua Achebe describes in his book of autobiographical essays Home and Exile as “an adventurer with all the right instincts”, recognised that the nascent post-colonial publishing industry was not supporting the growth of original African literature. Domestic markets at the time were dominated by foreign publishing houses, and were considered primarily a territory for selling books written and published abroad. Not much was happening to encourage and promote new writing from within.
The Oslo House of Literature was an impressive sight recently with the gathering of several big names in African literature – including Petina Gappah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Niq Mhlongo and Binyavanga Wainaina.
Nigeria’s Tolu Ogunlesi (Conquest and Conviviality) was also there and reports back on the experience:
In a piece I wrote after my first visit to Oslo in September 2008 I observed: “To the eyes Oslo is not a very appealing city. To my mind parts of it were plain depressing. In my journal there is a note I made, as follows: ‘Norwegians think [Oslo] is an ugly city. I think so too.’ But it is a city of proud inhabitants.”
Returning a little over a year later for a week-long celebration of African literature organised by the Oslo House of Literature, I’m more forgiving. The city is not that ugly after all. But with a population of about half a million, it will always be a Tiny City in my estimation. Half a million people will be a housing estate in Lagos, I think.
There are no direct flights between Lagos and Oslo. A Lufthansa flight deposited me in the German city of Frankfurt, where I would catch a connecting flight to Oslo’s modest airport. (The last time I was in Oslo I came by train, an endless journey from Gothenburg in neighbouring Sweden to Oslo’s Central train station).
Alert! A new piece by Ngugi wa Thiong’o appears in the latest edition of Granta, which has the theme of “work”.
The piece is an excerpt from the writer’s “forthcoming memoir of his childhood in a rural, polygamous Kenyan household”. To promote the issue, the magazine’s deputy editor, Ellah Allfrey, conducted this video interview with Ngugi:
Credit has crunched, debt has turned toxic, the gears of the world economy have ground to a halt. It’s now clear that the market doesn’t only get it wrong about sub-prime mortgages, it gets it wrong about everything.
We need to ask again one of the most fundamental questions a society ever addresses, and one to which very few people know or understand the answer: why do things cost what they do?
Radical, original, nimbly argued, The Value of Nothing uses some fundamental but forgotten economics and some cutting edge neuroeconomics to show how the price we pay for everything from food, to handbags, to fridges, to entertainment, is systematically distorted. After reading this book, the question ‘How much?’ will never just be about the price on the sticker.
You can read the book’s first chapter:
If war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography, recession is His way of teaching everyone a little economics.
The great unwinding of the fi nancial sector showed that the smartest mathematical minds on the planet, backed by some of the deepest pockets, had not built a sleek engine of permanent prosperity but a clown car of trades, swaps and double dares that, inevitably, fell to bits. The recession has not come from a defi cit of economic knowledge, but from too much of a particular kind, a surfeit of the spirit of capitalism. The dazzle of free markets has blinded us to other ways of seeing the world. As Oscar Wilde wrote over a century ago: “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Prices have revealed themselves as fickle guides: The 2008 financial collapse came in the same year as crises in food and oil, and yet we seem unable to see or value our world except through the faulty prism of markets.
While “undoubtedly a key leader” of Africa’s literary renaissance, writes the marvellously-named Siena Sofia Magdalena Anstis in Uganda’s The Independent, Kenya’s Binyavanga Wainaina “repeatedly denies its existence”.
Apparently Wainaina would prefer that the word “African”, in the phrase “African literature”, be dropped altogether, lest books from the continent become too closely associated with the identity of their authors, rather than the quality of their contents.
Wainaina is a gentleman malcontent, then – who manages to get in a dig about Margaret Atwood, and to prognosticate about the future of fiction (think: cell phones), in the course of his “Af Lit” chat with Anstis:
Binyavanga Wainaina is a literary legend in his home country Kenya and abroad. Author of “How To Write About Africa” and founding editor of “Kwani?”, a Kenyan magazine responsible for launching some of the continent’s greatest writers,- Wainaina has given many budding authors an outlet for their work.
Almost always wearing bright African print shirts and sporadically swearing, Wainaina is an unexpected character. Currently, he is the Director of the Chinua Achebe Centre for African Literature and Languages at Bard College in New York. His aim is to discover new African authors and help launch them both regionally and internationally. His familiarity with authors and publishers from Cape Town to Nairobi, Kampala to Lagos puts him at the center of the so-called ‘African literary renaissance.’
Alert! In a sign of greater economic cooperation between African regions, top SA online retailer Kalahari.net has expanded to Kenya, opening its new east African storefront, Kalahari.co.ke, over the weekend.
Here’s a screenshot of the Kalahari.co.ke’s landing page, which is a pared-down version of its SA cousin’s:
Whereas Kalahari.net sells everything from jewellery to appliances to postbox renewals, in addition to books and dvds, the Kenyan version of the site is sticking with the entertainment basics for now: books, music, movies and toys, with a few digital cameras thrown in (get the Olympus FE-45 for just Ksh 16,220.55!).
Customers in Kenya can purchase Kalahari.co.ke products with a credit card or with M-Pesa, one of the country’s e-currencies.
The main reason that this is news for BOOK SA readers, of course, is that Kalahari’s move opens up a new African market for SA books. It would seem that Kalahari.net’s complete books catalogue has been incorporated into Kalahari.co.ke’s offerings. Compare, for instance, these two searches for Kgebetli Moele’s books:
They’re identical – except for the costs and delivery times. The main thing is, the books are in the store – meaning publishers don’t need to do any extra work to get their titles farther afield in Africa. Just sign up for Kalahari.net’s distribution services.
Hopefully, it will be a two-way street, too, with Kalahari opening up Africa’s largest book marketplace to Kenyan publishers. This being the case, one would urge said publishers to register with the company as soon as possible.
Coincidentally – or not – today’s the day that the Amazon Kindle starts shipping internationally, bringing wireless delivery of hundreds of thousands of ebooks within the reach of readers in South Africa and Kenya alike. One wonders if Amazon’s ambitions forced Kalahari’s hand at all – a case of the river moving the desert, as it were – or whether the rollout to Kenya has long been in the works.
BOOK SA eagerly awaits the opening of Kalahari’s Nigeria storefront. It surely must be next?
Alert! BOOK SA is not entirely convinced of the genuineness of the call, but Granta magazine is apparently looking for help compiling the top African short stories of the past 50 years. The following notice has been found poking out of various online literary thickets:
