Editors and
Publication Date: January 2010.
ISBN: 978-0-9555079-5-3
Price: £16.99
Masculinities in African Literary and Cultural Texts represents an invaluable contribution to the emerging body of African masculinity studies drawing on epic, folk tales, proverbs and song genres. The book explores the pervasive influence of orality on patterns of thought, underlying notions of masculinity in African societies through the work of writers such as Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ahmadou Kourouma, Nuruddin Farah, Nawal El Saadawi et al. The collection’s multi-genre approach and wide geographical breadth reflects the effort of the editors in expanding the boundaries of masculinity discourse in Africa literary and cultural studies.
Author
Publication Date: November 2009.
ISBN: 978-0-9555079-6-0
Price: £16.99
This engaging and erudite collection of essays offers fascinating commentaries and critiques of contemporary events as seen by a leading African public intellectual. Framed around the extraordinary election of President Barack Obama, a member of Africa's rapidly growing new Diasporas in the global North. The book provides insightful reflections on the changing dynamics of African Diaspora histories and politics, the complex relations between Africa and its Diasporas. Written with elegance and passion, the thread that runs through all these fascinating essays is the question of Africa's place in the world and the place of the world in Africa, a challenge in which the Diaspora has a crucial role to play.
Author ; translated from the French by
Publication Date: November 2009.
ISBN: 978-0-9555079-9-1
Price: £8.99
Tadjo uses her powerful and fertile imagination to rekindle an ancient Akan myth and deliberately sets it ablaze! In deceptively simple but poetically elegant prose, she revisits the legend of the Baoulé female ancestor, Queen Abraha Pokou – presenting it not as one authoritative, impermeable text, but as a series of self-regenerating narratives; each version just as colourful, persuasive and compelling as the others. Through this process, Tadjo shows the received texts of history and tradition as they truly are – as subjective fictions capaciously vulnerable to interpretations and reinterpretations.Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama, Department of Theatre Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria.
Author
Publication Date: June 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9562401-4-9
Price: £9.99
A Fine Madness is a brilliant work of great poignancy and a powerful narrative shedding fresh light on the struggle for Zimbabwean independence and the effects of colonialism on the progress of postcolonial Zimbabwe as a metaphor for African progress. Gomo’s language has the urgency of an ex-soldier, deploying a combination of powerful prose and evocative poetry to create a novel of great beauty that will appeal to enquiring minds probing the fate of African identities in a 21st century globalized world. The novel’s unique style and thematic concerns has been compared to classics in the African literary canon including Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Aime Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism and Okot p’Bitek’s Son of Lawino and Song of Ocol. This novel has the makings of a modern classic.
– Simon Gikandi.
About the Author
Mashingaidze Gomo was born in 1964 in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), third in a family of eight where he was raised during the struggle for Zimbabwean independence. He joined the Airforce of Zimbabwe in 1984 as an aircraft engines apprentice and later joined 7 Squadron as an Alouette 111 helicopter technician and gunner in Mozambique where Zimbabwean Defence Forces protected the fuel pipelines from Beira during the Mozambique civil war. He returned to the Zimbabwean Airforce School of Technical Training as an instructor in aircraft engines and later served in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). After the DRC, he completed a BA degree in English and Communications. In 2007, he retired from the Airforce to study for a BA (Hons) degree in Fine Arts (Chinhoyi University of Technology) and to pursue a life in the arts. Gomo is married with three children and lives in Zimbabwe.
Author
Publication Date: June 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9562401-2-5
Price: £9.99
The Other Crucifix is a unique epic novel and a welcome addition to the existing genre on the African immigrant experience in America. The novel chronicles the minutiae of the American college experience by one of the most accomplished new generation of African novelists to emerge from Ghana. The writer reveals how the most intimate details of the recollection of the protagonist’s immersion in that culture leads to his alienation from home and as the years pass by, memories of Africa fade until his Uncle Kusi’s death in a coup d’état. Kwakye is an award-winning writer who has been described as possibly the most important Ghanaian novelist since Ayi Kwei Armah, establishing him as a prominent African literary voice.
About the Author
Benjamin Kwakye was born in Accra, Ghana and attended the Presbyterian Secondary School in Ghana and Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School in the US. At Dartmouth, he majored in Government (with an emphasis in international relations), spending trimesters in Arles, France and the London School of Economics (LSE). He wrote and published poetry while in college, served as editor of Spirit (a literary journal of the Dartmouth College African American Society) and received the Society’s 1990 Senior Honor Roll for outstanding leadership, distinguished service and intellectual and artistic creativity. His first novel, The Clothes of Nakedness (1998) won the 1999 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Africa Region) and was adapted for a BBC Radio Play of the Week. His second novel The Sun by Night (2005) won the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Africa Region). He is a director of The Africa Education Initiative, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting science education in Africa. He lives near Chicago.
Author Wole Soyinka
Publication Date: Jan 2010.
ISBN: 978-0-9562401-3-2
Price: R239.95
A sweeping panorama of a life lived to the fullest as narrated by the subject himself, the Nobel Prize Laureate.
“If the spirit of African democracy has a voice and a face, they belong to Wole Soyinka….
Playwright, poet, political activist, teacher, student and friend: Soyinka's every aspect is brilliant and he serves ably as a model for us all. In these pages we celebrate his marvellous life.”
-Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
About the Author
Wole Soyinka was born in 1934 in Western Nigeria. He studied Greek, English and History at Ibadan University in Nigeria from 1952 to 1954. He then studied English Literature at Leeds University, UK. In 1960, he returned to Nigeria to research West African drama, wrote and directed drama sketches critical of the government. He has been arrested twice in Nigeria and released for lack of evidentiary support. He was forced into exile between 1993 and 1998 as a result of his opposition to military dictatorship and its brutality. Soyinka has served as chair of the University of Ibadan’s Theatre Arts Department; professor of English at the University of Ife; visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Cambridge and several other universities. His published work includes The Man Died, Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (1972); Aké, The Years of Childhood; Climate of Fear (BBC Reith Lectures 2004); Season of Anomy (1973); The Swamp Dwellers; Interventions (Series); Myth Literature and the African World, Death and the King’s Horseman; King Baabu; Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known and The Interpreters. Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, the first African to be so honoured.
Co-Published by Ayebia Clarke Publishing Limited, Oxfordshire, UK and Bookcraft Nigeria Limited.
Distributed in Southern Africa by Book Promotions a subsidiary of Jonathan Ball Publishers in South Africa.
Author
Publication Date: 30 December 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9562401-6-3
Price: £16.99
Claudia Jones was a smart, politically-wise, brilliant, transnational feminist, Pan Africanist theorist and
cultural activist who brought together in her speeches and writings the politics that is now seen as a
necessary way of intersecting a variety of political fields and positions. Known as the founder of the
first London carnival and the editor of the first black newspaper The West Indian Gazette in England,
Claudia Jones’s activism bridged US and the UK with the black world politics of decolonization that
ushered in contemporary community empowerment. For the first time, in one place, Claudia Jones
Beyond Containment… brings together her essays, poetry, autobiographical and longer writings,
expanding our knowledge of several fields. Providing us with the clarity of the ideas of a black woman
activist-intellectual of her period, for a fuller understanding of Caribbean, African American and the
larger African Diaspora discourses. Claudia Jones Beyond Containment is essential reading.
Author
Publication Date: 30th December 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9562401-5-6
Price: £19.99
Pilgrims of the Night is the first book of critical essays to combine the expertise of political leadership with
economic, creative, environmental and academic analyses in examining the continuing developmental challenges and opportunities facing African development in the 21st century. African is a continent on a pilgrimage to stabilize and renew partnerships with the developed and developing world – a pilgrimage its people have to make to ensure its precious natural resources and a huge market of over a billion people constantly modify its trade and economic relations not only with Europe and North America but with the newly emerging economies of China, India, Brazil, South Korea and others. This Anthology reflects this constantly changing position by African experts and world-class analysts best qualified to make them. They include the Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Frances Cairncross the Rector of Exeter College, Oxford University, former Ghanaian President John Agyekum Kufuor and Architect Elsie Owusu among others.